Philippians 4:6
Pray About Everything
Philippians 4: 6 is My Fervent Prayers’ Key Verse No. 3 out of four. Though the actual verse is much longer and has valuable information, for the purpose of encouraging you to pray, the “take-away” for this verse, that I want to focus on, is that we can know that we can pray about everything. There is no topic off limits with God.
Our first perception of God’s character may not be correct
I once read that as young children we get our first notion of Who God is and What He is like by looking at our earthly dad. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it makes some sense to me.
If we do get our first glimpse of God from our earthly dad, and we had (or perhaps still have) a great dad with whom we could discuss anything knowing he would listen and care, then we may have an easier time believing we can talk to God about anything, and He will listen and care; however, what about those of us
- whose father was not approachable,
- whose father was not a good listener,
- whose father got easily upset if we broached a topic he didn’t like, or
- whose father was completely absent due to death or divorce?
Maybe we had a good dad, and maybe we also had nine siblings. Maybe our dad didn’t have a lot of time to talk individually to us and all our siblings.
Those of us who have had such experiences may struggle a little more with the idea that we can talk to God about anything and everything, and He will listen with a caring ear; nevertheless, we can. God is not bound or defined by human frailties or flaws that afflicted our earthly dads, nor does He have any time constraints. He has literally all the time in the world to listen to each of us individually.
God is listening with a good ear and a caring heart
God has time to listen. God is listening. God cares. No problem is too big or too small for Him. Corrie Ten Boom, author of The Hiding Place and survivor of World War II concentration camps, said it this way.
If an issue is big enough to bother us, then it is big enough for us to pray about it. For some of us, the idea of praying for something as simple as a parking space seems ludicrous, but for those of us who have had to park knowing that when we get out of work, we are going to have to walk to a dimly lit parking garage . . . alone . . . late at night, praying about parking doesn’t seem quite so trite. However small our issue may seem, if it is important to us, then God is ready to hear about it.
God wants to be our first resort not our last
What about the big issues in our life? Some of us have a nagging feeling that we should not burden God with those problems. We feel like He expects us to handle things . . . until we cannot.
Maybe that is the kind of home we grew up in. We were taught to be responsible and handle things and only call on our parents if we couldn’t handle a problem on our own. Be responsible, and be independent, we were told; consequently, we now feel like God expects similarly of us, and we ought to handle as many of our problems as we can . . . until we can’t, and only then will we trouble God with our problems.
God is not troubled. Period.
Know this, God is not troubled by us. He is not troubled by our problems. He isn’t troubled by the number. He isn’t troubled by their size: large or small. He isn’t troubled by their timing. He isn’t troubled by their complexity. He isn’t troubled. Period. He wants to hear from us, and He wants us to tell Him about everything.
If I can quote Corrie Ten Boom again, she painted a very vivid word picture of two ways to think about prayer. She asked, “Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire? Do you use prayer as your primary tool for navigating your day, or do you just pull it out if something blows up, and you cannot get on with your day without it?
My prayer for us each of us is that we will make prayer our steering wheel, and that we will know that we can pray about anything and everything, anywhere and anytime.
God is ready and wants to hear from you right now
Wherever you are right now, take a moment and quiet your mind. Think about something that has been troubling you. Tell God about that problem right now. Tell Him what about it causes you stress. Ask Him to give you wisdom to deal with the problem the best way possible. Maybe you want to ask Him to fix the problem, but definitely ask Him to use it to bring you and others closer to Him.