Before I started the Prayer and Intercession study Stan is teaching, my prayer life left a lot to be desired. While I prayed, I didn’t pray long or often enough to even meet my own expectations. Now, as of the past week and counting today, I reached a new achievement: six out of seven days, I’ve made time for God.

And I don’t spend this prayer time doing esoteric stuff like contemplating how fast a stone sinks, either; instead, I am concentrating on improving my relationship with the L-RD and seeking His direction for my life.

This past week, in fact, I had a really different but enjoyable experience where, during the entire hour or so I was in prayer, all I could really do is concentrate on being given a glimmer of the holiness of God. Each night, I don’t know what to expect necessarily, but I’m certainly feeling better about my pursuit of closeness to the L-RD, even though I still have plenty of room to grow.

I have been hoping that I would be able to stick to my prayer commitment once I started Rabbi Stan’s prayer and intercession class, and while I’m not quite at “every day” status just yet, I’m well on my way and much improved in my prayer life so far. The benefits are showing.

The first week, we were told to concentrate on eliminating sin. I got a surprise from God on my first night following through on this; His priority of the sin in my life was different than I expected, and yet it was surprisingly easy to obey, give it up and not feel tempted to go back. Specifically, God told me to “eliminate Facebook.”

I’d been spending far too much time there in recent months and it was affecting my life in many negative ways, but until I spent time in deep prayer with God, I was taking it too lightly to see it for the sin it had become. Since giving up Facebook (and all other “social networking” sites, too, mind you), I’ve had more time for everything that’s really important to me… especially prayer. Heck, I’d even have time to earn a degree online… or at least another degree… were I of a mind to.

But for now, remaining a Messianic Rabbi In Training is more than enough to keep me occupied. And I’m finally developing a respectable-enough prayer life to feel like that title’s not just decorative.

As I look forward to Rabbi Stan’s new study on prayer and intercession, I’m reminded of a fact he shared from the bema once. According to some research study, the national average for the amount of time a pastor or rabbi spends in prayer each week is… about five minutes.

Not per day. Per week.

Now, to do prayer correctly, it takes time. At least an hour a day. Sometimes more. And that’s just to run out of words so that you can spend some time waiting for the L-RD to talk back to you and direct you toward His will, rather than your own.

So if the average pastor or rabbi spends only about five minutes a week actually praying, how “anointed” are his sermons, really? How God-directed are his messages?

Is it any wonder more sermons are “ripped from the headlines of today’s newspapers” than they are “inspired by the whole word of God?” The average pastor or rabbi probably spends more time browsing the day’s newspaper, or news Web site, than he does speaking with the L-RD! That means a believing sales guy selling commercial fitness equipment could easily spend more time in prayer than the man behind the bema.

Do I need to improve my own prayer life? You bet. By a lot. But I am relieved to know that, as much as I need to improve it, I am already a healthy margin better than “average.”

Some people think security comes from whole life insurance or a tidy nest-egg in the bank; but those who believe in ADONAI realize that real security comes from a close relationship with the L-RD.

That’s why I’m going to attend Rabbi Stan’s series on Prayer and Intercession which starts next Shabbat. I want to improve my prayer life so that I can hear God’s calling on my life clearly, distinguishing it from my own hopes and ambitions, so that I can know what God would have me do next in my life.

It is the L-RD who calls and ordains Messianic rabbis and ministers. I’m ready and willing to serve, but I have to know … really KNOW … that the L-RD is going ahead of me before I can pursue that goal. If I do it on my own, it will fail. If I wait on the L-RD, there’s no way it can.

The choice, really, is a no-brainer. But my prayer life needs to be deeper than its ever been, if I’m to hear Him clearly.

Some bloggers obsess about diet pills, but I put more of my energy into matters of the spirit. The thing that’s been on my mind lately is the power of prayer.

Prayer can work in many different ways. It can bring healing when medicine comes to the limits of its abilities. It can comfort us in a time of loss. It can help us connect to God and each other. But faith, as James advises, must be accompanied by action.

The old saying is that someone can be so heaven-minded that they are no earthly good. The other saying is that God helps those who help themselves. Neither of these sayings is a Bible verse, and they are not Biblical perspectives, however.

The truth is that the L-RD helps the helpless, not those who help themselves; also, if one is truly kingdom-minded, they would feel compelled to act in ways that make them a help to others in the world, not mindlessly contemplating the world to come.

Some folks abandon prayer because, at a critical time, they did not get something they prayer for in the way they prayed for it to be granted; that’s regarding God as a genie in a bottle, however.

The truth is, on those times when healing doesn’t come in this world or this life, and we lose someone we love, if they were in Messiah, they have simply moved on to a greater form of healing: an incorruptible body and an eternity with haShem.

Some problems can be solved with something practical, like a new HDMI wall plate; other problems are less oriented to the material world.

Take for example an anonymous friend of mine (not anonymous to me, but I’m maintaining confidentiality here). Like me, this friend is going through a time of grief. It’s amazing how, once you are grieving yourself, you begin to find out how many around you are also part of that club.

