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How would you love to gain total control of your mind while praying? How would you love to be mentally focused while you are praying even when prayer is not so much of the intellectual but of the spiritual? In this article I seek to help us gain perfect and adequate control over our mind while praying.

Prayer According to

According to Buddhism, prayer is an invocation or act that seeks activate a rapport with an object of worship through deliberate communication

In Hinduism, prayer is sighted as an essential process of enlightenment found through worship of God, in whatever form one envisions.

For us Christian, we understand prayer to be a communication or a dialog with God

Now whether defined according to Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity, one fact remains constant and that is the fact that it involves communication and from my little understanding of what communication is, an effective communication must depict two things first is sending and the second is receiving. In other words a communication is ineffective and incomplete if message is only sent and not received and vice versa.

Before a person understand perfectly the information it is receiving, he/she has to engage his mind in the process and if in the process of receiving an information, your mind wasn’t focused on what it was receiving, chances are that the person is likely to miss vital details of the message.

The Mind

The mind is a person’s ability to think and reason. Now everything we will ever becoming in life first begins in our minds and bible has already told us that as a man thinks in his heart so is he. See Proverbs 23:7. Our minds is our big picture, it is our greatest asset and at the same time our greatest distraction if not properly managed.

Our minds can either obstruct our prayers or advance it depending on how we engage it in the praying process. Praying is not just an act of the spirit alone but also of the mind. So Paul said I will pray in the spirit and I will also pray with my understanding – mind work.

My Little Experience

I woke up on Tuesday morning to observe my normal morning devotion and while I was praying in the spirit, something outside what I was praying about just entered my heart and some people will say that my mind wondered. Now while my mouth was still speaking, my mind was thinking of something else. Friends this is one of the strategy the devil employs in weakening a man’s prayer life. The place of prayer is the place of focus and Jesus said that if our eye be single, that our whole body will be flooded with light in other words until our mind receive synchronization with our spirit, transformation or renewal cannot take place. You see transformation is an inside out experience.

The Big Question “How do I gain mastery over mind distraction during prayer?

In this publication, we will limit our focus to just one thing and we will try to talk exhaustively on it

• Pray with the Word of God in Your heart and in your mouth.

Captured everywhere in the bible are His ever assuring promises for man kind to live with. In Jeremiah 29:11 God declared to us that He knows the thought He thinks towards us, that they are thought of peace and not of evil to give us an expected end. Every time a Christian prays with the word of God in his heart and in his mouth please note that the word must be in your heart first because out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. You cannot give out what you do not have for out of our belly shall flow rivers of living water. Praying with the word of God tells us that you know you are praying and that you are not praying to an unknown God. When you pray with God’s word in your heart, you relate with God on the bases of His word and in Isaiah bible says we should present our strong reasons. No strong reasons, no assurance of a guaranteed answer.

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In Acts 4:25-26 we could spot the early apostles after being threatened not to preach in the name of Christ again in Jerusalem, praying with the psalms of David chapter 2 verse 1 and 2, reading down on that same Acts 4, you will notice that as they pray engaging the word of God, they got an instant manifestation of the God whom the prayed to. One of the importance of praying with the word is that it quickens God to answers your prayers.

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Praying with God’s word prolongs your prayers and makes it more effective. Bible says that the effectual fervent prayer of the righteous man availed much and makes tremendous powers available and it is also dynamic in working emphasis added. See James 5:16.

Every time we pray with God, we are simply reminding God of His promises in His word for our life and by doing that we cause Him to hasten to perform them.

Receive grace to be able to wait on God by His words.