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The Lord’s Prayer is a wonderful soul-serving, soul-saving prayer. It can change your way of living because when you talk to God, really talk to God, all kind of things can happen. But praying is also dangerous business.
Moses talked with God and ended up having to lead his people out of Egypt.
Saul talked with God and ended up with a monumental name change, for today we know him as Paul. And we know Paul as a spiritual giant.
The man in our story, yesterday, talked with God and one day it all fell in place. It took a lifetime, but his last earthly words were to God and it was good.
Why pray? And for what?
When
you pray for patience are you really praying that your neighbors and
other church members will be more perfect so they won’t try what little
patience you’ve got?
Do you pray rambling prayers without detail? We live life in detail. We must pray the same way. Let me suggest that sometimes you write your prayers down. Not so they will be profound or better expressed but to keep you from mental wanderings. It will also help you to get a grasp on what you think is important.
When you pray are you like the woman who prayed to be able to make bouquets of God’s refusals? And
have you learned that you can often beat the blues if your prayers are
filled more with more sunshine statements than cloudy complaints?
Though
I am hardly an authority on prayer I know that you and I had better do
it and do it often, because when we bow our heads our souls open wide
and we feel the power of the Holy Spirit.
In everyday life we live by the clock, impatient to move on to the next project. But
rather than praying with a stopwatch in hand, we need to pray pointed,
practical, scriptural and intense prayers with our eyes on eternity
rather than the hands of a clock. And always with humility in our hearts, for our capacity for false pride is close to ridiculous.
Edward Day, a minister and author of the book An Autobiography of Prayer, tells his story: Ten years ago, a beloved physician and friend told me that I had a heart blockage, and that my heart was greatly enlarged. His
conclusions were the result of careful examinations by himself and
experts with the aid of the electrocardiograph and other reliable tests.
His warning was to slow down.
Two years later, the examinations were renewed and the diagnosis and prescription were the same. The prescription could not be taken. What
seemed to me to be the clear call of God took me into labors that were
even more grueling than those from which I had been warned.
Sixteen
to eighteen hours a day, journeying up and down the land bearing almost
intolerable burdens in the effort to reach the unawakened masses with
the message entrusted to me; keeping schedules that would exhaust much
younger men… From the viewpoint of medical science, it was reckless
folly.
But God had called and was still calling. What else could one do? Here,
however is the surprising thing. Tests, of the most thorough kind,
revealed there was no sign of heart blockage and the heart perfectly
normal in size! Do you wonder at my belief that It is of God? Or
that there is a conviction that the prayer which commits one wholly to
God has therapeutic reverberations in the body as well as redemptive
effect upon the spirit?”
There is nothing too great nor too small to be covered by prayer. Martin Tupper calls its force “the tender nerve that moves the muscles of omnipotence.”
Benjamin Franklin,
that grand old man who helped to shape our country in its infancy, once
rose during an impasse at the Constitutional Convention in June 1787
and said, “Mr. Washington…. The small progress
we have made, is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the imperfections of
the human understanding. I have
lived sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing
proofs I see of this truth that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire cannot rise without His aid?”
So why pray? Why bother?
I pray not because I am a preacher, but because I am a human being. Because I sometimes simply want to sit quietly andbask in my heavenly Father’s magnificent presence. Know again and again His overwhelming love. I
visit God often because I both want and need a daily conversation with
this Author of the Universe. And if I call Him my friend, my Savior and
my creative King, He will not let me forget what I have called Him.
In short, pray often. It
is, after all, the practice of talking to God and if you don’t talk to
God regularly isn’t that a good way to feel that He is a stranger?
Why pray? Why bother? Because you’re like the company you keep.
TO
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serializations; a novel on Sunday and Tuesday and Thursday varying
subjects) (3 times a week added to)
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