Pray-ers
Maybe you’ve listened to this week’s devotions and said to yourself I’m not a people person, I’m just awkward with people and I’d rather be by myself. All these ideas of mentoring and talking of God, I’m just not good with people.
Well consider this. Maybe God wants you to be one of his prayer warriors! Maybe he wants you to care for his people by praying for them.
That’s what Paul did, look at his words here: “I thank God, whom I serve, as my ancestors did, with a clear conscience, as night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers.” (2 Timothy 1:3 NIV11)
For Paul, a great way to be people-centred - to care for people - was to lift them up in prayer consistently. Oh how Paul prayed! When he wasn’t with people, he was praying for them. Pleading with God to bless them and help them and grow them and protect them.
Prioritize Persistent Prayer
Paul’s prayer life very much reflected the prayer life of Jesus. Jesus would regularly take time to be alone and pray. He was a busy man. People pressed in at him all day every day… but he took the time to pray, to intercede for others.
Paul too. A busy person. But how he prayed! He made sure that he didn’t neglect prayer.
In fact all of the great saints we revere were great pray-ers. But how easy we find it to neglect this! Wesley Duewel wrote these startling words which really stopped me in my tracks when I read them: “There is probably no single sin that you and I ought to acknowledge with deeper shame than the sin of prayerlessness.”
Ouch.
But he’s right.
How we should pray! Our lives should be filled with prayer and more prayer, because we love God and we love His people so much, that we can’t imagine not spending time in intercession.
Andrew Murray was the great South African Dutch Reformed minister of the 1800s. In his book The Ministry of Intercession, he talks about attending a meeting with other ministers in the Free State, in the 1890s. And their conversation was all about how they lacked time to pray. They were so busy with duties and business and so on… that they were struggling to pray. In the 1890s!
Choose Persistent Prayer
I read that and thought, how about today in the 2020s? We are all SO distracted and SO busy and filling our minds with SO much other stuff! We would LOVE to have the type of schedule that a person would have had in the 1890s, we would then have time to pray!
And then I realised… nope. The issue is not time per se. It’s a choice. We always give time to the things that matter to us. Full stop. And it’s easier to busy ourselves with anything else expect getting stuck into prayer.
Paul was a deep pray-er. He didn’t neglect the great joyful duty of praying for those under his care. He prayed constantly for them, night and day!!!
May it be that you and care so deeply about the people in our lives that we cannot imagine not praying for them each and every day.
