If I'm honest, one discipline I have been lacking in years past has been consistency in prayer. Not that it hasn't been a desire, but for many reasons, it just hasn't happened.
This week I've come across some deep truths and questions to ask about prayer or more asking about the lack of prayer in my life.
To start, Bonhoffer in "Life Together" speaks of the Psalms as the prayer book of the Bible, and I think I may have stumbled across something very meaningful to me. Currently and for so much of my life, I have felt in some way captive to concerning myself primarily with myself. In my prayers and life, I have tried to give myself away, but the eventual current of my prayers seems to run continually back into my needs and concerns.
So, the idea of praying through the Psalms struck me. Especially when he began to describe the process of being faced with difficulties in genuine prayers in some of them. Whether, because it is something David said of his purity and single-minded love for God or speaking about enemies about to overtake him and even punishing his enemies. I think Jesus is inviting us in to join with His prayers in the Psalms and join with the entire Kingdom of Heaven. Praying about enemies, being conscious at the same time of believers all across the world fighting real battles like David speaks of. It may be a way for God to draw my attention away from myself. And in prayers of purity, simply joining Christ in praying them as He will continue to pray them over the world until its redemption.
So add to that the discipline of intercession for others, which I have really desired to be diligent in for so long, but haven't really been consistent in it. We asked the pastor who came what he thought about it in your devotional life, and he mentioned praying for others at night is a good practice because your heart is full of stories and people in the evening and it also is a good practice because in it you relieve yourself of the burdens meant not for you trusting those you love to the Lord. I think these ideas in prayer could help lead my heart to others.
One last thought on prayer, is if you get to praying Psalms, connecting the enemies spoken of to the existence of sins that war on and for our soul. That the warring and battle sounding Psalms can be describing our personal fights against sin.
Hope this was clear and brought up some good ideas or questions,
John
PS. Next week, Os Guinness is coming to talk about his book Entrepreneurs of Life and I love his definition of that: "The entrepreneur is the person who assumes the responsibility for a creative task, not as an assigned role, a routine function or an inherited duty, but as a venture of faith including risk and danger, in order to bring into the world something new and profitable to humankind. Called in this sense, and answering such a call by rising to it in faith, entrepreneurs of life use their talents and resources to be fruitful and bring added value into the world - quite literally making the invisible visible, the future present, the ideal real, the impossible an acheivement, he desired an experience, the status quo dynamic, and the dream a fulfillment."
