This a guest blog by Acts 29 pastor, Robert Livingston, who pastors Source Church. Check out how they post corporate prayers and answers to prayer here.
I have never had a difficult time talking with my wife. I think one of the first things I found attractive about her was how easy it was to talk for hours upon hours and never get bored. And because of God’s goodness, even after almost 12 years of marriage we still spend most mornings together drinking coffee and talking. Conversation with her is just so easy. Talking keeps us close to each other. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes our talks are difficult as we work through struggles or bicker with each other – but we do talk.
What about talking with God? It’s called prayer and if you ask most Christians about their prayers you will usually get a garbled, apologetic response that concludes with, “I need to work harder at making time to pray.â€Â For some reason talking with God is hard for most of us to do.
But there is a time when prayer becomes easy. For example: when my wife and I lost track of our 5 year old daughter in a sea of people at Disney World late one evening; or the time we got news that a family member had been struck in a head-on collision and was barely hanging on to life. Prayer was instinctive. Prayer was the easiest thing in the world in the moments surrounding those events.
Genesis 4 describes the first time in the bible when people begin to pray. A man had a son named “Enosh†which literally means “frailtyâ€. I suspect that his son was born premature, or undersized and in light of the violent world he was born into, his dad began to pray. When frailty or weakness becomes obvious, prayer becomes easy.
I have one of those jobs that exposes my frailty on a regular basis – I am a church planter/pastor. Daily I am faced with tasks and conversations that require more than my education, charm, experience, or limited money can accommodate. I am simply outmatched, and I think God is behind it all. The good news of God is that I can talk with Him and share these burdens and find strength. By talking with God I find so much more than help – I find the joy of truly knowing Him. The bad news is that I forget that or stubbornly refuse to go to Him for help.
Prayer becomes easy, enjoyable, necessary, & satisfying when we become aware of our frailty and emptiness.
