(Colossians 1:9) Never stop praying.

After 45 years of serving God, I still do not understand how prayer actually works.

I know that our prayers do not manipulate God. 

I know our prayers are not magic pills. 

In some way, our prayers move God’s heart toward the situation we are praying about or the person we are praying for. 

The Holy Spirit moves in our hearts to pray for certain people or specific circumstances.  

Sometimes we do not even know why God is leading us to pray.

Somehow God acts in response to our weakest prayers. 

Prayer is a paradox of faith. 

Prayer is not irrational, but it is not fully rational either. 

Prayer is not simply a human work, but paradoxically it is also God’s work. 

The Holy Spirit leads us to prayer according to God’s will, not our own. 

With this understanding, we partner with God in prayer. 

The two most amazing verses related to prayer are Romans 8:26-27:

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.” 

We have two options in life concerning prayer: Either we keep on praying and call for God’s intervention, or we give up and turn everything over to materialism and fate. 

For Christians, the Bible is clear: we are exhorted to never stop praying (Luke 18:1; 1 Thessalonians 5:17). 

Why do we stop praying? 

It could be that things aren’t changing fast enough, so we give up. 

It could be that we pray in our own strength instead of through the power of the Holy Spirit. 

We simply become disillusioned and so we give up.

We get tired and so we give up.  

We must persevere in prayer. 

We need to pray in trust that God knows best and is working in ways that we can’t see or understand. 

I encourage you to stop trying to figure out how God works through prayer.

We need to stop trying to understand how prayer actually works in the plans and purposes of God. 

We must just keep praying, keep seeking, and keep knocking! 

We must never stop praying!

We do not fully understand how God works through prayer, but prayer must be our way of life in the kingdom of God.