Prayer Is A Privilege

Prayer is not an obligation. Prayer is a privilege. What would be wrong with somebody who didn’t want to have the privilege to go to the creator, the master of everything, and get the help they need? We have to stop looking at prayer like an obligation and how we need to put in a certain amount of minutes every day to keep God satisfied. God doesn’t need us to pray. We need to pray! One of the things that motivates you to pray is when you really understand something that Jesus said in Matthew 26: the spirit is willing. The flesh is weak. The spirit is willing. The flesh is weak. Well, if God’s dealing with us all the time like revelation 3 says, how does he deal with us? What does it take to change us?

I believe the way God deals with us is like this: Jesus, the holy spirit convict us and work on us inside and it would just be really great if we would just listen and do what God tells us to and just get it over with. We get to that point where we do that more and more, where the minute God starts dealing with you about something, you already know there’s no point in going around the mountain 300 times because in the end, if you’re going to be happy, God is going to get his way. It’s kind of like if momma’s not happy, nobody’s happy, so you might as well go clean up the room because momma’s not going to be happy until you do. That’s the way it is with God.

You’re not going to be happy and have joy and peace and feel right inside until you learn to do things God’s way. So if we would learn to just take that “God’s dealing with me, I need to apologize to Dave,” so I get in there and apologize to Dave. “Dave, I’m sorry.” get it over with in a few minutes. But most of us, sad to say, especially in the beginning of our walk with God, we don’t learn that quickly, so not only does God deal with us inside but he brings circumstances to press us from the outside. Between the holy ghost pushing from the inside and the circumstances pressing from the outside, guess what happens? We get squashed in the middle. The flesh finally gets broken. So on a practical level, what kind of things does God use? Well, one of the things that we can’t stand is being out of control. We want to control stuff. The only thing we don’t want to control is self. We don’t care much about self-control (laughing)