Praying
The more abundant life is what I call the "Now Jesus" life. In Jesus' stead, we have the Holy Spirit. What Jesus would have done were he with us physically, the Holy Spirit does with and among us.
In other words: The Holy Spirit is working in you and me.
The power of this statement is in its invitation to look:
Where is God working?
What is God working on?
What is God saying?
The Therefores:
What is God inviting me to think and believe?
What is God inviting me to say?
What is God inviting me to do?
The idea is simple. God wanted a relationship with you and found a way to bring you to him. Why? Because God wants to perfect you according to the image of Jesus.
And you want that too. Which is why you're here. You and God are aligned.
Again the idea is simple - precept upon precept.
Let's dive in to one such precept: Prayer.
At YouAlive, prayer is NOT a discipline we force, it is a discipline God and you foster. Some Christians let their relationship with God be frustrated by guilt and shame in this area (as well as the area of spending time reading scripture) more than any other "should" of our relationship with God.
Like any other "should" in our relationship with God, Christians should pray. Our angle, however, is that frequency, style, and intensity is co-developed in the context of your relationship with God, your community, and your season of life. We call this the invitation model. It works by recognizing that God is a good master. God will invite you to moments or blocks of prayer. If God calls you to pray at Noon on certain days during the week, then pray at noon on certain days during the week. If you don't perceive such a call, don't manufacture it. Some will come back and tell us that they pray everyday (in the traditional sense of dedicated prayer time), some will tell us that that happens every week, and others, once in a while.
There is another kind of prayer that can and should happen all the time. We call that one the "posture" of prayer. It's technically not dedicated prayer - where you go off somewhere and spend X minutes or hours in prayer - because it's always "on". It is an attitude of dependence on God. This posture of prayer is an open communication line that is only possible because God is a Spirit. As such, you can both speak to and hear from God "from the inside".
Dedicated prayer is not replaced by the posture of prayer. It is predicated on the reality that "real" persons build relationships by separated contact. You can't be successfully married without separated time with your spouse. If the two of you don't talk deeply regularly, your relationship will whither. Separated contact is bigger than I have covered here. If you think about the way we grow in relationship with a best friend or a spouse you have the general idea.
Again, the invitation model is the YouAlive way to build your dedicated prayer discipline. Let God invite you to prayer. The result will be a living cadence that is anchored in real life, not religious idealism.
In this season, what's the cadence you're hearing God invite you to?