1- Whatever You Do Is What You Really Believe

You show what you believe by what you do. If you say, “I hate dogs, I can’t stand to be around them and I think they make the worst pets,” and you then buy a dog for your children instead of any other kind of pet, you probably didn’t REALLY believe what you were saying about them being terrible pets.

Whatever you do is what you believe.

With that in mind, for most of my life, I didn’t believe in prayer, not really. I know that because I didn’t do it.

I have been teaching on Wednesday nights to my youth and college students on prayer for the past few months. I have been using Tim Keller’s new book “Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God,” and I have enjoyed this series and found it more impactful than maybe any series I have ever taught. As often as I can, I am going to write short articles here about what I have learned in that journey and what I am learning as I struggle through the mire that is the beginning stages of prayer. I promise to keep them brief as I desire for them to actually be read.

I never really got prayer. I never really understood it. I never really knew how to pray. I never really trusted that it had any power at all. Sure I’d throw one up before a test and would often be the one called upon in my youth group to close us out; however,  I often viewed prayer, though I never would have said this, in a similar way to how outsiders view Christianity: all kind of hokie, not REALLY relevant to spiritual life, just a checklist matter that I obviously didn’t see as important enough even to check off. I would talk away prayer saying things like, “Yeah well really I pray all day every day as a Christian walking with God,” but that wasn’t true. Very rarely did my mind focus exclusively on God like prayer calls for. Sure there is a sense in which every Christian lives every moment in prayer, but biblical prayer calls for more than the divided mind prayers that I was offering.

I would be hard pressed to find an area that I feel more incompetent in than this one. I have only just recently began to pray, actually pray, and I feel like this just born baby deer that has just managed to stand for the first time. I am still not confident where to place my feet, I am still being convinced that walking is worth the struggle, I am still constantly stumbling and falling backwards. However, I have seen so much fruit from just the short time that I have been truly praying. I have never experienced the growth and self-knowledge that I have seen over these past months and have seen a massive amount of growth in outside things that I am involved with. Things that I have known intellectually for 20 years have now, for the first time, begun to sink into my heart, and it has changed me forever.

I am convinced that God paid an immeasurable price to grant me day and night access to Himself, and I am committed to taking advantage of that gift.

I have decided to pray.

Join me.