Being Christian from an early age, I always heard about prayer being important, but I never understood why. I had a list of people that were sick, troubled or looking for a job that I recited to God on a daily basis, but beyond that, there was little commitment on my end. Later I discovered that prayer is a two-way conversation. We speak, and listen. It’s when we pray that God speaks to us.

To hear from God, we need to set aside time to listen. but the trouble is that the world around us is very consuming. And it’s not always things that seem bad that become separators between us and God. Pastor Zedick mentioned that even our husbands and children can interfere with our prayer life. Even something that we assume is good for our spiritual welfare can actually be bad if we idolize them – putting them before God.

I struggle with this, because when things get hectic, my time with God is one of the first things to go even though I know that to have a good relationship with God, I need to dedicate the time for prayer. I started thinking about how our faith in God also gets stronger when we pray. God is all knowing, so he could fulfill our requests without being asked, but if he did, chances are we wouldn’t recognize them as answered prayers. We might think that we were lucky, or that we were able to accomplish it on our own. Then we believe that we can make decisions outside of God, and he starts to seem more and more distant. We start to forget that God wants a relationship with us, and eventually, we can loose faith in God altogether.

At times I have a tendency to think that my time is too valuable to spend with God, but the reality is that I can’t afford to not spend time with God. Listen to the recorded sermon here.