Why do we pray?

Why do we pray?? Prayer is vitally important and a crucial part of a relationship with God. But why do we pray? When you first prayed why was it? We get told we must prayer when we get saved or even to get saved. It’s a way of communicating with God. Building a relationship. There are lots of awesome analogies and thoughts behind prayer. But the simple question is why do we pray? Do we believe God is in control and can change things? That if we are growing in a relationship with him we can pray inline with what His will is and become part of it.

I think we have lost the sight of the power of prayer and have just made it part of our daily Christian to do list. Pray = TICK! We have lost all passion in prayer because we focus on prayer and not the person to whom we pray and the awesome power and sovereignty that is God. 

Faithless Prayers

Phillip Yancey once wrote "If there is no room for doubt there is no room for faith"

I read verses like James 1: 7 saying I must not have doubts when I ask God things? obviously according to his will.

So the question then I suppose... is...

Do I need faith in my prayers if it is in line with what God wants for me?

My faith is in the person to whom the prayer is directed at! Not in my prayer at all...

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

My first thoughts of Fatherhood

So my baby boy is almost 6 months. I would love to sit here and type and tell you I have it all figured out. That things have always been smooth sailing. But that would be a lie and according to Homer Simpson "Lies make baby Jesus cry".

However, a couple of tips...

1. Make sure you communicate with your wife, don't assume she understands you or that she knows what you want or are thinking.

2. Make sure you prayer together as a family, as children grow it will be good for them to see that it is God who gives us strength to be parents and husband and wife.

3. Love every moment, take loads of pictures cause they grow so fast.

4. One of the hardest things is to identify your emotions and triggers and where they are coming from before lashing out... most likely lack of sleep

5. Suck it up, you are a Parent Now, you have a job to do, to love and to care and to nurture them to the best of your ability and then some and them some more and then some...

Lastly a short story, before Seth was born I read up on baby stuff, asked questions and found out as much info as I could. To sum it all up this is what I came home to in my head with our first baby boy.

"Your baby cannot regulate its own body temperature so you have to do it, if he is too hot its bad, if he is too cold its bad" Basically you need to stay awake with a temperature gauge!

So basically good luck!

Open my eyes God!!!

Once back when I was 18 I had borrow my moms car, she had just gotten it back from the garage where it had just had a major service. It cost loads of money and also gave issues so she was always a bit reluctant to let me or my brother use her car, but of course with our puppy dogs eyes and boyish charm we always got to use it. It also always broke down with one of us using it. More of a coincidence than anything else really, my car was this old black beetle. I loved the car because it was my first car and got it super cheap because my cousin owed my dad some money and was selling his car so I landed up getting the car. I was stoked and my friend Alan and I would spend endless hours working on the car and making it cool. Or at least what we thought was cool. One night we took the car out to the movies, it was the middle of winter and that’s when we figured out the vents in the car don’t close, we where freezing and our last resort was to put my girlfriends jersey (she left it in the car, this never happened again after that night). In the dashboard through where the radio should be. We had the radio in the cubby-hole, as it was easier to install there. So we shuffled the jersey in nice and tight and it was working well until it decided to rain. As it was raining we needed to use the windscreen wipers, it was only drizzling so nothing too bad. When we got to the movie place to meet everyone including my girlfriend, she sent me a message to say “please bring my jersey out the car. So I went to grab it only to find that the windscreen wipers had tangled up the jersey and it had gotten caught that I couldn’t get it out and it ended up getting ripped and broken. It is funny how we all have gaps in our lives that we try fill with whatever we find laying around and appealing? It always goes back to having a God space inside of each of us that we just try fill with whatever is around whether girls, booze, or even sports.

So this night it was raining and cold so I got to use my mom’s car for legitimate reasons. I cant remember where me and Alan where going, but we where going out none the less. When I got to his house the rain had stopped and the roads where slightly wet, just wet enough for some fun. So Alan gets into the car and we reverse out of his drive way, as we are going backwards I quickly throw the car into first and do a wheel spin, however the wheel spin is cut short because the car just cuts out. My heart starts to race and I start thinking up excuses to why the car just stopped working. We manage to get the car under some trees outside of Alan’s house. The rain starts to pour down again and Alan and me are just stuck there in silence. Rain is dripping through the trees and falling on the windscreen. Then it was almost simultaneously that we thought back to Sunday’s church service about prayer and how this guy prayed to God and he got a wife. We both thought wow, what we are asking for is way easier than that. So I prayed for us something along the lines of “Father God, we love you and just want you too fix the car, we wont wheel spin again and will try be better people”. I thought it was a good prayer, we where bargaining with God, giving him what he wanted to hear and in return we would get our small miracle. At that moment our faith was huge, I mean it was either faith or the wrath of mom. After the amen we tried to start the car and to our surprise it didn’t start. No what, we almost felt a little betrayed by the whole deal, we had done our part, had faith and prayed a sincere prey and nothing. We felt cheated out of a miracle and also new the trouble that awaited us because of the unanswered prayer. After a while it stopped raining and we figured that God would answer our prayers if we met him half way, so Alan jumps out the car and starts to push, we try a few times and Alan can’t feel his arms anymore. I just feel the sinking feeling of surrender coming over me. I have nothing left to try, its time to face the consequences and phone my mom. Just before I do that though I pop the bonnet in the hope I can see what the problem is. Even though I have no real clue, I thought 5 more minutes won’t hurt. The whole time everything is going on I am still praying in my head asking God for help. When I pop the bonnet and look inside I notice that the box for the airflow straight into the engine has come off. So I clip it back on and away we go. Turns out the guys that services the car didn’t put it on properly. Seems God did answer my prayers but the way he wanted to answer them not the way I wanted them answered. He gave me the insight into the problem and I had to go and fix it. I think a lot of times we sit by and want God to fix everything and do everything for us. But if God has answered our prayers the way we wanted him too. We would not have developed a dependence on him, we would have properly in all honestly developed big heads because God answered our prayers on our terms, instead he taught us everything in his time. Everything his way, we don’t always have to understand that but the more we know the easier it becomes.

