How to Pray

[Quiet Listener]

I have been listening to sermons about prayer lately and they have been focusing on the way in which we should pray.
I realize that prayer is important and infact vital to our walk with the Lord and try to practice more sincere and meaningful prayer in my life. These messages have been a eye opener for me as of late and have got me wondering. Does anybody have any advice or anything in particular that they have discovered in their prayer life that has made them a stronger prayer warrior that they would like to share?

[deputydog530]

Praying specifically and within God's will according to the scriptures. Such as trials, recognizing that they can come according to God's will, and to get through them not aroound them as an example...

That has helped me.

[Revelation3:20]

I have been listening to sermons about prayer lately and they have been focusing on the way in which we should pray.
I realize that prayer is important and infact vital to our walk with the Lord and try to practice more sincere and meaningful prayer in my life. These messages have been a eye opener for me as of late and have got me wondering. Does anybody have any advice or anything in particular that they have discovered in their prayer life that has made them a stronger prayer warrior that they would like to share?

I think one of the most important aspects of being a strong prayer warrior is personal holiness unto the Lord. If you study the temple and the tabernacle in the old testament you can see holiness and purity are a major theme in nearly every aspect of the service of God. If the priests were defiled and came before God in a inappropriate manner the could potentially die. The new testament teaches us that the Christian is the temple of God and that we have access to the father through Christ. We are saved and preserved through Christ alone not through our own righteousness. However our relationship with God does depend in very large part on our personal holiness, or more accurately the degree to which we allow the Holy Spirit to conform us to the image of Christ. I believe many Christians do not have a good prayer life or a close relationship with the Lord because they resist the working of the Holy Spirit when he tries to conform them into the image of Christ.

How many believers regularly do things they that they know are wrong because they don't consider it very serious? This could be anything from being snappish or grumpy to watching films that do not honor the Lord to overeating. I suspect that most believers who may have a prOBlem or two in some "minor" areas(and who doesn't?) have been prodded by the Holy Spirit and been made aware that they are not in the perfect will of God in these "minor" areas. Then after a momentary twinge of guilt far to often we ignore these promptings because we are comfortable holding on to "minor" sins. That quenches the Spirit and hinders our prayer lives.

You see God isn't impressed with how good or how holy we are. Yes I know that sounds like it contradicts what I was just saying but stay with me. We cannot attain unto the holiness of God. Any time God looks at us it must be through Christ or else all our righteousness is as filthy rags before a perfectly pure God. What God desires in us is a pure heart that loves him. A pure heart strives to be perfectly holy. Not to attain acceptance with God(we are justified through Christ) but because holiness is who God is and a pure heart loves who he is and longs to be like him. When we shrug off the direction of the Holy Spirit on a "minor" issue we are showing we have an impure heart. We are not desiring to be holy as the Lord is holy and to be within Gods perfect will in every area. We may just desire to keep out of the worst and most OBviously destructive sins while retaining a level of impurity and sin that we are "comfortable" with. Maybe we become comfortable because we may seem to be as good or better than other brothers and sisters in Christ. A pure heart does not compare our own holiness to that of others and decide that we are better than most or "good enough" though. A pure heart continually seeks to be as holy as possible because the one we love is perfectly holy.

If we manage to keep a perfect heart before the Lord we will be able to maintain a close relationship with him and will be able to be powerful prayer warriors. As Jesus said:

Matthew 5:8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

[1Timothy115]

Whenever I feel like skipping prayer and taking care of something else, the Holy Spirit convicts me to pray. This morning I have tasks to take care of and thought of rushing out to take care of them. The Holy Spirit said, not so fast, go to prayer and read your daily Bible devotional. We (all of us) receive convictions like these from our pastors messages and daily devotions, reading, and study in God's Word.

I agree with the above, we need to stay sin confessed with our God to maintain the relationship we need. Prayer is about the 2-way communication and fellowship.