Some months back I was blessed in sharing a short devotional on prayer for a very special Momma and her sweet baby girl. The Lord impressed on me the importance of women being devoted to prayer. This message has been coming up for me and the women in my life again recently so I thought I would share some of what the Lord showed me then and what He is showing me now.
Whether you’re welcoming a new baby, serving in your community or walking with a loved one through sickness this season I pray this message be an encouragement to you. I pray God will give you a deeper understanding of the importance of prayer and that you will be filled afresh with a desire to be in prayer. The holidays have a way of magnifying the things around us. Christmas has a way of magnifying the greatest joys of our lives or the deepest losses. Let us choose then to magnify Christ this Christmas season, let us choose to celebrate the greatest gift ever given to us, our Savior. Being in prayer is like putting a magnifying glass on your relationship with Jesus.
Why is prayer in motherhood important?
As women and Mother’s in our community we are uniquely positioned to pray for our children, our leaders, our husbands, friends and for the church. Women interact on average with far more people groups than the men in our communities. Women who are faithful in the mundane everyday moments are more likely to have homes where prayer and worship are modeled on an everyday basis. In my own life I have seen this, our home visibly begins to fall apart when our/my prayer life begins to fall apart. This last year I have been praying diligently for my son, Jackson. Jackson has a diagnosis of Autism, this particular diagnosis comes with a certain reality that we have to learn to wisely manage and maneuver with during these formative and foundational years of his life, Jackson will be turning 5 this month. In my own strength I could not handle the sleepless nights, the isolation, the rigid routines and structure he needs or the series of doctors and therapists who want to tell me the best way to raise my son.
OH, BUT THE GOODNESS OF GOD!
In His strength I have found all of these and so much more.
Matthew 21:22, “And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing you will receive.” John 14:13-14, “And whatever you ask in my name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in my name I will do it.”
The Lord has answered many specific prayers for Jackson this year, that he would:
Have a desire for relationships and be able to tolerate being close to others. Jackson greets everyone from the coffee shop in our Church every Sunday morning. Jackson is the first to notice if someone is upset and will guide me by the hand to go pray for them. And although it is a little scary at this age, he will graciously give out hugs to any and all!
That Jackson would begin to have functional language and words. A year and a half ago Jackson could only sign three words and would communicate by names of sea animals and vegetable categories. A year ago he said, “I love you” for the first time. And in these last 6 months he has began to use phrases and can express when he feels hungry or thirsty, if he wants to do an activity, and he can make some choices without becoming overwhelmed to the point of a meltdown.
These are all things I have real fears over that I continue to choose to take to the Lord in prayer. And this is only a tiny amount of all the things I am weak in that I NEED GOD’S STRENGTH to survive and thrive in.
Another praying mother…
Most of us remember Hannah of the Bible, Samuel’s mother. Hannah poured her out soul to the Lord for year’s pleading for a son and eventually God granted her prayer requests with her son Samuel, who Hannah dedicated to the Lord. Samuel grew in wisdom, became a great prophet and judge, and led the Israelites to victory over the mighty Philistines.
Throughout scripture we are told that God desires, invites, and hears our prayers. What a gift He has given us! The psalmist writes, “As for me, I call to God and the Lord saves me. Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and He hears my voice.” (Psalm 55:16-17)
Despite knowing that God invites our prayers, we often struggle with how to pray, what to pray, and what to expect from our prayer lives. In the west, we are especially a results driven culture and we tend to have a utilitarian outlook on prayer. We pray to God to ask for HIS help with our problems. Of course asking for God’s help and provision is one important part of prayer, but mostly a pragmatic, problem solving approach to prayer misses the deeper and beautiful truth about prayer:
We are meant to have a relational outlook on prayer. Not a practical one, as we pray we can and should view God as a loving Father who cares deeply for us. He wants to hear about our deepest pains AND our grandest hopes. He wants to know the ways we need HIS help.
He also wants you to LISTEN for HIS voice. Prayer is not mainly about solving problems; it is about experiencing our relationship with God. Though prayer is relational and thus not formative, we do need to know something about how prayer works.
In Matthew 6 we find the famous Lord’s Prayer and some introductory comments Jesus made about it. In this text we discover a basic guide for how to pray, as well as encouragement and warning about our attitude towards prayer.
Matthew 6:1; 5-8 – HOW WE SHOULD THINK ABOUT PRAYER
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep babbling on like the pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
This tells us and the audience of the danger in making our prayers a performance.
Matthew 6:9 -13- A GUIDE FOR PRAYER
“This, then, is how you should pray:
“This then is how you should pray”. These are the introductory words to the Lord’s Prayer and before we get into the prayer itself, it is important to notice a key word in this opening phrase, “HOW”.
