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Prayer Definition Essay

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How easy is it to become disheartened or weary about praying? If we’re really honest with ourselves, it’s pretty easy at times, especially when our prayers seem to go unanswered. How about distractions? How easy is it to allow distractions to interrupt your prayers? How frustrating is it when those unexpected thoughts pop into your head while praying? On average, how long can you pray before these distractions take effect? If you’re fortunate, it may be several minutes before things we forgot to do or need to do just pop into our mind. We catch ourselves and go right back into our prayers only to be distracted again, at some later time. Do you think this happens with every Christian? How about with Billy Graham, R. C. Sproul, Vernon McGee …show more content…

Take a moment to think about ten of them. If I asked you, where in the world is the hardest place to pray, where would you say? The hardest place would be here in the United States. Why? Awesome question! As Americans, we’ve become so caught up in a culture of always doing “something” that it’s hard to slow down and pray for any length of time. It feels uncomfortable or feels like we’re wasting valuable time. Our society has placed such a high premium on accomplishments or on being productive that prayer sometimes goes against the grain of our society. Do we see any accomplishments in prayer? Are we being productive when we pray? Prayer is nothing more than talking to God, but how many of us feel like it’s hopeless or useless? We pray for healing only to continue in sickness. We ask for victory over sin only to find defeat. What good does it do to pray? Another problem with the American culture is our attention span. When we’re not working, we’re watching television, playing video games, surfing the Internet(s) or on our smartphones. The next time you go to a restaurant or to the movie theaters, look around to see how many people are on their phones. Being still and quiet is not in the American culture. Sin is another “thing” which keeps us from praying as we ought to. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Act III, scene iii, Hamlet sneaks in to kill King Claudius, who killed his own brother and Hamlet’s father. At the end of the scene, Hamlet realized he cannot kill Claudius and sneaks back out of the room and we hear Claudius say, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain low. Words without thought never to heaven go.” Claudius tried to repent for committing murder, but he couldn’t. We see him kneeling in prayer, but he couldn’t feel any sense of comfort or mercy from God. There’s a realization that because he had no intentions of confessing to the crime or even changing his life, his words were empty

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