How often do you pray? What priority do you place on prayer? Do you pray every day? Do you pray multiple times per day? What are your prayers composed of? Do they include thanksgiving? Do they include praise? Or are they only composed of wants?
Prayer should be an important part of our daily lives. Often our prayers include our wants. We ask for healing of a loved one or ourselves. We ask God to guide us in the search for a job. We may occasionally thank him for specific blessings or answer to our requests.
There is nothing wrong with making requests of God. In fact, Jesus tells us to make our requests. He even states that anything we ask will be given to us…if it is in accordance with God’s will. That “if” can be a test of our faith. We wonder why God doesn’t heal a loved one. We may even blame him for the person being ill. We must remember that God does not cause the illness, we live in a broken world. But he also may choose not to heal the person for a reason we do not understand…yet.
But how dedicated are we to prayer? We see Jesus got up early to spend time in prayer with the Father. This after a long night of healing people and casting out demons. He knew that He must rely on the Father to guide Him along the path laid out for Him. He knew He needed to submit to the Father’s will to be the perfect Lamb of God.
We, too, need to dedicate time for prayer, for conversation with the Father. It is in our conversations with the Father that we grow our relationship with him. It is through conversation we gain an understanding of who God is and what he desires for us and how we fit into his will. Through our dedicated conversations with him our prayers become more in line with his will, and we see more of our prayers answered the way we want because our will is the same as his.
I pray we all dedicate time to be in conversation with God daily. I pray we seek to know God’s will. I pray each one of us will align our will with God’s will and our prayers become more effective. Dedicate time for prayer. Spend time in conversation with God. Align your will with his.
Mark 1:35 In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.
Marty Pressey 