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| Torrey Pines, California |
Last evening Linda and I drove to Lansing, Michigan, where we joined our colleague and friend Pastor Ed Owens to kick off Prayer Summer 2014. Thanks to the friends at Olivet Baptist Church for hosting us. Thanks also to Pastors Dave Brown and Lara Heise for bringing some of their Jesus community from Midland, Michigan.
If you're involved in Prayer Summer I suggest you spend this week in Psalm 23. Meditate on it. Perhaps memorize it (to memorize is to meditate).
Take five 30-60 minutes periods of time this week to go to a "lonely place apart" and meet with God. Use Ps. 23 as your meditative focus.
When God speaks to you, write it down. This is your spiritual journal, a record of the voice and activity of God in your life.
Last evening I shared some reasons why I pray. One is: because prayer works. I wouldn't take time to pray if it wasn't "powerful and effective" (James 5:16).
The best way (perhaps the only way) to experience prayer as powerful and effective is to have a sustained life of actual praying. Pray, focused and enduring, over weeks and months and years. I've done this since 1977. I've got 3500 pages of journal entries, just for myself. I have a record of "the acts of God in the life of John Piippo."
Have a prayer life that is fresh, green, and growing. Water it every day. See for your own self how God blesses and blooms it.
I bless you now with a deep, profound, God-engaging life of praying.
Note: one reason a Jesus-follower "doesn't have time to pray" is that they don't believe. If prayer is talking with an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, necessarily existent [everlasting] Reason and Cause of all that exists [to include you], who wouldn't have time for this?
Pray and see that the Lord is there, that the Lord is capable, and that the Lord is good.
