Breathing is not Life, Return to Main Menu
Life is Believing... Click here for Part 1
Why we need a prayerful life through the Holy Spirit.
Part 2 Click here for Part 1
One of the Glories of God in creating this world is that He gave mankind the ability to choose. The issue with our capability of choosing is that with the help of common cultural thinking influencing our lives through media, internet, friends, and TV, we desire to choose the fun and easy way of living emboldened by our self-centered and self-focused selfishness.
With our acceptance of Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes to guide our lives and begins the God given ability to overcome the negative influences of our world. It can be a most powerful moment when we accept Jesus and we truly feel changed. We may feel the power of the Holy Spirit in that moment, but for that feeling of the Spirit to continue in our lives, we must engage in an active learning and growing process through Godly fellowship and Bible Study but most importantly- through our prayers.
On our own, even without inspiration, people can accept Jesus by faith, but it is through the Holy Spirit we see and more greatly feel God's activity in our lives. It is in and through the Holy Spirit filling our lives that our faith in Jesus grows. As the Holy Spirit is in us, it is as a tree putting down its roots and spreading its gifting branches over every aspect of our lives. From that tree of the Holy Spirit filling our lives we receive abundant Grace in the gifts of the Spirit for our daily living. But, it is our prayers daily to God, that in God's Grace and Blessings we feel more of the power of the Holy Spirit growing in us (Luke 11:8-13). God does not want us to live half filled, short changed, or with Spiritual crumbs! He wants us to be spiritually charged to fully appreciate His work in our lives. Therefore, it is IN our faith that we pray in our communications with God, but it is THROUGH our prayers God most assuredly builds our faith through the Holy Spirit! Our Faith withers when left unattended, un-nurtured by prayer, unsupported by Godly fellowship, and pushed aside by our selfish desires. But, Godly faith flourishes through prayer and the activity of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Where we are weak the Holy Spirit intercedes, and most especially in our prayers! (Romans 8:26)
Jesus demonstrated the need for pray as recorded in the Gospels (especially Luke) and as found in the writings of Paul. From the Gospel of Luke, we read an emphasis on prayer and Jesus was often in prayer at/around important events and when teaching His disciples about prayer.
Luke open His Gospel with people praying as Zachariah receives the news that his wife Elizabeth will have a child, and with people in prayer and praising God he ends the last chapter (Luke 24:53) (*1).
Jesus opens and closes his ministry praying, praying as His baptism is completed and the Holy Spirit anoints Him (Luke 3:21-22); likewise at the end of his ministry, praying when he is on the cross, uttering prayers to God, forgiving His enemies (Luke 23:34), and committing His Spirit to Abba God (Luke 23:46) (*1).
Jesus prayed when under stress of the crowds demanding his time and compassion as found in Luke 5 in healing the leper (Luke 5:12-16). Jesus in talking to, questioning, and teaching His disciples, we see Jesus in Prayer. In Luke 9:18-21 Jesus questions His disciples about what the people are saying and what they (His disciples) believe about Him. Peter confesses Him to be the Christ and then Jesus directs them to tell no one. Jesus had a plan for his time on earth and it was important, perhaps stressful, He understood the growth in faith of His disciples, He understood the need for prayers not only in His life, but too, the life of His disciples and believers.
There are several other times Jesus was in prayer for Peter, others, His disciples, and Himself and most notably by Himself, when choosing the twelve (Luke 6:12), the Transfiguration (Luke 9:28-29), intercession for Peter (Luke 22:32), and Gethsemane (Luke 22:39-46). Also, we find Jesus in prayer in Luke 10:21-24, Luke 11:2-4, Luke 11: 5-13, Luke 18:1-8, and teaching us to be watchful (Luke 21:36) (*1) . Clearly, from this and other Gospel examples, prayer was essential to the life of Jesus.
The sum of the many events reported about Jesus' earthly life verified by His resurrection leads us to understand that to be the people of God and live life as God intends, we must look to the example of Jesus. What was important to Jesus must be important to us, and prayer was an integral, most important aspect of His relationship with God. Luke begins and ends his Gospel with prayers, Jesus begins and ends His ministry in prayer, and similarly our real belief expanding our relationship with God begins, continues, grows, and thrives with, in, and through our prayers.
Our lives and our relationship with God will be measured by Jesus (John 14:6 ). In seeking Jesus as our example in living life we should desire the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts and lives, just as did Jesus. To fill our hearts with the Holy Spirit, we must pray, and pray, and pray, often, everyday. In this, God will then fill our live's in remarkable, breath taking ways through the work of the Holy Spirit filling our lives.
Thanks be to God
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An interesting note about scripture:
According to Lee Stroble in "A Case for Christ" (*2) there are over 24,000 separate manuscripts of some portion of the New Testament from ancient times and as copied down through the centuries. This is quite astonishing when your consider other important manuscripts from ancient times. There are just 650 manuscripts of Homer's "Iliad", only one manuscript of "Annals of Imperial Rome" written by Tacitus about 116 AD, and nine manuscripts from Josephus' "The Jewish Wars", written in the first century. According to the foremost scholars of these manuscripts, the manuscripts of the New Testament are concurrent in meaning 99.5 percent of the time.
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Lonnie Coggins
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REFERENCES
*1 references herein to the Gospel of Luke provided by:
Green T, "A Study of Prayer in the Gospel of Luke", http://www.biblicaltheology.com/Research/GreenTM01.pdf,
tmattgreen@gmail.com
*2 Strobel L, "The Case for Christ", Zondervan, 1998
Chapter 3, sections: "A Mountain of Manuscripts", "The Wealth of Evidence"
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