Learning to pray in public and private can be challenging, and why do you think that is? If you learned to pray as a child, your prayers were intentional and full of faith. That is why Jesus told His audience, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). As we grow older and experience the world’s temptations, our individualism starts to take root, and spiritual sickness starts to develop. We start relying more and more on ourselves and less and less on God.
What happens next is we get crushed by our self-imposed desires of the flesh, and hopelessness starts to take over our minds. Unfortunately, too many of us never fully recover from our hurts, habits, and hang-ups; we never find our way back to God. Surrender is our only hope. We must find the will to turn our lives over to God. If we are fortunate enough to surrender, we have to start dealing with all the twisted ideas about God embedded inside each one of us. How well we deal with the doubts and certainty we have about God will determine the amount of dedication and zeal of our prayer life.
When we say we struggle with prayer and meditation, what we are genuinely not recognizing more times than not is that it isn’t prayer and meditation we are struggling with; it’s our perception of God. If we view God as an authority figure, prayer and meditation become a duty and nothing more than a tedious task. Prayer and meditation become a box we check and something to rely on only in the case of emergency and desperation. On the other hand, if we learn to view God as a loving God with an abundant amount of grace and mercy to share with every one of us (which is true), then we can start to enjoy intimacy with the Creator of the universe. When we learn to change our perception of God, we will learn what it means to pray fervently.
Lord, help me to learn the lessons for what You desire from me and all of creation. I desire to be willing to pray, obey, and eager to do what You are asking. Please give me a willing spirit. In Your Spirit and Name, I pray these things. May I do Your will and not mine now and forever. Amen.
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