7 Vital Signs of Spiritual Growth – Prayer

Acts 2:42 states, “They devoted themselves to … prayer.”  Don’t worry, we’ll get to all the “…” in there, but I wanted to highlight the prayer part today.

First and foremost.  God is not your cosmic butler.  This is not about asking God to do stuff for you.  Prayer is about an open, honest, ongoing conversation with your creator.

Christians often state, “I’ll be praying for you.”  If you tell a non-believer that you’ll be praying for them, they will accept such a statement with sincere appreciation.  Some folks who have never even spoken to God will ask for prayer.  Unfortunately, it is all too common that the prayer is never voiced.  If you’re honest with yourself, you’ve been guilty of it.  I know I have.

Why is that the case?  I suspect there are several reasons.  Sometimes we voice “prayer requests” as a way to gossip in Christian circles.  Sometimes we say it in order to avoid having to actually take an action that might be uncomfortable.  Perhaps other times, we really do intend to pray for that situation or person, but we really don’t know how or what to say.

Well, I am going to assume that if I stepped on your toes with the gossip statement, then you got what you needed from it, and I’ll move on.  I would rather address the last 2 reasons.

If you offer to pray for someone, and in the back of your mind you are thinking that it’s your “get out of work free” card, then my friends, you have missed the boat.  You’ll notice in my last post I referred to teaching and then mentoring not only as a study of God’s Word, but also of action.  In terms of vital signs, if you have a pulse, but your nervous system has stopped communicating to your hands and feet, you’ll not be a fully-functioning being from a physical perspective.  Prayer alone is the same thing when looking at the vital signs of your spiritual life.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s very important to be in prayer.  In fact, 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says, “pray continually.”  But, you cannot stop there.

That last reason is where I have been known to get stuck.  I really do intend to pray for someone or something, and then I just get busy and forget or don’t know how to communicate with God what I want to say about it.  That’s where an incredible opportunity to learn came into my life in 2006.  We were preparing for a youth mission trip to Brasil, and our youth pastor, Brett Levy, had everyone on the trip read a book by Disk Eastman titled “The Hour that Changes the World.”  This book commits to teaching you how to pray in a structured way for an hour.  Yep, you read that right, a whole hour!  I was bamfoozled just thinking about that concept.  I struggled to pray for 60 seconds, much less 60 minutes.

I like to read a lot.  I subscribe to 5 magazines.  I read 4-5 books per year on top of that.  I read blogs and twitter feeds til my eyes glaze over.  I’ll tell you that this book was NOT easy to read.  It challenged a lot of concepts I had about prayer.  However, in the end, it stands as one of my favorites of all time.  I constantly refer to it when discussing challenges with prayer among other Christians.  There’s not room to put it all down here, but I highly recommend the book as a way to mature your prayer life.  In the end, I found myself driving to see clients, sometimes 2-3 hours at a time, and I was amazed that I could get deep into prayer and find that time to be insufficient to address everything that God and I had to discuss.

Prayer is critical to spiritual growth.  Find a way to keep it developing in your life.  Just don’t stop with prayer.  Be prepared to take action as well.