Make your prayers count - Chapter 2
Prayer is not an isolated and optional religious exercise. It is a vital factor, significant in determining our eternal destiny!
The supreme purpose that God is working out here on earth is the expansion of His Kingdom – His Family. He wants to make out of human beings immortal members of His ruling Family.
These must be individuals who, by their own free choice, come to fully support God’s way of doing things, who want to think as God thinks, perceive as God perceives, react as God reacts. They must want with all their hearts to be involved in whatever God is doing.
Such an attitude is essential in order to maintain, throughout eternity, harmony and peace in the God Family.
Deuteronomy 8:2
Remember how the Lord
your God led you through the wilderness for these forty years, humbling
you and testing you to prove your character, and to find out whether or
not you would obey his commands.
God has made us temporarily human. This existence is a testing ground so our Creator can try us and know what is in our hearts, whether or not He can trust us to live by His rules and laws. He must be sure. He is looking at us, closely examining our actions and reactions.
God takes note of what we say when we are talking to Him. Of course He knows our hearts and intents. And the Holy Spirit helps where we cannot adequately express ourselves.
Romans 8:26-27
And
the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know
what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with
groanings that cannot be expressed in words. And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will.
Still, as Jesus showed, the actual words we use are also important, and they ought to be meaningful, rather than vain repetitions.
Matthew 6:7
“When
you pray, don’t babble on and on as the Gentiles do. They think their
prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again.
One of the obstacles to effective prayer is not often identified: It is the fact that we live in the age of devalued language. Words have never been so cheap, so frequently meaningless. All around us language is misused in advertising, politics, entertainment and casual conversation.
Because we have been disillusioned more than once by broken promises, exaggerations, shading of the truth, even outright lies, we have come to automatically doubt that words mean what their face value would indicate.
This is one reason some have difficulty believing God’s promises. It also could be one of the reasons some prayers are not as effective as they should be.
Remember that God really didn’t have to ask Adam and Eve the series of questions about what they had done. He already knew the answer.
Genesis 3:9-13
Then the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He replied, “I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.” “Who told you that you were naked?” the Lord God asked. “Have you eaten from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat?” The man replied, “It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it.” Then the Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?” “The serpent deceived me,” she replied. “That’s why I ate it.”
He didn’t have to ask Cain where Abel was.
Genesis 4:9
Afterward the Lord asked Cain, “Where is your brother? Where is Abel?”
He didn’t have to come down to earth to verify how evil Sodom was.
Genesis 18:20-21
So the Lord told Abraham, “I have heard a great outcry from Sodom and Gomorrah, because their sin is so flagrant. I am going down to see if their actions are as wicked as I have heard. If not, I want to know.”
He didn’t have to allow Jacob to contend with him all night.
Genesis 32:24
This left Jacob all alone in the camp, and a man came and wrestled with him until the dawn began to break.
But He wanted to — and wants to — hear from humans themselves what they have to say, and see their reactions.
