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