Organization of effective prayer life II
Greetings to you, my dear friends!
Praise God for this wonderful day, which He has given us! Thank God for one more opportunity to be filled with His living word! Yesterday we began talking about an effective prayer life. We established that an individual cannot be effective in ministry to God and to men without effective prayer.
You know that there are prayers that reach God, and there are prayers that do not reach God. We will talk about it later. Every person has his own understanding of prayer. I want to share with you some insight into this area.
- Prayer is spiritual effort.
Prayer has little to do with our intellectual abilities. It has everything to do with our spirit, so it is spiritual labour. Prayer is the spirit of man appealing to God, who also is Spirit. God is Spirit, and a man is spirit, so effective prayer is communication and fellowship of the human spirit with the Spirit of God. Prayer is spiritual aspiration for God. Of course, our mind has its part in prayer, but if prayer only stays in the realm of the mind and the spirit does not connect with God, then it is not prayer at all. Every time I have touched God in prayer, my spirit knows it has connected with God and I know I have communicated with God.
Prayer is not an intellectual game. The truth is that human beings cannot connect with God other than by the spirit. The only part of a person that can contact God is his spirit. And our spirit is the centre or the basis of our life. So first and foremost, prayer is communing with God on a spiritual level, and it implies effort. Praying is not physical work; it is spiritual labour.
I would like to point out that no other creature has been given this amazing privilege. A dog cannot contact God. A cow cannot fellowship with Him. Trees cannot communicate with the Creator. Only humans have this privilege. The very reason God created men is so that He could fellowship with them. No other creature was made in the image of God and according to His likeness-only human beings. Why did God create man in His image and according to His likeness? So that he could fellowship with God – spirit to Spirit. It is an enormous privilege.
Prayer is a privilege! I have been given a license to commune with the Creator of the Universe. I have a great advantage to walk into God’s presence and communicate to Him – spirit to Spirit. And we know that when Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden, then the first thing he lost was fellowship with God. After the fall Adam lost his communion with God; he ran away from God and hid. Adam could not freely come before the face of God and fellowship with Him. Because of the fall Adam died spiritually. When it happened, everything grew worse and worse. After the fall, there was a break in Adam’s relationship with God, and afterwards illness, ageing, hatred and other evils came into the life of humanity. Why? The connection with God was lost.
That is why we say that prayer is similar to breathing, but in spiritual sense. We can live only by the communion with God. Only when we fellowship with Him, we can be renewed, restored and equipped.
When a man sinned, Jesus came and died for all of us; He shed His blood and washed away our sins so that our fellowship with God could be restored.
Let’s read 1 Corinthians (1:9):
«God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord». You are called into the fellowship with God!
Let’s look at another verse of the Scripture:
«..that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ» (1 John, 1:3).
Here we can see that, first, prayer is fellowship with God and, second, we are called into this fellowship.
Every day God calls us to communicate to Him. When you wake up in the morning, your first calling is to fellowship with Him. If you want to live, you need to fellowship with God. If you want to live spiritually, you need to pray!
I wish you to be spiritually strong and alert!
Till tomorrow!
Pastor Rufus Ajiboyi
