muses

It is inevitable that our lives will be busy because of service to God and people. But busy lives doesn’t mean busy hearts, as Paul Miller suggests:

The quest for a contemplative life can actually be self-absorbed, focused on my quiet and me. If we love people and have the power to help, then we are going to be busy. Learning to pray doesn’t offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of outer busyness we can develop an inner quiet. Because we are less hectic on the inside, we have a greater capacity to love… and thus to be busy, which in turn drives us even more into a life of prayer. By spending time with our Father in prayer, we integrate our lives with his, with what he is doing in us. Our lives become more coherent. They feel calmer, more ordered, even in the midst of confusion and pressure.

Paul Miller, A Praying Life

I just re-posted an entry on ‘Can a Christian be prayerless’ a couple of days ago, and there’s another post that i just had to share. Rev Kevin DeYoung wrote about why ‘Prayerlessness is unbelief’ and I felt that it pierced my heart. I quote the part that struck me the most:

Too often when we struggle with prayer we focus on the wrong things.  We focus on praying better instead of focusing on knowing better the one to whom we pray.  We focus on our need for discipline rather than our need for God.  Almost all of us want to pray more frequently, and yet our lives seem too disordered.  But in God’s mind our messy, chaotic lives are an impetus to prayer instead of an obstacle to prayer.

I often think that my ill-disciplined life is an obstacle to prayer, but as Rev DeYoung suggests, it should be the impetus (motivation) to our prayer instead. Prayer should be a cry to God, for God.

Please, read the whole article here.

This post on Desire Spiritual Growth made me uneasy, in a good way. I
wasn’t much of a pray-er when I was younger in my faith, particularly
because of my self-sufficient attitude. By the grace of God, that slowly
changed because I have learnt and am still learning to see much more of my
weakness and inadequacies. It bothered me that I wasn’t prayerful, and a
Christian cannot be prayerless, as these quotes from five spiritual giants
here suggest. And why not? In summary:

1. C.H. Spurgeon: All true Christians are marked by prayer
2. J.C. Ryle: Not praying is a clear proof that a man is not yet a true Christian
3. John Calvin: Claims of belief are worthless if prayer if of no account to us
4. Martin Luther: Prayer is the necessary breath of a Christian
5. Andrew Murray: Your Church is Powerless Because It is Prayerless

I encourage you to read the whole article here.