| Time | Text |
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Prayer as Battle
00:02:58
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| You mentioned a little bit as you got started here, but how could it be difficult for you to pray? | |
| Well, I think prayer is a battle for one thing. | |
| The enemy attacks us when we're on our knees. | |
| When you're on your knees, that's the front line of the battle. | |
| So the enemy will just do everything he can. | |
| The doorbell will ring, the phone will ring, the dog will throw up. | |
| You know, so many distractions, or you know, they can just be other things. | |
| We all of a sudden get a headache, or we all of a sudden get so sleepy we can't keep our eyes open. | |
| Those are the enemies. | |
| And when I mean the enemy, the devil, that's him trying to keep us from prayer because prayer is so powerful. | |
| So that's one element of the struggle. | |
| But another struggle is just personal, and I guess my personal weakness. | |
| And I struggled with consistency, making time every day for that set-aside time. | |
| And COVID has helped me overcome that, Jim and Laurie. | |
| You know, I've been home. | |
| I know you all would understand I'm not traveling, running around. | |
| I can be home so that I can have an extended time of prayer and Bible reading with the Lord. | |
| And then concentration, when I go to pray, it just seems there are so many things that distract me, even just in my own mind, thinking about what I've got to do tomorrow, the emails I've got to answer, or what I'm going to fix for supper. | |
| And then the content. | |
| Exactly, what do I want to say to the Lord? | |
| And so the concentration and content have overcome enormously by just writing down my prayers. | |
| I don't write them all down. | |
| I will tell you that there are many days I pray and I'm not writing them down, but the discipline of writing them down forms a pattern that then even when I'm not writing them down, I fall into that template. | |
| And just to encourage the people, you know, in scripture, David wrote down his prayers. | |
| We call them the Psalms. | |
| And think of how many people over the centuries have used his prayers to launch their own. | |
| Or we look at Paul's prayers in Ephesians 1 and 3 and other places in the New Testament. | |
| We look at our Lord's prayer, the prayer he taught us to pray, our Father who art in heaven, but then also his own prayer in John 17. | |
| And so prayers in scripture, people have written them down to help us launch our own prayers. | |
| So these prayers in this little book aren't meant to be a substitute for your own prayers. | |
| They're just meant to launch you into prayer. | |
| So that I've put in the book blank pages, hoping that as you read my prayers, your own thoughts will trigger and you'll want to write down your own prayers. | |
| And it just helps with concentration and content. | |
| And I think it's a blessing then in time to go back and see the way you were praying and find out how God has answered because the last element, there are four elements in my prayers: the worship, confession, thanksgiving, and intercession. | |
| And when I intercede, I want to come back and thank the Lord for his answers to prayer. | |