Thoughts for another day

December 9, 2010

Today's verse: Mt. 26:40. And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour? (KJV)
(Pls. read the above before you read further. Thanks)

Prayer: the sign by which we shall be strong and known as Christians. Prayer, the all-powerful tool to shake the heart off the Almighty and get the things we need from Him. Prayer, oh the sheer power of it that it can move mountains and hurl the rivers into oblivion. Prayer it is that should be our recourse to God. But here, the 'but' always happens, how many of us pray. How many of us really consider it worth our time to pray. Let's say we are in a spot, how many of us prefer to sit and pray as against go to people for help. Your answer to this will define your attitude towards prayer and it is this attitude which is of phenomenal importance in praying.

We go through 'busy' lives, finding all sorts of excuses to not pray. Excuses are the gift wrapped presents that the devil gives us and nudges us to believe that our excuses work before God; this although we know God wants us to pray unceasingly for there is much to pray for in the world. Yet we adhere to the devil's prompting of excuses and give them to God. He wakes us up early in the morning reminding us to pray and we find the excuse of tiredness, etc. During the day, He prompts us to pray and we of course have our work or daily chores. What fools we are to believe that without His power we can accomplish anything oblivious to the fact that with prayer and a little self work, God can and will work wonders in our lives!

What we see in our Scripture is the Lord telling us to pray for at least one hour. Well you might say, one hour where can I find that much time? What if the Lord hurls us into the hospital with some disease? Then we have all the time in the world; so obviously we can pray no? But, at that time too, we are tired so we sleep, prayer be damned! We hardly heed the call of God to pray and are so parsimonious with prayer as to shame Him who has asked us to pray. And pray we must for if there are mountains in our lives that need be moved, there is no better way than prayer to make that possible.