If you're like me, it can be hard to focus when you're praying. I can't tell you how many times I've started to pray, but then I quickly get distracted. I think of people that I need to reach out to, tasks I need to complete, soon my prayer has gone down a rabbit hole and I am thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch tomorrow. It feels like I've completely lost track of my prayer.

If this is something that happens to you then I want you to know you're not alone. This is something that I struggle with as well. These last few weeks, I have been trying something new that has really helped me focus during prayer. Today I want to share this practice with you.

Quieting Your Mind

Distractions, especially in our world today, are all over the place. Sometimes we can’t avoid them, and other times God works through them. However, quietness is very important to our prayer life. This is something that Jesus demonstrated throughout His life on earth. Scripture tells us that Jesus took intentional time out of His busy ministry to find quiet places away from other people and to pray.

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns.

Matthew 14:13

And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.

Mark 1:35

But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.

Luke 5:16

If Jesus, who lived the most important human life and was fully God, could take time to be quiet and pray, then we should prioritize these things as well. Quieting our minds is especially important today. If you're like me, it feels like your life is packed full: busy schedules, social media and phones eating up your free time, responsibilities and a never ending list of things you need to do. For me, it feels like my brain is almost always operating at 100% capacity.

Why It’s Hard to Focus When Praying

If you are wrestling with frequent mental distractions while praying, it likely means your brain has not had a chance to slow down and catch up with the busyness of your life. The moment that you actually come to God in prayer, and your brains slow down for a minute, you get this rush of thoughts that come to your head. All of these unprocessed thoughts end up completely derailing your prayer. This is a scenario that has played out in my prayer life frequently. Today I want to share with you something that has helped me slow down and quiet those distracting thoughts, and be able to focus more during my prayer time.

How To Slow Your Mind Before Prayer

What you need to get started:

1. A quiet place

2. Pen

3. Paper

Once you have found a quiet place to pray, have your pen and paper near by. Then, sit and try to be quiet.

If you’re like me, as soon as your brain gets quiet, thoughts will immediately start rushing to your head. When this happens, take a second, slow down, and write down those thoughts on the paper. Then, go back to quieting your mind.

I have found this practice of writing down distracting thoughts extremely helpful. Oftentimes I really don’t want to forget the thoughts that come into my head. Writing down these thoughts not only preserves them, but the act of writing them out by hand helps the thought to leave your mind. Later, you can look back at your list, so you are free to let your brain go back to being quiet.

It often takes me several minutes of writing thoughts down before my brain actually starts to become quiet. This process may be shorter for you, or it may take even longer. I have found it depends on the day and what is going on in my life. However, after giving yourself the time you need, your brain will be able to slow down and it will become easier to quiet your thoughts. This practice has been very helpful for my prayer life, and I hope that it is helpful for you as well.

Pray Through Your List

One additional benefit to writing down distracting thoughts before praying, is that the list of thoughts you write down will contain important things for you to pray about. If these thoughts are occupying your brain, it means they hold some level of importance to you. Bring these thoughts, concerns, or desires to God.

Prayer is Important

Prayer is important.

As Christians, we believe that prayer is very important to our faith.

The Bible tells us that we need to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and to be “constant in prayer” (Romans 12:12).

pray without ceasing

1 Thessalonians 5:17

Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.

Romans 12:12

Prayer is how we speak to God, how we worship him, and how we ask him for help.

Prayer Can Be Misused

If prayer is so important and necessary for us as Christians, how could prayer ever be a problem?

Prayer, in itself, is not bad. But, even a good thing can be misused. Specifically with prayer, we see this point made in the Bible.

When Jesus is teaching his disciples how to pray, he begins by telling them how not to pray.

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.

Matthew 6:5

And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.

Matthew 6:7

Another time, Jesus tells his disciples a parable about humility and prayer.

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Luke 18:10-14

When hearing this parable, Jesus’ original audience would have seen the pharisee as a respected religious leader and the tax collector as a traitor. The pharisee should be the hero in this story, and the tax collector the villain. However, Jesus shocked his audience by telling them it was the tax collector who went home justified, not the pharisee.

Both the pharisee and the tax collector prayed, and prayer is good. However, Jesus says that only the tax collector was justified.

These teachings of Jesus reveal something important to us about prayer: prayer is good, but like other good things, prayer can be misused.

One Way We Misuse Prayer Today

The above teachings from Jesus show some of the ways that it is possible to misuse prayer. Today, I want to highlight one way that we misuse prayer today. To demonstrate this, I want to use a dramatic example.

Imagine you are walking and carrying a gallon of clean drinking water with you (no one said this example had to be completely realistic). You find someone sitting by the side of the road who has not drank water in three days and is dying. How should you respond?

Like a good Christian, you pray, “God, please provide water for this dying person.” Then you wave goodbye to the person on the side of the road and continue on your walk.

Was praying in this situation wrong? No. But praying also was not an excuse not to help this person!

While this example is a bit dramatic, it highlights something I see today with prayer (and have even been guilty of doing myself): using prayer as an excuse not to take action.

The Importance of Action

Prayer is important and necessary to our faith, but so is obeying God and loving people. Jesus says that our love for others is what will define us as followers of him.

