20 December 2022
Prayer does more than we will ever know in this life.
There is one thing for which my writing cannot help you: whether you believe prayer does anything. If faith does not call to you in the first place, there's nothing I can do. Without that sense of conviction, everything in your life is just random.
The single hardest thing for folks to swallow is that prayer is meant to change you, not the hand of God. You cannot isolate a single act of prayer from the whole program of making us each more like Jesus. Every time you call on the Lord, it's one more nudge in the right direction. And because of our fallen fleshly nature, while we live, the job is never done.
But that's how prayer works: It makes you increasingly ready to hear from God what He plans to do with your life. But even those things He already intends to do require your voluntary willful participation. That is, even if He does things unilaterally, it may not do your soul any good until you are in the place where His actions can be understood as a blessing. The most important element is the loving humble dependence on Him.
If there is any particular "goal" we can point to, it's that you cheer and celebrate when He takes from you something that was a hindrance to grace, or you dance when He gives you something your flesh never wanted. Prayer always works, even if nothing you've requested is granted. Your failures are part of the process.
When someone cuts loose with a lot of black-pilled verbiage, my first instinct is to be silent. Sometimes I feel led to answer, and it's typically along the lines of warning the mouthy that they are missing the point. Granted, there's an awful lot of really bad religion out there, and I will support black-pilling standard mainstream churchianity. Most church folks proceed through life with operant-conditioning, not faith. Their "suggestions" are programmed, and their testimony is false. It takes someone capable of actually listening and knowing when the Lord wants them to speak or act. Sometimes the friction that rubs someone raw is a long-term project to make them more receptive to mercy.
It's not a question of when they are ready to receive, but whether the Lord wants you to act, and what action is best. That clarity of focus is the whole point of prayer.
But I can testify that, having been rubbed raw myself a great deal over the years of my life, these days almost everything I ask of God is granted. I've learned what to request. And I've also learned that the whole process is far more important than the ostensible object of prayer. All around the county where I live are places of miracle, little prayer chapels where I stop and sense the divine Presence better than other places. It's not that I can't effectively pray anywhere I happen to be, but those places are quite noticeably a better atmosphere for me to hear.
Again: The process is far more important than any alleged transaction. This is spiritual warfare at its finest. Don't try to change the world; change yourself. The only reason the Lord lets us sojourn in this world is to prepare us for Eternity. You can't take any of the world with you into Eternity. What you will take with you are the changes to yourself.
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