I believe that every follower of Jesus Christ has an innate desire to pray, to communicate with one’s Heavenly Father as a child wants to talk to his or her parent. And it’s reasonable to think that every disciple would discover or develop a sincere delight in prayer, a joy found in expressing gratitude to God for his goodness and sharing the deep longings of one’s heart with the Lord.

So, how do we move from desire to delight in prayer?

The essential, central element that takes us from just wanting to pray to actually experience prayer as a fulfilling and satisfying spiritual exercise is discipline, and there’s the rub! As with so many things in life, we want to skip the hard work and jump to its reward, and it just seldom, if ever, happens in prayer.

I’ve always loved sports and played several, but even as a teenager I hated the thought of running any distance, even cross country. Finally, when running became all the rage, thanks in no small part to Dr. Ken Cooper, the school where I taught started a “New Me in ’83” campaign that included jogging.

I made a good start, mixing jogging and walking, until one of my colleagues said she was jogging three miles without stopping. I thought, “If she can do it, I can do it,” and soon I was jogging three, four, five, then six miles a day. The more I ran, the less discipline it required, and the more sheer delight I found in running, which I continued until my knees forced me to retire.

Without the desire giving birth to the discipline, I would never have discovered the delight that so many have found in running.

If you have tried before, perhaps multiple times, to develop a consistent prayer time that brings deep fulfillment and joy, but without success, now is the time to move ahead with a regular, scheduled discipline of prayer. It is the only way we can learn to pray as Jesus taught us, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Daily bread requires daily prayer. Tapping into God’s abundant provisions and protection, especially in these critical days, requires our disciplined daily dependence upon Him expressed through prayer.

May you find with each passing day, as desire leads to discipline, and discipline to delight, the joy of intimate fellowship with the Lord in prayer.