Thoughts and prayers.

It’s a phrase we’re so used to seeing — and saying — that it has become rote. Whether in the wake of a grisly mass shooting or on the eve of surgery, you’re likely to hear your friends and see your social media acquaintances assuring you their “thoughts and prayers” are with you. Most of us have used the phrase to comfort a friend at some point — and then most of us promptly forgot all about it.

This week, the words — and maybe the empty sentiment they so often represent — were thrown back into the faces of people of faith. And I — as a man of faith — am fine with that.

The backlash to all the “thoughts and prayers” offered over social media in the wake of the mass shooting in San Bernardino on Wednesday began even before all the victims had been identified.

As with so many things in our society, the shooting — and people’s various responses to it — quickly became a political issue, and many of those on the left who wish to beef up laws against guns in America seized the opportunity to say that thoughts and prayers are not enough. Their avalanche of frustrated social media posts has come to have its own hashtag, #prayershaming.

The New York Daily News went a big step further, declaring in bold bright letters on Thursday’s front page: “God Isn’t Fixing This.” And in a sense, the paper is right.

How could I say such things as a follower of Jesus Christ? Because His Word tells us much the same thing.

Consider this: Speaking to the Pharisees about vain worship, Jesus said, “You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” (Matthew 15:7-8)

It’s one thing to say you’re praying for someone, and it sounds pious when put in the right tone, but it’s an entirely different thing — and one that requires a true relationship with God, along with conscious obedience and complete surrender to Him — to actually utter those prayers in a meaningful way.

Talking about prayer accomplishes much the same thing as the prayers of the hypocrites, of whom Jesus said “… they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you , they have received their reward.” (Matthew 6:5)

Better that someone actually BE in my prayers than that I glorify myself by telling all of Facebook that I’ll be praying for him. If more American Christians spent more time in actual obedient, penitent, humble prayer — and less time talking about how they’re GOING to pray, even those in our nation who do not follow Christ would recognize the power of those prayers.

God makes a powerful promise in 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people who are called by My name will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sins and heal their land.”

That’s a promise to God’s people that comes with a set of conditions for those same people. Our nation is desperate to see that promise carried out here, because Christians have by and large been unwilling to meet the conditions.

In the flood of social media “prayer shaming,” on Thursday, an atheist friend was using the following hashtag, which he applied to his own taunting posts about prayer: #itsnotenough.

He’s right, though probably not in the way he meant.

It’s not enough to mouth (or type) platitudes about prayer. And it’s not enough to say our prayers on our terms. If we really want God to fix this, then maybe it’s time to meet His conditions.

We can’t expect non-believers to do that, but for those who follow Christ, penitent, obedient and humble prayer should be such a way of life that we never have to tell someone they’re in our prayers: They’ll already know it.