Prayer
To Pray is to contact God and to be saturated with God, resulting in having faith in God for the exultation of God.
[The God-man Living, Witness Lee, Living Stream Ministry, p. 138]
The way to experience Christ, to be constituted with Christ, and to live Christ is to pray in a genuine way.
We need the kind of prayer that brings us into contact with the Lord. This kind of prayer causes us to be one with Him in our spirit. But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit. (1 Cor. 6:17) The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you. (2 Tim. 4:22)
A life of genuine prayer stops our natural being. A life of prayer is a life that revolts and rebels against our natural being. To pray means to realize that we are nothing and that we can do nothing. And when He entered into the house, His disciples questioned Him privately, Why were we not able to cast it out? 29 And He said to them, This kind cannot come out by any means except prayer. (Mark 9:28-29) The disciples tried to cast out demons in themselves, but the Lord Jesus did nothing from Himself. He only did what the Father was doing (John 5:18-19).
Prayer is the real denial of the self; thus, to pray is to deny ourselves. And He called the crowd to Him with His disciples and said to them, If anyone wants to follow after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. (Mark 8:34) When we live a life of denying our self, this is genuine prayer.
To pray is actually to declare, "No longer I, but Christ!" (Gal. 2:20a)
In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made know to God (Phil. 4:6)
Prayer involves conversing with the Lord, communicating with Him in fellowship, and worshipping Him.
Praying "to" God implies a living union and communion with God in our daily life. Praying "to" God conveys the thought of moving towards God, producing a transaction in the sense of a living union with God. Praying "to" God means to be in fellowship with God. In this fellowship, in this mutual communication, in this union and communion, we should let our requests be made known to God.
If we ask the Lord about everything and talk with Him about everything, we will receive the Lord's element into us, a divine metabolism will work in us, and Christ will be expressed through us; this is to live Christ (Phil. 1:21).
We need to practice speaking to the Lord constantly; then spontaneously we will live Christ. Fellowship produces dispensing of the divine life into us. Dispensing produces a mingling of two natures, ours and God's, as one without the producing of a third nature. We two become one. This is prayer! Then, "whatever we ask the Father in the Lord's name, He will give to us." (John 15:7, 16)
