To Pray?

Winter Fest 2008 was a huge success! It was great just to go sledding (I loved that jump on the side of the hill). I saw that Meghan Ross already had some picture on her Facebook site. It was amazing that we actually had enough snow, since a week ago they were calling for the whole week to be in the 40 degree range. God is so good to answer prayer (even though my hopes and prayers for the Patriots were ineffective).

Well the next Side by Side Youth Fellowship is not until Feb. 24^th but I was wondering what everyone thought of Pastor Paul’s message today? Prayer is something that I have always struggled with when I am in my quiet times alone. I start to pray and then get distracted or I pray through a list and check off that it is done. It has been fairly recently that I have seen God lead me into deeper times of prayer. What about you? Do you find prayer alone to be easy or difficult? Let me know how I can pray for you all as well.

Think about this, Jesus prayed often to His Father. If Jesus needed to pray often, how can we get away with any less without suffering spiritually? One way to start is just to ask God to help you to pray. The Holy Spirit was given as the ultimate teacher of all things so if you ask Him, He will show you how to pray (John 14:26). Paul says several times that we should pray all the time (Ephesians 6:18).

Rather than thinking of prayer as a task I find it extremely helpful to think of it as a dialogue with your closest friend who has all the time in the world to listen and answer you! There is so much more that can be said about prayer but I thought I would leave you with a recent quote I read by the evangelist DL Moody “I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach.” Let’s thank God today that He is approachable because of Jesus who died on the Cross for our sins to make us sons and daughters of God.