Grow Your Relationship with God Through Prayer: Part 2 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. As we take time each weekday morning to spend time with God, we find God speaking so practically into our lives. And this week we’re talking about growing our relationship with God through prayer.

Yesterday we saw the huge priority of your prayer times with God and how they need to be put in your life first and let the other things in your life group around them. And we’ve seen that that’s exactly what Jesus did.

Today, we want to learn the lesson: Learn to speak with God, not just to God.

Normally when we come to God, we’ve got things to say, right? We want to praise Him for things he’s done, we want to thank Him for his work in our lives, we want to ask him to get involved in situations that we’re aware of, we want his help with circumstances that we’re facing, even for our schedule for today.

In all of these we come to speak to God, but speaking with God is different because it means there’s a conversation happening, doesn’t it?

Whenever Jesus prays, it’s like we’re just hearing him speak out loud in the middle of an ongoing conversation he has with the Father. He just starts talking, Father, and then he goes on with his prayer.

Jesus’ prayers are conversational in their tone. How would you describe a conversation? What makes for a good conversation? Well, for sure, several things come to mind, don’t they? It means both people are talking, for one thing, not just one person. It means both people are also listening to one another.

Also, both people take an interest in each other and care about each other’s concerns.

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Those make for a good conversation.

So let me ask you this, what would conversation look like in your relationship with God?

Think about it. How does it work in prayer for both people to be talking, not just you? Both people listening, not just God, both people taking an interest in each other, caring about each other’s concerns.

Well, here’s how it works in my life.

I start my prayer times by opening my Bible and reading something, and as I read, I’m letting God know that I’m listening for what He might be saying to me. Here’s an example.

I was reading through the book of Isaiah in my daily times with God, or a chapter each day and asking God what He is saying to me. I came to Isaiah chapter 6.

And I started reading these words:

In the year that King Uzziah died. I saw the Lord. High and exalted with the train of his robe filling the temple, and the passage goes on, but as I read that, I just sensed God wanted me to listen to him.

So I stopped trying to read the whole chapter, and I just started thinking very deeply about those words.

Isaiah said, I saw the Lord. I just turned those words over in my mind.

What did it mean for Isaiah to see the Lord? How did that impact him?

I thought about times when I’d had very deep encounters with God in prayer, and I pondered, I thought about what was it that led to those deep exposures to God, that those times when God revealed Himself so deeply to me. I saw the Lord.

What does it mean to see God today? We don’t see Him physically. Jesus said God is spirit, right? So how do we see Him? I started thinking deeply about that. The Lord, He’s the one that Isaiah saw.

I want you to know that in those 1st 5 or 6 verses of Isaiah I spent several months every morning just pondering deeply over each word and the things in there God spoke to me, and the very end of that time of thinking through those verses was me talking back to God about my response to what he was saying to me.

You can do that too. Why don’t you start each day this week by choosing a paragraph or even one verse from the Bible, listening to God and then responding to Him.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.

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