Our prayer life reflects our love for God.
IT’S WORTH CONSIDERING
At a recent conference, the speaker made the point that our prayer life is as deep as our love relationship
Courtesy of theleadingedgeblog.com
with God. It was one of those comments that stop you dead in your tracks. The truth of its claim is immediately obvious, and the conviction of its message is instantaneous. It seems so elementary, yet we often fail to make the connection. If we have to carve out some time to pray, our love relationship with God needs some attention. When we love someone, we want to spend as much time as possible with him or her. Our time together is a top priority. The greater the love, the more emotional intimacy will be present. It just seems so natural. You don’t have to work at it. You know when you really connect with someone because your conversation goes deeper, your defenses are down and you don’t feel vulnerable. You feel safe in saying anything and you don’t feel like there’s anything to hide.
AS I SEE IT
This should describe our prayer life. We shouldn’t have to work at it, but we live in a fallen world. 
Sometimes prayer is hard work. In fact, the most effective prayers almost always involve a lot of hard work and some very calloused knees. Sometimes we have to work through all sorts of stuff before we can get to the place where we know we’re being honest with God and we know He is listening. Usually the hardest part is being silent before God and waiting for His response. We don’t like silence. We feel a need to fill every moment with something that stimulates our senses. Sometimes God doesn’t answer at all while we are praying. The answer may come when we least expect it or at what seems to us to be a very inopportune time. My point is that there is no formula for effective prayer, but there is a direct relationship between the amount of time we are connected to God and our love for Him. Paul exhorts us to pray without ceasing. Our problem is that we think of prayer as those special times when we set aside time to have a conversation (usually a one way conversation) with God.
In the classic devotional My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers says that prayer is not an 
exercise at all. It is the life (May 26). It’s not something you do. It’s something you live. He likens prayer to breathing or to our blood flowing through our body without any decision on our part. If we’re rightly related to God, it just happens. In the March 20 devotion he says that the point of asking (in prayer) is to get to know God better. He is making the connection between our prayer life and our love for God. If our requests are all about getting our needs met, we probably won’t progress very far in our relationship with God, but if we focus on getting to know God better through our prayers, we can expect great results:
Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desire of your heart (Psalm 37:4)
We should keep praying in order to get a perfect understanding of God Himself.
It’s worth taking some time to analyze our prayer life. God gave us direct access to Him, so we would be foolish not to take advantage of this great gift. If our prayer life reflects our love for God, there’s a lot at stake. Let’s get this right!
GOD DISPLAYS HIS MAJESTY THROUGH HIS CREATION
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