Our Footsteps: Learning to Pray

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Learning to Pray

Prayer is one of those spiritual disciplines that I am constantly working on. Praying is not easy – in fact, it is hard work. The forces of evil are obviously opposed to the fervent prayer of a righteous man - and so it is a battle. I want to grow in prayer. I want to learn. Not so I can be the person who ‘prays the best’, but so that I can be something like the person of Paul who said simply, ‘that I may know Him’.

There are several ways to learn how to pray better:
1). Learn to pray by praying. On the job experience is one of the best teachers.
2). Learn to pray by hearing others pray. We can learn a lot just by being around those who have a deep and meaningful relationship with God in their prayer lives. And so their example is valuable.
3). Learn to pray by reading the prayers of other Godly men. A good example of this is ‘The Valley of Vision’, which is a collection of Puritan prayers.
4). Learn to pray by studying the great prayers in the Bible. And there are many of them.

In future posts in the next week or so, I would like to share what I am learning by studying the prayers in God’s Word such as Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kings 8, Nehemiah’s prayer in the first chapter of Nehemiah, Daniel’s prayer in Daniel chapter 9, the Disciples Prayer(the Lord’s Prayer) in Matthew 6, Mary’s prayer in Luke 1, and possibly others.

Mark

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I Believe...

1). I believe that there is one God. I believe God consists of three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
2). I believe that God is holy, righteous, loving, and just.
3). I believe that mankind is separated from God by sin; that sin entered the world through Adam and death through sin.
4). I believe that, because of sin, man is condemned. Because of God’s utter hatred for sin, there is an eternal conscious punishment in hell for all those who do not come to God on His terms, dealing with their sin.
5). I believe that confessing our sins and confessing Jesus Christ as Lord is the only way to properly deal with the sin that has infected everyone. Jesus Christ paid our sin debt on the cross; reconciliation by substitution. There is nothing we can do to add to the finished work of Christ.
6). I believe in the security of the believer, that once he is truly born-again, there is nothing that would cause him to lose his salvation.
7). I believe that upon the death of a true believer in Christ, that he is ushered immediately into the presence of the Lord, where he will live in everlasting joy in Heaven, experiencing eternal fellowship with God.
8). I believe in believer’s baptism by immersion. I don’t believe baptism is necessary for salvation, but it is a beautiful outward profession of an inward possession.
9). I believe in a literal 6-day creation where God created the heavens and the earth and then rested on the seventh day.
10). I believe that the words written in the Bible are truth. I believe that the Bible is inerrant in its parts and in its whole. I believe that the 66 books that make up the canon of scripture make the Bible complete and that God inspired the words written therein. The things that were written down in the Bible are sufficient for every need we have. Not only is God’s Word sufficient, but it is far superior to any other method of handling the problems that man faces, since He has given us all things pertaining to life and godliness.