'The deeper the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, prayer is a meaningless mumble of words. Such perfunctory, formal praying, with no heart, no feeling, no real desire accompanying it, is to be shunned like a pestilence. Its exercise is a waste of precious time, and from it, no real blessing accrues.
And yet even if it be discovered that desire is honestly absent, we should pray, anyway.
We ought to pray.
The "ought" comes in, in order that both desire and expression be cultivated. God's Word commands it. Our judgment tells us we ought to pray -- to pray whether we feel like it or not -- and not to allow our feelings to determine our habits of prayer. In such circumstance, we ought to pray for the desire to pray; for such a desire is God-given and heaven-born. We should pray for desire; then, when desire has been given, we should pray according to its dictates. Lack of spiritual desire should grieve us, and lead us to lament its absence, to seek earnestly for its bestowal, so that our praying, henceforth, should be an expression of "the soul's sincere desire."
A sense of need creates or should create, earnest desire. The stronger the sense of need,
before God, the greater should be the desire, the more earnest the praying. The "poor in
spirit" are eminently competent to pray.
Hunger is an active sense of physical need. It prompts the request for bread. In like manner, the inward consciousness of spiritual need creates desire, and desire breaks forth in prayer. Desire is an inward longing for something of which we are not possessed, of which we stand in need -- something which God has promised, and which may be secured by an earnest supplication of His throne of grace.'
Quoted from- 'THE NECESSITY OF PRAYER By E.M. BOUNDS' (Excerpt 13)
*******
Truly our adversary, the devil, will do all he can to keep us from praying! The belief that we must feel like praying to pray is one of those tricks he uses to keep us from communicating with our Father God. The knowledge that we should pray regardless of our feelings is what we need embedded in us. We most definitely shouldn't wait till we are trouble to turn to God in prayer, yet that's exactly what a lot of people do. Waiting until they have a need for help, not realizing that we have a desperate need of prayer daily. We need daily spiritual bread as well as daily physical bread. Only one of those two things are within our power of enacting. We cannot always supply daily physical bread but we can daily supply spiritual bread because that spiritual bread is just a prayer away from us. We can open the lines of communication in our happiest and our most desperate of hours. There is never a time we are forbidden to pray because prayer is so incredibly important and special. We can pray in complete silence without anyone knowing, or we can choose to be outspoken and loud in our prayer. If we choose to be outspoken and loud we may be asked to stop, but even if we do stop the noise of our prayer, inwardly no one can stop us from praying - not a single person. Spiritual sustenance is extremely necessary. We no more can keep living without physical food than we can keep spiritually alive without prayer.
Here, E.M. Bounds speaks of desire and lack of desire in prayer. When our hearts are sometimes at their lowest point and life has tormented us with it's evils, the slicing arrows of satan cutting us to the quick, the poison tipped barbs infuse us with a desire to turn from God, not towards Him, it is then we need to take that lack of desire to pray and pray even harder!
We will not be left to a life filled with wondrous and constant joy despite life's hardships, not if Satan has anything to say about it, and truly...not if God has anything to do with it as well. We are being refined! Our patience is being perfected! These awful trials and tribulations are ripping our hearts out and wringing the evil from them by the grace of our GOD. Satan would turn that grace into disease, wanting us to shun it at all cost, but our God is greater than the evil one!
Please, LORD, please SAVIOR, please HEAVENLY FATHER live in us and us in You! We need You more than anything else! We need YOU!
Job was tortured physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually tortured as Satan tried his best to rip him from God's love. All by God's grace that wasn't possible! Please, LORD, keep us in YOU, in YOUR grace no matter what. We don't want pain and heartache, we don't want to be tortured in any way at all, our desire is to be kept in YOU free from all that, but we know that this world is filled with pain and heartache that You cannot keep us from, but You can keep us from EVIL that would destroy us by wresting us permanently from You! Please, we pray the desperate prayer to be kept from EVIL! Deliver us, LORD, deliver us from evil, lead us not into temptation, not into despair! You have the POWER, You have the GLORY, Yours is the KINGDOM forever and ever. All in YOU in YOUR grace, YOUR mercy, YOUR love… we PRAY.
