Help! I'm Not Good at PrayerSample

"I want to grow closer to God."

Today, you join millions of others who have opened this app with the same heartfelt desire to grow closer to God. You may be longing for a sense of His presence, praying for a miracle, or seeking a sign of His work in your life. You are not alone in this journey!

When you read the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, it's apparent that one knows all the right words to say but doesn't know God well, while the other feels sheepish around God but longs to be close to Him.

It's possible to be religious but not know intimacy with God. For those people, their prayers are more like a monologue with God rather than a dialogue with God.

However, Jesus wanted His followers to know intimacy with God. This truth is evident by how He taught them to pray during The Sermon on the Mount. The way Jesus taught them to pray begins with "Our Father."

For many people who've heard or recited this prayer hundreds or thousands of times, the significance of these two words may be hard to grasp because of their overfamiliarity. But these two words symbolize intimacy and access; instead of formal language reflecting the distance between creation and Creator, Jesus models and calls us into intimacy with our Father. A healthy relationship between a father and a child is close and tender.

Intimacy with our Father allows us to be honest and process through big decisions and emotions. Jesus Himself modeled this in Luke 22:41-44 when He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. Though He knew that His path from birth was to go to the cross, Jesus struggled in prayer on three separate occasions. He wrestled with God, and the Scripture records Him sweating drops of blood, a physical condition that modern doctors believe reflects intense anxiety to the point of bursting blood vessels in His forehead.

When you can be that honest with someone, real intimacy is present. You need to know something about that kind of relationship - you cannot delegate someone to do intimacy for you. We can leverage all sorts of technology to make our lives easier and accomplish specific tasks. But no app or artificial intelligence can accept God's invitation to intimacy for you.

Intimacy with God comes as we accept His invitation to pray and then wrestle with Him through whatever life challenges come our way. While many people seem to want to be close to God, far fewer can stand what intimacy requires. If we get close enough to God to share our deepest fears and most secret struggles, we get close enough to hear God challenge and call us in ways sufficient to make us tremble with discomfort. God may reveal something we'd rather not know or send us someplace we'd instead not go.

Intimacy can be scary because we feel exposed. But intimacy is where we experience a sense of knowing and being known, loving and being loved, and seeing and being seen by the God who made us and sustains us.

Today, God invites you into a deeper, more intimate relationship with Him, and this intimacy begins as you pray.

Tomorrow, we will examine a challenging and complicated invitation we often misunderstand. We skip it to our detriment. Take advantage of the next day of this plan!