Prayer is Spiritual Breath

Prayer is Spiritual Breath. When a tiger attacks a victim the first objective is to slit the throat of his victim with his sharp claw. When the victim is no longer able to breathe, he is finished. Satan, the enemy of our souls, seeks above all to cut off our spiritual breathing because he knows that when this is accomplished we die of our own accord.

As you seek to develop greater prayer effectiveness be alert to the fact that the devil will do everything in his power to discourage you and divert your attention to other things.

He doesn't mind how many committees you sit on, how many sermons you preach, how much evangelistic literature you pass out, how many meetings you attend, providing you spend little or no time in prayer.

So, before we go deeper into the subject, send up a little telegramatic prayer right now, asking God to help you see that you are beginning something which will make all the difference between weakness and strength, between defeat and victory.

You will find that the more you pray the more you grow in spiritual things because Prayer is Spiritual Breath. Prayer tones up the whole life. You can never be better in life than you are faithful in prayer. If prayer lags, life sags.

If you know how to pray you know how to live, if not then you merely exist. When you pray you are like an electric bulb in the socket, full of life and power. When you don't pray, you are like that bulb out of the socket - lifeless.

A lady once said to me, 'You don't say anything very original, but you seem to push God's message right into my heart.' I've cherished that as a pure compliment. Actually, a Christian doesn't really originate anything; he transmits.

One Old Testament writer said 'There is nothing new under the sun.' Every important principle of living has been enunciated before; we simply repeat in new forms what has already been uttered and expressed in days gone by.

God is the origin of all we are and all we have; we simply pass on what has been passed on to us. Once we learn the art of receptivity, that is opening ourselves to God in prayer, we have learned one of the greatest lessons of life.

Luke tells us that one day Jesus withdrew into the wilderness to pray, and adds 'the power of the Lord was present to heal.' (Luke 5.16-17).

These two things follow as cause and effect - prayer and power. They have been described by someone as 'the Siamese twins of the spiritual life.

We can do more than we think and accomplish things beyond our abilities when we pray. Many Christians think of themselves as reservoirs with a fixed capacity, but if we are men and women who give ourselves to prayer because Prayer is Spiritual Breath,  then we are more than reservoirs - we are rivers. We are attached to infinite resources and therefore we have boundless possibilities.

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