National Day of Prayer

While I know that today is the “National Day of Prayer”,  I wanted to take a moment to encourage all of us to look to God’s Word to provide instruction for our prayer lives, and the frequency with which we should pray.  What does it mean to “Pray without ceasing”?  After all, I have to work, and I have things to do.  This doesn’t mean to spend all of your time on your knees talking to God at the expense of your other commitments and responsibilities.  What it does mean is that we should always be in the mindset of prayer, or communicating with God.  How else will we know His will or His plans for our lives. We can pray while driving.  Some of my best conversations with the Lord are when I’m alone in the car, and the radio is off, and it’s just me and Him! I pray while I wash the dishes, or while I’m putting a load of laundry in the washer.  And please understand that when I say that I pray, I simply mean that I talk to Him…I pour my heart out to Him…and He listens to me and sometimes, He responds and provides clear direction, and sometimes His response is silence, and I have to trust Him all the more!  I also pray after we’re finished reading the Bible in the mornings, or while I recline after the kids are in bed in the evening.  What I’m trying to say, is that while I also celebrate “The National Day of Prayer”, EVERYDAY in the life of believers around the world should be a day of prayer.  We need to pray for the salvation and protection of our families and loved ones! We need to pray for the Body of Christ to truly represent Him accurately and with sincerity of heart and clarity of purpose! We need to pray for our government and world leaders, that they would begin to rule with integrity and reverent fear of the Lord! We need to pray for our marriages, our husbands or our wives! Oh God, we need to pray earnestly for our children!!! Pray with all of our hearts that the Lord would give us the wisdom to parent them in His ways and according to His statutes!! Pray that we would desire to cultivate little hearts that love and honor and respectfully fear the Lord! We need to pray that their eyes and ears be covered, and there hearts protected, and their innocence not stolen, with all of the evil that is thrown at them every second of every day!!! We need to pray for our brothers and sisters here and abroad, who are experiencing great persecution for their faith in our Lord, or who are just struggling to stand against the culture and its horrendous influence!!!  Simply put, today and every day, we need to PRAY! This moment and every moment, we need to pray! Teach our children to cry out to God, and teach them that He hears them.  And if you don’t know what to do, you can learn together! It begins with our submission to His will.  A genuine believer who truly has a heart to pray, already knows that our prayers are not an opportunity to bring God down on our level, and command Him or demand things from Him.  But we talk to him because we genuinely love Him and care what He has to say.  😀 I know some who have found this difficult to do…pray that is.  It seems some in the church have made prayer seem like some mystical event that only the super spiritual can participate in, or that it’s something for the all knowledgable. But that could not be further from the truth.  Prayer is a right, a privilege of all who love Him and have entered into relationship with the Father through His Son.  If you have withdrawn from communicating with the God who created you, or you never started because you didn’t feel comfortable or simply did not know where to begin, just start where you are! He hears the prayers of His children just as you would hear the prayers of your own. (Psalm 66:19-20) And He longs for a genuine relationship with you. The following verse explains one of the reasons we pray.  If you want to know more about what the Bible teaches on prayer visit this link http://www.biblegateway.com/keyword/index.php?search=pray&searchtype=all&version1=51&language1=en&spanbegin=1&spanend=73&resultspp=500&displayas=long&sort=bookorder.   Let me know if this is a desire that you have…or if there is something I can pray with you about.  If you’re still asking, “How important is prayer?”, or “Why pray?”, the word ‘pray(er,ed) is in the Bible between 438-508 times depending on which version you read.  Enjoy reading them all :D. You’ll find that what God’s Word teaches us is so much easier to understand than we think!