In the Destiny School of Ministry, which I have the awesome privilege to attend, we don’t just have someone come in and lecture at us for hours on end…that will bore you to death. We like things lively and exciting that will produce fruit and challenge us in our walk with Christ and one way we do that is by having various ministers from across the nation from time to time to teach us as well as those awesome leaders we have within our home church. Thanks to FaceTime and Skype that becomes a cheap and easy thing to do and these men and women of God, always seem to have a few things that will hit home hard and today was no different.
A pastor from Louisiana made a statement that hit me right where I have been struggling in my own life:
“Do you pray because of structure or do you pray because you hunger for the Spirit of God?”
In my own life this has been something I have been watching change and had to stop and do a course correct in my prayer time with the Lord. One of the best things about my school is that we get to spend a hour a day in prayer with Jesus before anything else is done. I can not begin to tell you the difference it makes.
As most great things they can be turned into a negative if not guarded. Having that built in structure of a prayer time, if unguarded in our hearts, then runs the risk of becoming routine and mundane. Spending time with the Lord of the Universe and our Creator should never be mundane; yet often we act as if it is, at least I do. I am so guilty of this and when I realized this I humbled myself and repented before God. Remember this: in our prayer life, structure [habit] produces distance but hunger produces intimacy. Since then my genuine hunger for Him has been growing more and more.
I encourage you to take this question and ask it honestly of yourself…do you only pray on Sundays or Wednesdays? Do you pray out of habit or do you pray because you genuinely want to know God and hunger for Him? I think we all agree that we want it to be the latter in our lives, even if it’s not right now. If that’s the case then just get with God and be open and honest with Him, repent of being structured and distant from Him and just draw close to Him in prayer, worship and the Word. Then you will see genuine hunger for the Spirit of God begin to develop within and shape your world through intimacy with God.
