This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, Dec 2, 2025.
Here we are, the final month of 2025. It is almost hard to believe. What I would like to discuss with you over the few remaining articles I have left in 2025 is to reflect on a few spiritual disciplines that I hope all of you have adopted into your regular practice.
The first of these 5 spiritual disciplines is prayer. As I am sure you will not be shocked at all to learn that I think that prayer is very important. For this article, I am not going to talk about any techniques or methods of prayer. If you are interested in talking about specifics about the practice of prayer or some pointers on how to do a daily devotional, I would be more than happy to work with you on that.
For this article, I want to talk about why prayer matters. The concept of prayer has been totally warped by our culture in that we think of prayer as a time when we get to ask God for stuff. The classic Simpson episode where Homer is walking into his kids soccer game and he sees his neighbor, Ned Flanders, praying with his kids prior to the game and Homer triumphantly yells out “Too late, Flanders, we already prayed and we can’t both win!” To which Ned replies, “we were praying no one would get hurt.”
I think that this cultural commentary on prayer is relevant. We think that we take the time to pray because we want God to bless what we are going to do or we want some kind of supernatural edge for some specific and usually self seeking purpose. At the very least, this cheapens prayer. In the worst case scenario, we are using prayer as a tool to get what we want. It is no wonder why prayer has fallen out of practice. If God “fails” our prayers by not doing what we told Him to do, then why pray at all?
I am to the point that I almost never pray for myself for anything. The vast majority of the prayers I say are for other people. I ask God to bless them, care for them in some way, or deliver them from something. The interesting thing about these kinds of prayers is that I almost never know whether or not these prayers are answered. I pray for almost a dozen people by name every day on a rotating basis. I have been doing that for years. Not one time has anyone contacted me to say they felt especially blessed on a day they were on my heart to pray for them.
What I have realized is that praying for other people makes me feel like I am pouring into their lives without ever interrupting. Many names that rotate through my prayers are not people who attend Wayne Street Church and a number of them are people I know are upset with me for a wide variety of reasons. Since they are not people I have regular contact with, it does my heart good to lift them up in prayer. I pray these prayers with no expectation that anything will come back to me in any way.
In the course of my prayers, I also have some old disappointments and emotional wounds that I pray for daily. The guilt or regret I feel does not diminish, but I have to admit, it is a blessing to be able to ask God to do what I can’t. This does not diminish my responsibility nor does it relieve all of my regret, but that prayer for these old situations becomes an outlet for grief that has no place else to go.
Prayer never ever takes the place of something I could do. But of all the things in this world, in this community, or in my own life that are a burden on my heart, prayer is a gift I have to give when I have absolutely nothing else to offer.