It was said about the missionary, John Hyde, called the Praying Hyde, that
he seldom prayed for more than 5 minutes, but that he seldom went for 5
minutes without praying.
At 03:59 PM 1/7/04 -0700, you wrote:
>Speaking of the different ideas of Bible reading and study, puts
>me in mind of the same principles relating to figure out how much
>to pray. Pray without ceasing, comes to mind from 1 Thessalonians
>5:17 and as Kathy said earlier, this is one of those verses that
>you can meditate on for the rest of your life and still not come
>to the end of it. I mean, it is like the old preacher said, I
>meditated on that for so long, my meditator fell out on the floor.
>The two words in this passage, without ceasing, is a single Greek
>word and means exactly what it says; praying without stopping or
>ceasing or quitting or without interruption or without
>termination. I mean, I have met a lot of Godly men and women in
>my travels and I have heard some of the greatest preachers alive
>today but I have never once met, or even heard of, somebody who
>prayed without ceasing. So wrestling with that concept could
>drive you crazy until you eliminate all the other possibilities.
>For starters, there seems to be no way to fulfill that command.
>Jesus, for that matter, didn't pray 24 hours a day either. In
>light of that, it cannot mean what it seems to say on the surface.
>The Lord led me to this conclusion one day about First
>Thessalonians 5:17 and it is this. I was complaining to the Lord
>that He commanded me to do something humanly impossible. After
>spending time in prayer about this little issue, He told me that
>all I had to do is make my life a prayer to Him. Then it began to
>come into focus. Back in the summer of 1982, I was asking the
>Lord a lot of big questions. I was not reading my Bible every day
>and I was not doing a lot of other things. In fact, I had given
>up trying to make myself spiritual by performing acts of
>spirituality. Not because those acts weren't, in fact, good
>things to do but because they were not making me more spiritual,
>bringing me closer to God, or even making me feel any better. I
>went to God at this time to find out why and praying was the only
>way I knew to find the answers to my questions. At that time, the
>Lord began to teach me how to pray perpetually and continually
>without ceasing. I know some will not believe this but He taught
>me back then even how to pray when I was asleep. On the other
>hand, there are times for dedicated focused prayer. Read about
>all the great revivalists in the world. They all prayed huge
>amounts of time. They were also called to what they were doing,
>if I may point out, so that doesn't mean you should be doing the
>same thing they did. However, every single Christian can pray
>without ceasing. Basic prayer, or communication with God, is
>simple. It is exchanging your thoughts for God's. Praying
>without ceasing means that prayer has to be something so simple,
>you can do it without thinking. Like breathing, for example. We
>never think about breathing unless somebody holds our nose for a
>few seconds and then we start thinking about it pretty seriously.
>If we are going to pray perpetually, something has to change in us
>and that something is what we think prayer is. Any time I begin
>thinking this way, I usually begin thinking about it in reverse
>and especially if I am getting no where with the concept by
>thinking about it from its face value standpoint. So, in this
>case, I began thinking about what prayer was not. Prayer is not
>time. That is, God is not interested in how much time you pray.
>I know. I prayed once for eight hours, all night in fact, and
>felt worse after it was over than when I started. The only thing
>I learned about praying for eight hours was that I didn't really
>know how to pray at all. The thing I really did learned through
>that over nighter was I was going about it all wrong. In Bible
>college, I heard a pastor say once that he never prayed longer
>than 10 minutes and never went ten minutes without praying.
>That's getting a little closer to the truth. Prayer is also not
>what is said, or more specifically, how you say it. Prayer is not
>where you are. Prayer is not candles, stained glass windows, pipe
>organs, or well orchestrated oration punctuated with vibrato. It
>isn't how loud you can get or how many words you can cram into
>your prayer. It isn't repetition. It isn't a morning, noon, or
>night, or middle of the night regiment. Well, you get the idea.
