Thoughts on Prayer and Its Necessity

 

The Bible is filled with hundreds of passages on prayer. Because communication is so important for any relationship and people were created for relationship, prayer is integral to our being and to being in a relationship with God. 

Without daily prayer, we are like a plant that has no source of nutrients. We wither, turn inwards on ourselves, die, and become dust tossed about by every wind.

Prayer is the source of our nutrients, a channel of food, that grows us upward in our relationship with God, inward in our estimation of ourselves, and outward in our relationship with other people. 

Without relationship with God grown through prayer, we gain no guidance in our purpose of being alive. 

Our redemption by Jesus comes from His relationship with the Father and His sacrifice to have relationship with us. 

Our hearing God’s voice and being saved comes because of prayer and through our prayer of acceptance and confession of sins.

If we don’t pray, we cut off that which Jesus gave His life for—relationship with Him, and we negate the meaning and method of our salvation. Then we die a martyr to this world and have an eternal destiny without God.

Prayer is vital to our lives as Christians.

Individuality

          We each strive to be our own person, to be an individual. No one wants anyone telling us how to live or what decisions to make. We shout for our rights and sometimes demand our privileges are our rights. You notice this when children demand things at home when they are growing up and stretching their wings to be independent.   

This gift of individuality is not a right, but a gift. So, how is this gift? Well, first, go back to the first assumption, God created you; He created each of us. If we stop with only that statement and pursue it no further, we say, “Yes, He made me.” God’s great knowledge and understanding in creating my body is amazing, for without the heart, I would be dead or without the brain, I would be dead. Consider though, your spirit and individuality. If we were involved in a Christian religion as a child or as an adult, we will grant the fact God made our spirit; He gave us a spiritual essence. You say, however, individuality is what I made of myself since my birth. It is the choices I chose to make; the road I chose to travel. God has nothing to do with my individuality, we may say. Maybe this is so, considering we made choices that were not always the best choices but good choices. Is that not the common thought expressed in the poem, “The Road Less Traveled,” by Robert Frost? Yet, is there not more to individuality than this? Consider then, we human beings have been in existence since day six of creation; hence, we are “old enough” to choose our own way, to become who we want to be. “No one is in charge of me but me,” we might have said or heard. Now, consider, since our creation, which we admitted, God was before we began, since before time began. With this reasoning in place, that He made us, we must realize individuality does not come from ourselves, but is a gift from God.   

Now, since we conceded individuality is a gift from God, we should consider then, how is that to play out in our realm of life of four score and ten years with the spirit God put in us? How do we reconcile our spiritual side to our individuality? Many of us consider our spiritual side and our own individuality separate from each other. We consider it our way to live, living our own lives. Consider though, since individuality is a gift from God, individuality is the gift God gave us to express in our own way how God is working in our lives and how He wants us to work in His world for His purpose. “What?” you say. Yes, if you agree individuality is a gift from God, as spirituality is a gift given to us at our own creation, then you must acknowledge each of these is to be used somehow in His purpose for our lives on this earth at this time. Wow, what a consideration!    

When we give our lives to Christ, not only are we accepting His free gift of salvation from our sinful life and accepting eternal life with God, but we are giving all of ourselves, which includes every aspect of our personality/individuality, to Him to use for His purposes. Jesus said this in Matthew 16:24-25 when he tried to explain to the disciples about following Him,

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone desires to be my disciple,  let him deny himself, forget his own interests, and take up his cross and follow me [Conform wholly to my example in living] ^. For whoever is bent on saving his temporal life will lose eternal life, but whoever loses his life, his comfort and security here, for my sake will find life everlasting.”

Individuality is the shell outside our spiritual life; our individuality is what we must give to God if we are to be followers of Jesus. To say no to this is either to be a child and means we have not grown into a deeper relationship with God or we actually have not given ourselves to Jesus. Which have you done?

Individuality is the shell or covering of our whole person. Inside resides the part of us God made for Himself and most like Himself, the spirit. Our individuality/personality must be given to God for us to give ourselves to Him to be in fellowship with Him. Individuality can corrupt human nature for its own gain and purposes, so, if we are going to follow Jesus and become more Christ-like, we must yield our individual nature, a gift from God, back to Him. We can stay as little children who are self-centered and interested in their own gain or we can allow God to break the outer shell of individuality, which allows our spiritual life to emerge. 

