Prayer & Modern Christians

In his excellent book, Above All Earthly Pow'rs, David Wells writes:

"In premodern societies, the sacred was a matter-of-fact part of life; in modern societies, God has been excluded from public life, pushed to the margins of relevance, and made to live out his life, as it were, underground and out of sight" (27).

I tend to point my finger at the our American culture and say "This your problem," but I've recently been thinking that this is a real problem in the American church.

The reason I say this is because of the American church's lack of prayer. We have our programs, our strategies, our books, our technology, our marketing, our training and hundreds of other things that most people in history and most people in the world do not have, and never will have.

So many of these things take care of so many of our problems that we don't pray, and lack of prayer demonstrates a lack of dependence on God, and a lack of dependence on God is pride.

The blessings of our modern world have led us to replace God with those blessings, and as a result, prayer meetings are empty and SELF-help books fill our shelves. I long for the day when God sends us a prayer revival, but I'm afraid of what it will take for that to happen.