No End to Prayer
If people should always pray and not give up, how much more should Christian people pray? Jesus has sent His church into the world on the same errand for which He came—and this mission includes intercession. What if I say that the church is the world’s priest? Creation is speechless, but the church is called to find a mouth for it. It is the church’s high privilege to pray impartially for all. The door of grace is always open to her petitions, and they never return empty-handed. The veil was torn for her, the blood was sprinkled on the altar for her; God constantly invites her to ask for whatever she wants. Will she refuse the privilege that angels might envy? Isn’t she the bride of Christ? Can’t she go in to her King at every hour? Will she allow this precious privilege to go unused? The church always has need of prayer. There are always some in her midst who are declining or falling into open sin. There are lambs to be prayed for, that they will be carried in Christ’s loving arms—the strong, so they don’t become presumptuous, and the weak, so they don’t despair. If we held prayer meetings twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, we would never be without a special subject for supplication. Are we ever without the sick and the poor, the afflicted and the wavering? Are we ever without those who seek the conversion of relatives, the reclaiming of backsliders, or the salvation of the immoral? No! Congregations are constantly gathering, ministers are always preaching, millions of sinners are lying dead in trespasses and sins; in a country over which the darkness of false teaching is certainly descending, in a world full of idolatry, cruelty, and all sorts of devilry, if the church doesn’t pray, how will she excuse this neglect of the loving Lord’s great command? Let the church be in constant prayer! Let every individual believer throw his or her small coin of prayer into the Lord’s treasury. - C.H. Spurgeon Morning and Evening
Where are you going? Have you spent time with Jesus yet today?
What are you doing? Is your heart where it ought to be?
What are you thinking about? Have you given thought that today might be the day that God speaks to you? Oh don't give me that "God doesn't ACTUALLY speak these days" speech. My friend oh yes He does.
The most memorable moments in my life are when I clearly know that Jesus has spoken to me.
Are your thoughts at all to do with people you know? People you have met?
As Spurgeon aptly pointed out there is always something that someone needs prayer for.
Is your example before men and women what it ought to be?
Do you praise your Heavenly Father yet swear at others with that same mouth?
Do you curse people who disagree or disrupt your ideas of what should happen or has been said and yey try to pray for things you want?
I guess God's point of today's post is for people who claim to be Christians to examine themselves to see if they are living, not going through the motions, of what the Christian life is meant to be.
There is no reason to not be praying. There's no excuse for not approaching the Throne of God in regards to ourselves or others that He has brought our way.
So maybe it's time for the Church to be the Church. To be about the Father's business. To be letting go of the things of the world. To stop loving the things of this world. Yes that's a verse from the Bible. Love not the world nor the things of the world.
More to come in another post.
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