We know that prayer is hard work. Prayer can be discouraging. Often, we pray expecting immediate answers. It’s sort of like when we were gardening, when our children were young, and I had them come out and put the seeds in the row, and we covered them up with dirt, and we watered it. And my daughter came out the next morning and looked at the garden and said, “Dad, it didn’t work,” because she was expecting immediate fruit. Sometimes we do that with prayer. So how to pray? Remember who you are. Remember who God is. Remember what you have been given. Quote Scripture as you pray. Rest in God's presence and power. Pray for grace and then get up and continue what God has called for you to do!

I want to give you five motivational reasons to open the Bible when you don't feel like it. 1. Identity The only way you can properly understand who you are and what you were given life and breath to do is when you look at yourself through the lens of the narrative of Scripture. It's only in this story that you will learn that you were made by God and for God, that everything you are and have comes from him, and that you were made to live for something vastly bigger than yourself. 2. Understanding You will never know all that you need to know in order to live as you were designed to live by human experience, research, and analysis. This is why God immediately spoke with Adam and Eve after he created them. In the same way, God speaks to us in his Word so that we can know and understand, and in knowing and understanding, live as we were created to live. 3. Comfort The world in which you live can be very confusing, distressing, and painful. But the biblical story comforts us with another reality - that our world is not out of control. Rather, our world is under the careful personal control of One who is the ultimate definition of everything that is good, true, wise, and loving. We can rest, not because we understand what's happening, but because we know the One who rules it all. 4. Salvation This is the ultimate reason for the Word of God. Without it, we wouldn't know that our biggest problem exists inside of us and is called sin. The biblical story chronicles the great things God has done and is doing to rescue, forgive, and deliver us from our sin. The epicenter event of the narrative is the Cross of Jesus Christ, delivering to us the one thing that we desperately need but cannot achieve on our own - new life. 5. Hope The biblical story, because it is a story, has a final chapter. One day, the sickness, sadness, and sin of this broken world will end. We will be like God and with God forever. The Author of this Book has guaranteed the end of the story by raising Jesus from the dead. No matter what happens, we have hope, because we know the final page has already been penned.