Prayer Workers Wanted: Apply Within Your Heart

Have you ever read something that immediately grabbed your attention and made you sit up and take notice?  Perhaps it made you begin to think and to question the way in which you were doing something or going about your life.  Maybe it was so profound that it stuck with you and caused you to want to do better and to be better.

Such a thing happened to me recently.  I was reading a monthly publication and an article about prayer when I came across the following paragraph.

Craig Warner, Executive Director for the Gideon’s International writes:

Intentional and genuine prayer is work.  Praying is much more than a physical exercise of bowing our heads, clasping our hands together, and going to our knees.  The goal of prayer is God Himself – not joy, peace or blessing.  How do we reach that goal?  Practice.  In his book, The Path of Prayer, Samuel Chadwick writes, “Though a man shall have all knowledge about prayer, and  though he understands all mysteries about prayer, unless he prays he will never learn to pray”.

I can’t stop thinking about it and even better, I can’t stop praying about it.  I want to know God better.  I want all of Him, or as least as much as I can handle in this earthly body.  The principle path to knowing God better is prayer so that means I need to get a lot better at prayer and talking to Him!

I think for most of us the primary obstacle to a better prayer life is the time and effort that we are willing to invest in it.  In other words, we aren’t doing the work required, we aren’t making prayer a priority and therefore our relationship with our Heavenly Father isn’t as strong as it could be.  I know this to be true in my case and I suspect it may be true in the lives of other Christians as well.

It’s been said that prayer is our power source and that is almost right.  Prayer is not the power source, God is the power source and prayer is the method by which we stay filled with the Spirit and in harmony with the power source.  The more we pray the more we are able to attune our hearts to the master and creator of the universe who is also our savior and our friend.  The miracle in all of this is that he desires our companionship and love more than we desire His.  He seeks us, draws us, teaches us and is always working on our behalf and unless we stay in contact with Him through prayer we are apt to miss most of what He is doing.

God is so good and the depth of his love and character is infinite.  Although we have an eternity to get to know him the sooner we start and the more emphasis we place on prayer the better and sweeter our lives will be.  And through our connection to God others around us will be blessed and God’s kingdom will grow.