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In the past week, I have been humbled yet again; this time about prayer. God has shown me that the importance of prayer cannot be over exaggerated. Without prayer, Christians will never know the will of God for their lives.
I have been praying that God will reach those that I know and love, friends and family, and work in them the importance of prayer just the same. It’s my desire to see people sharing their prayer requests freely amongst each other through this site and in their lives without myself or someone else having to pry their prayers from them like a dentist pulling teeth.
The devil has done a work in most people’s lives. He did a work in my life, I know. He convinces people that prayer doesn’t matter. He convinces people that they are too busy to pray. He works to keep people away from learning how to pray and why to pray.
If people are anything like me, they tend to keep their desires and petitions to themselves. They have no idea how to praise and thank God through prayer. They don’t even know how imperative it is that they pray and do it constantly. It’s as if prayer is an off-topic, a no-fly-zone in their spiritual lives.
Let me put it bluntly: Without prayer, Christian life becomes worldly life. Without prayer shared between friends and family, those relationships are nothing but the same as worldly friendships and bonds. They may look outwardly different, but they are dead inside. Individuals who do not prayer to God or pray but don’t know how to pray and why are like ponds. In the Bible, it says that God pours out a river of His pleasure to us. If we aren’t praying, that water comes into our pond, so to speak, and we act like beavers. We dam up the other end of the pond and very little escapes or nothing at all. The water becomes stagnant and anyone knows that stagnant water is poison. It’s not worth drinking. Yet, this water is supposed to be life giving. We turn it into something worthless.
Imagine that you enlist as a soldier. At boot camp, you are told you will be a radio man. Soon, you’re sent off to war and called into a fight. Instead of loading your weapon with ammunition, you throw all of your ammunition into a hole before charging into battle. You also destroy the radio, so you and your platoon no longer have any contact with air support and your commanders. Soon, you’re being shot at and asked to cover your fellow troops as they try to take strategic positions to defeat the enemy. You watch as your platoon is shot down one by one and you can’t defend them because your threw away your ammo. You can’t call for support or medivac because you destroyed the radio. There is no communication with your commanders. Then in an attempt to reconcile the situation and defeat the enemy, you charge them head on with nothing to defend yourself with other than your bear hands.
That’s what it’s like to live a Christian life without prayer. You cannot produce spiritual fruit without prayer. You can’t grow as a Christian. You are not communing with God. You’ll never know the will of God for your life without prayer.
Prayer was designed to thank God for all that He has done. Jesus gave an example of prayer in Matthew 6:9-13:
Most people do not notice that the main point of Jesus’s example of prayer is that God is to be exalted. He is in control. He alone is holy. Everything in life is according to His sovereign will. We should live our lives according to His will. How do we do that? We must pray and learn His will which he has made explicitly clear in Scripture.
Also, Jesus shows us the importance of repentance. True prayer acknowledges that we are sinners and fall short of the glory of God. Repentance means in Greek to “turn away from”. There is a difference between telling God your sorry and having a change of heart by truly seeking to cease and desist a specific sin, turning away from it.
Without prayer, we are not letting our petitions to God be known. Jesus shows us that we can trust God to be the provider, but we are also praising Him and showing our allegiance to Him when we pray to God, letting Him know that we need Him as our provider.
Lastly, 1 Peter 5:8 says that the devil is like a roaring lion, looking for people to devour. God is our deliverer and we show Him humility in acknowledging He is our deliverer from the evil one. A poet, William Cowper, said, “And Satan trembles when he sees The weakest saint upon his knees.”
Nothing about prayer is actually about us. It’s all about God. Most people make prayer about themselves. Prayer is about knowing God. Andrew Murray, a South African minister once said, “Some people pray just to pray and some people pray to know God.”
It is my desire and prayer that God continues to break me and teach me about prayer and that I stay on task, sharing what it means to pray, why to pray, and how to pray.
Last night, my friend Roy told me a story. He said to imagine a man that says he is a Christian like a man with a stick of dynamite. Then he said to imagine a man who states he is a Christian AND prays as a man with a stick of dynamite WITH a match. Which one is useful? Which one is going to cause an explosion?
The Holy Spirit is our match. God has graciously given the Holy Spirit to us. If we don’t pray, we are actively snuffing out the flame of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We are dynamite with no boom.
We should desire to want to cause explosions of Holy Spirit all around us. We should love to petition the Lord, interceding for the people all around us, for our government, for those in need, all in the name of Christ Jesus.
I implore you to join me in prayer. Not say you’ll pray and never do it. Not say you’ll do it and only do it once. Grow in prayer. Seek out what it says in the Word about prayer. Share your sins, desires, and needs here so that others may pray with you. It doesn’t matter that you may not know who you are praying for by name and maybe have never met them in person. They are your brother. They are your sister. God is our father. Christ is our bride. The Holy Spirit intercedes for us even now.
