Work as if you were to live a hundred years, pray as if you were to die tomorrow.
- Benjamin Franklin
The age old question is more worth asking today than ever. Without prayer do we have one? One mirrored in Albert Einstien’s answer to a Princeton doctoral student who asked “What is there left in the world for original dissertation research?” To which Einstein reportedly replied, “Find out about prayer. Somebody must find out about prayer.”
For those interested in engaging in serious prayer there are several ways to do so. To this end GB has identified seven time tested methods or modes of prayer.
Methods or Modes of Prayer
1. The Prayer of Silence: Designed to clear the mind and acclimatize our souls to the importance and practice of serious prayer. Honoring God and giving our Creator and Savior a little equal time. Listening in hope of insight and understanding regarding such important topics as honesty and humility, genuine and living faith, salvation and discipleship, fellowship and worship. Click here to read article.
2. The Prayer of Repentance: Clearly brokenness and repentance are a key part of what God requires prior to approaching and worshiping Omnity acceptably. Particularly at a time when the quantity and quality of personal and corporate Me-ism and sin are at all time highs.
3. Conversational Prayer: The most common form of prayer taken to a whole new level.
4. Contemplative Thanksgiving: Taking the time to thoughtfully give thanks and count our blessings.
5. Prayer of Petition: How and why to recapture the lost art of personal and corporate intercession. Waiting on and wrestling with God, pressing through to realizing the power of answered prayer. The critical importance of developing a strategic and extensive daily prayer list.
6. Prayer of Complaint: Refusing to take no for an answer. Crying out to God in lament like Jeremiah or bewilderment like Habakkuk. Humbly yet boldly approaching God when life and/or prayer leave much to be desired. Like Mary’s perfect insistence and the persistent widow Jesus lauded, asking, seeking and knocking until the answer is given.
7. Prayer of Stillness: What to do when every mode has failed to bring the answers we desperately need. See Modern Psalm entitled Be Still.
Why Pray?
It's a good question. What if no one's listening? Is faith reasonable? Is there proof God exists and is as the Bible claims? If God's omniscience why should we waist our time telling Him what He already knows? Does prayer work? Are there tangible results that make it worth the effort?
The reasons for prayer are as numerous as its benefits. These include but are not limited to the following:
1. As a reasonable response to the realities and hazards of mankind’s precarious existence.
2. A desire to know and please our Creator and Savior.
3. To organize and express as well as work through our thoughts and feelings.
4. To seek relief from anxiety and fear.
5. To obtain Divine help in times of need for ourselves and family.
6. To petition and thank God for resources.
7. To intercede on the behalf of others friends and neighbors.
8. To understand why we are here.
9. To comprehend the ether glorious or horrifying eternal consequences of earthly life.
10. To champion the cosmic struggle that has marred the history of heaven, daily overflowing into humanity's, as a war in heaven and Earth between light and dark, good and evil, God and Satan.
Who Can Pray?
Thankfully anyone who wants to can pray. Yet, while not RC (religiously correct) to say so, the Bible sets conditions on who can pray so God will hear.
God Blog has introduced Quantum Christianity as well as a QC QuickStart Guide to help identify and understand the most important of these conditions. Using good Biblical rules of interpretation, including the extremely important Rule of Emphasis, we hope our Quantum Prayer Series may be of value.
Thoughts On Prayer
We hope our thousands of observations and proverbs on 20 different topics will provide food for thought on some of the why's and how's of prayer. See Also Prayer Meetings
More information
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