Grow Your Relationship with God Through Prayer: Part 4

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Transcript

Good morning. We’re talking all this week about how to grow your relationship with God through prayer. You need to establish prayer as one of the biggest priorities in your life. Put it first. And then fit the other things in your day around it, and you’ll find God balancing out your day, making the other things work.

Put prayer first, it’s putting God first, it’s putting your relationship with God first.

Well, as we’ve talked each weekday morning, I want to come to you today with this lesson.

Grow your relationship with God by staying in constant contact with Him.

Have you ever noticed that when you spend a lot of time with someone, even someone when you first met them, you thought, I don’t really click with this person.

But when you spend a lot of time with someone, you get to know them pretty well even if you don’t end up great friends. You know that person well by spending a lot of time with them, right? Spending time with them and talking with someone all the time, you get to know them well, it’s no different in your relationship with God.

I remember when I first met Loyce, my wife, we were in a crazy busy time in both of our lives. It was so inconvenient to fall in love. We fell hard for each other though.

In the middle of my crazy postgraduate class schedule, and all my studies to do with that, and working full time and leading a ministry team at our church in my own time.

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And Loyce was also getting her master’s degree and working full time. Still, our relationship grew rapidly because somehow, in a way I still can’t explain, we constantly found time to get together and to talk together.

Sometimes, I was just on the phone, and this was before mobile phones, you couldn’t just pick up your phone at any moment and call, you had to get somewhere where there was a fixed telephone, dial the number where you knew the other person was, they had to be there and talk, and yet we found ourselves talking for hours every day, into the night, spending so much time talking, and our relationship grew so fast as a result of how much we were interacting with each other.

Well, this is exactly how you grow your relationship with God.

On Monday we read in the Gospel of Luke how crazy busy Jesus was, and yet it says, but he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.

Well, how are you going to grow your relationship with God the same way Jesus did, the same way my wife and I got close.

When you get in the car to drive between places today. How about turning the radio off? And talk with God instead.

When you’re cleaning the kitchen. Talk with God.

When you’re taking your shower in the morning, talk with God.

When you’re on your exercise bike at the gym, talk with God.

When your dog needs to go out for a walk, don’t just walk with your dog, walk with God.

Because the more you stay in constant contact with God, the more your relationship with Him will grow.

You’ll get to know him on the personal level, and isn’t that what you want in your Christian life? Do you know that there are so many Christians, probably the bulk of Christians, whose encounters with God are limited to their time at church on Sunday and their time with their growth group during the week, and that’s it.

They’re not reading their Bible, they’re not talking with God, they’re not listening to God, they’re not building their relationship with God, where you don’t just want a commitment to God, you don’t want to just do the Christian things out of a sense of guilt or a sense that I ought to do these things. You want to do all of these things to grow your relationship with God. You want to be close to God.

And the way you get close to God is by staying in constant contact with Him.

How could you do that today?

I’m John North.

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