104 Days to Go...How Much Are You Sleeping?

Greetings Brothers,

A word of caution...if you value your sleep, definitely stay away from anything written by E.M. Bounds. I have been reading Power Through Prayer and am suddenly seeing so clearly the absolute necessity of making prayer a priority in my life. My heart is so cold that I congratulate myself if I can spend a few minutes in concentrated devotion and prayer each morning. What a pitiful joke! If we truly desire to be men of God, it is essential that we give not only significant time in private to prayer, but that we first and foremost learn the importance of prayer. Unless we grasp the significance of communicating regularly and passionately with God, our efforts are wasted and we simply give lip service to our hunger for a deeper walk with Christ.

How is it that we can read of our Saviour spending entire nights in prayer, and getting up long before daybreak to go out alone to pray, and yet we somehow expect a few hurried minutes each morning to suffice? There is a definite connection between our powerlessness and our lack of prayer.

Let's consider the average Muslim. Billions of followers stop their activities five times every day to focus on their god. How would our world change if every Christian would stop five times daily to commune with the one true God? Of course, that sounds too much like legalism right? I have learned on my own journey that the cry of "legalism!" is the first tactic my flesh uses to fight against a deeper walk with God.

Prayer is hard work and whether in the physical or the spiritual, my flesh despises hard work. Therefore we comfort ourselves in the knowledge that we are not bound by any legalistic rules but can simply fritter away our bland and powerless lives, wishing for the day when we will finally be rescued from this world. I fear we will be dreadfully ashamed when we look back on our lives and see how little we prayed, how little we hungered for this deeper walk we talk about. Are we willing to walk the talk? Here is a closing quote from E.M. Bounds:

"No man can do a great and enduring work for God who is not a man of prayer, and no man can be a man of prayer who does not give much time to praying."

How would our lives change if we truly grasped the power of prayer?

Praying for you....more! Steve