Value scripture and prayer
1 Thess 5:17 Pray without ceasing
Psa 119:97 Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.
I hope everyone of us who is truly saved values our Bibles and prayer – something would be terribly wrong if we didn’t. But how much do we value them?
Scripture and prayer are both about one thing: communication. Communication between God and me. In reading my Bible God speaks to me, in praying I speak to God, and both are vitally important. The problem is that both take time and both preclude speaking to, and listening to, others.
No one can seriously pray while they are speaking or listening to someone else, no one can seriously study God’s Word while they are speaking or listening to someone else. These things cannot be done in some multi-tasking fashion, they require our minds, our hearts, our full attention, and so there is always a question of priority and competition when it comes to these activities, and in normal life, we can so easily find them being squeezed down or even squeezed out of the day.
Now for most of us this virus has affected us in one of two ways – either we are now busier and time is even more precious, or we are less busy and we have more time available to us – either way we are having to reassess how we use our time. At the same time most of us would see an even more urgent, more extensive need for prayer and study – at the very least we have far more to be praying about.
So surely what should be happening is that the longer this virus lasts, the more we should be seeing scripture and prayer as essential gifts of God’s grace to be valued and used every day – indeed as often as possible; and if our days have become far fuller then how much more careful we need to be to ensure that somehow we still find time and space to read and study God’s Word and spend quality time before His throne in prayer!
If, on the other hand, you have been forced into self-isolation then the saying “the devil finds work for idle hands” can become too true. Fill much of that time with communication: communication with God, in His Word and in prayer.