Devote yourselves to prayer

"Devote yourselves to prayer with an alert mind and a thankful heart." - Col. 4:2 NLT

I am convinced that God is calling many of us to once again to devote ourselves to prayer, so that we can stay focused on the advancement of His kingdom and enjoy His presence. Jesus calls his children sheep because we tend to be led astray easily and sometimes forget the importance of prayer. We need to pray often to be able to survive the onslaught from hell that comes aganist us. Jesus is raising up a counter-cultural Church, disciples of Christ that refuse to allow our materialistic western culture dictate to us how we should live our lives. Prayer, meditation, and radical obedience are characteristic of a people seeking God's presence. Our hearts can only be transformed as we live in communion with God and his word - our joy comes from his presence. This is one of my favorite quotes on communion with God - George Muller

"I saw more clearly than ever that the first great primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord . . . not how much I might serve the Lord, . . . but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers . . . and yet, not being happy in the Lord, and not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit. Before this time my practice had been . . . to give myself to prayer after having dressed myself in the morning. Now, I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God, and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that thus, by means of the Word of God, whilst meditating on it, my heart might be brought into experimental communion with the Lord." - George Muller