And yet even if it be discovered that desire is honestly absent, we should pray, anyway.
We ought to pray.
The "ought" comes in, in order that both desire and expression be cultivated. God's Word commands it. Our judgment tells us we ought to pray -- to pray whether we feel like it or not -- and not to allow our feelings to determine our habits of prayer. In such circumstance, we ought to pray for the desire to pray; for such a desire is God-given and heaven-born. We should pray for desire; then, when desire has been given, we should pray according to its dictates. Lack of spiritual desire should grieve us, and lead us to lament its absence, to seek earnestly for its bestowal, so that our praying, henceforth, should be an expression of "the soul's sincere desire."
A sense of need creates or should create, earnest desire. The stronger the sense of need,
before God, the greater should be the desire, the more earnest the praying. The "poor in
spirit" are eminently competent to pray.
Hunger is an active sense of physical need. It prompts the request for bread. In like manner, the inward consciousness of spiritual need creates desire, and desire breaks forth in prayer. Desire is an inward longing for something of which we are not possessed, of which we stand in need -- something which God has promised, and which may be secured by an earnest supplication of His throne of grace.'
Quoted from- 'THE NECESSITY OF PRAYER By E.M. BOUNDS' (Excerpt 13)
*******
Truly our adversary, the devil, will do all he can to keep us from praying! The belief that we must feel like praying to pray is one of those tricks he uses to keep us from communicating with our Father God. The knowledge that we should pray regardless of our feelings is what we need embedded in us. We most definitely shouldn't wait till we are trouble to turn to God in prayer, yet that's exactly what a lot of people do. Waiting until they have a need for help, not realizing that we have a desperate need of prayer daily. We need daily spiritual bread as well as daily physical bread. Only one of those two things are within our power of enacting. We cannot always supply daily physical bread but we can daily supply spiritual bread because that spiritual bread is just a prayer away from us. We can open the lines of communication in our happiest and our most desperate of hours. There is never a time we are forbidden to pray because prayer is so incredibly important and special. We can pray in complete silence without anyone knowing, or we can choose to be outspoken and loud in our prayer. If we choose to be outspoken and loud we may be asked to stop, but even if we do stop the noise of our prayer, inwardly no one can stop us from praying - not a single person. Spiritual sustenance is extremely necessary. We no more can keep living without physical food than we can keep spiritually alive without prayer.
Here, E.M. Bounds speaks of desire and lack of desire in prayer. When our hearts are sometimes at their lowest point and life has tormented us with it's evils, the slicing arrows of satan cutting us to the quick, the poison tipped barbs infuse us with a desire to turn from God, not towards Him, it is then we need to take that lack of desire to pray and pray even harder!
We will not be left to a life filled with wondrous and constant joy despite life's hardships, not if Satan has anything to say about it, and truly...not if God has anything to do with it as well. We are being refined! Our patience is being perfected! These awful trials and tribulations are ripping our hearts out and wringing the evil from them by the grace of our GOD. Satan would turn that grace into disease, wanting us to shun it at all cost, but our God is greater than the evil one!
Please, LORD, please SAVIOR, please HEAVENLY FATHER live in us and us in You! We need You more than anything else! We need YOU!
Job was tortured physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually tortured as Satan tried his best to rip him from God's love. All by God's grace that wasn't possible! Please, LORD, keep us in YOU, in YOUR grace no matter what. We don't want pain and heartache, we don't want to be tortured in any way at all, our desire is to be kept in YOU free from all that, but we know that this world is filled with pain and heartache that You cannot keep us from, but You can keep us from EVIL that would destroy us by wresting us permanently from You! Please, we pray the desperate prayer to be kept from EVIL! Deliver us, LORD, deliver us from evil, lead us not into temptation, not into despair! You have the POWER, You have the GLORY, Yours is the KINGDOM forever and ever. All in YOU in YOUR grace, YOUR mercy, YOUR love… we PRAY.
No comments:
Post a Comment