Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Prayer Is Not An Option - It Is Fundamental To Your Spiritual Health

My Utmost For His Highest
 
When you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. —Matthew 6:6
 
“Prayer is an effort of the will. After we have entered our secret place and shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. We cannot seem to get our minds into good working order, and the first thing we have to fight is wandering thoughts. The great battle in private prayer is overcoming this problem of our idle and wandering thinking. We have to learn to discipline our minds and concentrate on willful, deliberate prayer.[…] Having a secret stillness before God means deliberately shutting the door on our emotions and remembering Him. God is in secret, and He sees us from “the secret place”— […] Enter into “the secret place,” and you will find that God was right in the middle of your everyday circumstances all the time. Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything.”  CHAMBERS
 
Jesus would withdraw from the disciples to pray. (Mark 1:35) “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.”  Before the day took hold of Him, He spent time with the Father.  It was necessary for Him and it is necessary for us.  WE should treat our relationship with God as if it is real .. because it is.  At my work, we are in cubicles.  Everybody can hear everything that is said.  There is no privacy.  But there are times when I need to talk to someone, alone, uninterrupted.  I have a lab that I use for testing computers, so I go in there.  In the same way, we must take time to talk to God, alone, without interruption.  Jesus gave us the example.  The Bible is replete with encouragement for us to pray.  Prayer is spending time with God.  Why would you not?  In the same way that God has given us His Word, He has told us to pray.
 
God’s Word teaches, corrects, rebukes, and trains us in righteous living (2 Timothy 3:16) and yet, we treat the Word as if it is a book of suggestions.  If God has said pray, there is a very important reason.  In Ephesians 6, after we put on the full armor of God, we are told to pray.  In Philippians 4 we are told to pray to God.  God loves us and desire to have a relationship with us.  That includes communication.  Prayer is a supernatural act.   (Romans 8:26-27) “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.  And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”  The Father hears us because of Jesus and what we can’t say or don’t even know to say, the Holy Spirit helps us.  Stop treating prayer as if it is an option … it is an absolute necessity to a healthy Christian life.  CHARLEY

No comments: