Hey supporters! Thanks so much for keeping up with my blog posts! I’m trying to get into the habit of sharing what I’ve been learning lately, so this post will be about the book I’ve been reading through recently! It’s called A Praying Life by Paul Miller, and oh milanta I highly recommend giving it a read!! This book gives an awesome breakdown of what prayer was created for and is supposed to look like when we live that out. Here are a few of the things I’ve gotten from reading:
- Prayer cultivates dependency. When we bring everything to Him and lay our hearts out before Him, we are trusting in God entirely. Going to God with every little piece of our life, totally transparent, is exactly the childlike faith we are supposed to have. By running to the Father, we are saying we understand and trust that He knows what is best for us better than we do for ourselves. We allow ourselves to become less self-reliant and much more dependent on the Lord to have control.
- Prayer isn’t a big deal. Society tells us nowadays that in order to have a “good prayer life”, we have to have a long-winded, philosophical, million-dollar-word prayers, or you are bad at praying. The reality is the exact opposite! God knows our hearts. He knows how we talk, what we think and desire. He doesn’t want us to be fake with Him, He wants us just as we are. Prayer is just talking to Jesus, your best friend. We don’t talk to our best friends in a fake way, so why would we do that our forever best friend? Just be honest with God, form a relationship by talking to Him with your heart’s real intentions.
- Prayer is constant. For the longest time, I thought my prayer life was amazing because I got into a good routine of making sure to pray when I got up in the morning, and before I went to bed at night. This was entirely the wrong thought process. Yes, it is important to have quiet time with God before your day begins, so He can equip you for the day and fill you up. However, God isn’t a little person you keep up on a shelf and only get out twice a day. God is with you all day, every day, and He wants so badly for us to be in continual fellowship with Him. One way I’ve worked on staying in prayer better throughout the day is praying the Scriptures I’m going through. I find little key phrases that I can keep in my head all day and pray those simple little prayers. “Lord, help me.” “God, give me patience.” “Lord, equip me.”
As plain and simple as I can put it, prayer matters. Prayer is such a big part of our walk with Christ, and we need it to have intimacy with the Father. That’s what I’ve been learning! Thanks:)
