Learn
of your Moments of Convergence with the One Reality. Awaken to your
Opportunities of Conversion in exchanging the potentials into actuality.
Arise and Venture forth to Accelerate and Ascend into your Mastery of
Transfiguration in your Human Concentration, Divine Cooperation, and
Adjuster Life Collaboration.
Prayer
is entirely a personal and spontaneous expression of the attitude of
the soul toward the spirit; prayer should be the communion of sonship
and the expression of fellowship. Prayer, when indited by the spirit,
leads to co-operative spiritual progress. The ideal prayer is a form of
spiritual communion which leads to intelligent worship. True praying is
the sincere attitude of reaching heavenward for the attainment of your
ideals.
Prayer
is the breath of the soul and should lead you to be persistent in your
attempt to ascertain the Father’s will. If any one of you has a
neighbor, and you go to him at midnight and say: ‘Friend, lend me three
loaves, for a friend of mine on a journey has come to see me, and I have
nothing to set before him’; and if your neighbor answers, ‘Trouble me
not, for the door is now shut and the children and I are in bed;
therefore I cannot rise and give you bread,’ you will persist,
explaining that your friend hungers, and that you have no food to offer
him. I say to you, though your neighbor will not rise and give you bread
because he is your friend, yet because of your importunity he will get
up and give you as many loaves as you need.
If,
then, persistence will win favors even from mortal man, how much more
will your persistence in the spirit win the bread of life for you from
the willing hands of the Father in heaven. Your persistence, however, is
not to win favor with God but to change your earth attitude and to
enlarge your soul’s capacity for spirit receptivity.
But
when you pray, you exercise so little faith. Genuine faith will remove
mountains of material difficulty which may chance to lie in the path of
soul expansion and spiritual progress.
Again I say to you: Ask and it shall be given you; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you.
For every one who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks the door of salvation will be opened.
I am concerned only with your personal and purely religious problems. I am the representative of the Father to the individual,
not to the group. If you are in personal difficulty in your relations
with God, come to me, and I will hear you and counsel you in the
solution of your problem.
But
when you enter upon the co-ordination of divergent human
interpretations of religious questions and upon the socialization of
religion, you are destined to solve all such problems by your own
decisions.
Albeit,
I am ever sympathetic and always interested, and when you arrive at
your conclusions touching these matters of nonspiritual import, provided
you are all agreed, then I pledge in advance my full approval and
hearty co-operation.
The Believer’s Prayer
But
the apostles were not yet satisfied; they desired Jesus to give them a
model prayer which they could teach the new disciples. After listening
to this discourse on prayer, James Zebedee said: “Very good, Master, but
we do not desire a form of prayer for ourselves so much as for the
newer believers who so frequently beseech us, ‘Teach us how acceptably
to pray to the Father in heaven.’”
When
James had finished speaking, Jesus said: “If, then, you still desire
such a prayer, I would present the one which I taught my brothers and
sisters in Nazareth”:
Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come; your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our bread for tomorrow;
Refresh our souls with the water of life.
And forgive us every one our debts
As we also have forgiven our debtors.
Save us in temptation, deliver us from evil,
And increasingly make us perfect like yourself.
I continue to teach that effective prayer must be:
1. Unselfish — not alone for oneself.
2. Believing — according to faith.
3. Sincere — honest of heart.
4. Intelligent — according to light.
5. Trustful — in submission to the Father’s all-wise will.
The
earnest and longing repetition of any petition, when such a prayer is
the sincere expression of a child of God and is uttered in faith, no
matter how ill-advised or impossible of direct answer, never fails to
expand the soul’s capacity for spiritual receptivity.
In all praying, remember that sonship is a gift. No child has aught to do with earning
the status of son or daughter. The earth child comes into being by the
will of its parents. Even so, the child of God comes into grace and the
new life of the spirit by the will of the Father in heaven. Therefore
must the kingdom of heaven — divine sonship — be received
as by a little child. You earn righteousness — progressive character
development — but you receive sonship by grace and through faith.
Prayer
and its associated worship is a technique of detachment from the daily
routine of life, from the monotonous grind of material existence. It is
an avenue of approach to spiritualized self-realization and
individuality of intellectual and religious attainment.
Prayer
is an antidote for harmful introspection. At least, prayer as the
Master taught it is such a beneficent ministry to the soul. Jesus
consistently employed the beneficial influence of praying for one’s
fellows. The Master usually prayed in the plural, not in the singular.
Only in the great crises of his earth life did Jesus ever pray for
himself.
Prayer
is the breath of the spirit life in the midst of the material
civilization of the races of mankind. Worship is salvation for the
pleasure-seeking generations of mortals.
As
prayer may be likened to recharging the spiritual batteries of the
soul, so worship may be compared to the act of tuning in the soul to
catch the universe broadcasts of the infinite spirit of the Universal
Father.
Prayer
is the sincere and longing look of the child to its spirit Father; it
is a psychologic process of exchanging the human will for the divine
will. Prayer is a part of the divine plan for making over that which is
into that which ought to be.
One
of the reasons why Peter, James, and John, who so often accompanied
Jesus on his long night vigils, never heard Jesus pray, was because
their Master so rarely uttered his prayers as spoken words. Practically
all of Jesus’ praying was done in the spirit and in the heart —
silently.
Of all the apostles, Peter and James came the nearest to comprehending the Master’s teaching about prayer and worship.
Michael Of Nebadon
Urantia Revelations
Urantia Revelations
