Beautiful.  Great examples.

Vicki

----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Scovell" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2004 3:59 PM
Subject: Bible Reading Verses Prayer Time


> 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
>