Is Prayer Necessary

Is Prayer Necessary?

Do you think that prayer is necessary? That depends on what you call prayer. Most people are asking God for something, more money, a better job, a loving companion. Some beg for forgiveness for a sin (that they have no intention of giving up. They just don’t want to get caught.) Most popular is the bargaining prayer, “God, if you will please see that I get $10,000 by the end of the month, I promise that I will be in church every Sunday for the rest of the year and I will even put $20.00 each time in the collection plate! How could God pass up an offer like that?

You can see the folly in the examples above, but aren’t your prayers just as ridiculous? Have you listened to yourself pray lately? Are you holding a conversation with God? Probably you are doing all of the talking. When you ask for a favor, don’t you also give instructions about where and when it should occur? When you are sick you pray for healing and wonder why you don’t get better. Two people can make the same prayer, and one is healed, the other may die. You think that God plays favorites. When you get worse you don’t understand why. Didn’t you have enough faith? Are you being punished for a sin that you aren’t aware of? In this vale of tears you have been programmed to expect to suffer. Maybe it is God’s will to make you a better person? The simple answer is You don’t know the God you are praying to.

God created man only after every condition had been created for his needs, requirements and comfort had been met. Nothing to harm, abuse, injure, trouble, or interfere with his complete health and happiness. Jesus named God our wealthy and generous Father who is ready, willing and able to give us our hearts desire. God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Good that God created in the beginning is still in force today. Any suffering we experience today is our ignorance that God’s good is for His children to enjoy.

Taking our problems to God is our privilege. We abuse this privilege by thinking of God as having human emotions. We get mad, spiteful, jealous, and vindictive. We look at the pain, disease, poverty, disasters and wars all around us and it proves, to our way of thinking, that God only intervenes in human affairs when the person asking for help has found favor with God. No one can find favor with God by his good works alone because God has no favorites. He loves everyone unconditionally. Only by knowing God intimately can God’s bounty be fully realized. To know, without a shadow of a doubt, that God sends only good to His children brings our good into our lives. Everything that troubles man comes from our misunderstanding of the nature, the Spirit, the Power, the Unconditional Love that God surrounds us with.

To ask God for anything is asking God to be God. God does not need to be reminded of His love for us. God has already supplied us with more then we can ever use.

Our prayers should always be a ‘Thank You’ for all the good in our life, an expectation of better things to come, and a clearer understanding of the unlimited power of the spirit that created, protects, and loves us.

Prayer is necessary, not to ask for what we lack, only to remind us of what we have: Everything! Our good will not come to us from heaven above, it will be revealed to us right where we are, because that is where God is.

625 words Loretta Ellen Edwards