Communion with God

Colossians 1:9 says, "For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding;" From this text, I see two things. We'll look at the first one now. Paul and Timothy were praying for this church in Colosse. Prayer by definition is a "spiritual communion with God." The Apostle Paul tells us that we should pray without ceasing (1 Th. 5:17). We are constantly told in the Bible that we are to be a people of prayer and yet it is one of the hardest things to do in our Christian experience. Why? – Because the Devil knows that it is our strongest weapon against him. Thus he throws everything that he can at us to keep us off our knees. I, for one, do not pray enough. I heard of an Iranian who invented a compass-like device engraved with the names of 150 cities, in Arabic. The devout Muslim needs only to turn the instrument until the needle indicates north, twists a dial to the name of the city he is in and the arrow points the way to Mecca, which Muslims face to pray fives time a day. How many times do we intentionally pray per day? I would venture to say that our Muslim friend out-prays most Christians.

There are two problems that I think we struggle the most with in prayer. First, we don't do it enough. Why? – The world, the flesh and the Devil. The world tells us we're too busy. The flesh tells us we're too tired. The Devil tells us we're too late. Second, we give up too quickly. We pray for a few days, a few weeks, a few months and then we stop. We start thinking that God isn't listening or that He refuses to answer. We do this because we forget that God's thoughts are not our thoughts and God ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:8). We forget that God does not work on our timetable. Never has and never will. In the end, we have not been called to figure out what God is doing all the time, but we have been called to pray all the time.