Good evening brethren. Hope we are all doing wonderfully well. God be praised for His mercy unto us all. For He has preserved unto the moment and making it possible for us to hear and study His word. Hence, God knowing the importance, instructs not to forsake the gathering of the brethren as some do and the more we give ourselves to God's word, the more we grow in our relationship with God.
Today's mass indoctrination was awesome as that of other days too. Today's teaching was center on prayer as a doctrine of the Christ for the church and the focus was on the content of prayer and how to know if our prayers are going to be answered.
When we pray ,we are to pray to God only and not to any other personality. In Philippians 4:6, we learnt there that we are to bring our request concerning anything we want before God. In the book of Acts 1:24, the Apostles prayed to God for the replacement of Judas Iscariot because he was no longer with them, for committed suicide after he betrayed his Master, Jesus Christ. The Apostles needed to be twelve(12) to complete the twelve (12) tribes of Israel. They were to choose between the two options they had and God answered them. We learnt from there we should make our prayers simple and precise, for it's not in much sayings that would make our prayers to be heard. According to Ecclesiates 5:2, that our words should be few . We shouldn't be like the like the Pharisees who think they are heard by their much sayings.
We are to pray as often as we can. There is restrictions on the number of times to pray. 1 Thesalononia 5:17, tells us to pray without ceasing. Apostle Paul too prayed without ceasing for the brethrens as recorded in the book of 2 Timothy 1:3. We should pray at all times, before we go out and when we are back, when we go to bed ,when we are awake,etc.
We also learnt that we can be sure that our prayers would be heard by God when we pray with a pure heart- 2 Timothy 2:22 and 1Peter 3:10-12. We must put away every work of the flesh before God can us,such as idolatry,witchcrafty, hatred,variance, etc. We are to come before God in prayers with a heart void of ofense towards God and towards man-Acts 24:16,Acts 15:20.
When the heart is evil then everything from it would be evil too. What defiles is not what we eat but what comes from the inside(the heart), for out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Mt 12:33-34,Luke 6:45
We also learnt it's not good that same mouth we use to pray that we use same too to curse according to James 3:10. This can stand as an hinderance to our prayers.
We should endeavor to cleanse our heart, tamed our lips,take away hypocrisy before we pray. we should avoid speaking lies with our tongue. God doesn't honour the request of the lips that tells lies. God doesn't hear the pretending heart; He hates a heart to act deceitfully. Our communication should be exact ie it should be what it is.
We also learnt that a man that treats his wife without regards, would have his prayers hindered too from being heard by God.
According to James 4:13-14,when we give response,we should always know that it's God that can enable us to do those things and hence we should always add "if God will" to such response because we don't know what tomorrow holds. And when we say a thing, we should strife to fullfil them; speaking in hypocrisy can hinder our prayers.
In summary
- We pray only to God
- Our prayer should be simple
- We can pray ceaselessly ie anytime
- God hears the prayers of a pure heart and it takes a good heart to have a tongue that speaks good.
- We can only tamed the tongue with the word of God.
- We must put away a pretentious heart, a heart that speaks in hypocrisy, a tongue that lies if our prayers must be heard.
- God would never leave us nor forsake, so when we pray ,we should hope that our prayers would be heard.
God bless us all. I want to invite us for the next session being Day 5 of the mass indoctrination.