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Do Not Lose Heart in Prayer

Filed under: Intercession

“Men always ought to pray and not lose heart.” – Jesus

Now you may say or think to yourself, “prayer isn’t difficult” or “if you think prayer is hard try this…” or you may have tried praying daily for more than a few minutes a day. What I’d like to address here is the value of not losing heart in the place of prayer and to share some of my own experiences, struggles and successes with prayer.

Persistent Prayer isn’t hard, until you actually attempt it.
Not just say you do it. Not just sit down for 5 minutes and think about praying. Also, not just sit in a prayer room for 1-2 hours checking your email, reading a book or browsing around your Bible. When you actually open up your mouth and start to speak and words start to come out that are directed toward God… then do that day in day out for months, and you begin to see that encouragement is needed in staying engaged in the place of prayer.

I believe the reason this becomes something Jesus addressed as something to “not lose heart” doing is because we don’t believe the reality that our prayers can change things, that God responds to us when we talk to him.

The War Between Physical Strength (Flesh) and Physical Weakness (Spirit)…
Even if you are are born again, a new creation and have God living on the inside of you, you still have your humanity to deal with. As believers our flesh is CONSTANTLY warring with our spirit. Our flesh is fighting to be satisfied with desires and pleasures that it wants; things that please the physical senses. So when you lift up your voice and speak to Jesus (or even through silent prayer, setting your mind on Him) you begin to deny your flesh it’s desires and feed the desires of your spirit.

Praying is Declaring Weakness
When you start to pray you are actually saying that I am weak, God I need Your help. The more you pray the more you are declaring your weakness. And the more you realize how weak you are, the more you will pray. When we begin to exercise our spirit through prayer, our flesh begins to war against our spirit because it is refusing to be weak. Yet we need this weakness, because if we do not enter into voluntary weakness, Jesus cannot be strong in us. And if we do not allow Jesus to be strong in us we cannot defeat temptation. We cannot trust our flesh to do good, to fight temptation, we will fail every time.

“And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” 2 Corinthians 12:9

We make prayer harder than it actually is.
When we think of prayer we as humans think that it should be some variation of the following: this holy thing that is done in reverence, or done in silence when no one else is around, or done when my mind is completely clear so that I can concentrate on Jesus.

I’ve learned some very easy ways to enter into prayer, that makes it enjoyable to start and continue in prayer.

1. Singing. Sing a your prayer to God, start out singing… or sing the entire time you are praying. Even if you don’t sing well, I’m sure you still like to sing when you are listening to your favorite song.  And singing your prayers to God is just as much praying as speaking them to God. You can switch between singing your prayers, and speaking them. Then switch between singing worship songs to Him and then back to singing individual prayers to Him.
2. Praying the Bible. I use this A LOT. I’ll use the Bible as my launching pad for starting prayer. I’ll start reading a passage, or just one verse and then I’ll talk to Jesus about that verse. Ask Him questions about it. Tell Him my thoughts about it… and then wait and listen to see if He says anything. This is actually when the actual “conversation” in prayer begins for me. Many times I’ll be reading the Bible and turn what I’m reading into prayer and I’ll hear Him speak to me through what I am reading. Also another thing you can throw into the mix here is singing. Try singing the Bible and praying the Bible and you’ll find its so much easier to pray.
3. Singing/Praying in the Spirit. (1 Cor. 14:15) Many times I will have NO IDEA what to pray about. Or I’ll start praying and pray for everything on my list, I look at the clock and its only been 5 minutes, and I’m like AAAGGHHH!!! Now What? When we pray in the spirit or sing in the spirit we don’t actually know what we are praying/singing but God does. I can do this for a while, and usually what happens after I start this is I switch back and forth between praying/singing for things on my mind and praying/singing in the spirit.
4. Worship Music. We often look at music as entertainment, or enjoyment time-passing. But when we actually SING the words TO GOD, that is prayer. Music engages our hearts and makes it easy to enter in to a time of prayer. This is most easily done to worship music whose words are God focused (singing to God), not just about Him, or about us as Christians, or about life.
5. Fasting. When your body is strong, many times you feel like you can conquer the world. But just take away a little food for a day or two and your body will discover very quickly that it is truly weak. From the place of weakness begin to cry out to God identifying with our spiritual weakness, our poorness of spirit, and great need of God’s help.

Tags: Intercession, Pray Daily