Prayer Changes Everything

Friend, prayer changes everything.

How is your prayer life, friend?

Have we settled for a dull repetitious prayer life?

As a follower of Christ, daily prayer is essential in our walk of faith.

It is how we can be most intimate and connected to God.

And prayer changes everything for the person praying.

But how do we establish a daily habit of prayer when we may not know how to pray or what our prayer life should look like?

Fortunately, Jesus teaches us the how-to and how-to not pray in Matthew 6:5-14 when the disciples asked Him this same question.

The Messiah first teaches His disciples that a good prayer life is not one with long, drawn-out sentences or fancy words to make themselves sound good to others.

But rather, when we pray, we ought to seek our prayer time in private with our heavenly Father; and when praying with others, we are to do it to glorify God, not outwardly pleasing.

Jesus says- “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him (Matthew 6:7-8)”.

God does not look at the beauty of our words.

He looks at the genuineness of the heart.

Jesus then goes on to teach the disciples one of the most recited and shared scripture passages among Christians- The Lord’s Prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer gives us a guide on how to pray and can be helpful when we find ourselves struggling in our prayer life.

We can start praying more like Jesus today when we purposely structure our prayers in the same pattern as The Lord’s Prayer- adoring God, confessing to God, thanking God, and making requests to God.

When we use this structure in our prayer time, we can establish a daily prayer life that is not from a ritualistic pattern but from an overflow of our hearts.

The late J. I. Packer once said, “We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts. Many of us, I suspect, have no idea how impoverished we are at this level. Let us ask the Lord to show us”.

Friend, every single day, we can go to our Father in heaven and receive His daily bread that will sustain us.

When we seek God through prayer, we receive the daily nourishment our souls so desperately need.

May you always remember on your best day that you still need God as desperately as you did on your worst day.

Let us pray and praise Him today, friend.