Have you ever heard someone say “If you met God, what would you ask him?” Well, prayer is a way to do exactly that, communicate with God and ask Him questions.
It may seem a strange concept, the idea of talking to the Creator of the entire universe, and everything inside it, but prayer forms a major part of our personal relationship with God and His Son Jesus Christ. Without prayer we’d have no way of asking God for what He wants from us, and what we want from Him. Prayer also helps strengthen our faith; knowing God is able to listen to, and answer, your personal thoughts is especially powerful in this regard.
When a person asks for something in prayer, it makes sense to make it a spiritual request, to pray for wisdom and strength, and for His will to take place on earth as it is in heaven. Asking for comfort when depressed or anxious can help, and there are many situations when talking to our Loving Creator can bring a desired outcome. Of course, asking to win a lottery, requesting money for a luxury car, or to gain masses of material wealth and riches are not prayers that God wants to hear from us. His answers are more likely to help us in other ways, especially when the desires of the world are passing away: 1st John 2:17 The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
What we ask for, and what we get, are not always in line with our way of thinking. Very often we can build expectations, or think that we have the right for our demands to be met, especially in a stressful situation. God does not always answer our prayers the way we imagine. It could be that when a prayer is answered we can even feel disappointed, maybe it was an answer we didn’t expect, or want. But God understands what’s best for us, and knows what we want even before we ask: Matthew 6:8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Prayer is very powerful, and often underestimated. A non-believer of God will scoff at the idea a person can get a prayer answered, for them it seems too far fetched that the Creator of our universe can choose to hear our prayers and answer them. For these ones there is doubt that we have been given the ability to use something that is invisible as a means of communication with God. This dismissive attitude seems contradictory when you consider that billions of people around the world carry a smart device that is capable of communicating with another person, or persons, pretty much anywhere on the planet during any hour of the day.
Many take for granted the invisible connection between one small handheld communication device to another, which is often sending and receiving clearly intelligible audible and visual messages that are sometimes travelling thousands of miles in just a few seconds. Many of our phone calls are made possible through satellite technology, our voices and content taken from the device in the palm of our hand into space, and back to down to earth in seconds; imagine how long it would take to send those messages in person on foot, or even using jet airliners to take us the same distances. Billions of people are glued to their screens almost constantly, and yet how often do we spend the same amount of time to communicate with God. The materials used to manufacture these smart devices all come from our own planet, minerals mined to make the electronic components, and other parts of the phone or computer; all of it comes from the ground and dust we live and walk on. If humans can use these materials to produce communication devices then surely it makes sense that God used the same dust to create the first human being: Genesis 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
Most of us use a mobile communications device daily, and there is no problem with believing that when we make a phone call, the person on the receiving end is real and can understand what we say, and vice versa. But somehow, it seems difficult for many to grasp the fact that our amazing minds are not perhaps capable of sending a message to God. But He did create us, and part of our design was the ability to communicate to Him. Talking to Him on a personal level, using an invisible connection through our atmosphere and beyond, seems far fetched for many. Jeremiah 23:24 reads: Can anyone hide from me in a secret place? Am I not everywhere in all the heavens and earth?” says the LORD. Keeping this scripture in mind, you can perhaps see that God is telling us that He’s within easy reach, and at all times. Even if He was light years away, nobody knows the speed of prayer. Your message may take time to compose, but the distance it takes to travel to God could be faster than anything we understand, or could even begin to comprehend.
There are many modern devices that remotely communicate information through invisible sources. Consider NASA and their Space Shuttle Discovery when deploying the Hubble Space Telescope on April 24th 1990. That mission was the highest recorded for a Space Shuttle; approximately 354 miles above our planet (to put that into perspective, a commercial jet airliner typically cruises at around 5 miles above the surface). During that mission, both those on the ground, and those on board the Shuttle, were able to communicate intelligible messages, often clearly. To do this, there was a transmit and receive round trip of between 3-6 seconds. There was no way to attach cables or wires to communicate between the Shuttle and earth, so it had to be made using invisible frequencies in and out of our atmosphere; I’m sure you’d agree that this is very impressive.
If humans can achieve such amazing engineering feats, and are capable of sending spoken, written messages, video and still images, all with hardly any delay when traveling thousands of mile across our entire planet (and outside of our atmosphere), then surely God, who created the earth, our bodies and minds, has the ability to do so much more; and do it in a way that even our most advanced scientists and engineers can only dream of.
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mark@truthministry.co.uk