Anyway, while this person’s grief is not centered around a parent, it is centered around loss. The thing this person requested was simple: prayer. I can relate to that. Words fail to be of much use at times of great loss. All the cliches in the world, meant to comfort, are actually of little use or real comfort.

That’s why prayer is so effective; we don’t need to know what to pray about specifically to be effective or for Adonai to know how to respond. All we need to do is direct our prayers toward Adonai and ask Him to intervene, comfort and be Himself.

What could be more effective than that?

In the years ahead, I think one of the most important qualities any spiritual leader can ask for from Adonai is discernment. Primarily this is because I believe deception within all sorts of Christian, messianic, and even Jewish movements is at an all-time high.

Rabbi Stan recently said this in one of his sermons: “A person – or a demon – does not need to be with you to control you. All they need to do is teach you something that sinks in and that you conform your life around, and from that moment on, whoever taught you that is in control of your life, even if you never meet them again.”

Too much of this is increasingly evident within the Judeo-Christian movement. We have exchanged, each in different ways, the truth of God for lies, and we will not go unpunished if we do not repent of it, cast off the deception, and re-embrace truth.

Unfortuantely, I believe that in too many congregations, the lies are so embedded, so sunk-in, that most of the people who attend these churches would not know the genuine experience of fellowship with the Almighty from the counterfeit, because they’ve never experience the genuine.

Controversial thought, I know… but for most believers and even church and synagogue leaders, our spiritual discernment is on diet pills, and we’re in danger of becoming spritually anorexic. The time to pray for discernment and the repentence it will bring as Adonai cleanses his bride is now.

Today, my wife and I went to meet with a couple friends for prayer. Though we all (except my wife and I, of course) go to different Twin Cities-based churches, we all are feeling equally convicted that the church as a whole is pretty messed up, with a lot of false teaching in it that needs to be cleaned up soon.

Our outlooks and approaches are different, of course.

Tim (I’ll share first names only) is a solid balanced-view guy. He is an evangelical who is not highly partisan and can see the way Adonai uses each church movement, but is concerned about the amount of deception many in the church have embraced.

Jim (who wasn’t able to make it this time) is from a more mainline church, and his emphasis is to pray for mercy from Adonai.

My wife and I, as messianics, place a lot more concern on repentence than anything else, because we are convinced that God will not hesitate to judge those who embrace deception over the truth. Especially those in leadership positions.

It can become an ugly treadmill when church leaders embrace deception, and today I felt moved to pray for discernment on behalf of all Twin Cities church and synagogue leaders. But that’s a topic for another post…

Slowly… sometimes lethargically, I’ll admit… my prayer time is increasing.

I’m great at studying the Torah and related materials; studying is a strength for me. But that’s not enough if one wants to be a messianic rabbi. One must also have an active prayer life and be sure of God’s call on their life to such an undertaking. It’s certainly not a job one wants to take on without Adonai’s blessing on their ministry.

I’m still not where I need to be, quite honestly. If my prayer life were essential to breathing, I’d still need an IQAir or something to help out. But I am further along than I’ve been.

One thing that’s helping is now being part of a prayer squad. It’s a group that consists of two long-time friends and my wife, so far, and may grow beyond that. We’re all from different denominations, but we’re all brought together by the conviction that there’s too much false teaching out there in the church, be it Christian, Jewish or messianic. We all feel compelled that God wants to clean up the mess of all this false teaching, to prepare his bride and make her hold again.

It’s a help to be part of a group like that; it lends extra purpose to devoting more time to my prayer time with Adonai.

Health concerns are always a faith-tester and again my mother is at the top of my prayer list. It seems like crisis like these are a supercharger for one’s prayer life, although we’d be much better off if we all prayed regularly with passion and zeal, and not just in times of crisis.

The latest is that my mother, whom God has brought safely through a stroke and pacemaker surgery in the past year, is now suffering from … well, we’re not quite sure, but the options aren’t exactly great. One possibility is that it’s pnuemonia, which would be bad enough. The other possibility is that it’s a tumor, either cancerous or non-cancerous.

The next 24-48 hours will reveal a lot; I know my mother is no spring chicken, though. She’s in her 70s and has been a lifelong smoker. My greatest comfort is that, when her time does run out and she’s called home, I know that she knows Yeshua.

That said, I am still praying that Adonai will choose, once again, to extend her days. Yet only He knows what is best.

Prayer is one of the most essential pieces of tactical gear a spiritual warrior can equip. And even if you see yourself merely as cannon fodder, that’s no reason not to pray.

Case in point: just as I was making plans to get together with a couple friends for some essential prayer time in a couple weeks, I got a call from the guy who suggested it and found out his wife was in the ER and needed prayer for her health, like, right now.

While things turned out OK, I have seen too many occasions where, due to lack of prayer, things haven’t always turned out quite as well. I’m glad we all started to plan a prayer get-together; if we hadn’t already been talking about it, who knows if he’d have called with the immediate prayer need? I suspect he might have… but making those plans certainly kept it at the forefront of his mind.

Without prayer, we eventually feel powerless because we’re cut off from the source of all power: Adonai. Prayer is essential in the life of any believer.