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

John 13:35

And that, if we love him, we will follow his commands.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

John 14:15

Jesus is clear that as his followers we need to obey him and love others. This requires action. Without this action and obedience, our faith is dead.

So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

James 2:17

If we are following Jesus, it will always lead to action at some point.

Prayer AND Action

Both prayer and action are necessary as followers of Jesus. Because of this, prayer and action should go hand in hand.

Jesus helps us to understand what this looks like by giving us an analogy of our relationship to him.

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

John 15:5

Jesus says that he is like a vine, and we are like the branches of that vine. A vine branch is dead and cannot do anything if it is not connected to the vine. In the same way, we can’t do anything apart from Jesus. We need to constantly abide in him. One of the ways we do this is coming to him in prayer.

However, a healthy vine is going to produce fruit. If Jesus is at work in our life, it will result in obedience and love. Action is the result of following Jesus

As Christians, we should pray, but we should never use prayer as an excuse not to take action to love God or other people.

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The Claim

The Bible appears to contradict itself on whether a human has ever seen God. In Genesis Jacob says that he saw God “face to face”. However, the Gospel of John says that “no one has seen God”.

The Issue

Has any human being seen God? The Bible seems to give two different answers to this. In Genesis we read this:

So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.”

Genesis 32:30

However, in the Gospel of John we read this:

No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

John 1:18

It sounds like the Bible is saying that no one has seen God, and yet Jacob very clearly says that he has seen God. Isn’t this a contradiction? Two things are going to help us understand this contradiction. First, let’s look at the word “see”.

Understanding “See”

Just like in English, we can use the word “see” in two different ways. It can mean to literally see something. Like, “I see this microphone in front of me” or, “I see this camera”. However, it can also mean to understand.

Say, for instance, that my friend is explaining something to me and I respond with, “Oh, I see”. I’m not literally seeing what he’s saying, but I understand what he’s saying. This same principle can apply when John writes that no one has “seen” God. He could mean no one has literally seen God. He might also mean that nobody has understood God. That definition would change the meaning of this verse.

So how do we know which one he’s referring to? Well, let’s plug both of those definitions of “see” into John 1:18 and see which one makes the most logical sense. We could say:

“No one has ever [literally seen] God, but Jesus has revealed God to us.”

This doesn’t really make a lot of sense because Jesus doesn’t spend any time talking about what God literally looks like. However, if we translate it as:

“No one has ever [understood] God, but Jesus has revealed God to us.”

This is a much more reasonable interpretation, because Jesus spends a lot of time helping us understand who God is.

So if it’s reasonable to assume that John is talking about understanding instead of literally seeing, what does the Bible say about us literally seeing God?

Moses “Face to Face” with God

One of the best answers to this is found in Exodus 33. Starting in verse 11 we read this:

Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend…

Exodus 33:11a

I just love thinking about this verse. What would it be like to have a literal conversation with God? It must be an amazing thing, and I would love to experience it one day. But if you read this, you might be tempted to think that Moses is physically looking at God as he is saying this, because of the phrase “face to face”. However, we know that can’t be true because of the verses that come after it:

Moses said, “Please show me your glory.”

Exodus 33:18

Moses is talking to God “face to face”, but still asks God to show himself. It wouldn’t make sense for Moses to be asking this if he had already been literally looking at God face to face. God drives this home in the following verses:

“But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” And the LORD said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

Exodus 33:20-23

God makes it clear that man cannot see God and live. This confirms that in Exodus 33:11, Moses was not literally looking at God when he spoke to him “face to face”. The emphasis of Exodus 33:11 is the fact that God and Moses were having a back and forth conversation the same way two friends would talk to each other.

God does not have a face or a hand or a back, but he uses this human language to help us understand things about Him. So what is God saying when he’s referring to his face? Well, if you think about humans for a second, if you just saw a picture of somebody’s arm or maybe even their back, you might not know who that person is.

However, if you see a picture of somebody’s face, you will immediately know who they are. The face is the most distinguishable part about a person. When God says that “you cannot see my face”, he’s saying that nobody can see Him in his entirety. Nobody can really, truly see Him. At best, we can only get a glimpse of him, or His “back”.

Back to Jacob

Going back to the first verse we read:

So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.”

Genesis 32:30

Here we have another account of someone seeing God “face to face”, does this contradict what we just read in Exodus 33? To answer that, let’s take a look at the verses right before this verse:

And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.

Genesis 32:24

This verse gives us an important piece of information to help us understand Genesis 32:30, God appears to Jacob as a man. God isn’t actually a man, which means he has not appeared in His fullness when He appears to Jacob.

How is God able to do this? I have no idea. But what we do know is that Jacob is not seeing the fullness of God, because we’re told if he did see the fullness of God, he would not live. Similar to God allowing Moses to see His “back”, but not His “face”. God appears to Jacob as a man, not in His fullness.

Because of this, Jacob saw God, but only in a limited capacity (as a man). He did not see God in his fullness.

Conclusion

Genesis 32:30 and John 1:18 do not contradict each other because:

1. When John 1:18 uses the word “see”, it is referring to understanding God.

2. In Exodus 33 we learn that man can see small glimpses of God, but if someone were to see God’s face (or His fullness), they would die.

3. In Genesis 32, God appears to Jacob as a man, meaning Jacob did “see” God, but not in His fullness.

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