Prayer: Communicating with God
King David once told his Creator, "O God, you are my God; early I
will seek You" (Psalm 63:1). He also disclosed that he regularly
prayed to God at least three times per day: "Evening and morning
and at noon I will pray, and cry aloud, and He shall hear my voice"
(Psalm 55:17).
The top priority in our lives should be to acknowledge our Creator
and Sustainer, the One who gives us every breath of air we breathe
and every morsel of food we eat. Prayerthe deep, heartfelt,
regular prayer modeled by Jesus Christ Himself, and by the apostles
and prophetsis one of those activities that can all too
easily
be pushed aside, and even out of our lives, if we allow it.
It's good to study the prayers of the great servants of God as
recorded in the Bible. If we do that, we will probably be struck by
one interesting feature of many of those prayersthey were
long!
In fact, they were sometimes very long! Check Daniel's prayer in
Daniel 9:3-19, and Ezra's prayer in Ezra 9:5-15, to get a feel for
how lengthy and detailed were the prayers of these men of God.
Theirs weren't the "Sorry, God, I have to go now; I'll talk to you
later" variety of prayer. Nor were they the "Please bless
everything" type of prayer.
These biblical models of prayer depict men and women of God who
talked at length, and in detail, with their Creator about their
praise for Him, the needs of other servants of God and the needs of
the work of God. When appropriate (and it's just about always
appropriate!) they confessed their own sins and those of
their community.
Their prayers weren't disrupted by phones going off and other
interruptions. Theirs are the model for the kind of intense,
personal prayer time so sorely needed in our modern world, but so
easily neglected (or lost).
