Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Speak Life Today Podcast. I’m your host Felton Thompkins, Gospel Minister and Ambassador for Jesus Christ our Lord. In this episode of the Speak Life Today Podcast, we will be focusing on the topic of prayer.
And to be more specific we will be focusing on kind of attitudes that can only be and must be developed through the power of the Holy Spirit. For a few weeks now God the Holy Spirit has been reminding of the importance of prayer in my own life as well as the importance of prayer in the lives of my co-laborers in the faith.
Out of curiosity, I Googled the word “prayer” to see how many times it’s used in a search term and it came back with about 287,000,000 results. I also became curious to know just how many times prayer is mentioned in the bible. The most intelligent answer that I can give is that according to one source that I found, there are about 650 different prayers in the Bible but it is very difficult to get an exact number of how many times that the word “prayer” is referenced or mentioned in the Bible as every version of the Holy Scriptures is worded slightly differently. and that number varies depending on the version of the Bible you are reading. But in general, “prayer” seems to be referenced over 600 times. The actual number of times it is mentioned by name may be much lower due to the number of times that certain figures in the Bible (King David in Psalms, for example) simply perform the act of prayer without it being directly talked about. All I can tell you is that it is mentioned a whole lot, and in a lot of different ways. But here’s another statistic. According to Christian Bible Reference.org, the word “pray” is used in the KJV 245 times in the Old Testament and 68 times in the New Testament so if you are the type that likes numbers that would be a good site to navigate.
Now back to focusing on “prayer”. I believe deep down in our souls we all know the importance of prayer. And yet it seems to be the furthest thing from our minds until trouble comes. And for a lot of us, it’s the hardest thing to get around to doing. Awhile ago the Holy Spirit calmly brought to my attention that in order, for us to have better prayer lives that we would first need to change our attitudes about prayer.
Have you ever heard someone say…Well, all we can do is pray, Or maybe you’ve heard this one, all I can do is pray…? I’ve said it myself. You can hear attitude in that statement and it’s usually an attitude of the last result, an attitude of hopelessness, an attitude that doesn’t know the significance or the magnitude of effectual fervent prayer. As the Bible teaches us that “the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man, or woman, will avail much.  We must develop an attitude that prayer is the most important thing that we can do for our relationship with God, for ourselves and for others.
Beloved, listen, I’m not trying to beat you down or make you feel bad about your prayer life or the lack thereof. But what I want to do is impart some desire in you and myself to focus on having a better attitude towards prayer and thus having a better, deeper, more passionate and fulfilling relationship with our Lord Jesus.
So, what kind of attitude should we have when it comes to prayer? I’m glad you asked. Now, let’s see what the Word of God have to tell us about prayer and our attitude or mindset that we should have when it comes to prayer.
But let me take a moment before we get started and speak a word of encouragement to those of you that may be new believers and are just babes in Christ, as t