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The Importance of Prayer
Prayer is difficult, but a true child of God is recognizable by their praying. Even when a true child of God struggles and stumbles in prayer, their prayer is genuine, because they love the One they’re addressing and hunger in their heart for the One to whom they speak.
The Holy Spirit produces this authenticity in their soul to the Lord. There are lost men and women who can construct and craft beautiful-sounding prayers, but there’s no authenticity to them, because they’re far from the Lord. Don’t you just love to hear someone pray when they’re really praying? I would rather hear someone who stumbles and struggles but is really praying than hear someone wax eloquent who isn’t praying, but showing off. Though praying is difficult for us, it is supernaturally natural to the child of God.
Believers not only pray, but they long to pray. Believers want to grow in their prayer lives. The Lord’s disciples asked Him: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). That is my heart’s cry also: “Lord, teach me to pray.”
John wraps up his first epistle in chapter 5 and begins his postscript in verse 14. There, he ties the central themes of his letter (the possession and assurance of eternal life) with things he wants to emphasize and connect to those themes. The first thing he connects is prayer.
“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). That verse shows his reason for writing. Then, John connects prayer with the assurance of eternal life, his main idea for the letter. “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him” (1 John 5:14–15).
We see the importance of prayer because it is at the top of the list of the final things John wants to say. We see the same message throughout Scripture, because prayer is how God communicates with His children.
About this Plan
What is prayer? Prayer is coming before the face of God. When we know how to talk to God, we come confident, understanding that we are accepted because we’re His children. And if we ask anything according to His will, we have what we’ve asked for. This is our confidence in prayer.
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