Slowing Down to Pray and Hear God

Hello again,

I am currently reading an old book I had on my shelf for a really Long time - "Too Busy Not to Pray" by Bill Hybels. Haha it's an oxymoron I know. However, due to some tragic events involving my relatives, and some soul-searching, I decided that I should really get down to pray more intensively for all my unsaved loved ones, "war room" style. However, after doing it for a while, waking up really early in the morning to spend half an hour on my knees interceeding, I realised that I lacked the techniques to do sustained spiritual warfare or be a prayer warrior. My prayers become short and repetitive and I'm done without feeling like I did any sustained battle.

Then my bible study facilitators group talked about doing topical Inductive Bible Studies next after we finish with Parables, so I suggested doing a study on intercession. Then just so happens I started delegating roles within my cell group early this year and I took up the role of outreach IC. And after thinking about it a while, I figured the best way was for us as a cell to come up with a target list of 1-2 persons we would like to outreach to this year and to figure out together how we can outreach to them individually and as a cell. After we did that, and brainstormed, I realised prayer was a start and volunteered to do a topical sharing on prayer soon after. I also opened it up to the rest to also prepare if they had materials to share. So this is how I came to be reading this fusty musty old book that I had read and forgotten.

The book, though a deceptively small-sized paperback, is really good! It's not a classic on prayer for nothing. And it helps that it's written by a guy who has a racehorse temperament who cannot slow down. Ok so after going into reasons to pray and techniques or rather, principles to follow (cos he emphasises that prayer to our living God is not formulaic or a chant we can use to make Him so what we want, it's about getting a deeper relationship with God, which will make us more powerful impactful Christians), this brings me to the purpose of this blog post. The author challenges each one of us to really slow down our lives enough to pray (Yep! No more praying on the go! Or rather supplement it with something else) and to do a 3 -step process every day.

1) We are to journal a 1-page entry every day where we reflect on our day
2) We are to write out our prayers on another page
3) We are to listen to God after that

He guarantees our spiritual lives will have a change after that. So, I'm going to try this out for a week. Starting from today. Sorry if you will become my spiritual journal for a while! :)