Before the world race, prayer was always a struggle for me. I’ve sometimes described it as the fight of my life. If there is anything consistent about it, it’s that I consistently struggle to maintain a quality time alone with God every day. I fail more often than I succeed.
I seem to plunge into thoughts about a situation, conversations about people, or fantasizing about dangers and problems, only to realize, as the time slips away, that I have spent very little time actually talking to God. I know that my prayer life tends to be very shallow unless I deliberately, intentionally make the effort to deepen and develop it on a daily basis.
But these people are so focused. It’s almost like Jesus is standing right in front of them, and they are just embracing him and telling him everything that is on their hearts. And just listening to what he has to say to them. They encounter Jesus in prayer in a way that has just inspired me to rise above my normal prayer routine.
I realized that one of the biggest deals with prayer is how we come before the throne.
Do we come with pride? Do we bring our selfish desires? Do we bring a humble heart? Do we come for our individual needs and the collective needs at the same time?
God wants, more than anything, to align our will with His will. One major way we do this is through prayer. God wants to work out his will through us and to know his mind on a particular matter we need to be talking with Him about it…..and LISTENING.
Also, prayer is not a substitution for action; rather, prayer is a preparation for an action through which God will use us. There are many prayers that God can only answer alone but he wants us to be the answer to our own prayers whenever possible. Even the way Jesus teaches us to pray points us toward the path we are to follow. A path to freedom. Jesus teaches us to pray for the kingdom to come, not just in heaven but also on earth.
We need to be people who pray and act. Way to often I use prayer as an excuse for inaction.
When faced with the problems of our world, we have asked “God, why don’t you do something?” without realizing that he might be saying ,”I did do something……I MADE YOU.” When we pray for God to bless someone we are challenged to see that we might be the hands of that blessing. Because God has no hands but ours.
When we pray, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done” we commit our whole lives to caring for the least among us – the unborn and the undocumented. If we are praying by the model Jesus gave us, we cannot stop praying and acting until we see the restoration of all that is broken in our lives, and in our streets.
To begin to act on our prayers with any seriousness is to remember why we pray in the first place – because anything worth doing is beyond our power to do alone. We cry out to God because we know we need to help. But God chooses to work in and through us!
Because we have a God that does not want to change the world without us!
And that is why……
ALL I CAN DO IS BOW!