Fear of Praying

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!

Pray for cars and it will rain

Once back when I was 18 I had borrow my moms car, she had just gotten it back from the garage where it had just had a major service. It cost loads of money and also gave issues so she was always a bit reluctant to let me or my brother use her car, but of course with our puppy dogs eyes and boyish charm we always got to use it. It also always broke down with one of us using it. More of a coincidence than anything else really, my car was this old black beetle. I loved the car because it was my first car and got it super cheap because my cousin owed my dad some money and was selling his car so I landed up getting the car. I was stoked and my friend Alan and I would spend endless hours working on the car and making it cool. Or at least what we thought was cool.  One night we took the car out to the movies, it was the middle of winter and that’s when we figured out the vents in the car don’t close, we where freezing and our last resort was to put my girlfriends jersey (she left it in the car, this never happened again after that night). In the dashboard through where the radio should be. We had the radio in the cubby-hole, as it was easier to install there. So we shuffled the jersey in nice and tight and it was working well until it decided to rain. As it was raining we needed to use the windscreen wipers, it was only drizzling so nothing too bad. When we got to the movie place to meet everyone including my girlfriend, she sent me a message to say “please bring my jersey out the car. So I went to grab it only to find that the windscreen wipers had tangled up the jersey and it had gotten caught that I couldn’t get it out and it ended up getting ripped and broken. It is funny how we all have gaps in our lives that we try fill with whatever we find laying around and appealing? It always goes back to having a God space inside of each of us that we just try fill with whatever is around whether girls, booze, or even sports.

 

So this night it was raining and cold so I got to use my mom’s car for legitimate reasons. I cant remember where me and Alan where going, but we where going out none the less. When I got to his house the rain had stopped and the roads where slightly wet, just wet enough for some fun. So Alan gets into the car and we reverse out of his drive way, as we are going backwards I quickly throw the car into first and do a wheel spin, however the wheel spin is cut short because the car just cuts out. My heart starts to race and I start thinking up excuses to why the car just stopped working. We manage to get the car under some trees outside of Alan’s house. The rain starts to pour down again and Alan and me are just stuck there in silence. Rain is dripping through the trees and falling on the windscreen. Then it was almost simultaneously that we thought back to Sunday’s church service about prayer and how this guy prayed to God and he got a wife. We both thought wow, what we are asking for is way easier than that. 

So I preyed for us something along the lines of “Father God, we love you and just want you too fix the car, we wont wheel spin again and will try be better people”. I thought it was a good prayer, we where bargaining with God, giving him what he wanted to hear and in return we would get our small miracle. At that moment our faith was huge, I mean it was either faith or the wrath of mom. After the amen we tried to start the car and to our surprise it didn’t start. No what, we almost felt a little betrayed by the whole deal, we had done our part, had faith and prayed a sincere prey and nothing. We felt cheated out of a miracle and also new the trouble that awaited us because of the unanswered prayer. After a while it stopped raining and we figured that God would answer our prayers if we met him half way, so Alan jumps out the car and starts to push, we try a few times and Alan can’t feel his arms anymore. I just feel the sinking feeling of surrender coming over me. I have nothing left to try, its time to face the consequences and phone my mom. Just before I do that though I pop the bonnet in the hope I can see what the problem is. Even though I have no real clue, I thought 5 more minutes won’t hurt. The whole time everything is going on I am still praying in my head asking God for help. When I pop the bonnet and look inside I notice that the box for the airflow straight into the engine has come off. So I clip it back on and away we go. Turns out the guys that services the car didn’t put it on properly.  

Seems God did answer my prayers but the way he wanted to answer them not the way I wanted them answered. He gave me the insight into the problem and I had to go and fix it. I think a lot of times we sit by and want God to fix everything and do everything for us. But if God has answered our prayers the way we wanted him too. We would not have developed a dependence on him, we would have properly in all honestly developed big heads because God answered our prayers on our terms, instead he taught us everything in his time. Everything his way, we don’t always have to understand that but the more we know the easier it becomes.