Recently, June 12 was the culmination of 10 days of prayer in the city starting on June 2. Christians all over Plymouth were praying during those 10 days, leading up to June 12 which was the date of 'the Global Day of Prayer', where Christians around the world all joined in prayer for their families, their communities, their leaders and their nations.
So why do Christians pray? It takes time, it takes effort to stop what we're doing and spend time in prayer, and heaven knows our busy lives nowadays have plenty of other things that shout for our attention.
I firmly believe in the power of prayer to change things for the better. If you spend time listening to your Christian friends, or if you're a praying Christian yourself, you will be aware of how prayer has made a positive difference in lives – it does not always solve every problem, by any means. Sometimes it does. Yet strength, patience, growth, maturing and hope seem to increase through prayer, sustaining us in difficult times.
Prayer is also key to the Christian life on a personal, one to one level with God. The Bible records that Jesus himself, the Son of God, often drew aside on his own to pray to his Father in Heaven, even at times when whole towns were turning out to see him and to ask for the miraculous help they had heard he had been bringing to others. At those most demanding times, he sometimes stepped back from it all and went to spend time with his Father. Reading the bible, it seems Jesus came out of those times with a strength of faith, love and compassion that empowered him to keep meeting the needs of many, many people. He also prayed when things were dark, when all others had left him, and when the choice to follow his Father meant his certain, agonising death, and worse. He found incredible strength from his relationship with his Father in those times, which he could not have found elsewhere.
That's the beauty of personal prayer – it can be deeply intimate between you and God, where you can talk about things you cannot really talk to others about. Sometimes even those closest to you will not be able to 'hear your heart' when you try to communicate things that mean so much to you. That could be because they just cannot share your experience, or you cannot seem to get the words to say what you mean. But God understands, because he sees your heart. You don't need to explain yourself, you just need to be yourself. He knows, he understands, he's listening, and he acts.
For some reason, God acts on our prayers. It's puzzled many people over the years, 'how come God needs us to pray before he does some things?' I honestly don't know, but the evidence of many people's lives shows that he does. I do know he loves to hear our voice and to meet with us. Maybe, in part, that's why he asks us to pray, so we that we can grow a relationship with him.
Prayer can also benefit whole nations, and this is something that has been seen in our own country's history in times of trouble. During the second world war King George VI called the nation to prayer during desperate times, when to the world who looked on it seemed the defeat of Britain by the Nazi forces was imminent. History itself bears witness to the effectiveness of the prayers of a nation turning to God for help.
Prayer builds love in our hearts in a relationship with God, and often it leads to action, either us being given direction and strength to do something, or God acting in response to our prayers. The recent Faith Audit shows just how much action goes on from Christian groups on behalf of their communities. So much of this is undergirded by prayer, and all of us here at Cross Rhythms 96.3FM pray that we may see a rise in prayer from Christians all over this city of ours who care about its future and its people.
