Prayer

What Happens When We Pray For Our Families By Evelyn Christenson

Children in many families today have rebelled and blatantly turned their backs on everything they have been taught in their homes.  It seems popular these days for family members to betray and accuse other members for past inadequacies, leaving confused parents and siblings bleeding in a shattered family unit that seems beyond repair.

What we are experiencing in our families today sounds frighteningly like the description of the last days in 2 Timothy.

For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossip, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; holding a form of godliness, although they have denied its power...always learning, but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. (3:2-5,7)

Is there any hope for today's families?  Your family?  Yes, there is.  And the answer is prayer.  Not just an sos prayer now and then, but an automatic calling out to God in prayer in every family need.  A lifestyle of prayer.  The answer to today's disintegrating family is a spontaneous lifestyle of prayer.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.  James 5:16

I found this book at Salvation Army and picked it up for forty cents.  It was written in 1994 and we know from listening to the news that things have not gotten any better.  Wasn't it this week a ten year boy in Ohio shot his own mother?  I mean ten?  At ten, I was still playing Barbies and neighborhood baseball down at the school ground.  So we know that today is the new normal--things will never go back; but there is Hope.  

I'm praying that God will open up this world of prayer to me; I'm an expert in the sos prayers she talked about.  But I want something different; and I have to admit I'm a little afraid.  Will God suddenly bring calamity and pain in my life if I pray for a deeper walk with Him?  I keep thinking of Job--but maybe this is the first step that is required.