Praying

This is something that I want to talk about today. What does it mean to pray?
Well for me, praying is the best way to talk to God and to ask for advice, support and to thank God for his glory.

But does it only have to be Christians that can pray and be heard?

I believe that this is not true, as Christianity is not a club with a membership that you need to enter. Christianity teaches us that God created all men and hence wants all men to know that he is a loving God who has control over our souls, if we believe in him or not.

1 John 5:14-15 tells us that This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to is will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us-whatever we ask-we know that we have what we asked of him.

This tells us that God will listen to us and deliver to us what we have asked for if it is part of his plan and that God does not always answer our prayers, only when he thinks he should and we must know that.

So why would a non-Christian want to pray?

Well I can give an example of this. Take a story of somebody ill in hospital and their relations are worried about them recovering and know that they can not do much to help the doctors. Now the 20th century has made massive advancements in medicine and recovering from illness is much more likely, however there are still some illnesses that are harder to recover from and doctors can only do their best. So what can the relations do? Even though they don’t believe in God and never have, they may pray to him as they want to believe that there is a all powerful being out that who has the power over life and death and controls the fate of their loved one and so they pray to him for recovery, this is the power of God.
This happened in a episode of Only Fools and Horses when Rodney, who has never talked about praying before, tells his wife that he prayed last night that his brother would make it out of hospital.

I believe that prayer is a very powerful thing and I have know times in my life when I have seen amazing things happen through prayer. I will be selfish and mention my near-fatal car accident when I was younger that really should have killed or seriously damaged me for life, however my recovery amazed people. I know that people were praying for me that day and it may sound crazy to non-Christians, but I believe that God gave me a second chance and here I am studying at University.

Matthew 6:5-15 tells us a lot about how to pray, but how often should we pray?

I often pray just before I go to bed and sometimes pray in the morning, but I sometimes feel that I should be praying a couple of times a day and not to a schedule as I do now, but as the old saying goes there is a time and a place for everything and for me it is church or my bedroom. To me a prayer is often personal.

Now I admire Muslims for the fact that they pray about five times a day and is more then the average Christian, but our prayers may be different. I do not know much about how Muslims pray (apart that they always bend over together and pray towards the Middle East) so I cannot really comment on it.

But I believe the power of prayer is real and is a brilliant thing in our lives, as it allows us to talk to our creator.

What do you think about prayer?