Day 5 - Principle 1: Breathe a prayer for help as you begin

"As you seek to develop greater prayer effectiveness be alert to the fact that the devil will do everything in his power to discourage you and divert your attention to other things.  He doesn't mind how many committees you sit on, how many sermons you preach, how much evangelistic literature you pass out, how many meetings you attend, providing you spend little or no time in prayer.  So, before we go deeper into the subject, send up a little telegramatic prayer right now, asking God to help you see that you are beginning something which will make all the difference between weakness and strength, between defeat and victory."

From  Fifteen Ways to a More Effective Prayer Life by Selwyn Hughes

I don't know how it works for you, but when I sit down at my desk in the morning to read and pray, there is always something that I can just quickly do before I open the Bible,  You know, like checking my email to make sure there's no über-important mail that arrived in the wee hours of the morning that I simply must attend to right away, before anything else, lest the world ends.  Just to settle my mind, so that I can read and pray with full concentration on God.

Yeah, right.

Until now that mail has not arrived.

And I'm pretty sure of two things:

1. That mail ain't gonna arrive, and
2. If it does arrive (a) God will warn me about it in good time, or (b) I won't be able to do anything about it anyway and therefore it does not matter whether I read it before or after my prayer time.

This is what happened:  God reminded me that He wants the first fruits.  That means I start my day with Him, not with email.

This is what I did:  I have a little notebook in which I write down what I want to pray about and anything that God tells me.  In that book I wrote the date and my decision to start the day with God.

Whenever I'm tempted to "just quickly  check my mail or the current cricket score", I remember what I wrote down and I act according to that decision.

It's real easy.  You should try it.

Remember to submit your comments about your experiences, ideas, song requests, etc. here.

PS:  On the same page where I wrote my "prayer first" decision, I also wrote this:  satan is a doughnut without the dough :)  I have no idea who said it, but I like it.