Disclaimer..My prayer life sucks!
What's always funny to me is when I was in the world, partying all night, coming home drunk...I prayed religiously! As soon as I got baptized, that prayer life or whatever you may have called it, took a back seat.
It'a not that I don't pray, I do. But the connection sometimes seems lost for me with the Big Guy upstairs. As compared to when, it alwys came from the heart. I think that's what God really wants too, it's not some 'mechanical' speech we send to Him every night before we go to bed, it has to be from the heart.
So over the past year, I've been reading a lot about the science of prayer. Or maybe a better way to put it, the theological essence of prayer. And one of the books I really enjoyed this past year was 'Why We Pray' by John Peckham...
I'm a big fan of John's work. His book 'God With Us' was one of the best theological books I've ever read in my life so when this thing came out this year, I grabbed a copy and dove in.
And even though I'd love to talk more about the book, the point of this blog post is to take what I've learned from reading this book and actually a biblical example of how we should pray...
It's found in one of my favourite books of the bible - Daniel.
Three times a day....
I mean, this is the minimum I would think but sadly....Yours truly didn't even follow this bare minimum. So I decided it was time to get a bit more serious about this prayer life of mine or lack thereof...
So I let the bible be my teacher when I started poking around about this minimum and found some times that scripture suggests.
Evening.
Morning.
Noon.
But I still needed to hold myself accountable and actually commit to this. So thanks to my really good friends at Apple, I started using my alarm clock in my phone :)
Crazy simple way to remind myself to pray at specific times each day. This allows me to put God first and the alarm going off helps me put things aside and focus on my prayer life with Him.
Yeah I know, there are fancier apps on the phone for prayer and all, but this is what I'm going to try for now. Habit forming is something I think is so important in anything you try to build into your life, so why not with prayer?
I also tried to incorporate some scripture after my prayer and today I read Psalms 7 simply because....It was the 7th day of the month lol Each time I prayed today, I ended it with some bible reading of that Psalm.
All in all, today was great! My wife even started to try this method as well and she told me it really helped her prioritize God. Now obviously both of us just started this little strategy today and if we follow through, it's all for not. But this just makes sense to me....
Thinking back about when I did have a 'prayer life', it always came from a need for God. Even if I wasn't in the church, I knew I needed God. And I am not sure why this changed over the past few years, but I'm going to change it :)
Hope this strategy can work for someone looking to deepen their relationship with God.