Praying Believer Or ‘Prayer Contractor’

Prayer contractor is a term we use locally to describe people who ‘pray’ with or without a burden but certainly with a personal agenda. Their personal gain is always the reason they call out to God and the more it profits them, especially financially, the more willing they are to keep ‘praying’ and this, notwithstanding whether or not such persons are born again believers. Sometimes the god they call out to in their ‘prayer time’ is not the God we know and accept into our lives. Much as we ought to love prayer because it is spending time with God and no believer will successfully go through their journey on earth without a solid prayer life, I realize that our God’s desire more than anything else is for us to be like Him. All the prayer is meant to help us be like Him and live successfully on earth in His image. I would love to have a wonderful prayer life as we all should, because true communion with God gives God pleasure and makes us behold Him so that as we behold His glory we are then conformed to His image. It is sad however to observe that though we seem to pray a lot around where I live, we are not becoming more like Him. We pray so much yet we are some of the most wicked, lawless, selfish and self-centered, undisciplined people. We resist transformation and remain unchanging meanwhile only God should be unchanging. Indeed, the more we pray, the worse we seem to get; there must really be a problem. Could it be that we ourselves have, unknown, to us become ‘prayer contractors ’instead of praying believers?

 

Luke 18: 1 “One day, Jesus told his disciples a story to show that they should always pray.”

Ephesians 6: 18 “Pray in the Spirit at all times and on every occasion.”

Most people pray, and as we should. It is God’s desire that we pray always. So prayer is good but best from the ‘right life’. Indeed, prayer by itself does nothing except it moves God what needs to be done if our prayer is a request. I have found that a lot of people who worship gods that have ears and can’t hear, mouth and can’t speak and also can’t see, pray much harder than we who claim to worship The Most High God. Like the prophets of bale in the time of Elijah who prayed so hard they cut themselves so badly until they bled and yet elicited no response from their god, many unbelievers pray really hard. The sad thing though is that a lot of us are building our understanding of prayer on what these unbelievers do as they pray to a god who cannot speak or hear or even see though we lie to ourselves that we are talking to The Most High God. Unless our prayer is one of sincere repentance, we cannot live in sin and claim to pray to the Most High God who already says that the sinner’s prayer is an abomination to Him. The fact that one claims to be born again and prays always will not change that. The confession that one is a born again believer by itself makes no difference to God who says He will save anyone who sincerely calls on His name. The point is our lives must line up with the confession of lips for our prayer to be meaningful.

Acts of the Apostles 10: 35 “In every nation he accepts those who fear him and do what is right.”

Proverbs 15: 8 “The Lord detests the sacrifice of the wicked, but he delights in the prayers of the upright.”

It would appear that God is not looking to having people commune with Him because of a name they call themselves but because of what they do which is tied to their fear of Him.  A prayer less believer is almost useless because He doesn’t commune with His God and as such may be unable to consistently receive instructions from Him but what is worse is to pretend like one is communing with God when they are not. Any believer who remains carnal, or lacking in joy or always complaining or continuously remains backslidden and such like, and yet seems to pray a lot, is not really praying. No one who enters that presence remains the same. If anyone who prays consistently finds that they are not becoming more like God or they still are always sad and so on, then it is most likely time for self-examination. No one needs to tell you. God is hungry for communion with believers and not just anyone. This does not suggest that true believers don’t do wrong but they do not continue in wrong doing. They repent, ask for mercy and then turn away from the wrongdoing.  A lot of prayer and even shaking of the head whilst ‘praying’ don’t do anything for us except and until God moves. The points we must always bear in mind are – did I enter His manifest presence and did all my communing impact God? If we enter into His very presence, then we would definitely be conformed to His image because the change cannot be controlled if one beholds His glory. Also, if we truly commune with God as we would like people to believe we do then we would also have better understanding of the scriptures and receive grace to become children of God. The grace we receive is the empowering to do according to His word that is revealed.

Deuteronomy 29: 29 “The Lord our God has secrets known to no one. We are not accountable for them, but we and our children are accountable forever for all that he has revealed to us, so that we may obey all the terms of these instructions.”