Do You have "Prayer Apnea?"

“Pray without Ceasing”

1 Thessalonians 5:17

This is the mask I wear every night when I sleep.  I know that many, many of you have one of these machines.  It’s called a CPAP.  I have this machine because I have something called Sleep Apnea.  That means that when I sleep my body forgets to breath.  When I had my test 12 years ago, I was having 59 apnea incidents per hour.  As a result I was never getting into a deep sleep.  I was constantly tired during the day.  The solution was simple. This machine is a pump.  At night I turn on the machine, and put this mask on.  This machine blows air into my nostrils, at just the right pressure for me… to keep me breathing.  What a difference it makes to breath without ceasing. 

What does all this have to do with prayer?  Well the connection was made for me in my devotional reading from God’s Word for Today by O. Hallesby.  Here is what he wrote – “Since ancient times prayer has been spoken of as the breath of the soul.  This suggests something about prayer that many of us are quick to forget.  Through breathing our bodies are constantly being renewed.  We eat three or four times a day.  But we breath all day, and at night, too.  Here we come to the contact with an important aspect of prayer.  We cannot breathe in the early morning in such a way that it will be sufficient until noon.  Likewise, we cannot pray in the morning so as to suffice until noon. Therefore the Apostle says: ‘Pray without ceasing!’”

That is what got me to wondering – “Do you or I ever suffer from prayer apnea?”  Hallesby calls prayer “the breath of the soul.”  More to the point I might call prayer “the breathing of faith.”  Prayer is faith in action – our hearts recognizing our complete dependence on God.  Just as there is not one moment during the day when we can go without breathing, so there is not one moment during the day when we  have no need for God.  Faith is as dependent on the grace of God in Christ as our bodies are on oxygen. 

So St. Paul writes, “pray without ceasing.”  I don’t know about you, but I don’t do that very well.  There are days, too many days, when I skip my time for reading God’s Word and prayer.  I am in too much of a hurry, too busy to take time.  Those are my excuses.  There are moments when my first thought should be to take the moment to God in prayer.  Instead I too often just react to situations.  I speak before I think.  I get angry or frustrated.  The one thing I forget to do is to pray. That’s what I mean by prayer apnea.

My body, especially my brain, doesn’t like sleep apnea. Whenever I have an apnea incident, my brain panics.  It sends out signals to try and wake me up.  Often I will wake myself up with snoring.  Sometimes my body just suddenly jerks and I wake up.  All of that is hard on the heart… but hey my brain wants oxygen.   Faith is the same.  Your faith needs to be constantly connected to God.  Too often it takes a crisis in the family, trouble at work, an illness to jerk us awake… to get us to pray again.  My point is that prayer apnea is serious! 

Faith needs the oxygen of grace… the power of the Spirit working through the word… the encouragement of fellow believers all reminding us… pray without ceasing.  You know when I started using this CPAP machine I stopped having apnea incidents. I started sleeping… really sleeping.  I started waking up in the morning truly rested… something that hadn’t happened in years.  That’s what God does for us when we pray without ceasing… He lifts the worries, stills our fears, quiets our anger… He gives rest to our souls.  You may think you can’t possibly pray without ceasing.. that you don’t have time.  How much better to think of it as you would breathing.  No matter what else you are doing, you always have time to breathe… You can’t do anything without breathing.  You breath even as you do everything else.  That’s Paul’s invitation.  Pray.  Let your whole life be looking to Him all the time… even as you live your life.  Then you will have rest in the midst of life… the peace of God will guard your heart and mind in Christ every day.  Breath!  Pray!  Amen.