Prayer Warrior

For all professing Christians reading this I have a question for you: Are you a prayer warrior? If you answered no, then you need to begin to really re-evaluate your sincerity in professing Christ. Harsh? Yeah, it is, but I keep going over that sentence and realize there's no nicer way of putting it. If you are a Christian you should be a prayer warrior, end of story.

Now don't get me wrong, some are defintiely better than others. There are some, how shall I put it...Green Berets of Prayer Warriors. There's one that comes to my mind in my church here in Moscow, as a friend of mine put it "Just from what she says to you, you think she must pray all the time." Don't even for a minute think that means she's bragging about her praying. She doesn't, she will simply mention to you that she's praying for you. And from what I can tell, she says that to most everyone she meets. And I believe her. She is an elite prayer warrior. One who makes the rest of us stop in awe and re-evaluate our own prayer lives. It's an amazing and encouraging example.

But tht doesn't keep us GI's from the line. We should all be prayer warriors. It's our first and most powerful weapon. If we fail to use it, we will fail. There's no question that if we are to be in a relationship with someone you need to talk. So how can you be a follower of God if you don't pray? And what sort of conversation is it if you don't share the problems, and beseech them for help.? It's a horrid thing I see in the church where prayer is neglected.

Take public prayer for instance. There's so many people who are afraid to pray in public, and I think that's a bad thing. It's not humility, as public prayer is not an act of arrogance if you're actually praying. The Pharisee and the tax collector: the pharisee wasn't really praying. So praying publicly (i.e. for a bible study dinner) is NOT an act of arrogance. If it is for you, I really encourage you to go back to the drawing board of your prayer life.

So what's the problem? It must be fear. And that's even worse than arrogance I think. This is equally as bad (in my mind) to being afraid of sharing the gospel. Spreading the gospel and prayer are two things there's no question that we should do, and yet then we squander it? What sort of people are we? I'm not setting myself up on a pedestal, I have plenty of growth in these areas myself. But at least I'm aknowledging the problem. All to often we tend to pretend things aren't a problem.

We get to obsessed with gifts I think. Yes we all have spiritual gifts, some have the gift of prayer, but all to often I think we use the excuse that prayer's not our paticular gift to hide the fact that we don't pray as we should. Number crunching and legal documents might not be my gift, but I still have to pay my taxes. Why should prayer be any different?

I don't know the whole of the problem, nor do I have a solution, but I do know there's a problem that we must overcome if we are to grow in our relationship with the Lord.

In this vein, I think I'll also start using this as a place to post prayer requests.