Catherine Ponder - Pray And Prosper

You are prosperous to the degree that you are experiencing peace, health, and plenty in your world. Prayer can help you experience peace, health, and plenty, because prayer is man’s steady effort to know God, and God is the source of all man’s good. Thus, in prayer man makes common union with God and His infinite goodness. It is wonderful, too, to realize that prayer is natural to man, and not a strange, mysterious practice. Man has always prayed and always will. In his primitive understanding, man prayed to the sun and stars, to the fire and water, to animals and plants, to images and myths. Later, as the intellect of man evolved, his ideas changed and he conceived of God as a personal deity with sentiments and emotions—a God with human traits, a God man felt had to be appeased by sacrificial offerings and assailed with pleas for favor. Many of the writers of the Old Testament had this concept of God. Still later, mankind began to come out of a primitive and intellectual understanding of God into a spiritual awareness that God is not a hostile being with a split personality of good and evil, but a God of love, the unchanging Principle of supreme good, both within and around mankind. Methods of prayer that have evolved, expanded, and improved now make it easy to pray to and commune with God.