If we are going to grow more Christ-like, we must continue to yield ourselves to Him so we can grow. In doing so, He will break through the individual of self, which desires its own way and its own wants, to get to the essence God has put into each of us at our creation, our spirit. Each of our individual spirits is the part of us that hears and understands God. Through this hearing and understanding, He leads us to obedience and we become more and more as He is. God wants to bring you into complete union with Him just as He is with Christ, but until we give up the right to ourselves, He will not. We must “deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him” (Matthew 16:24 New American Standard Bible). From this point, our spiritual life will grow. Individuality is the part of our selves which expresses our spirituality; yielded to Him, we will not only grow but also show the world the way to true Life.

Physical and Spiritual

           So often, we live our lives only in the physical sphere without even realizing we chose physical over spiritual. Some people choose not to recognize a spiritual side of life at all. Why do we choose to live solely to our physical wants? Why do we choose to ignore or avoid anything spiritual? Do we not believe? Do we not want to give any claim of our lives to a higher power? Alternatively, do we intentionally only feed our physical nature out of disobedience? 

            In my studies, I found humans live in both the physical and spiritual realm at the same time. We may not admit to being dual-based beings, physical and spiritual, because we are doubters or never thought of it. God is around us and, if we are Christians, in us. God’s angels do His work for Him around His created and spiritual world. This is very hard to understand much less deem true when we, as a scientific people, must "see it to believe it.” For us living almost 2000 years after Christ's death, resurrection, and ascension, we say we do not see God and, thus, we cannot have faith in Him. Still, we do have the ability to see God through the statements and testimonies of the many people who walked with Christ while He walked on earth. They testified of what He did, where He walked, and what He said while in human form. In our scientific-based thoughts, we say we must see something with our eyes, but scientific reasoning gives credence to other scientists who state that this plus that makes this compound. The rational scientists are relying upon the testimony of another scientist. So what is the difference to relying upon the testimony of the disciples and other followers of Jesus? They gave actual eyewitness accounts of Christ and His works while on earth. The followers of Jesus experienced real occurrence with Jesus and their testimony is valid. Can we not allow ourselves to comprehend that? The Old Testament prophets foretold of a coming Messiah and trusted the prophecy to be true though they would not physically see the Messiah. The prophets searched and inquired about this salvation (1 Peter 1:10). They did not know to which people, when, or where this salvation would occur, but they knew, because of God's Spirit in and upon them, that salvation through the Messiah was without a doubt in the future. The prophets rendered the prophecies for future people. This did not make them doubt. God’s prophets trusted the prophecies and God who was behind them even though they did not see the fulfillment with their own eyes. They prophesied even though their intellect said salvation was unreasonable because they trusted in the un-seeable, yet visibly powerful, God. These prophets sought to accept the prophecies as true even though the prophecies appeared irrational. God gave them faith to trust and the Spirit to bolster them. In the book of Hebrews 11, Paul told us of a great cloud of witnesses. In both Hebrews 11 and Genesis 5, Enoch stayed in habitual fellowship with God and, because of his close relationship, did not experience death. God raised him to heaven before Enoch’s body died.

             If so many people in the Old Testament could trust without having actually seen God/Christ, why can we not believe even though our intellect says this belief is irrational? Relying upon someone’s testimony is not irrational. Belief becomes even less irrational when relying on the testimony of many people whose declarations of faith are bound into one book testifying of God and His work in human history. To rational humankind, it appears more irrational to believe when not seeing before Christ’s physical birth. Why cannot we as humans, almost 2000 years after Christ's works on earth, His death, and His resurrection, acknowledge and trust in Jesus based upon the testimony of many people and the recording of His acts upon earth? What seems harder to consider is that with so many witnesses and testimonies of God's work and His salvation offered, some people still choose not to believe. God is here. God is now, in this present physical world, in and around us, calling our names and choosing to walk in a relationship with us. How can we deny this reality when all along He has been here? Choose to acknowledge and trust. Choose to be in habitual fellowship/relationship with God, our maker.