PRAYER

the Christian’s Vital BREATH

(77 days)

After a quick look on my bookshelf at home I found the following books on prayer: ‘Praying Successfully’ by Charles Spurgeon, ‘Rees Howells – Intercessor’ by Norman Grubb, ‘The Practice of Prayer’ by G. Campbell Morgan, ‘How to Pray’ by Pete Grieg, ‘Prayer: Key to Revival’ by David Yonggi Cho, ‘Reckless Devotion’ by Heidi and Roland Baker. There are others, but what stood out about these is that these are all people who have seen the most amazing moves of God in their communities, and through their ministries. This undoubtedly highlights the importance of prayer for us all, and partly why we are embarking on this series on prayer, which we will be following with this reading plan. It continues to be our experience that when we take time to pray, and particularly as we persist in prayer, we start to see God move more and more.

I have another book on prayer, it was given to me a number of years ago by the author who I met whilst at Bible School. It is called ‘Prayer – The Christian’s Vital Breath’ by L. A.T. Van Dooren. I don’t know too much about the author; I am not aware of him leading big revivals or preaching to the masses … he was simply a faithful follower of Jesus who had learnt how prayer needed to be at the heart of all that he did. He took the title of his book from a 19th Century hymn – ‘Prayer is the Christian’s vital breath, the Christian’s native air,’ and we are going to use that title for this series.

As we embark on this journey, thinking about the different ways we can pray, and then meditating on example of these types of prayer in the Bible (and as part of this time spending a week praying around our worshipping communities), let us all embrace this God-given gift more and more so that it becomes as natural (and vital) to us as breathing.