It Is Not Fake to Pray When You Do Not Feel Like It

A lot of us have this idea in the back of our minds that if we do not feel close to God right now, then it would be fake to pray. If we do not feel love, affection, passion, or gratitude, then we assume the honest thing to do is stay away until those feelings come back.

But that is one of the fastest ways to quietly cut yourself off from the Lord for weeks or months at a time. And it is not even true. One of the most important things the Psalms show us is that a real relationship with God does not only exist in your most emotionally alive moments. It continues even in the moments where you feel almost nothing at all.

I fall into that trap constantly.

If I don’t actually feel like praying, it’s just a ritual. If I go and I pray without actually having any kind of passion in my heart driving me to do it, then I’m just saying some empty words. That if I don’t feel love right now, I must be a hypocrite. That if I start praying, but I just kind of don’t really feel anything toward the Lord, I don’t really feel any love, any affection, anything like that, that I’m being hypocritical even talking to Him at all. I’m just pretending. I’m just putting on a mask.

It would be fake to pray. It would be fake to read the Bible if I don’t actually feel like it.

That’s one that I have struggled with for a really long time.

And so for a long time what would happen was that I would not feel like praying or reading Scripture for a week, so I wouldn’t do it for a week. Or I wouldn’t feel like it for a month, so I wouldn’t do it for a month. I wouldn’t feel like it for six months, so I wouldn’t do it for six months. I just kept waiting until a day would come when suddenly there’d be wind in my sails again, and then I’d start again.

But that day wouldn’t come for half a year.

So I would spend half a year just kind of disconnected from the Lord.

How do we keep ending up there?

I think the reason is really simple: it’s because we’ve been kind of trained to think that the way we relate to God is through performance.

We think that the only right way to talk to God is praise. We think the only right way to talk to God is telling Him how great He is. And we say, “Oh man, even if you are suffering more than you could ever imagine, still you need to be like, ‘Oh, God is good all the time. All the time, God is good. I’m not suffering. I’m not having a hard time. Everything’s great. I’m so glad. I’m happier than I’ve ever been.’”

It’s like, “Oh yeah, okay. Well, you know, your arm just fell off. Are you sure you’re doing great right now?”

But as a result, we have a tendency to cut ourselves off from God’s presence so often because we are in that headspace rather than this headspace. We’re in the headspace of lament, the headspace of complaint, the headspace of, “I need to lodge a grievance with the manager,” rather than the headspace of praise and, “I love you so much and thank you for everything.”

So we just stay away, because we’re not in the “right” headspace to worship today. “It would be hypocritical to even try to have a quiet time today.”

This is one of those things that I think kind of got burned into us by really heavily emotional revivalistic-type preachers and teachers and books and stuff like that.

But that’s just not true.

And here’s why: it’s because God is an actual person.

When we act like we can’t spend time on our relationship with Him during those seasons where we don’t really feel anything, then what we’re doing is treating the Lord like He’s not really a person.

But He’s a real person.

He’s as real as your spouse. He’s as real as your kids. He’s as real as your friends. He’s as real as the closest person in the world to you. He’s as real as you.

And this one really simple truth is a hammer to the kneecaps of so many of the misconceptions that drive us to bolt the door shut between ourselves and our Father.

Because if God is an actual person, not just an idea, then your relationship doesn’t stop existing when your feelings simmer down.

I love the way Psalm 139:7–10 puts this:

“Where could I go from your Spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence? If I ascend up into heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there! If I take the wings of the dawn, and settle in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me, and your right hand will hold me.” (Psalm 139:7–10)

If you drift away from the Lord, He drifts after you.

If you walk away, He walks after you.

If you run away, He runs after you.

Whether you feel anything right now or not, your relationship is still there.

Like, if I just didn’t feel like talking to Elyse for a week and I didn’t talk to her for a week, we would have a very misshapen relationship, right? If I just didn’t feel like talking to my son for a month, and so I just didn’t talk to him for a month, he would have some pretty serious daddy issues at the end of it.

We fundamentally understand that you talk to people whether you feel like it right now or not because you maintain those relationships that you have regardless of your feelings in the moment.

And yet, when it comes to God, we have it in our heads that we can’t maintain our relationship with Him in any meaningful way unless we desperately want to in the moment, desperately feel like it in the moment.

We say, “Oh, if I don’t feel like it, then it’s fake to do it.”

No, it’s not any faker than talking to your spouse when you would rather be alone.

There’s nothing hypocritical about going and talking to a God you just don’t feel anything for right now.

And that is what is so encouraging about the vision of our life with God that the Psalms lay down for us. They really kind of give us a glimpse at what it looks like to have a relationship with God that just continues regardless of how you feel about it in the moment.

Another way to put it is that they show us what it looks like to bring our real selves to a real God.

There are 150 psalms, written by dozens of different authors, but the thing that they have in common is that the people who wrote the Psalms are insane. They’re really weird. They’re kind of unstable. They say a lot of stuff that is just odd. They say the kind of stuff that a lot of us have been told we are never supposed to say in the context of prayer.

Each of the people who wrote some of the psalms go through at least a handful of periods where they are just straight up spiraling out. The authors behind the Psalms say stuff repeatedly throughout the Psalms that straight up sounds like they have lost their faith at times.

Listen to Psalm 13:1–2:

“How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart every day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?” (Psalm 13:1–2)

Listen to Psalm 88:

“You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths . . . I have borne your terrors and am in despair . . . You have taken from me friend and neighbor—darkness is my closest friend.” (Psalm 88)

That straight up sounds like a guy who doesn’t believe the things he used to believe about his God.

And then he picks up right back off in the next psalm and says, “Oh Lord, you are my fortress. Oh Lord, I love you. Lord, you are with me every single day.” He is over the way he felt in Psalm 88.

So many of the psalms basically start off with the Psalmist saying, “God, why do you hate me? Why did you abandon me? Are you even real? What’s the point of following you?” And then by the end, he’s come completely around to the other side of the spectrum. He says, “Actually, nope. You know what? I get it. You’re awesome. You know more than me. You are cool. I love you. Thank you. Okay, talk to you tomorrow.”

And that confuses a lot of us, right?

But what confuses us even more is that these temper tantrums are literally in the Bible.

The Psalms are prayers. They are prayers that the Lord not only listened to but then proceeded to forever preserve in His divinely inspired word that we call the Bible.

Psalm 88 is literally a dude yelling at God from start to finish, telling Him that he feels like God has let him down and abandoned him. And yet, instead of lighting him on fire, the Lord permanently preserved this prayer that’s just a long, primal screech.

Why did He do that?

It’s because that is what our actual spiritual life looks like so much of the time.

We’ve been told that God only wants us in the praise and worship headspace, but God actually wants us in every single one of our headspaces.

He is a loving Father who wants to hear all about what we are going through. He is a King who adores His subjects, listens to His subjects, will never leave or forsake His subjects.

God wants to listen to you right now.

Even if the only thing you even have to say to Him right now is, “Where are you? And why are you letting this happen?” bring that to Him today. And if you’re in the same headspace tomorrow, bring it to Him tomorrow. And if you’re in the same headspace next week, bring it to Him next week.

That’s what Psalm 55:22 is talking about:

“Cast your burden on Yahweh and he will sustain you.” (Psalm 55:22)

He wants us to bring Him all of ourself, even when the real self we have to bring Him isn’t even kind of pretty.

Because our relationship is about bringing our real selves to a real God.