Up until very recently, I had never even heard of such a thing as living a life of prayer. I've learned of late what it means to be a priest before God and the importance of the man's role as the spiritual head of his house, and how he is the family's priest before God.
Even so, I've still been struggling to grasp the concept of a life of prayer. My wife and I are becoming more and more involved in our church's prayer house and have sought to make prayer a daily priority, but I've also learned that once a day for ten or twenty minutes is just not enough. When your life is marked by a lifestyle of prayer, you are constantly spending time before the altar of the Lord and ministering to Him through praise, worship and prayer. When you decide to dedicate any extended time in your day to being before the Lord, it can be easy to get distracted, but I've found that if you just press in and keep your focus on God, you'll be surprised by what happens. I've always been the kind of person who, when praying, tends to go over their list of 'prayer requests' that have come from friends and family, but prayer can be so much more than simply going to God with what you think you need to bring. Often if you allow your heart to be open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, you will find that what you're praying is not so much what you think you need to pray for, but what God would have you pray for. It's in this that I begin to see God's will unfold in many areas, even if it has nothing to do with me. I've noticed that if I just listen to where the Spirit is pulling my heart, I begin to pray about things that were far from the forefront of my needs or the needs of others.
Something else that can lead your life in the direction of persistent prayer though, is knowing in advance that God has laid something on your heart and that you need to continue to press into Him with this issue. For myself, a recent example of this has been the topic of the new health care reform bill. Sure, it seems fair enough on the surface, but when you look deeper into it and what we're not hearing about as much on the news, you'll see that in this bill, abortions will become readily available to those who seek it. Even worse, the bill will do away with the Conscience Clause, which states that any doctor who has a moral opposition to abortion does not have to perform it. If the bill goes into legislation as it stands, many doctors will be federally mandated to perform abortions, as will most hospitals. Abortion clinics are scarce in our nation right now, but this reform would make that much less so, as most hospitals would have to offer abortions. When I learned about all of this, I felt the Holy Spirit immediately speaking to my heart, and I knew that this was something that I needed to be going before the Lord with until I knew the outcome of this legislation, and even after the fact.
A life of prayer isn't nearly as hard as we can make it out to be. Prayer can be very comforting, even though we don't know the outcome of the things we bring to God. The fact of the matter is that when Christ died, He did away with the need for a high priest. No longer do we need to wait for that one day of the year when someone else can enter the Holy of Holies for us, for we are now allowed intimate access to God Himself. This is a calling that we all have on our lives, and while that may seem daunting at first, it's really quite a blessing.