Jesus says that what he is about to tell us is an example for us. It is a guide to the manner in which we ought to pray. It is a script. He did not say, “this then is WHAT you should pray”. We should think of the Lord’s Prayer as a rough outline or template that we can go through when we pray. It helps us to make sure our priorities are in order and that our heart is in the right place.
Let us continue now with the prayer itself and not the order of thoughts.
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name (recognizes who HE is – the person / Adore Him because of who He is and give Him praise)
your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (seek to do His will, His word is the path to finding His will and your purpose)
Give us today our daily bread. (ask God to meet you even in the mundane tasks, what you need to accomplish your spiritual duties, this is an example of PETITION)
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. (ask God to forgive your debts or failures in obedience due Him, this is an example of PARDON)
And lead us not into temptation, bur deliver us from the evil one.” (seek a way to escape the evil of temptation, an example of PROTECTION, this is not asking for a removal of trials but of judgment when you are overcome by trials)
A number of Biblical commentators and theologians over the centuries have recommended praying the Lord’s Prayer line by line. And then elaborating on the specifics from your own life. For example you could pray something like this, “Give us today our daily bread. Lord Jesus you know what I need. Please help me to trust in your provision and be thankful for all the things you have already given me.”
WHAT ABOUT PRAYER LIFE OVER THE LONG HAUL
What about our prayer life over the long haul, over time? We can once again find clues about this in something else Jesus said in the parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-6).
Luke 18;1, “Then Jesus told His disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.”
The final phrase of verse 1 “always pray and do not give up”, doesn’t mean to “always pray and keep on praying” which would be one basic idea stated two ways. The phrase conveys two separate, related ideas. The “not give up” part is a translation of a greek word that has to do with being discouraged or loosing heart. So we might translate that last phrase as “always pray and do no loose heart or become discouraged”. Jesus is telling that persistence in prayer and avoiding discouragement are linked. Then Jesus tells the parable of the persistent widow.
Luke 18:2-5, “
2 He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. 3 And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
4 “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
Jesus was saying that even if an unjust judge hears the pleas of the widow and responds, how much more will God, who is a just judge and loves His people, respond to the cries of His church?
Jesus finished with a rhetorical question: When the Son of Man (Jesus) returns will He find faith on earth? This question relates directly to prayer; which is what the parable of the persistent widow is about. Will Jesus find people who are still believing in Him, praying and trusting in Him despite life’s challenges?
The point is this: Our endurance in prayer – or lack thereof – tells us something about whether we really trust in God. When we continue praying over and over it is a testament to the fact that we keep believing God is real, that He is there, that He is listening and that He cares. It is not about that perfect words, even if our prayers are clumsy and intermittent, the very fact that we keep praying is an expression of our trust in God. Our prayers are real conversations with our Heavenly Father.
We should always pray and not loose heart, “I love the Lord for he hear my voice; He heard my cry for mercy. Because He turned His ear to me, I will call on Him as long as I live.” (Psalm 116:1-2)
In closing, if you are still with me, I would like to offer a few encouraging examples of faithful women who changes history through having a faithful prayer life:
Susanna Wesley raised her sons (John one of the greatest evangelists of the 1700s speaking to crowds of more than 20,000) and (Charles who wrote 9,000 hymns still sung today) in a home dedicated to the word of God and prayer. In the midst of raising 10 children, she would spend two hours a day in personal prayer. On the days she could not find a place of solitude she would lift her apron over her head to be alone with God.
George Washington was inwon for his humility, perseverance, and dignity. His mother Mary raised him and his siblings as a single mother after her husband died when George was 10. It is recorded that she went to a nearby rock outside of her house to pray continually. George wrote letters to his mother while on the battlefield of the Revolutionary War, that he escaped death when bullets went through his coat and horses were shot out from under him. Miracle after miracle happened to George and he honored his praying mother with these words, “all that I am I owe to my mother”.
Billy Graham has led nearly 3 million people to freedom in Christ and has preached the gospel to more than 80 million people during his lifetime. He has said of all the people he has ever known, his mother, Morrow, had the greatest influence on his life. She would gather the family together to listen to the Bible and to pray together. She and his dad would pray for Billy at 10 each morning.
Every christian mother contending, interceding and praying for her children had the potential to change the course of history for God’s glory. Let us rise up and be strong in the Lord and in the power of His Might as we pray to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ever think or imagine.
So how should we pray?
Honestly
Consistently
With the main goal being a deeper relationship with God – to experience the joy of unhindered access to God and a relationship with Him.
When the Son of Man returns, will you be found in Faith?
The Meek Momma 
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