Three Essentials to Prayer - How to Pray?

Many Christians wonder how to pray.

They "try" as they suppose they should. They study prayer topics in the Bible and try again to emulate the "Lord's Prayer" which is an excellent example of the ingredients of prayer...but they are frustrated by the lack of power found in their prayers and the sheer boredom of trying to pray.

They hear voices and are confused if they are hearing God, Satan or their own heart desires. Rightly so, they sense their meager attempts to pray are fruitless, and worse, cause them to doubt their faith and question both their own heart and that of the reality of God Himself.

Should communicating to the Creator God be so troublesome? Is God not able to communicate to us if He wishes? God is ABLE. Therefore, if God is able then what is wrong? It must be us-- our condition- - our own attitude and actions. While in everything spiritual we are continually growing, here are three essentials to Prayer:

• Patience

• Precepts 

• Perseverance.

Any Christian --young or old -- should work toward developing and practicing their prayer life... effectively communicating to God.

Patience

We are instructed continual in Scripture to "wait on the Lord." God does not live by our clock or time zone; we must learn to align our soul to His. In a real sense God is beyond our concept of time... but we can grasp some truths about God's timing. First and foremost, His timing is perfect and ours definitely is not; we should eagerly want to make certain that we are not rushing into something or lagging behind. We need to press into the Holy Spirit and be willing to set our life to His schedule. God is never early or late. He is quite timely!

All of the prophecies foretelling of the Messiah would not have been fulfilled if God was in one instance untimely. We need to trust Him fully that no clock or calendar days are of any importance when it comes to waiting on the Lord.

When we come to Him in prayer, we are to be still before Him and continue to seek Him, until we have full assurance from Him that we have received the steps or direction we must take according to His will.

Many persons (ministers/ministries/followers) meaning good have blundered by moving forward when the grace of God did not lead in unison. How tragic that many harms have come to churches and their members because the leaders follow visions of greatness and thoughts of goodness instead of pressing into the fact that a true believers waits upon the perfect timing of God.

No program can facilitate a movement of the Holy Spirit and His power. This is not to say that churches need not run their assemblies in order and respect the time of its attendees, but when followers of God gather to worship and learn and love they should not be constrained by the minutes ticking on the clock. 

In the same way when we pray, we must be patient to allow the Holy Spirit to guide our private time in talking and listening and meditating upon trials, prayer requests, joys and simply relishing being in His presence.

It is a wise lesson to learn early that we should never move forward without assurance from Him of the step we should take, even if it is to be a step of faith (one of not knowing what the next step will bring) we should wait until we make that step in full assurance that the unction of the Holy Spirit abounds, that we are right with God in every area of obedience that we are made aware and that we are totally abandoned to submit to His will, upon His asking.

Precepts

The diligent study of the Bible is our greatest source of foundation in prayer and in every other aspect of life as a follower of Jesus.

Reading, studying, and applying the Word of God as a balm on every need is they way we should live from the day of salvation until the day we have our final breath of life. We are not to be silly in opening the Bible and taking the first verse that our eyes light upon as an answer to prayer or to go dipping in with a finger to find a response pretending that God is a mystical source of chance. This is totally unBiblical!

We should read verses within chapters and chapters within Books and Books within the entire Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. We should cling to the easiest of verses first, the ones that we know there is no doubt about its meaning. If we did this for the first several years of being a Christian, even the first decade, we would not tire of not having enough to embrace and embed within out heart. 

We need to read these passages, and apply them to our lives --both within our heart and by our outward actions. Learning to be obedient, to the easiest and clearest of instruction, will guide us gently to rightly dividing the more obscure passages of Scripture, because when we come upon them (the controversial/obscure passages) we will have a large wealth of Scripture knowledge that must not be contradicted, since we stand on God's Word as fact and promises that can not lie or change. 

So in prayer, what we suppose we hear God say must always be aligned to what we KNOW for certain God has already spoken in His written Word. It is by this process, we become very attuned to identifying the voice of God verses our own, one in our memory or the enemy. 

Truly it is a simple process and easy for any believer to become quite apt at doing, that is, if they would only study God's Word and become a doer of the Word, not a mere hearer. In this way, being a doer of the Word, the Word becomes flesh in our own life and It becomes a part of our very fiber because we are being shaped by It as we are obedient to It.

Quickly we will be to discern a lie or a suggested answer in prayer that is impossible to be of God because it contradicts Scripture, thus we will be sharp against the deceitful tongue of trickery that might try to masquerade as a word of encouragement or unction from God that is clearly false.

Understand this to be absolute: God cannot and will not contradict Himself.

He can't hate divorce and love it at the same time. He can permit it when the occasion rises to the point that it becomes one of sanity or health or safety but we must tread very lightly in these type of situations. Moreover, God will never condone the murder of a baby in the womb or the union of homosexuals - these are absolutes and if we - in earnest prayer - hear differently we must belabor our time before the Lord until by His Word He instructs us to obedience.

Perseverance 

A praying saint finds perseverance is necessary. God is not a magical genie that instantly answers our request by manipulating people's freewill and bending physical circumstances to meet our wish. This kind of thinking is a completely perverted concept of God.

We know in our own life that God is ever so resilient and full of grace that He never gives up on us no matter how long it takes us to learn or change. Therefore, particularly when we pray for others, we must persevere in their behalf knowing that God is working with an individual like ourselves that is not easily molded into submission and obedience though it is the best for us. God's grace sufficiently draws us and teaches us until we chose to surrender to Him and His best for our life. 

Oh, if we were all more of a malleable brood of children in the hands of our loving Father - what kingdom work could be done for the glory of God - if we were truly a lump of clay laying on the Potter's wheel without a hardened self-will and sinful determination.

Therefore, we must persevere for both our own benefit and that of the person for whom we pray - waiting until God's will to manifest and form.

I hope this helps...

for anyone reading that is seeking how to pray.  Pray! Continue every day and through each day in this worthy pursuit, for it is the only way for us to know the will of God and to be filled with the power of God, that His will on earth may be done - Yes, We must pray!