Friday Fight 100 - Position of Prayer
For this 100th post, my desire is to share the importance of prayer. Please allow this post to speak to your heart about the unparalleled relationship and lifeline that prayer continually and powerfully enables.
Position of Prayer:
Prayer is a dialogue we have with our Creator. It brings hope, instills peace, and offers comfort and clarity to a mind filled with chaos. The Holy Spirit reveals the darkness in us, allowing the light of Christ to break us free while He works in and through us. In our surrender through prayer, seeking God's presence reveals our selfish desires, which always deceive us. Through our submission and personal interaction with God, the Holy Spirit deconstructs our worldly desires and fills our souls with the outpouring of God's grace. Praying shifts our priorities and helps us ignore the physical desires that slowly decay our souls. It builds us up, removes strongholds, and agrees with the Holy Spirit to lead us in God's will. Through prayer, God births spiritual gifts that He allows us to walk with and use in service for Him. In prayer, we can confess our utter dependence on God, placing our worth in our Creator through a relationship founded and growing in Him.
Prayer hinders our compromises today that could lead to what future generations idolize. Additionally, prayer shapes our lives as we willingly accept and confess our sins, and walk in repentance as God lifts the hurt that once held us captive.
In prayer, we can lift the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of others, particularly those who don't know God's love. Prayer teaches others how to pray and plants seeds that build generations of believers, prayer warriors, and difference-makers. Lifting our concerns removes the world's weight and brings us joy.
Raising our voices in thanksgiving and adoration allows us to receive new and living waters transforming us into new wine that brings life to others. In God's presence, we are shown our soul's deepest affliction of all, our sins, which separates us from the True Source. In our despairing cries, God replenishes by replacing things intended to bring us life but only bring our destruction. New believers can welcome Christ to reside in their hearts by petitioning God.
Darkness will do all possible to keep us from praying. Satan seeks to limit our prayers because he knows our prayers will limit him. The busyness of working for God is essential, but it should never replace our time alone with God. We cannot have a relationship with God while remaining silent toward Him. Being busy can derail our prayer time. Asking God for protection shields us from spiritual attacks. God wants to hear from His children so they understand through praying to Him that a communication lifeline is open and readily available. Hearing about God is not praying; watching a podcast is not praying, but quiet time with Him allows us to experience His grace directly. Prayer diminishes to what extent Satan can exploit our weaknesses.
The Word emphasizes the living relationship that prayer establishes. God did not call us to a life of silence or a life of withdrawal but to share the new life God first shared with us. In this understanding, we see our weaknesses and inability to do anything, but in our obedience in praying, God works powerfully in and through us. Praying builds a spiritual inheritance of protection and blessings. Children listen to everything adults say; let our children also hear us pray.
When we pray, we become a wide bridge that places people and circumstances right before the throne of God. We become like a shepherd gathering all the lost sheep to bring them home to Him. Only through prayer can we have a personal relationship with our Lord and Savior, experience forgiveness and joyfully walk a life for Christ. Let's offer our humble thankfulness for our Heavenly Father who sent His only Son, our Lord and Savior, to become true man, true flesh, true human, the second Adam that took away the curse of the first Adam, allowing humanity to be redeemed and free from sin and death.
Romans 12:12
Pastor Shannon
New Life Calvert