>I kept this up until I felt confident I had eliminated everything
>concerning prayer, that is, what prayer is not. When the Lord
>touch me one day and explained to me that prayer should be as
>natural to the Christian as breathing was to the body, my concept
>of prayer instantly changed. The Lord further tightened down on
>this concept buy making me understand that what He wanted was for
>my life to become a prayer to Him. I am still working at that, by
>the way, but I am a lot further down the road now than I was when
>He showed this to me more than 20 years ago. What I mean is this.
>I find it almost impossible to do anything without acknowledging
>the Lord and this is about nearly everything. There are some
>things the Lord expects me to handle for myself. Like when to get
>my hair cut, when to watch TV and when not to, when to eat, or not
>eat would be more like it for me, when to get up, when to go to
>bed, when to pay my bills so they are paid on time, and, well, you
>get the picture. these are normal every day secular mundane
>things that everybody must do. During all these things, and more
>importantly, in between these things, is the background sounds of
>God in our ears. No, not literally but spiritually. God should
>be our background noise, sort of speak, in all things. Let me
>take a stab at a simple illustration of what I am talking about.
>A friend of mine here in Colorado was not born again. His wife
>was but he wasn't. Nor was he interested in becoming a Christian
>no matter how hard I tried to bring him to Christ. One day he,
>decided he was not getting what he thought he should be getting
>out of his marriage, so he had an affair. For some unknown
>reason, he even brought her to Denver once so Sandy and I could
>meet her. This affair lasted off and on for about two years.
>Then he went back to his Christian wife. A couple of more years
>passed and I thought they had worked all this out. I was wrong.
>For two weeks my friend's name kept coming to my thoughts and I
>couldn't figure out why. It was just below the level of my every
>day thinking. It was, in fact, the background sounds of the Lord
>in my spirit. As I said, this kept happening for about two weeks
>until one day the Holy Spirit said, Pray for Larry. He is having
>another affair with Jenie. Yes, these were actual words in my
>thought patterns. In other words, it was no longer background
>sound. My heart sank. I began to pray specifically worded
>intercessory prayers and within a couple of days, Larry called me.
>He was a broken man and desperate for help in finding answers.
>For the next three months, Larry called me almost nightly. Some
>nights we talked for a half an hour while other nights we talked
>for three and four hours. Just before he called me, he had been
>led to Christ by someone over on the western slopes of Colorado
>where he lived. He was going to church, mens Bible studies, and
>seeing a Christian marriage counselor. He was still full of fear
>and crippling anxiety. Why? The woman with whom he had the
>affair was quite strange, to say the least, and she had a lot of
>demonic activity around her. By the way, anybody living immorally
>has a lot of demonic activity around them. Jesus wasn't joking
>when he said a man and a woman become one flesh. This is a soul
>tie, or a bond, between a man and a woman which is reserved only
>for marriage and nothing else. If oneness occurs outside of
>marriage, it is an unholy bond or unholy covenant, or an unholy
>soul tie and it doesn't go away simply because you prayed and
>asked for forgiveness of your sin. Why? Because God takes
>covenants more seriously than anything else in the Bible. Our
>salvation, for example, is a holy oneness covenant with the
>Creator God. Furthermore, One flesh means one. The sin is
>forgiven upon confession but the bond has become a bondage and
>that needs special attention to settle once and for all. Anyhow,
>I got to preaching there so forgive me. Back to my story about my
>friend. My whole point is this. My spirit, the real me, which
>has the Holy Spirit dwelling within it, was communing with God
>about my friend Larry for two weeks. I knew it but I didn't, if
>you know what I mean. The day the Holy Spirit actually spoke to
>me and said, Pray for Larry. He's having an affair with Jenie
>again, was my prompt to begin intercessory prayer for Larry. So
>what was going on for those two weeks? I was praying without
>ceasing for my friend. How? The Holy Spirit was in agreement
>with my spirit and He, the Holy Spirit, was helping me pray for my
>friend. When Larry was ready for help, the Holy Spirit prompted
>me to pray specific prayers to bring it to pass and it came to
>pass. Why was I prompted to pray specific prayers out loud?
