CHAPTER TWELVE

ENJOYING GOD BY PRAYING AT SET TIMES

Scripture Reading: Psa. 27:4; 84:4, 10; 55:17; 119:164; Dan. 6:10; Acts 10:2-3, 9-11, 30; Gen. 18:16-17, 22-23, 33

NEEDING A SET TIME OF PRAYER

God is Spirit, and the most appropriate way for us to absorb and enjoy Him is to turn to our spirit. Turning to our spirit is as necessary as breathing in air. We will now consider how to enjoy God from a different perspective. Although God as the Spirit is available everywhere on earth, and although we can now receive Him anywhere and at any time, those who are experienced know that we need set times to devote ourselves to absorbing God. This can be compared to breathing. There is no need to concentrate on breathing—we breathe spontaneously at any time and in any place. But everyone who is conscious of their health knows that we need to set aside time every day to breathe deeply. We should find a quiet and open space and spend some time to breathe deeply. Deep breathing is beneficial to our health. If we only breathe normally, we cannot remove more than a certain amount of carbon dioxide. In order to remove more than this amount, we must breathe deeply. It is also through breathing deeply that a fresh supply of oxygen is able to fill more of our lungs. A good exercise in deep breathing thoroughly cleanses our lungs. Similarly, our drawing near to God and breathing Him at any time is general and common. If we want to touch Him in a deep way, and if we want to breathe out our sins and absorb God so that our entire being is renewed, we need a definite time to come to God. We need spiritual deep breathing. In other words, we need a set time to come to God to pray.

We should all be clear that prayer is to breathe in God. It is to breathe out everything that belongs to us and to breathe in God and everything of Him. Prayer is a kind of breathing. Although we mention many things in prayer, our goal is to breathe. We breathe out everything that is within us through prayer. At the same time, we breathe in everything of God through prayer. This is prayer. If we grasp this meaning of prayer, we will be able to pray anywhere and any time. No matter how noisy the environment is or how busy we are, we can breathe in God. Nevertheless, there is still the need for us to set aside some time during the day for prayer. We need such a time for spiritual deep breathing so that we can absorb and enjoy God in an intensified way.

Set Times of Prayer Being Worthwhile

Regrettably, we often spend time on worthless things. We waste precious time on things of no value and neglect the most precious thing—breathing in God. The psalmist says, “A day in Your courts is better than a thousand” (Psa. 84:10). This means that spending time to draw near to God and to breathe in God is most precious. Spending an hour a day to absorb God is of more value than occupying ourselves with other things for a thousand hours. Nothing in this world is more worthwhile than breathing in God.

The most precious time of our day is when we breathe in God, when we pray. Whether our time is well spent depends on what we accomplish during that time. God is the supreme blessing, the ultimate treasure of the universe. Nothing is more precious than God. Even the blessings that God gives cannot be compared with God Himself. We do not pray to receive blessings from God or even to obtain answers to our prayers. We pray to breathe in God. We receive God and enjoy Him in our prayer. Nothing can be more precious than obtaining God through prayer, but we are often foolish in our accounting; we do not know that we must do this most worthwhile thing.

In our Christian life there are two contradicting things. The first is that being filled with God through prayer gives us the most precious reward; the other is that gossip, or loose talk, gives us nothing but loss. We should consider how many hours a day we spend in loose talk. The brothers and especially the sisters often say that they are too busy to pray. But when sisters come together, they gossip a lot; they can even make time to gossip. Gossip or unnecessary talk, which are actually words that spread death, bring nothing but loss to the church. For this reason I say that we often do the most unprofitable things. We neglect the most profitable things and daily engage ourselves in more unprofitable things. If we would use a notebook to record the times that we daily spend in prayer and to record the times that we engage in loose talk, we would be surprised to see that less than one-tenth of the time we spend in loose talk is spent in prayer. We waste our precious time on worthless things.

Prayer is to breathe in God; it is to receive God and to absorb Him. This is priceless. Why are we not attracted to this? Our problem is that we hear many exhortations concerning breathing in God, but we spend only a few minutes breathing. We should ask ourselves of what use this is to us. We need to change our concept. Even though we are busy, we should still set aside some time to receive and absorb God. No matter how busy we are, we should daily devote some time for prayer with the sole purpose of breathing in God.