Is Prayerlessness a Sin?

(Note: This week in Adult Sunday School, we introduced the topic of prayer, which will continue to be the focus of our Sunday School for the next few months. I thought I'd expand some of the key points we discussed together last Sunday into a series of short blog posts, each covering a different portion of the discussion. The hope is that these posts will remind us to pray! The only disclaimer is that this was, and will continue to be, an exceptionally busy week, so I'll start here, and we'll see how far I get!)

Many of us, myself included, struggle with prayerlessness. Most of us who struggle with prayerlessness actually desire to pray, and know that its a bad idea to be prayerless.

But exactly how displeasing to God is it to be prayerless? And is prayerlessness actually a sin?

Well, insomuch as sin is a violation of God's command, I think we must categorize prayerlessness as a sin (1 Thess 5:17, Colossians 4:2-3, 1 Timothy 2:1-2). But prayerlessness is not the type of sin that is actively committed. It is more a state of being. You don't actively try to be prayerless...rather, one day, you just look up and "find" yourself to be in a state of prayerlessness. It is a sin of omission, a passive sin.

In order to understand the severity of the situation, so that we would be motivated to repent of this particular sin, we must first understand why prayerlessness is so displeasing to God.

We talked about two reasons this week in Adult Sunday School that prayerlessness is displeasing to God. The first reason, already mentioned above, is that prayerlessness violates God's direct command to pray. The Bible is filled with commands to pray, examples of others praying, God answering prayer, etc. Jesus set an example of prayer everywhere he went. And Jesus essentially assumed that his disciples would pray, as if it were unthinkable that they would not (for instance, when he gave the Lord's Prayer in Luke 11:2-11:4, Jesus says "when you pray, say" and not "if you pray, say..." ).

A second reason that prayerless is so displeasing to God is that prayerlessness is an insult to God. Andrew Murray writes in his book The Prayer Life, "There is the holy and most glorious God who invites us to come to him, to hold converse with him, to ask from him such things as we need, and to experience what a blessing there is in fellowship with him. He has created him we might find our highest glory and salvation. What use do we make of this heavenly privilege?"

God has bought our privilige to pray at great cost to Himself. Jesus suffered, bled, and died so that the veil of the temple could be torn in two, and so that we could have direct access to God. It is only because of this that we can pray and have God hear us at all. God then graciously invites us to have fellowship with him through prayer, which is only possible because Jesus brought us to God. In this sense, its not a stretch to say that Jesus died so that you could pray (1 Peter 3:18).

When we don't pray, we're implicitly saying that God's gift of Jesus Christ is of little value, that its only worth a minor piece of our attention, a place in the peripheral part of our lives after we get done with all the stuff that's more interesting and important. Wow. Dare we indulge prayerlessness?

Next time, we'll examine the question: What are the root causes of prayerlessness?