By David ReayMonday 3 Feb 2014LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 0 minutes
Transcript:
Read Colossians 4:2
Pray diligently. Stay alert,with your eyes wide open in gratitude. (THE MESSAGE)
We sometimes grumble about our prayers not being answered and wonder why on earth we bother praying. This betrays a common but false understanding of prayer: that it is the means by which we get what we want. There is a lot more to prayer than that.
But we might also add that in fact each and every prayer is answered. It is just that it might not be the answer we expected or wanted. Or we might not recognise the answer when it stares us in the face. Paul encourages us to pray diligently,alert to what is happening as we pray. Is God guiding our prayers a certain way? Are changing circumstances indicative of a response to our prayers? Was that ‘chance’ encounter really a coincidence? Having prayed,we need to have our senses alert to such things.
Paul also speaks of gratitude. We are to be thankful for God responding to our prayers even if we can’t quite grasp the full significance of the response. We thank God for the answers that are coming but have not yet been received. To merely go on and on about our concerns is to focus on them and thus be in a state of tension.
Better to simply share our concerns then wait alertly for God’s response. Better to relinquish the concerns to God and start thanking him for how he will respond.
Prayer is never meant to result in anxious burden bearing. It is meant to release us from this. But it can only do so if,as per our text,we have our eyes wide open in gratitude.
Blessings
David Reay