That's the church's greatest problem in the West. We don't realize how weak we really are,

and therefore we pray so little. And that's my problem as a Christian. I think I can do it,

and that makes me prayerless. And it's only when I realize how dependent I am on him that I'll learn to pray.

Prayer can be hard, but why is it difficult?

It can be challenging for a number of reasons.

It could be, as Sinclair Ferguson just mentioned, that we forget how weak we truly are,

and so we neglect prayer.

We may have our priorities upside down,

or perhaps because of sin, we don't want to approach God. Well, the disciples knew that they needed to grow in prayer, and they asked Jesus to teach them to pray. And that's what we'll consider

on this Tuesday edition of renewing your mind.

In a time when many of us can't go two minutes without reaching for a device, where boredom is

almost impossible due to overstimulation. It's vital that we return to prayer and seek to grow

in our prayerfulness, putting away our devices and other distractions

and coming before our Heavenly Father. Here's Sinclair Ferguson with an overview of prayer

and the answer Jesus gave when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray. We're talking at this stage in our studies about what we sometimes refer to as the means

of grace.

And we've already seen that we shouldn't think of the means of grace as instruments we use

in order to get grace, but privileges God has given to us in his grace so that we may know

him better and indeed serve him well. We thought in the last study about the Bible, and now

we're coming to the subject of prayer. Remember many years ago, I think it must be 40 years ago now, at the privilege of

being visited by the senior editor of a major Christian publishing company. And in the course

of the conversation, he said to me, we would like you to write a book on prayer. I thought

...