The Daily Guide
Schooling in Prayer
Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns
Philippians 4:6 - Message Translation
Observing prayer at work the disciples asked, "Lord, teach us to pray." It's a question we still need to be asking. Actually, Jesus gave them an answer adequate for us all by giving the model prayer we know as "The Lord's Prayer". Nevertheless, we still need to ask the question. By asking we give the Holy Spirit an opening to teach us how we can have an effective life of prayer. Luk.11:1 - 4, Joh.16:13 - 14.
The following prayer request was posted on The Virtual Church, "Please pray that I will always be employed in a well paying stable job with health benefits and good work environment that pays all the bills and rent." There's a lot of problems with that prayer request! I posted this response, "The all-inclusive, open-ended nature of your prayer request makes it difficult to respond to. For example, your prayer request doesn't make any allowance for the words Jesus spoke telling us, 'In the world you will have tribulation'." If you are unschooled in prayer you can present a request which cannot be answered in the form you have present it. Let God's Word and God's Spirit instruct you and you can come to know how to present prayer petitions which are answerable. Joh.16:33.
The apostle Paul appropriately writes, "We do not know what we should pray for as we ought". What's his answer to that problem? It's to get the Holy Spirit involved in your prayers. What's more, those who daily look to the Holy Spirit as their teacher find that He draws their attention to scriptures that are directly applicable to prayer. Here's a simple example, "Whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him." Rom.8:26 - 27,Mar.11:25.
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Copyright © 2008 P.F. (Simon) Measures
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