no.337 140402 Thank you for encouraging me to pray through "Pray like Jesus"

"I"

After I finished blogging last night, I purposely took some time to read my Bible and to pray. I started reading Psalm 119 since last week, so I continued on even though it only lasted 10 minutes. I've been having a hard time focusing on God's word, and sadly, yesterday was not any different. However, I took some decent time to talk to God. I think listening to pastor Mark Driscoll's sermon on prayer "Pray like Jesus" encouraged me to have that time with God again.

I began with thanksgiving prayer, and moved on to confession. Repentance is probably the hardest part of my prayer life. It's not that I'm trying to hide my sins from omniscient God, because even before I open my mouth to confess, He already knows what I'm about to say. I tend to go in so much detail about describing my problems and worries, but I fail to explain about my sins. Most of the time, I pretty much say "dear God, I have done this wrong, please forgive me" and that would be it. It's horrible eh? There are other times when I forget what I've done wrong and therefore, I can't (or choose not to) confess. However, I'm thankful that I was able to come before God about my sins. And then I talked to God about Mexico and the memories from last year rushed back to me, and I started to thank God again for all the amazing things that He's done and shown me when I was in Mexico. As I was thanking Him, I got so overjoyed and also got extremely excited about the possibility of this year's trip that I couldn't fall asleep. Yeah.. I couldn't sleep at the thought of going back to Guadalajara to experience God's greatness all over again.

I wanted to share one more thing about prayer with you. Consider this. Let's say you've been praying for someone or about something for some time now. Suddenly, you stop praying for him, or about something. Doesn't that mean you've given up on him or given up something? When I heard pastor Mark say this, I knew exactly what he was trying to say. In one of my blog entries, I've shared that one of the best things you could do for someone who you love is to pray for them. So if you stop praying for him, then it just means that you stopped loving him. Or, according to pastor Mark, we could say that you've given him up. That motivated me to pray again. For the people around me, and for things that I've been praying about. Because I'm not gonna give up on them.