Book: 2 Timothy

Can you really be a Christian when you don’t pray every day? A recent Pew survey indicates that roughly half of all professing Christians do not pray every day. Without daily prayer, we cannot be truly happy. And when we pray, we should pray like the tax collector, begging for God’s mercy. We need to be people of real prayer.

It is said that our issue as Christians is not that we ask God for too much, but that we ask God for far too little. The same is true of our frequency in asking. Our problem is not that we come to God too much, but that we hardly come to him in prayer at all. Listen as the Rector encourages us to be persistent in prayer.

Here’s the great preoccupation of Americans: We do everything in our lives to avoid mortality. Are we not all going to die, however? We can’t avoid mortality, but we can enjoy eternal life in the presence of God, like the Samaritan and like Ruth, if we simply put our trust in Jesus Christ to save us.

How many of us have gone through a season of chaos and hardship in our lives - be it illness, financial hardship, or broken relationships - and lost sight of what the LORD is doing? We cry like the prophet, “How long will I cry for help, God, and you will not listen to me?” But hindsight is twenty-twenty, is it not? How differently would we approach our present sufferings if we only considered how God was using them to increase our future holiness!