The Importance of Prayer

I have a crazy proposition. The number one important thing in the life of any Christian is not how kind he is, how much he spreads the gospel, or how involved he is with church. No, I believe that the most important part of a Christian's life is prayer.

(Now I know that's not that radical. But let me pretend it is.) Here's my argument. Jesus made it clear in the gospels what the greatest commandment is. And there were lots of good ones to choose from. But he chose this one,

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind."

 So, it's a strange thing to me to say, but one of the best express love or to generate love is to communicate! And we communicate of course through prayer. My love for God only stands strong when I am praying constantly and readily for the sake.

I could also make the argument (because it's true) that we can do none of the service that we are required to do, absent God. And we get that help via prayer.

So prayer is important and you should probably do it every day. More than just once. Here's some thoughts on how to make that happened (ironed out with help from two amazing friends of mine):
1. Plan an extra long time to pray in the morning, or whenever you do your devotions. Make sure you don't have to rush through your prayer.
2. In that time, pray with purpose. Consider creating a prayer journal. Document your requests, and God's answers, in an organized way. My prayer journal is set up like this:
Date          Request                          Date          Answer
9/20/15     Blog Post Idea                9/20/15      Prayer
3. Ask people if they have anything you could pray about. This gives you further things to bring to God and helps make your prayer less self-oriented. It also helps you fulfill the second greatest commandment - love one another.
4. If you have time alone, don't just talk to yourself. Talk to God. It will fill your time nicely.
5. Put up something that will remind you to pray in a place that you frequent often. Whether that be an office or your bedroom, or a car. Whether the reminder be worship music, verses on a whiteboard, or a prayer wall. Put up a reminder. We're carnal creatures. We're going to forget. So let's make it harder for ourselves to do so.

Purpose of Man: Love God

Yeah, so this is better than Monday, but hopefully, I don't have another moment in chapel, where I think, "Oh, this would make a good blog post idea. OH, I didn't publish one today!" They really aren't fun.

You've heard me say before that the purpose of man is to love God and enjoy Him forever, and through that, we glorify Him. This is the essence of something I am desperately seeking to know. How does one die to self and live for Him? If He is all that it takes to serve Him, then what effort must we do? What is our part? How does dying to self actually look in our life on a day-to-day basis?

And with today's chapel message, I begin to be more and more convinced that the main thing we need to do is just get to know and appreciate God more and more. As we study more and more about Him, and spend more and more time with Him, serving Him and living appropriately just starts to flow.

Not that it becomes easy or that our nature suddenly stops wanting to sin, but we start to more successfully abide in Him. We surrender to what He wants, and we're already all ready to accept His grace immediately when we sin and move on to serve Him greater.

So how do we do die to self? By fully knowing and understanding God, and asking Him to grant us a love and desire for Him. At least, that's part of it. I'll let you know what else the Lord teaches me on this subject as time goes on.