Call Me!

Like many of you I am sure, on my desk in my office sits a telephone. It has all kinds of features. Voicemail, call forwarding, hold, caller ID, and a call history. Now, I know I am one year and forty-seven days shy of turning sixty, but I cannot remember not having access to a phone. It may have been one phone hanging on the wall in the kitchen, but there was always a phone. If you needed to make a call away from home, there were phone booths you could use. Just had to have some change on you. In fact, in 1999, there were approximately two million phone booths in the United States.

As I grew up, the communications industry grew with me. Soon we had more than one phone in the house. Then, there were cassette tape answering machines. This was followed by cordless phones. No longer did you have to buy a twenty-foot phone cord so that you could sit on the cellar stairs and shut the door behind you for some privacy while you talked to your girlfriend or boyfriend. With a cordless phone you could go anywhere. Sometimes the signal would even reach outside! How we communicated with each other continued to change. In the late 1950s, the first pager was introduced by Motorola and by 1980 there were over 3.2 million worldwide users! Everything changed in 1992 when Nokia released one of the first cellphones with text messaging capabilities. By the 2000s, smartphones arrived and with access to the internet we literally had the world in the palm of our hands. Today, worldwide, there are approximately 6.57 billion smartphones. That actually works out to nearly 85% of the entire global population of 8 billion. Now, I understand a lot of people have multiple phones, but this is still a lot of phones. 

Why bring this up? Well, communication with each other has changed incredibly since Alexander Graham Bell said to his assistant Thomas Watson, “Mr. Watson come here, I want you” in 1876. How we communicate with God, however, has not changed. From the Garden of Eden to the surface of the moon, if we want to talk to God – just pray.

There is no “magic formula” for prayer. There are those who believe if you do not say the right words, or pray in the right position (head bowed, sitting, kneeling, etc.), God will not hear us. This is completely unbiblical. God does not answer prayer based on when we pray, where we are, what position our body is in, or even what words we use. He listens to all prayers offered from a sincere heart and He answers them. 1 John 5:14-15 says, “…we are confident that he hears us whenever we ask for anything that pleases him. And since we know he hears us when we make our requests, we also know that he will give us what we ask for.” Note John says, “anything that pleases God.” That’s why as children God did not answer our pray that our irritating older sibling would disappear. He does answer all prayer though and there are only three answers. “Yes, no, and not yet.” That’s right, “No,” is an answer. Not the one we were hoping for but He’s God and He gets to decide. “Not yet,” means God answers prayer in His time and in His way. Often, that does not sync up with what we want and how quickly we want it but, again, He’s God and He gets to decide.

Nonetheless, however technology will change over time, communicating with God will always be the same. He is saying, “Call Me!” Just talk to Him. He’s listening and He loves you.     

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Remember you can email praises and petitions to southchurchprayer@gmail.com. We lift them up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at 4:00 pm on Facebook Live.