The sacrifice of prayer...

“But the king replied to Araunah, ‘No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” (2 Sam 24:24)

Waking up this morning was a struggle. For some reason, now that I wake up at 7am, its way harder than when I use to wake up at 5am. Five am or 7am, it’s early and I would much rather just wake up at 8am and get that extra hour of sleep that I know will put me right at the mark for my allotted 8 hours. So, this morning, I tried to push the envelope. When my clock went off at 7am, I was having a rather peculiar dream and was actually glad that is woke me up when it did. The reason I knew something funny was going on, is because my alarm went off really different this morning. I can’t even begin to describe how it scared me out of my sleep. It wasn’t cool at all. So anyway, since I had been awaken with a startle, I decided that should automatically allow for me to have an extra 10 minutes to regain my composure and allow my body to catch up with the rate at which my brain waves were traveling (which was extremely fast considering I was horrified) lol. So, 7:10am comes around and I just don’t feel like I have had enough recovery time…so I did what anyone that is still sleepy would do…I fell back asleep. Not even 5 minutes later, I heard the spirit telling me to GET UP, NOW! That’s really what He said! I was like not trying to hear it…But what did I do? I got up!

So after that entire episode this morning, I remembered the scripture above that I wrote down last night before I went to bed. It reminded me that it’s not always going to be easy to wake up an extra hour and a half early every morning just to ensure that I have my time of fellowship with my Heavenly Father. It reminded me that God desire’s us to make the sacrifice of prayer…Knowing that prayer isn’t always convenient, or fun, or really even something you desire to do at the time in which He wants you to do it…He knows that He has something for you. He knows that if you will just get up or stop doing whatever it is that you are doing that is hindering you from communion with Him at that particular time, He knows that you will be fulfilled beyond the point of gratification if you will just sacrifice your time to pray.

My pastor once, delivered a message about prayer and how it was a sacrifice to God. Now that we live in the New Testament era, we are not required to bring brunt offering to the alter as King Samuel was going to do in the above scripture (that was their way of staying connected to God and ensuring they had His covering over their lives, land and people remained). However when God sent Jesus to die on the cross for us, He established a new covenant with us. He said that if we would come to Him in praise and worship in His son’s name, that we would remain in Him and Him in us. The only way to commune with our Father in this nature, is to connect with Him in prayer…To sacrifice our time to fellowship with Him…to praise Him…to worship Him…to hear a word from Him. This is one of our spiritual acts of worship to Him and He never forgets our sacrifices. Every morning that I wake up and push my way into God’s presence, I am able to start my day with a sense of confidence and purpose. I am restored, rejuvenated and joyful! Furthermore, I feel like I have accomplished something…and I have! I suppressed the desires of my flesh and was able to feed my “spirit man” with the food that comes only when we commune with God. Producing a sense of fulfillment that is indescribable and incomparable to that one extra hour I would have gotten in my bed! Because we all know that sleep breeds sleep; the more you sleep, the more your body desires to sleep. So I never would have been satisfied. But in the presence of the Lord, there is perfection, there is liberty, there is satisfaction! So I urge you to get into the presence of God and allow Him to give you your own revelation and understanding about the sacrifice of prayer! It will truly change your life…