Learning how to pray
“The LORD would speak.. (with Moses) ..face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”
Jesus: “My sheep listen to My voice; I know them, and they follow Me.”
Prayer has been the one practice that cannot be scientifically proven… other than that patients who pray to God & have people praying vocally over them generally do much better & heal faster.
“Prayer is more than a lighted candle,” insists the theologian George A. Buttrick. “It is the contagion of health. It is the pulse of Life.”
A real relationship with God means walking with Him daily, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It means talking with Him intimately,
Mark 1:35 “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, and left the house and went off to a solitary place, where He prayed.”
The greatest person who ever lived on this planet was preeminently a Man of prayer. After being Baptized, after meeting most of those who would be his disciples, He sent them home. Before beginning His ministry, He would go into the wilderness and fast and pray for 40 days and nights. At the end of that time Satan came to test Him.
The priority of prayer is found in one way or another on almost every page of the Bible and in every chapter of church history. It is neither a peripheral theme nor an optional extra for the desperate and the devout.
How to “PRAY”: An acronym P=Pause R =Rejoice A=Ask Y=Yield
A 4 fold Circle of Prayer
Your Guide for 15 minutes of Prayer daily
- Choose a time and place
- Sacred meeting between you & God – no interruptions, music, phone,
- Know that He wants to meet you more than you want to meet with Him
- Talk out loud to God,(Whisper if you must)what’s currently on your mind
- If you run out of things to say then just listen.. come expecting to hear
Prayer does not belong to some other time in history, nor to some other type of person more spiritual or disciplined or experienced than you and me. Prayer is nothing at all unless it is a matter of vast and all-consuming importance for each one of us.
And it means listening attentively to his voice because, as Jesus said, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow Me.”