Guidelines For Living

Guest (Male): Take a break from your busy schedule and join Harold Sala for Guidelines for Living.

Harold Sala: You can no more have intimacy with God without prayer than you can have intimacy in your marriage without communication. Though you may have never thought of the two in relation to each other, what makes both meaningful is much the same. Success in both is dependent upon the quality of your relationship with the object of your affection.

When you can't communicate with your husband or wife for whatever reason, your relationship rapidly disintegrates. Your love grows cold. Warm memories are just that: recollections of the past, but not realities of the present.

Prayer is communication. And the secret of intimacy in your spiritual life is being able to share your thoughts, your heart, and your feelings without fear of rejection.

What are the enemies of intimacy? Well, there are several, and they apply both to your mate and your relationship with God. For the next three minutes, however, I'd like to focus on your relationship with the Lord.

Enemy number one is busyness. And this is undoubtedly the chief foe that turns our good intentions to well-worn excuses and leaves us feeling pretty guilty. Yes, we know we ought to read the Bible and pray, but we don't have time. So what's the solution? In a single word, priorities. You find time for what you really think is important.

In my personal life, I've found the only way to turn intentions into even simple, small forward steps is to set the clock 30 minutes earlier and then force myself to get up and moving. But won't that leave me tired out? No, to the contrary, you'll have greater energy, be more focused, and accomplish far more than if you slept.

Enemy number two: attitude. Whose attitude? Yours. It's quite amazing how your personal relationships with others also affect your relationship with God. Anger, bitterness, harsh feelings, negative emotions—they don't put you in a happy mood so you can bow your heart and say, "Good morning, Lord, it's me." To be honest, you'd have to say, "Lord, I'm not very happy right now."

But pouring out your heart and telling him how you feel will not only change your attitude but create the environment whereby God will let you know what your response should be.

Enemy number three is distractions. "I'm burned out," writes a friend of Guidelines who explains, "I go to work early and go home late because of overtime work. I'm beat when I reach home, and my quiet time often becomes really quiet time because I'm dead asleep." Drowsiness isn't the only distraction.

If you haven't discovered this, you will because it happens to everybody. As soon as you bow your head and you start to pray, the phone rings. Your two kids, the ones who play tirelessly together hour after hour, will start a war. Or, boom, just like that, you have instant recall and you think of what you didn't get done yesterday. You remember the phone call, a pretty important one too, that you didn't return.

So is there a solution to distractions? If your mind wanders, pray out loud. If something comes to mind which is important, stop long enough to jot down a memo which serves as a reminder later, but don't quit.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ challenged Peter saying, "Watch and pray so that you won't enter into temptation." It's still true. Intimacy with God doesn't come by going to church for an hour on Sunday or flinging a prayer towards heaven as a basketball player hurls the ball toward the hoop, hoping to win the game in the last three seconds of play. It is sustained and kept alive by praying.

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