Can You Pray Without Ceasing?

Can You Pray Without Ceasing?

1 Thessalonians 5:17

Pray without ceasing

   I have been fortunate in that I am in love with a special person.  I remember the first few months dating her.  We were only together a couple of hours a day, but she was in my thoughts every waking hour.  It was impossible to be with her every moment of every day, but she was still with me in my mind and in my heart every moment of every day.   I found my thoughts drifting even while at work, wondering what she was doing at that moment.  I thought up things I could do or say to please her.  When something good happened, I wished she was there to share it with me.  And when we were together and something good happened, it was so much better because she was there.

   If you have been this lucky in your life, try to think back to when you were courting and see if this was true for you.  That special person was all you wanted and all you desired.  Everything else that happened in your life was just a distraction, keeping you from what you really wanted – to be together with that special person.

   Now do you have a better understanding of what Paul was getting at in this passage?  We cannot actively pray every second of every day any more than we could have been with that person every moment.  But it is possible to love Jesus Christ so much that we carry Him in our thoughts and our hearts wherever we go, just as our thoughts were on that special person when we were apart.  In this verse Paul is talking about prayer as an attitude.  We love Jesus and so our thoughts drift to Him even when we’re doing something else.

   Much like my love started out like a flame that grew and warmed even more over the years, so our love for Jesus should grow and become more intense over the years.  The danger is that people let their love grow cold and become indifferent which threatens their relationship.  This can happen in our relationship with Jesus as well.  We can start out on fire in love with Christ but then other cares get between us and our fervor fades and we stop praying and stop reading our Bibles. 

   Just as we need to work on our relationship with our special person, we need to work on our relationship with Jesus.  We need to place Jesus in the center of our lives and our thoughts and we will find ourselves living with this constant attitude of prayer.  And as we fall more in love with Jesus, the joy we gain will eclipse anything we have ever known before. 

Stephen Cram                                                                    April 28, 2013                          

Colossians 2:8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, following the tradition of men according to the rudiments of the world, and not in accordance with Christ.