Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
-Matthew 26:41
When we who are drunks and addicts seek to find freedom from those chains of addictions, invariably at some point we will hear that we need to watch out for "trigger." We're told to not put ourselves in the situations and surroundings that led to drinking or using in the past. (Like breathing. Breathing while being awake was probably my biggest trigger.) To help fight the desire, the temptation, to go back to whatever addiction we have to change our people, places and things. But if we eliminate every old trigger to our addictions and behaviors, we will only make new ones if we don't find relationship with God that sets us free and fills us. If we do find said relationship we can go anywhere and be around anything or anyone without falling back into old behavior.
But if we want to be free, free from chemicals, free from selfish attitudes and emotions, free from the chains of any kind that have held us in bondage in the past, the first thing we need to do after coming to Christ to be set free is to learn to pray successfully. Prayer taps us into and allows us to access the power and grace of God to walk in His will, to deny our own and old way, and to resist the temptation to turn away or to turn back to where we once where slaves. Jesus didn't tell the disciples to prevent falling to temptation by avoiding anything or anyone. He told them to watch and pray.
But learning to pray may be the hardest thing for anyone to do. It's what, if one is like me, may be on our top 5 list of things we need to do every day and do more and yet it can also be the spiritual act that is easiest to cut short, leave out, put off till later, etc. That is because our flesh, our humanity if you will, doesn't want to pray. It has no desire to enter into the presence of the Most High God. Our mortality puts on immortality in the presence of God, and it does so by surrendering to the purpose and will of the One who created us, dying and being resurrected into new life. No matter how seriously the surrender at the cross of Jesus was meant, our old nature will fight it. And so first and foremost, the flesh must be fought and conquered, at least for the time, in order to pray well.
It's also frustrating that prayer isn't an intellectual pursuit. Books and books have been written on the subject. Some are good and some are bad, but none can teach a person to pray any more than a person can learn to ride a bike by reading a book. One learns to ride a bike by doing it. By getting on, struggling for balance and power to pedal before falling, then getting up and doing it again. Finally the falls become rare if ever. And prayer is the same. We can finds tips and suggestions that may act as training wheels, but the only thing that we can do to learn to pray is to pray and pray and pray some more, and to not give up when we fall flat on our face or skin our spiritual knees. Learning to pray well and establishing a prayer life is a process.
Every believer is unique, fearfully and wonderfully made. Every Christian has his or her own name that is special between them and God and that no one else knows. And everyone's conversation with their Creator is as unique as they are. Maybe not at first, when the training wheels are on, but by the time it becomes a part of life and the falls occur less, we all become original in our prayers. We have found relationship, and it is in spending time with Daddy in a way that is real and can't be imitated or learned from someone else that we find freedom and power to walk away from temptation.
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