Every day on Facebook, people offer the hardships, tests, trials and the tribulations of their personal journey’s…and person-after-person respond by saying, that they are “praying for them…”
Are they?
Do they?
Do people feel the power of that prayer?
Are they really, truly remembered in prayer AND FOR HOW LONG?
Is it pray “and DONE?” And, move on?
Instead of it being something we do every day, all the time, like breathing, eating and walking and talking, prayer seems to have become like that little glass covered box on the wall that says, “Break in case of emergency.”
It is true that “so very often” we associate prayer only with the “crises in our life” and in the lives of others…
I heard a story the other day of a man who encountered a bit of trouble while flying his little tiny single engine airplane. He called the control tower and said,
“Pilot to tower, I’m 300 miles from the airport, six hundred feet above the ground, and I’m out of fuel. I am descending rapidly. Please advise. Over.”
“Tower to pilot,” the dispatcher began, “Repeat after me: “Our Father who art in heaven…'”
Prayer is, “for the most part,” an “untapped resource,” an unexplored continent …where “untold treasure” remains to be unearthed.
It is talked about more than anything else, and practiced less than anything else.
And yet, for the believer it remains “one of the greatest gifts” our Lord has given us outside of “salvation-itself.”
This is good: In 1952, Albert Einstein was delivering a lecture on the campus of Princeton University. A doctoral student asked the famous scientist “What is there left in the world for “original dissertation research?” With considerate thought and profundity Einstein replied, “Find out about prayer.
…Somebody must “find out about prayer.”
Prayer is the pipeline of communication between God and his people, between God and those who believe in him. Never take your life of prayer for granted. It is important. It is critical.
It is a part of who you are supposed to be. As a child of God, you are to be “a person of prayer.” Prayer is to be taken seriously. Prayer is significant. Prayer is like our “life-line.” Prayer is earnest and heartfelt communication.
Two of the most instructive parables Jesus ever told on prayer happen to be in Luke’s gospel. One is in Luke 18 and the other in Luke 11, both have to do… with being “persistent and not giving up” when it comes to prayer.
Luke 18:1 says, “Now He was telling them a parable to show them that at all times “they ought to pray and “not to lose heart.”
Luke 11:9 is where we find the promise that says, “ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you.”
Each of those verbs are in the present tense, active voice and that means they could be translated, “keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking.”
Jesus does not want us to “give up” in prayer, he instructs us to be persistent. Always…no matter what…
Now there is a difference between a “persistent prayer” and “a long rambling kind of prayer.”
A person who is persistent in prayer does not necessarily have to pray for a long time. Persistence means “not giving up.”
Some people give up easy, they quit because they say they don’t feel like praying, the joy is gone, the feeling is gone. The answer didn’t happen in an instant.
But we are not to live by our “feelings alone” but to live by the commandments of our Lord who tells us to pray “without ceasing.”
Is anybody listening?
One author has written: How much prayer meant to Jesus!
It was not only his regular habit, but his resort in every emergency, however slight or serious.
When “perplexed” he prayed when “hard pressed by work” he prayed. When “hungry for fellowship” he found it in prayer.
He chose his associates and received his messages upon his knees. “If tempted”, he prayed. “If criticized,” he prayed.
“If fatigued” in body or “wearied” in spirit, he had recourse to his one unfailing habit of prayer.
Prayer brought him “unmeasured power” at the beginning, and kept the flow unbroken and undiminished.
There was no emergency, no difficulty, no necessity, no temptation that would not yield to prayer.
So, just what is your prayer life like? Are you a person of prayer?