Dear Church Family,
As you receive this article, we will have just begun a new series of messages based on the topic of prayer. I have entitled this series of messages, “Let’s Pray”. This title is an invitation for us to pray. In that invitation is an encouragement for each one of us to pray. You see prayer is not something that just the pastor does. All of God’s people are encouraged to pray to Him
Andrew Murray once said… “Faith in a prayer-hearing God will make a prayer-loving Christian.” That quote made an impact on me. You see I have never met a Christian who did not believe in the importance of prayer. But I have met a lot of Christians who struggle with the daily practice of prayer. Maybe it is the lack of faith that God hears our prayers. Now most would never say that, but why else would we see such a lack of a love to pray to God? If we truly have faith that God hears our prayers it should encourage us to love to pray because we would be convinced that God was going to be working in our prayer concerns. But we live in such an anti-supernatural world where we are encouraged to function in our own intellect. We are encouraged to find the answer ourselves instead of crying out to God asking Him to guide us and doing things that only He can do. My prayer is that we will grow in our faith that God does hear our prayers. What a privilege it is for us to pray to the one true and living God of this universe
We will spend five weeks considering prayer. Four of those weeks will be in the psalms considering one psalm each week from the prayer life of King David. David is a good example to look at when it comes to prayer because we find in his prayers, themes of his failures, successes, vulnerabilities, and need. We will see him offering to God, Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Those four words represent the acronym of A.C.T.S. which can be used to help bring some order and focus to our prayer lives.
As we think about this acronym it will remind us that we have so much to converse with God about. But as we have this conversation, we must remember the importance of listening to God as well. I love what Andrew Murray says about this kind of communication with God. He states… “Prayer is not monologue, but dialogue; God’s voice is its most essential part. Listening to God’s voice is the secret of the assurance that he will listen to mine.”
There is so much for us to pray to God about. We need to extol His greatness, we need to confess our sin, we need to thank Him for all He is doing and what He has done, and we need to lift others and ourselves before Him and ask Him to do things that only He can do!!
He is such a good God to us! Let’s pray in faith with the assurance that He hears our prayer and that He will listen to our voice.
I love you and I love being your pastor!
