I don’t know about you but I have always been afraid to prayer out loud, and I have not even really been sure how to pray when I prayer by myself. I went to Sunday school a couple of times and all the prayers I heard literally made no sense to me. They people praying used big words, prayed for what felt like forever and left me feeling like I would never be able to prey due to the fact I can’t even think of the words they use, let alone pronounce them.
When I was in grade one, and they still allowed you to prey in schools, I had my first run in with the law so to speak, I was sent to the office in tears. I was sent not for punching anyone, or for back chatting. But rather when we closed in prayer and the teacher said AMEN, I promptly followed by saying AMEN, AMEN, AMEN, AMEN, AMEN, AMEN. To which the teacher jumped up, ripped me off the ground and threw me outside and sent me to the office. I was in tears, crying myself to the office, taking the long way around of course, I was distraught not stupid. I could not understand what I did wrong, and to this day I still don’t really know, I was honestly not being disrespectful, I just didn’t know any better. No one had taught me anything about prayer. AMEN AMEN AMEN was all I could do to express myself to God as a child.
Following on from that experience I became very weary of prayer, like if I did not do it properly I would get in trouble, and thrown out again, maybe even thrown out of heaven. I thought I would be better off taking my chances not praying at all than upsetting God through the wrong prayers.
Prayer becomes easier the more you do it, but what in our head stops us from praying.
Firstly I think it all ties up with our understand of who God is and who we are in him. It is easy to pour your heart out to someone you know without a shadow of a doubt that they love you no matter what. This is two fold because it means us taking the time to find out whom Jesus is.
The idea of prayer is that we as finite humans can communicate with an infinite being God, basically meaning we can chat with God that lives outside of time and space that we know. Our Motive is very important when we prayer, do we prayer so the people around us can hear and go WOW, that was great or do we prayer for an audience of one, Prayer is about God… not the people around us! We need to exclude others and ourselves as the reason for prayer…
We must not trust in the prayer but rather the person to whom we are praying… If you run to someone for help screaming, “help friend playing fell off roof” is the person going to say… hold on that was not the correct way to form that sentence. In the same way God wants to hear our hearts, not our intellect.
Prayer should be honest… it is an important thing that praying is sharing your heart and being honest with God about what is going on in your life! Psalms shows true prayer, we should prayer with our heart and not our heads.
We need to have faith that God will answer our prayers; it says in the word that God is gracious and generous and if we ask in accordance to his will for our lives we shall receive! Are we in line with Gods will??? Must remember sometimes God says no or answers in his own way or a way we didn’t want him to answer so we ignore it and say God never speaks to me… you know when God is speaking…
Faith that God hears us…
It is a dependence on God, submitting to him and his work in your life… our prayers should be in the impossible, praying in such a way that if God doesn’t step in our prayers will be useless!
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