Prayer Problems: Getting Started With Confidence

If you have not been active in prayer, getting started can seem like a major problem. 

Let’s face it. You are talking to a God that you can’t see and struggle to hear. You often need Him most at the times when you are struggling and your life is about to go down the drain. You throw up a prayer to heaven and wonder if any one heard you.

If that sounds like your prayer experience, take a deep breath and realize that you are not alone. The problem is that prayer is talking to God and most of us are not very good at talking to strangers. Our experience is like talking to a stranger at the Department of Motor Vehicles when you have lost your car title. You don’t know this person at all and you desperately need the stranger’s help. So let’s go through a few things that can help you.

• First, build the relationship before you desperately need it. It is easier to talk to God about important things if you know him. If God is a stranger, begin your prayer conversation just like you would with a stranger you meet at a park or at the office. Begin by telling God who you are (this will help you know yourself better) and read the Bible to let God tell you who He is. If you don’t know where to start in letting God tell you who He is, start with the blog post on this blog called “God is”.

• Second, talk to God on a regular basis. The new person at work will be a stranger if you speak to them only once or twice. Yet if you have lunch with them a couple days a week, slowly they will become a friend. Talk to God a couple times a week telling Him about the good and the bad in your life. Let Him into your life and start by asking God to help you in little ways. Build the relationship and build your trust in God. Time is what makes relationships grow.

• Finally, know that God wants to build a relationship with you. I have had times where a stranger just didn’t want to be bothered. I might want to talk to them, but they didn’t want to talk to me. That is never true about God. He always wants to talk to us and will always make the time to talk to us. Some of my best conversations with God happen at 3 AM when I can’t sleep. I find that talking with God calms me after a tough day and lets me fall asleep because I have talked the crisis through with Him.

Prayer is not automatic any more than friendships often are. Don’t let that make you think that you can never have times of prayer with the Lord. You just need to start building a relationship by telling each other who you are. You need to do that often and you need to know that God wants to talk to you. Keep at it. It will come if you give it time. You will find that conversations with God will become a special time and will give you a lot of joy and comfort.

If you would like the five devotions called “God is” sent to you as a PDF file, just email me at 32daysdevotions@gmail.com.   I will gladly send the devotions to you at no charge. You can also include any thoughts that you have about this blog or any of the blogs on prayer. I would love to hear from you and learn from you.