A Praying Heart

I urge you, brethren, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God.
—Romans 15:30

Most of us feel guilty about the lack of prayer in our daily life. We wish we prayed more. And when we do pray, it’s a titanic struggle to spend more than five or ten minutes on our knees before we get distracted by something. The truth is, deep down, most of us have difficulty believing that prayer really makes any significant difference in our lives.

If you struggle with prayer, don’t feel guilty about it. Prayer is hard—communicating with an invisible being who rarely answers back, at least audibly. It might help you to know that some of the greatest saints of all time, including the apostle Paul, struggled with having an effective prayer life. In fact, in Romans 15:30, Paul said, “Strive together with me in your prayers.” That phrase strive together is the Greek word agonizomai, where we get our word agonize. Prayer can be agonizing work.
What is it that makes prayer so difficult? A lot of people say, “Well, Pastor, I don’t get paid to be religious like you do. Those of us with real jobs, we just don’t have time to pray.” But the fact is, no one has time to pray. We all have to take time from other things in order to pray. I think probably the bottom-line reason we don’t pray is we’re really not convinced that prayer makes a difference. After all, if God has a plan for every detail of our life, what difference could prayer make?

I don’t pretend to understand how it works, but Scripture testifies to the fact that prayer does change things. It is through prayer that we can move the hand of God. It is through prayer that God will do things that He would not do unless we pray.

One of the most vivid illustrations of that is in Revelation 8. In this chapter, the earth is going through a time of God’s judgment. Those Christians who have been saved during the Tribulation are crying out to God, asking Him to judge the wickedness that is on the earth. And there’s a picture in Revelation 8 of a pause in heaven, an interval in which God is not acting, but instead He is collecting the prayers of Christians on the earth who are crying out for God to answer.
In other words, God is waiting to accumulate all the prayers of His people. And when those prayers are collected, suddenly the angel flings them to the earth and God begins to act in response to His people’s prayer.

We have the ability not only to change our lives but to change history through prayer. Are you spending time praying right now? Christians have a chance to make a difference by our prayer life. History belongs to the intercessors who pray the future into being.

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “Developing a Trusting Heart” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2008.
Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960,1962,1963,1968,1971,1972,1973,1975,1977,1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.