Texting vs. Prayer

 reetings to you all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,

     Psalm 119:164 says, “Seven times a day do I praise thee because of thy righteous judgments.”

     I have learned how to text.  Once I got a smart phone,I discovered another way of communicating with people.  I can text them.  Of course, you never know when they are going to read the text and answer or if they will answer at all.  There is a list of texting acronyms, such as lol, laugh out loud, that one needs to know in order to convey some different thoughts along the way that  you can do with your voice but not with typed words.  I can only text with one finger so it takes me a long time to get anything said so I tried using the4 microphone to dictate text to my phone.  It must not like my accent as I get words that are not intended and if I say, two, I might get  to, too, or two or the number “2.”  Texting to a person who is 84 years old apparently is not an enjoyable experience for most people, as who wants to talk to us old folks anyway?  I am happy that I don’t have to text God.

     Prayer is a unique form of having a discussion with God.  Unlike texting, God answers and hears all prayers and will respond in His timing to all requests.  The answers can be, “yes, no, and not yet. “  Like many persistent children in the line at Walmart, we keep on asking, thinking that maybe God didn’t hear it the first time and so repeat it over and over.  There are many scriptures on the topic of prayer and I chose the one above simply because it says, “seven times a day I praise thee…”   You can find that prayer exists in the morning, in the evening, seven times a day, and Paul exhorted us to pray without ceasing.  Prayer is one of the most necessary functions of the believer as it concerns contact with God and it should not be avoided.    We sometimes think that because our schedule is extra full on a certain day, that we should cut our prayer time short until we have more time to spend with God.  The opposite should be our course of action.  The more needs we have on a given day, the more time we should spend in prayer.  I have had people text me for a month or so and then just get tired of me and never say another word.  Fortunately, God doesn’t get tired of communicating with us.  We can and should learn about Him in His Word and then keep conversing with Him and the method is called,”prayer.”  Jeremiah wrote the words of the Lord which said, “Call unto me…”  Are we calling unto Him and enjoying the benefits of prayer?  We are never too young for prayer and we are certainly never too old for prayer.  How is your prayer life?  How much time do you and I spend in prayer?  May we say with the Psalmist, “Seven times a day…”  Or may we say with Paul, we pray without ceasing.  Praise God today when you pray to Him!