Explaining Myself Before I Ask

She timed it once, out of curiosity, and then wished she had not.

Four and a half minutes of preamble before the actual request. Not confession. Not worship either, although some of it wore the clothes of worship. It was a case: here is the situation, here is what I have already tried, here is why I think this is a reasonable thing to be asking for, here is my acknowledgement that You may see it differently.

Four and a half minutes of a woman establishing that she is a serious person with a serious reason before allowing herself to say the sentence she came to say.

She is not anxious in the rest of her life. She asks for things at work directly. She would tell somebody else to get to the point.

But in prayer she builds the case first, every time, and she has begun to suspect that the case is not for God's benefit at all. It is a woman convincing herself that she is allowed to ask.

If your praying has a preamble, come and sit at this table. Nothing about your case is going to be assessed here.

Who the preamble is addressed to

Let us work out where those four and a half minutes are actually going, because it changes everything about what to do with them.

They are not information. God is not learning the situation from the summary. They are not persuasion either, because a case only persuades somebody who could be moved by argument into a different disposition, and His disposition is not a variable.

So the preamble is being spoken to the only person in the room who is genuinely uncertain about the right to ask. It is a woman arguing herself past her own doorstep.

You are not required to establish anything. Nothing about the case has ever affected your right to speak, and the right was never conditional on the reasons being good ones. I am not saying it to be encouraging. The written word says in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him (Ephesians 3:12), where the boldness comes through Him rather than being built out of the merits of a request, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that hold at a table at the end of a long day.

Confidence with a location

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not an instruction to pray more directly.

Look at where the confidence in that verse is placed, because English hides it slightly and the Greek does not.

In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.Ephesians 3:12

In whom. Everything in the sentence hangs off those two words. The boldness is not a personal quality some believers have more of. It is a property of a position, and the position is being in Christ, which is why the verse can promise it to people of wildly different temperaments.

A shy person in Christ has exactly the same access as a bold one. The verse does not distribute it by disposition.

You have boldness as a location rather than a personality trait, and the Word ties it to Him rather than to your nerve. That is written into the first two words of the verse, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who makes it register in a woman with a four minute preamble.

Directness is not the new requirement

Something has to be said before Sunday, because the obvious next move is to strip the preamble out and measure yourself on how quickly you get to the point.

That would make brevity the entry condition, which is the same doorstep with a stopwatch on it. And some prayers genuinely wander, and some evenings a person needs to talk their way around a thing before they can name it, and none of that is a failure.

You are heard whether the request takes four seconds or forty minutes, and no shape of praying has ever purchased anything. Scripture says your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him (Matthew 6:8), which removes the informational function of the preamble entirely and does not replace it with a rule, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who has been at that table for every long approach without once checking the clock.

And if this has cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.