Prayer

We talk about how impartment prayer is for our walk with Christ, but are we really focusing in on what prayer is all about.  We look at others middle –eastern religions  that call their people to pray 3 times a day to a false god, one that does not even exist, yet we who serve the Living God, look for excuses not to pray.  We say we are busy and God understands that.  Really, does He really understand?  I’m not sure I agree with that, after all we see that Christ spent hours in His time on earth in prayer, making sure that He made time to spend alone with His father.  Daniel felt that his time in prayer was so important that he did not allow the threat of loins eating him stop him from praying.  Then there is the question how do we pray, and  when do pray?  Are we rushing through it just to get it done and over with, like it’s a duty we have to do, so like a school child wanting to get their homework done as fast as possible so they can play with their friends we rush through it not even thinking of the words we have said.

When we do finally go to pray to God is it because we need something, you just found out that you lost your job, you come back from the doctor and the outcome isn’t good, your wife or husband told you they no longer love you, maybe you just aren’t happy about life and you want God to change it for you.  Is this really what prayer to God is all about?  What if I told you that our prayer life is a direct reflection on how we view God.  A.W. Tozer wrote, “what  comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.… Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.”  How we view God and our relationship with Him is how we come to Him in Prayer.

Daniels Prayer to God: Daniel 9:19

The thing I love about Daniel is the Love that he has for God, He continued to worship God through his entire life.  We come to Chapter nine of Daniel and we see that he had been studying the bible, he sees that in his study that God promised to only hold Israel captive for seventy years.  We come to understand that to be able to know how to pray, and  what to pray for we must read and study the bible, we must not just sit down and pray whatever pops into our head we must prepare for prayer, we might want to grab a list of people we want to pray for.  The next thing we notice is how Daniel prays, he never glorifies himself always glorifying God, even when he asks for something he glorifies God (notice verse 18).   Never does Daniel say he has done so much for God that God owes him this, always he talks about how He or Israel does not deserve Gods love. 

We must begin to realize that in this world it is not about us but always about God, we must begin to shift our focus on God.  I can only begin to think of how God is going to work in the Churches life that is focusing their time and energy into worshiping God Through Prayer and study of His word,  and who is saying my  life is going to honor God in all that I do.