Prayer

I finally finished Red Moon Rising (by Pete Greig). Please, please, read it!! It is amazing. Here is just one small little excerpt that I liked and wanted to share...enjoy!

“ ‘Whether we think of, or speak of, God, whether we act or suffer for Him, all is prayer, when we have no other object than His love, and the desire of pleasing Him. All that a Christian does, even in eating and sleeping, is prayer, when it is done in simplicity, according to the order of God…In souls filled with love, the desire to please God is a continual prayer.’ -John Wesley

What does it mean to pray 24-7? It means living our whole lives, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, in the grateful awareness of God’s presence and with a desire to please Him always. Prayer is not just about the contemplative moments or the moments when I’m consciously firing words at God. The call to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17) is a call to remember Christ’s presence continually in the subconscious as well as the conscious realms of my life. But how am I to do this? How am I to keep Christ in my subconscious, in my reflex-reactions even I’m sleeping or working or watching a movie? How am I to be Christian by default as well as determination?

The key is to maintain a rhythm, a heartbeat of disciplined prayer, in which I encounter Christ regularly, deliberately, and consciously. The spinoff of these times, as you will see in the character of any older person who has spent a great deal of their lives contemplating Jesus, is that His presence thereby moves by a process of osmosis from the conscious into the subconscious mind. As we open the door, again and again, to Christ, he comes in day by day and eats with us, laughs with us, shares with us, until we acquire His mannerisms and know His very thoughts. A season of 24-7 prayer can be a useful tool for bringing Christ consciously back into the midst of our ongoing lives as individuals and as communities. And prayer rooms are an interesting expression of God’s intention, which has always been to walk in continual communion with His people….”