By Tammy King
Is prayer enough?
What a friend we have in Jesus all our sins and griefs to bear, what a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer – but how easy it is to think that praying is just not going to be enough. Maybe we have friends or family who are in trouble, we can’t really do anything practical to help them, we feel powerless and that all I can do is to pray for them. It just doesn’t feel like that’s going to be enough; I mean what does prayer really do?
In the Old Testament we see miracles from prayer, for example Elijah praying for rain after a drought (1 Kings 18:42) or Elisha restoring the Shunammite’s son to life (2 Kings 4:33-37). If we look at the gospels we see Jesus praying often to his father in heaven. Through prayer Jesus was able to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf and to heal the lame, he was even able to raise somebody from the dead! And still today we hear of great answers to prayer, the other week Alan told us about a miracle in the Namib desert.
If Jesus and these other people could do all that with prayer, surely we can do the same. But I still find myself doubting, am I really doing enough? What we need is to believe that yes, prayer is enough. And maybe there is one more small thing we can do, we can message that person and let them know that we’re praying for them every day. If we make that message open-ended then they get a word of encouragement without the added pressure of having to respond.
So yes, prayer is enough but sometimes it can take an awful lot of faith to believe that it is going to be enough. Going back to the words of that amazing hymn; oh what grief we often forfeit, oh what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.
We have 2 prayer groups in Pastrow and if you ever want prayer support please get in touch. As a military person once said, “it never hurts to get cover from up top Padre”