How do you Pray?

How do you Pray? Let’s answer this question with another question: how do you talk to your friends, to your loved ones? It’s something you do automatically, something you need to do because you have a relationship with these people.

So at its most basic, prayer is conversation with God. Psalm 73:28 says “…it is good for me to draw near to God…” You can do this at any time, any place and in all circumstances.

When you realise that God is as essential to your life and well-being as food, drink and sleep, you will want to spend time with him in the same way as you care for your other needs.

In Psalm 63, David compares his need for God to being thirsty in the desert: “You, God are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1).

Our lives can be so demanding that sometimes we forget to stop even to sense our need to spend time with God. But our whole lives suffer when we cut ourselves off from our source of real life.

“Delight yourself in the Lord,” we are told in Psalm 37:4, and he will “give you the desires of your heart”. This does not mean that God will give us everything we want; it means that as we meditate on God and come closer to him, we will naturally become more responsive to his will for us and will delight in his leading. We cannot do this without talking and listening to him in prayer and meditation.

Spending quiet time with God will refresh your soul for the demands of life, but most importantly, it will keep you in tune with the real source of your life and purpose.

How do you Pray? You may choose a beautiful place where you can feel peaceful; you may need to stay indoors, but you might choose to have beautiful music playing; or you might prefer to have complete silence as you focus on God and your two-way communication with him. Whatever your situation, make your prayer time special.

There is another kind of prayer, also, and that is the ‘attitude of prayer’ in which God is your constant companion throughout your day, whatever you are doing. Your time with God should not have boundaries, for even when you are concentrating on other things, you can still be aware of his presence. How do you Pray?

Jesus gives us an example of the kind of prayer that sustains us and our relationship with God. He was always conscious of the presence of the Father. We can read the record of how he included his Heavenly Father in what he was doing or talking about, e.g. “Father, glorify the Son.” We can do likewise. This flows from an attitude of prayer.

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