>Because I am in the natural, or physical realm, and what was going
>on with the Holy Spirit and my spirit and the Heavenly Father was
>in the spiritual realm. For the things that are occurring in the
>spiritual realm to come into the natural, or physical, realm, one
>has to be in the natural realm to speak the will of God into the
>physical world. That's way too much theology for this single
>message so maybe I'll come back to that Biblical principle later.
>In short, as I said already, the background noise we hear in our
>daily lives should be the sound of God speaking. No, this is not
>accomplished by going into a meditative state of consciousness and
>conjuring up God. It is getting to know God better than you know
>anybody else. How do you get to know God? Two ways. Through His
>Word and through prayer. How do you pray? Think God.
>Specifically, become aware of God in your life. John 15:7 says,
>If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask what
>you will, and it shall be done unto you. That's Jesus speaking,
>of course. If you read this verse in context, it is clear that
>Jesus is talking about prayer and how to pray. I was teaching on
>this one Wednesday night when the Holy Spirit spoke to me as I
>taught and said, "If you do what I say, I will do what you say."
>This made John 15:7 clearer in my mind than I had ever seen it
>before. This interpretation of the verse made me clearly see
>Jesus was talking of the covenant relationship which we have with
>the Father through Him. If you don't understand Old Testament
>covenants, you are missing a great deal of insight to the New
>Testament relationship we have with God through the finished work
>of His Son. The bottom line is this. Jesus said that if we abide
>in Him and His Words abide in us, there is an exchange going on.
>So let's talk about falling in love now. I got to know my wife by
>first being introduced to her by someone else. I then got to know
>her by talking. Our first real chat lasted 4 hours on the phone.
>The second night we talked nearly as long. One night, as I
>recall, we literally talked all night for a good 8 or 9 hours.
>You know what? If you talk to someone long enough and frequently
>enough, you'll get to be friends. Why? Because you have gotten
>to know them. What happens next? Well, in this case, we talked
>so much, we finally decided to meet in person. Why did we want to
>meet in person? Because, talking on the phone was fine but it was
>not like being in the same room with each other. Once we started
>seeing each other, something else happened. We wanted to make
>physical contact so we held hands and sat close to each other. We
>still talked, of course, but we grew even closer through
>closeness, if you get my meaning. Then one day, something strange
>happened. Our togetherness and our communication with each other
>no longer was fulfilling. We knew there was more, much more, but
>we could not go there. Why not? Because we were not one. We
>both knew there was only one way of being one, according to God's
>Word, so we became engaged and made plans. When that day came, we
>were married and because we now could express our love in the
>deepest and most intimate of terms, we became one flesh. What
>does all of this have to do with prayer? Everything you just read
>is how prayer works. You get to know God by talking to Him and
>thinking about Him. The closer you get to Him, the closer you
>want to be. Now, for example, in my marriage of 32 years, Sandy
>is always in my background and I am always in her background.
>Even when we are apart, we are together, because we are now one
>flesh. We think alike, we talk alike, we act alike, we sleep
>together, eat together, and do everything else together. Do we
>talk about how much we love each other every minute of the day and
>night? No, because we are one. Love is always in the background
>of our thinking and has now become a part of our minds and our
>bodies. So how does all this relate to praying without ceasing?
>It is spending so much time with God, exchanging your thoughts for
>His, that God is always on your mind even if you are not
>consciously thinking of Him at any given moment. It is also a
>matter of learning how to listen to your spirit. And, pray tell,
>how do you listen to your own spirit? Remember what everybody
>says about a sea shell? I remember, as a kid, the first time
>someone said, "You can hear the ocean in an empty sea shell." To
>prove it, they held it up to my ear. "Can you hear it?" they
>asked. I could hear the soft rushing sound. At the time, of
>course, I didn't realize it was just the acoustical audio
>differences generated by the sound waves produced by the close
>proximity of a hollow object placed near the ear. However, the
>principle is the same. If you get closer to the Lord by talking
>with him, He gets closer to you. Eventually He is so close, the
>sound of God is always heard in the background of your life. Yes,
>He wants to be that close to you. Is He?
>
>Phil.
>
>Crazy For Jesus
>www.SafePlaceFellowship.com
John
Sometimes I need what only you can provide... your absence
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