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