May 1

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…praying always with all prayer… Ephesians 6:18

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🔊 Paul here sums up a great subject in one sweeping phrase: “all prayer”.  The phrase indicates that there is a whole discipline to be covered, with many branches.  We often think of prayer as a narrow thing, like multiplication tables in relation to mathematics.  As essential as these tables may be, no mathematician would ever accept that they are the only area to be mastered when studying the subject of mathematics.  In the same way, our little quiet times may be a 10-minute ritual that has become a repeated habit.  Prayer is an ocean, and often we have mastered only the most elementary steps.  Prayer ranges from deepest quiet in awed silence, to mighty praises that shake and fill our beings with the greatness of God.  It ranges from joy unspeakable, to inexpressible sorrow and floods of tears over the lost states of humanity.  The range of prayer is as wide as God, and we were made for communion with God.  There is something God-shaped about us, and that inner need and impulse can be filled by nothing other than the activity of praying.  We are made for God – that is the way it is.  Prayer is the sharing of our lives with God, and God sharing His life with us.  This is our greatest adventure – to let God in at all times.  Pray, then, always with all prayer.