Re: Prayer - Part 1

How's your prayer life?
When my pastor exclaimed in his sermon, "If you aren't a praying Christian, you are no Christian at all," I thought to myself, "wow, he is making a bold statement." Perhaps, it was a bold statement, but it was more of a wake-up call I needed to hear. Truly, "non-prayer Christian" is an oxymoron! Christian life without prayer is dead. Jesus Christ, God himself, prayed day and night, then how much should we?

Here are some quotations on prayer that helped me to examine my prayer life:

Heavenly citizenship and heavenly homesickness are in prayer.
E.M. Bounds, The Reality of Prayer
(hmm… how often do we think about our heavenly home?)

Men are never nearer Heaven, nearer God, never more God-like, never in deeper sympathy and truer partnership with Jesus Christ, than when praying.
E.M. Bounds, The Reality of Prayer

"The closer we draw to His heart, the more we shall share in His sorrows. All this we obtain only by faith. It is not our broken heart, it is God's we need. It is not our sufferings, it is Christ's we are partakers of. It is not our tears with which we should admonish night and day, it is all Christ's."
John Hyde

Biblical prayer includes the dimension of importunity and of submission. It is both wrestling with God in the darkness and resting in the stillness. There is a time to argue and complain to God, but there is also a time to submit. Biblical faith sees submission to the will of God coming after the attempt to discover his will through heartfelt supplication. Prayer is both a pleading with God that he will hear and act upon our requests and a trusting surrender to God in the confidence that he will act in his own time and way. But the confidence comes only through the struggle.
Eastman's Bible Dict.
(I had to highlight this particular line: the confidence comes only through the struggle!!!!)

Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer.
John Bunyun

A promise from God may very instructively be compared to a check payable to order. It is given to the believer with the view of bestowing upon him some good thing. It is not meant that he should read it over comfortably, and then have done with it. No, he is to treat the promise as a reality, as a man treats a check. He is to take the promise, and endorse it with his own name by personally receiving it as true. He is by faith to accept it as his own. He sets to his seal that God is true, and true as to this particular word of promise. He goes further, and believes that he has the blessing in having the sure promise of it, and therefore he puts his name to it to testify to the receipt of the blessing.
This done, he must believingly present the promise to the Lord, as a man presents a check at the counter of the Bank. He must plead it by prayer, expecting to have it fulfilled. If he has come to Heaven's bank at the right date, he will receive the promised amount at once. If the date should happen to be further on, he must patiently wait till its arrival; but meanwhile he may count the promise as money, for the Bank is sure to pay when the due time arrives.
Some may fail to place the endorsement of faith upon the check, and so they get nothing; and other are slack in presenting it, and these also receive nothing. This is not the fault of the promise, but of those who do not act with it in a common-sense, business-like manner. God has given no pledge which He will not redeem, and encouraged no hope which He will not fulfill.
C.H. Spurgeon, Faith's Checkbook, preface




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