Pray Until You Pray

I really need to do more of this:

"Christians should pray long enough and honestly enough, at a single session, to get past the feeling of formalism and unreality that attends not a little praying. We are especially prone to such feelings when we pray for only a few minutes, rushing to be done with a mere duty. To enter the spirit of prayer, we must stick to it for a while. If we 'pray until we pray,' eventually we come to delight in God's presence, to rest in his love, to cherish his will. Even in dark or agonized praying, we somehow know we are doing business with God. In short, we discover a little of what Jude means when he exhorts his readers to 'pray in the Holy Spirit' (Jude 20) - which presumably means it is treacherously possible to pray not in the Spirit.

"The Puritans...exhorted one another to 'pray until you pray.' Such advice is not to become an excuse for a new legalism: there are startling examples of very short, rapid prayers in the Bible. But in the Western world we urgently need this advice, for many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers."

-D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation, pp. 36-37