Prayer

An excerpt from Mark - Preaching the Word Commentary by R. Kent Hughes:

If I have any sense of where the Christian culture is today, I would say our Number One sin is not sensuality or materialism (though they are close behind) but prayerlessness. So often when busy, caring Christians get together and “let their hair down,” they talk about the trouble with their prayer lives. Each of us needs to seriously consider the following applications of this matter:

No matter how busy, we should regularly be exposing our souls to God in adoring worship, that he might be glorified and his life burned into ours. If we are not doing this, we are sinning.

We should be praying for our inner life: that our character will have grace to match our profession; that we will walk our talk.

We should be praying in detail for every member of our family.

We should regularly pray for our neighbors.

We should have a list of missionaries and systematically pray for them.

We should be praying daily for our churches—going beyond generalization—naming names, programs, and needs.

Prayerlessness is the fundamental sin of the busy Christian. Because of it, much of today’s Christian work accomplishes little for the kingdom. “If we would give sight to the blind, we must ourselves be gazing into heaven.” All of us are busy. If we pause for even a tenth of a second at a traffic light turned green, the whole world honks at us. But we always manage time for the things we really want to do.