Your Prayers
Scripture Reading: Psalm 132; Ezekiel 26-27; 1 Peter 3
So that your prayers may not be hindered...for the sake of your prayers…
- 1 Peter 3:7, 4:7
I cheated a little today. Today’s devotional includes a text from tomorrow’s reading. Forgive me. But I wanted to take a bird’s eye view of a point Peter is making about prayer. In both texts, the one in chapter three and the one in chapter four, Peter seems to drop the idea of prayer into them out of nowhere. What I mean is, Peter wasn’t writing about prayer. In chapter three he was writing about marriage and in chapter four about general Christian morality and ethics. And then, out of left field, he drops in these lines about prayer.
While it might cause us some interpretive angst, it shouldn’t. The fact that he does this twice demonstrates that he was deeply concerned about the things that would hinder our prayer life – both in terms of our ability to pray and our ability to receive answers to our prayers.
What Peter is helping us to understand is that our spiritual life is integrated. Sometimes Christians talk about their “prayer life.” That’s not necessarily a bad term unless it leaves us with the impression that our prayer life is a segregated part of life that is unaffected by the rest of our lives.
Peter does us the favor of reminding us that our prayer life can get out of sorts before we ever set foot in our prayer closet. Before we ever bow our heads and lift our voice, we can slam the door shut on our prayers by the way we live and the way we treat others.
Does it seem that your prayer life is hindered? Could it be that it is because of how you are treating your wife, or because you aren’t living a sober, self-controlled kind of life? Maybe if we can get some other things straightened out we will find a new vibrancy and life to our prayers.
