Desperate for more of God? Don't know how to get it? Longing to talk to Him more but don't know how? Or maybe you're wondering what is prayer anyway? Does it work? How do you do it? What do you pray about?

These short guides about prayer, we hope will take you closer to God and nearer Him in His throne room.

If you have any questions, comments or encouragements after reading them, please use the e-text form on the left.

Praying In A Barren Place: 1. Lord, Lead Us Through The Wilderness

Barrenness is a place of no growth and being in a wilderness is definitely a place where nothing grows. We can feel barren in many areas of our lives, as if we are walking through a wilderness. We can be in a barren place in relationships, in our relationship with God, in our jobs, in our health but God can make a way, as we will discover, as we work our way through the Bible.

So how do we pray in a place that seems so dead? So often in this sort of environment we find our hearts failing and hope disappearing and we stop praying and give up. Over this series we will see different ways people prayed in their barren place and how this can help us to pray and more importantly give us hope to pray. The hardest thing in the world is when we believe God doesn’t want to ever make us fruitful, as that lack of faith stops our prayers.

Our first prime example are the Israelites, they left Egypt in triumph but lost all faith and hope as they entered the wilderness. As they cried out to God mainly out of sheer exasperation and frustration, God was faithful and answered their prayers, however He kept them there a long time to teach them about Him. They cried out for water and He provided (Exodus 15: 22-27), they cried out for food and He provided (Exodus 16). The main thing for us to learn here is that even when we pray in a barren place God will provide the necessities but the longer we have a bad attitude and lack of faith in Him, whilst in that place, the longer He will keep us there until we have a different spirit, one of faith and trust. God does not put us in barren places to punish us but to help us grow and the sooner we learn to pray prayers of faith and not prayers of frustration out of our barrenness the sooner He will bring us out of the wilderness.

Stuart Garrett (guitarist in Delirious?) wrote the following words,
“Lord lead us through the wilderness,
We trust that you’ll provide.
Be our cloud by day and our fire by night,
And when we reach the other side,
We’ll look back and all we’ll see, is your goodness!”
If your prayer of faith has dried up use these words instead and believe that you’ll look back over this barren time and see God’s goodness.

Sara Jukes

2005-04-11