May is an especially beautiful time of year, the grass is green, the trees are budding and leafing out, the birds are singing, in fact all of nature is proclaiming the glories of it’s Creator. I believe that we all should do the very same thing. It is time that in everything we do we give honor and praise to God. One way we can do this is to begin each day thanking Him for the gift of another day and praising Him for His goodness to us. It is so important for us to go before God in prayer not just in the morning but also throughout the day. We are reminded in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to simply ‘pray continually.’ All too often we pray only as a last resort instead of turning to God first. Isaac Bashevis Singer once confessed, “I only pray when I’m in trouble … but I’m in trouble all the time, and so I pray all the time.” W. Graham Scroggie shared just how often we should pray, he once said, “Pray when you feel like it, pray when you don’t feel like it, pray until you do feel like it.”
Prayer is vital to our relationship with Christ. There are so many times to pray, so many things to pray for as well as many methods of prayer. One day there were three ministers talking about prayer in general and the appropriate and effective positions for prayer. As they were talking, a telephone repairman was working on the phone system in the background. One minister shared that he felt the key was all in the hands. He always held his hand together and pointed them upward as a form of symbolic worship. The second suggested that real prayer was conducted on your knees. The third suggested that they both had it wrong – the only position worth its salt was to pray while stretched out flat on your face. By this time the telephone repairman couldn’t stay out of the conversation any longer. He interjected, “I found that the most powerful prayer I ever made was while I was dangling upside down by my heels from a power pole, suspended forty feet above the ground.” It doesn’t matter how you pray, when you pray, or how long you pray, the most important thing is that you come to your Heavenly Father and talk with Him one on one.
May is an excellent month to focus on Prayer. May is the month that we recognize our National Day of Prayer. On the first Thursday in May, which this year is May 6th our Nation recognizes the importance of prayer as well as the power it holds for our country. I am asking you to stand together with many others this year as we affirm our belief in prayer and ask God to forgive our Nation for turning from His ways as well as ask Him to bless us in the days and years to come. You will have an opportunity to do just this in a National Day of Prayer, prayer rally held right here in Stockton, Missouri. The Ministerial Alliance is hosting a prayer rally at 12:00 noon on Thursday, May 6th to be held at the grandstand in the City Park. This will be a brief time when we can come together as a community and pray not only for our Nation but for our leaders, our community, our children and our churches as well. I want to encourage you to take a few minutes and stand with us as we pray thanking God for His many blessings and asking Him to continue to bless our community, our country and one another.
Because We're His,
Pastor Michael Tunnell
[email protected]