Bible teacher and best-selling author Sheila Walsh believes prayer is the “single most underused weapon in the Church.”
“Over the last two-and-a-half years, I’ve had this burning thing inside of me that every morning I wake up with this word ‘prayer’ on my heart,” Walsh told The Christian Post. “I’ve been a Christian for many years, but I didn’t understand the importance of prayer.”
“I kept recalling the words of Corrie Ten Boom: ‘Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?’ In other words, is it what guides my life, or is it a last resort? I am convinced there’s nothing the enemy would love more than for us to stop praying.”
Walsh knew she wasn’t alone in her struggle. She spent two years researching what God says about prayer, looking at how the early Church fathers viewed prayer, and even penned a survey asking women what they thought about prayer. The results, she said, were astonishing.
“So many women said they got bored, distracted, felt like they were repeating themselves when they prayed,” she recalled. “Others asked, ‘Why bother to pray when God already knows all?’ or, ‘I prayed and God didn’t answer, so why would I keep praying?’”
“That,” she added, “gave me a fresh passion to provide women a practical, step-by-step handbook as to how to pray through some of the toughest times of life.”
The Scottish-born evangelist is gearing up for the Feb. 4 release of her latest book, Praying Women: How to Pray When You Don’t Know What to Say. In it, she teaches women to experience the power of prayer through conversation with God by inspiring them to develop a lifestyle of prayer.
While researching for her book, Walsh said she discovered that for many women — herself included — the most difficult time to pray is in times of pain and suffering. Yet Walsh stressed the importance of “processing your pain in the presence of God.”
“I believe Satan makes us feel like we don’t want to pray; it’s a strategy of the devil,” Walsh posited. “We do have an enemy who would love to make sure that we don’t pray. I think sometimes when we’re walking through painful situations, we think, ‘God, you’re powerful enough to have changed this, but you didn’t.’ We get confused in our pain and the last thing we want to do is pray.”
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Leah MarieAnn Klett
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