One of the greatest experiences that best prepared me to
serve overseas has to be the times spent with other individuals in prayer. Learning to faithfully be on my knees in
prayer and how to petition to our God on behalf of other lives as well as my
own life has been the key that has opened doors for us in our lives and
work. I even remember the very first
time my youth minister asked me to pray out loud for our group. I was extremely nervous and unsure of what I
was doing, but it was the start of learning how to pray. Since that day I have sat in prayer meetings
where I would listen to mature believers, who obviously knew what they were
doing as they were bold and confident before our Father in their requests, and
I would learn from the examples they set before me. They did not know of course the huge impact
they were making on this new little prayer warrior, but they were. I would hear passion in their voices as they
spoke with God and I could only imagine what their times with God were like
spent behind closed doors. I wanted that
passion and thirst for God as well.
When I would pray behind my closed door at first, and for quite a few
years, I would quickly run out of things to pray for. I would have a very empty head all of a
sudden when it came to my time in prayer.
Over the years I would learn how to use God’s own Word in my prayer
times and so as I poured over scripture I would underline verses I could use in
petitioning for myself and others. I
learned the purpose in prayer and the many different types of prayer. The very first time I sat in a prayer meeting
that went longer than one hour, my awareness of God’s presence in our time
before Him grew. After spending four
hours of prayer with these women I began to understand how to thirst and hunger
more for Him. Prayer is simply sitting
with the Lord and placing all of our attention on Him as we speak His promises
and pour out our hearts to Him. My
prayer life deepened more and more as my time with Him alone became
fuller. I no longer would sit running
quickly out of things to pray for, but instead I would pour over His promises
in scripture and take hold of them and as I would do that the Holy Spirit would
speak clearly into my heart the things He wanted me to petition for. The prayer
time would not stop during that quiet time in my day.. it would continue as I
would go about my day and the Holy Spirit would keep speaking into my heart
what to pray for next. I learned how
growing close to the Lord really did in fact mean giving Him time in your
day. It meant being disciplined to sit
still before Him every single day and it meant trusting Him to be faithful in
those times of prayer to help us know how to pray. I know some people like to attain things
quickly, even a super deep relationship with God, but He created it to be
something where we would have to invest in the relationship in order to receive
from it. Our lives today are so busy and
fast, yet our God doesn’t change to adjust to us. We need to change to adjust to Him. If you want to thirst and hunger for Him, you
have to make the investment to get to know Him and to do that involves prayer
and reading His Word. They go hand in
hand. You need His Word to pray, to know
what promises to ask for in faith, and you need to pray as a result of reading
His Word, which commands us to pray without ceasing.
