Prayer Begins with God

In the beginning, God spoke the heavens and earth into being.

“Let there be light, ” (Gen. 1:3 ESV) He said, and the light appeared.

“Let there be. . . ,” He said, and you were born.

God speaks and life comes into being.

God speaks and prayer is born.

 God created prayer. It begins with Him. He is speaking to us all the time.

But shouldn’t prayer begin with us? Shouldn’t we be praying all the time?

The truth is I forget to pray and I don’t pray hard or long enough. For years, I felt like a failure in this area of my spiritual life.

How does the Spirit of God speak to us and help us pray? Henry and Richard Blackaby state, “Every day numerous events magnify the awareness that Christians need a timely, specific word from God. Most Christians acknowledge their need for God’s guidance. Many people regularly seek it. The problem is that they are not sure they recognize God’s voice.”

Hearing God can be compared to making a business call that can be extremely complicated. You almost never get a human voice. Instead you get a dizzying selection of menus to choose from, none of which may be the one you need.  You make your best guess and after you’ve pressed all the numbers, you find out you still have more options to choose from. One mistake, and you have to start all over again.

Or you get a voice mail recording telling you to leave a message. What’s worse is when you finally reach a real human voice only to find out you have the wrong person. You get transferred or you have to start over and work your way through more menu options.

When we pray we may feel the same kinds of frustrations. How do we reach God and does He really hear us?

A friend of mine said, “My struggles with prayer are very much like the struggles I first had with leaving a message with voice mail. It’s easy to talk to someone you can see and hear — someone who responds to you at that very moment. But to talk and continue talking with no feedback or immediate response is hard for me.”

The difficultly with prayer is that God does not communicate with us in the same way we do with people. We can’t have face-to-face, back-and-forth conversations with the Lord as we do our loved ones and friends since He is not visibly present.

We cannot do things with God as we do loved ones, such as play sports, eat a meal together, or do other activities. We cannot see God’s face or hold his hand or hug Him. Prayer is not even like talking on the phone because we can’t hear His voice audibly.

Moreover, you may be “understandably wary of any talk about hearing a direct word from God because of the rampant, exaggerated abuses of this claim, both now and throughout history. People can recoil from talk of God speaking to people because they think this can refer only to God’s audible voice,” said the Blackabys. (Hearing God’s Voice, 6,)

 How do you discern when God is speaking to you?  You need to know God, which “comes through experience as He reveals Himself to you.” (Experiencing God, 57.)  He desires to guide you, have a personal relationship and open communication with you. He is the only One who fully knows you and your needs because He is the only One who is with you twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

To hear God, we need listen to His Word and open our hearts to what He is saying to us through His Word. If we only listen for what we want to hear or what we want from Him, we will be deaf to what He is saying to us. He makes His presence known to us as we open our heart to Him and listen. Knowing God is a growing experience; it’s a process that comes over time as He reveals Himself and His plans to us and as we share ourselves with Him in return. The Lord gladly guides us and gives us the wisdom to live and be the godly person He desires us to be. But how? That is the question we need to answer.