Spiritual Disciplines: Prayer

When I first planned out this sermon series on Spiritual Disciplines I knew that prayer would either be the first or the last topic that we looked at. This is because prayer is central, or should be central, to everything that we do as followers of Christ. If Jesus is Lord of everything and nothing is outside of His dominion (see Colossians 1:15-20), if God is aware of all things (see Psalm 139 and Matthew 10:28-31), then it makes perfect sense for us to go to Him about anything and everything. In fact, that is exactly what we are called to do (Philippians 4:6, 1 Thessalonians 5:17) and expected to do (Matthew 6:5-15, Luke 18:1-8).

So why do we sometimes (much of the time!) struggle with prayer? How come it often feels like when we pray our words/thoughts stop at the ceiling? In order to pray well we need to know who we are praying to. If we don’t have a good understanding of who God is and what He is like, then our prayers will be focused more on ourselves rather than on God. I believe that if we have a clearer picture of who God is then our prayer life will become more vibrant.

Like each of the other topics we’ve looked at, prayer is a discipline, something that we need to train ourselves in and work at in order to improve. Even for those for whom prayer comes more easily it is still a discipline and needs to be cultivated. Jesus taught His disciples and others how to pray, and modeled what a prayer filled life looked like by often going off on His own to speak with God. If Jesus needed to pray in order to stay connected with God, how much more do we need to pray?