There are temptations all around us. The chances are that it won’t take you too long to remember some of the ones that have drifted through your mind over the last 24hours. But while some of them are obvious, there’s a range of temptations that are subtle and sometimes harder to spot.
Take this one, for example: our prayers don’t matter that much.
This myth comes in many forms, plaguing us with thoughts about God being too busy, that we are too small or that the world’s problems just too great.
Giving into these temptations leaves us muzzled, blindfolded and deaf, like those three brass monkeys all wrapped up in one. Giving up on prayer cuts into our potential and reduces our impact. Giving up on prayer is giving up on God.
There’s more to being a Christian than being a brass monkey.
In the days of the early church with its ever increasing roll call of martyrs, the numbers of Jews and non-Jews joining the Christian sect grew with phenomenal power. By the end of the first century – and not more than seventy years after Christ’s handful of followers were told to go and make disciples – there are as many as one million Christians spread across the Roman empire. Within another three centuries 40 million people would count themselves As Christians – almost a quarter of the world’s population.
The numbers are different today. There are even more of us: almost one in three of the world’s 6 billion people are Christians. Within the next week we could do more to change the state of the word than any single government could do in a decade.
Filed under: we can do better than this
That is VERY true – it’s such an easy thing to believe.
I thing sometimes we cheat ourselves (and God) by setting our horizons too low. I work with the youth at our church, and when we say ‘what should we pray about’ the first thing mentioned is almost always ‘exams’ or ‘college work.’ Now, God certainly cares about both of those things, but the thing you’re asking for prayer about is something that you have complete control over in this case, which slightly defeats the point.
“Come on guys!” I always want to scream (and sometimes I do raise myself to mild hysteria – in a good-tempered Basil Fawlty kinda way) “Let’s pray for some things that we CAN’T achieve on our own – things that we NEED God to do, otherwise we – or someone else – is sunk!”
I think genuine prayer starts with genuine need, and genuine trust in God’s ability to meet it.