Exhortations on Prayer
PRAYER:
Exhortations from Ps Longinus
Ps Gabriel
Elder Nick
What is Prayer?
Prayer is a place of transformation a part of our discipleship experience rather than a means to get something from God.
Firstly prayer addresses God and framed by his word. Jesus’ teachings presume that we have audience with God already hence the implied confidence when we approach him.
Studying the many prayers of the saints, one sees a discovery of who God is and intends through the process of prayer.
God is so great beyond knowing but when we come in prayer we get a little bit more knowledge of him and thus we grow.
Whether it is in asking for something or worship or intercession for others, God always takes pleasure in revealing his nature to us.
Being Prayerful –
We are admonished to win the battle agsinst “inconsistent prayer life” by allowing God to teach us lesson with these words –
“Pray without ceasing”
We MUST –
Pray when we are too sinful to pray, too holy to pray, too weak to pray, too strong to pray, too faithless to pray, too full of faith to pray.
Pray when we know what to pray about, pray when we do not know what to pray about.
Pray when we feel like praying, pray when we don’t feel like praying.
Pray standing, sitting, kneeling, crawling, lying, bending, or squarting.
Pray at a specific time, pray without specific times, pray regularly, pray irregularly.
Pray in tongues, pray in known language, pray with scriptures, pray without scriptures.
Pray with our emotions, pray without our emotions, pray with our mind, in our mind, with mind focused, pray with our mind wandering.
Pray with our spirit, pray in the Spirit. Pray for yourself, for the Church, intercede, destroy, uproot, plant, etc.
Pray for everything and everybody we can think of.
Pray in the morning, noon and night and the minutes between.
By all means pray.
How?
Start with thanksgiving, start without thanksgiving.
Pray to confess, plead, request, command, decree, appreciate and complain.
The Formular:
Many people would like to have a formula for prayer, the secret is that there are no such formulas really different from what is already taught us.
We must not harbour any fear about “PRAYING AMISS”. Nobody will go to hell for the sin of praying amiss.
(A personal experience:
Sometimes the writer would have spent hours praying and afterwards the Spirit of God would show me him in prayers, those that were off course and those He had answered)
It is better pray off point than not praying at all because we are looking for working formula.
The benefit is that, after developing the habit of being prayerful, our prayer contents will become better.
Be Determined!
We must be determined in our hearts that if Prayer and Praise are the KEYs to INTIMACY WITH GOD, we would do better.
We do not necessarily need to ask how long or how often we praise or pray because we MUST spend more time on OUR KNEES than we spend watching television in a week.
The communication gets clearer, and becomes more of dialogue not a monologue. Thenafter you won’t need to necessarily have to fast every time you want to hear God.
Why? Because the channel of communication has been cleared through by FIRE !!!
By Praise and Prayer.
If we keep this commandment diligently we would definitely experience what it means to pray without ceasing.
We would experience how to be prayerful.
There is no better way to hear the Holy Spirit than developing intimacy.
We must learn from David , Daniel and Apostle Paul
KING DAVID
Psalm 119:164 AMP
“Seven times a day and all day long do I praise You because of Your righteous decrees”
DANIEL the PROPHET
Daniel 6:10 NLT
“But when Daniel learned that the law had been signed, he went home and knelt down as usual in his upstairs room, with its windows open toward Jerusalem. He prayed three times a day, just as he had always done, giving thanks to his God”
APOSTLE PAUL
1 Cor 14:18 NLT
“I thank God that I speak in tongues more than any of you”
Let US be determined to make
-Prayer, Praise & Worship and
– studying the Word
a lifestyle not just events!
When we feel overwhelmed:
SPREADING IT BEFORE GOD – PRAYERS
2 Kings 19:14
“Hezekiah received the letter of the hand of the messengers, and read it: and Hezekiah went up into the house of the Lord, and spread it before the Lord”
Here is one of the best pictures of prayer in the Bible. Hezekiah is king over Israel when the cruel and powerful Assyrian army marches against them. Rabshakeh, the army’s spokesman, sends a threatening letter and tells Hezekiah not to trust in his God for deliverance.
Here was an enormous temptation and a trial, all wrapped into one little scroll. There is the imminent danger of being razed to the ground by the Assyrian empire; then there is the verbal prompting not to trust in God for a rescue.
But how does Hezekiah deal with this letter? He receives it, he reads it…and then he takes it straight to the Lord and spreads it before him.
What a wonderful picture of prayer! It is the spreading of our problems, our temptations, our struggles before the Lord in the face of every temptation to do otherwise.
Are we today wrestling with a temptation to sin that is threatening to conquer us?
We can spread it before the Lord.
Is your heart weighed down with some terrible worry, or sorrow, or pain?
Please spread it before the Lord.
Have you felt the weight of your guilt before a holy God for the first time?
Spread it before the Lord.
No one has every come to the Lord and gone away disappointed.
Hezekiah did not, and we will not.
Isa.45.19. kjv
“I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth: I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain: I the Lord speak righteousness, I declare things that are right”
The seed of Jacob shall not seek Him in vain.
God bless us all.