Prayer Service July 20, 2020

Family Dinners

The family dinner table is somewhat of a lost art. It seems like now when a family does get together for dinner all they do is look at the social media feeds or they are texting someone instead of talking someone at the table.

Prayer and Good Family Dinners

A praying life feels like family mealtimes because prayer and eating around the family table are both about relationships.

It is a time when we can sit down, let our guard down and talk to someone that we love and we know loves us.

What is Prayer

“Prayer is simple the medium through which we experience and connect to God.”

Praying is Hard To Learn

One question that disciples from the first 12 have asked is “how should we pray?” Learning to pray is tough and we make it harder.

Why? Because we focus to much on “learning to pray” instead of focusing on God. We make prayer a task to be done. “Prayer is not the center of this book. Getting to know a person, God, is the center.”

Let me put it another way. Your quite time is not about your reading your Bible, praying or doing a devotional. It is about getting to know a person, God the Father, though Jesus Christ who manifests His presence by the Holy Spirit.

In fact, we have been taught wrong about our quite time. It is not a duty to be performed. It is a relationship to be enjoyed so the next time you want a quite time with God grab your Bible, your favorite devotional book and your favorite beverage and just enjoy being with God.

Because as the author, Paul Miller says, “You don’t experience God, you get to know him. You submit to him. You enjoy him. He is, after all, a person.”

A Praying Life…Reveals the Heart

When we, as Christians, pray we get to know ourselves better as well. A Praying Life will cause change in your life. Now some of this are the author’s ideas and some our my own.

Author says, “We don’t learn to love someone without it changing us. That is just the nature of love that reflects the heart of God.” I agree. Every relationship that we have changes us or at least has the potential to change us.

Mentors = we establish relationship with mentors to learn from and be shaped by our mentors.

Friends = We are told as young people to always choose our friends wise because we will become like our friends.

Girlfriend/Boyfriend/Spouse = This category of relationship extremely for obvious reasons. They will change your heart.

Parents = Whether we like to admit it our not, our parents brings about the most change in our lives. I mean think about…they are ones that shaped almost everything you believe or don’t believe. For example, say your parents always made sure every bill was paid before they got groceries for the week. Now image that after the bills were paid your family did have enough money to buy food. Not the food you want, but they didn’t have the money to be any food or not enough anyway. Don’t get me wrong your parents loved but there were times you were glad the best friend’s mom and dad asked you to stay for dinner.

So you decided that when you got married and have a family, groceries were going to be bought first and then the bills would be paid. This is just one possible way that your parents might have caused a change in your life.

Of course when we are in a relationship with the Lord, He will change us the most dramatically. Why? Because He is the one that will change our sinful nature into a Godly nature and one day Jesus will give us glorified bodies. We will be without the affects of sin in our lives. It will be wonderful.

You see the more time you spend with someone the more they will cause change in your life. So, if you don’t see God changing your life, you might examine how much time you’re spending with God.

You see we should be totally dependent on God and the only way to be total dependent on someone is be with them all the time and you have to totally trust them. Think about the dependent baby. A baby is with its parents almost 100% of the time when they are newborns. About the only time they aren’t with the parents is when they “drop them off” at babysitter or when they are a sleep. Either way that baby is with you or trusting you to pick the correct person to watch them.

Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer. The amount you depend on God will be revealed by the amount of time you spend with God in prayer.

The question is our we dependent on God or something or someone else?

Tonight, as you go to prayer, I would encourage to take that question to God. Ask God to reveal to your heart whether you are totally dependent on Him or are you dependent on someone else? Take the time to get to know the Lord tonight.