Devotion - Wednesday - September 23

​Prayer is conversation with one who is always there. Prayer allows us access through Jesus Christ into a conversation with God. God is always seeking a conversation with us. God always greatly desires to communicate with us.
 
My wife and I recently did some redecorating in our upstairs bathroom. We took down some wallpaper, spackled a few holes, and repainted the walls. She purchased some new decorations and pictures. Of course, she wanted me to hang these pictures on the walls, so I went into my garage, reached into my tool bag, pulled out my hammer, and grabbed some nails. I took my hammer and used it to drive in every one of those nails in the exact location where my wife wanted those pictures hung. 
 
When I finished driving the nails, I hung the pictures and headed back into my garage. I opened my tool bag again, placed my hammer back inside. Finished! Right now, my hammer is put away. I know it will be there the next time I need it. That’s using my hammer as the tool for which it was intended.
 
We might as well admit it. We often use prayer in our lives and in the church as a tool from a tool bag. When we need God to do something, when we need something in ministry, when we desire to have something accomplished, we go to the spiritual tool bag because we know prayer is what we should use. We pick up prayer, we pray the prayer, and then we put prayer back in the bag until we need it again. But prayer is intended to be so much more than this!
 
So often we use prayer as a vehicle to get us to a desired destination. We need provision, so we pray. We need anointing, so we pray. We need healing, or deliverance, or cleansing, so we pray. But what if prayer is not the vehicle that brings us to our destination, but rather, what if it is the destination? Prayer is not simply a step of the journey, prayer is the journey. When we realize this, we begin to understand prayer as a continual conversation with God and our relationship with God deepens to new levels.
 
And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.
1 John 5:14 ESV
 
 
From Conversation with God by Brian Sutton on Youversion