A prayerful life
We may have a belief about prayer but is it a true belief or is it false belief? Some view prayer as purely a spiritual exercise – like a test that we either pass or fail. To get our prayer answered, God has set up like an obstacle course for us to weave our way through and if we are slightly out-of-bounds in any area then our prayer request is disqualified. If we are working with that definition of prayer we are left feeling that our prayers are answered on the basis of our efforts and God’s mercy & grace has very little to do with it.
We can also make the mistake of focusing on the activity of prayer itself but it’s not the act of prayer that changes things – it is the God to whom I pray that changes things.
The bible gives us a different view of prayer. Prayer is presented to us as a simple, spontaneous sharing of our hearts with God. Prayer is a conversation with God and like any conversation the topic can vary. But we can also pray with :- silence, singing, shouting, dancing, raising our hands, bowing down in reverence. These are all forms of prayer if they represent a person’s true heart expression to God. ANYTHING you do that helps you express & enhance your heart connection with God is a form of prayer because that is the primary essence of what praying is about…our intimate expression of our relationship with God.
Knowing how to open your heart to God and talk to Him shouldn’t be that difficult but its motivating yourself to do it regularly .
Illustration: - Cup of water. It takes a fair degree of effort to get a cup filled up and brimming with water but once it is ~ it only takes a small amount to keep it overflowing!!
We can get our lives to the point of overflow but when the pressure is off we need to maintain the spiritual disciplines that got our storehouse full!
