When You Stand Praying
Text: Matthew 6:5 – 6 TPT
“Whenever you pray, be sincere and not like the pretenders who love the attention they receive while praying before others in the meetings and on street corners. Believe me, they’ve already received their reward.
But whenever you pray, go into your innermost chamber and be alone with Father God, praying to him in secret. And your Father, who sees all you do, will reward you openly. One of the most common things in our current world is Distraction. Everyone seems to be multitasking on a lot of things. Focus has become a scarce commodity, especially among Christians.
Many a time, we pray as individuals but hardly see any result of our prayers. Even when we pray corporately in most instances, it feels as if we are serving some form of punishment. We usually can’t wait for the session of prayer to be over, so that we could move on to the more fun stuff.
Why does this happen? Why does prayer feel like heavy weight-lifting? Why do we feel like offenders serving punishment when we are asked to pray in church?
It’s simply because the Helper, The Holy Spirit, is absent (Romans 8 v 26- 27, Philippians 2 v 13).
Why is He absent? Simply because of our disobedience. He said in Matthew 6:6 that we should first enter into our inner chamber (closet), that is the inner chamber of our heart, where all other voices are blocked out, where the beeping of phones cannot penetrate, where the activities of other church members, neighbours, housemates and so on, cannot be noticed.
This is where the Holy Spirit waits for us. But since we never even make it into the inner chamber, but choose to stay outside where people can see us, where the sound of our phones can reach us, where the voices of animals and neighbours still catch our attention, then we never encounter the Holy Spirit for help, and we struggle to pray.
Have a change of mindset today. Repent. Get rid of distractions while praying, and God will surprise you with supernatural power for prevailing prayer.
How would you feel if someone came to you to ask for a little favour, and while the person was talking to you, he/she was busy attending to calls, chatting while in conversation with you, or maybe carried away by the scenery around? Would you be in the mood to help such a person?
Now, if we feel disrespected by such, imagine how the God of gods, the King of kings would feel.
Give Him the honour due to Him and He will honour you. Continue to disrespect His person and presence and He will ignore you (1 Samuel 2:30).
The choice is yours, but make the right choice!
