There are many reasons we don’t pray. Likely you’re familiar with the common ones: I don’t have time, I forget, I find it boring, I get distracted, I don’t know what to say.

And by describing them like this, I don’t mean to dismiss them. These are significant barriers for some. Another reason not to dismiss them is the malevolent mind behind them — for the Devil hates it when we pray, and will present all sorts of suggestions and reasons for why we can’t do it or shouldn’t bother. Even better than that, in the Screwtapian sense of ‘better’, is when he helps us not to even consider that we might pray. No need for excuses why we can’t, if the possibility of doing so never occurs.

But for the sensitive conscience (I would include myself in that category) there is a further and higher hurdle to dive over on the way to prayer, and that is when the Devil tries to convince you that you must not pray. That prayer is a privilege to which you have no right. That it would be dangerous to pray. Because how can such a wretched sinner as you, dare to presume upon the listening ear of God?

Bunyan writes at great length about the internal warfare he faced in his long approach to saving faith. Grace Abounding is largely about the torments of conscience he suffered — too convinced of the truth of Scripture to go on without God, too conscious of his sinfulness and failure to approach God. And underneath it, not yet understanding or believing in the power of Christ to save.

Here he writes of how the Devil tempts him to despair, telling him that to pray would be pointless. And then he writes of the turn of will given him by God, to just pray anyway.

Now while these Scriptures [the threatenings of the law] lay before me, and laid sin anew at my door, that saying in Luke 18.1 with others, did encourage me to prayer:

Then the Tempter again laid at me very sore; suggesting, That neither the Mercy of God, nor yet the Blood of Christ, did at all concern me, nor could they help me for my sin; therefore it was but in vain to pray.

Yet, thought I, I will pray:

But, said the Tempter, your sin is unpardonable.

Well, said I, I will pray.

‘Tis to no boot, said he.

Yet, said I, I will pray.

So I went in prayer to God; and while I was at prayer, I uttered words to this effect,

Lord, Satan tells me, that neither thy Mercy, nor Christ’s Blood is sufficient to save my Soul: Lord, shall I honour thee most, by believing thou wilt and canst; or him, by believing thou neither wilt nor canst? Lord, I would fain honour thee, by believing thou wilt and canst.

John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 62.