Hello, and welcome back to cultivating growth. We want to thank everyone for joining us this week. As we talked about last week and a little bit of a preview for 2025, we're going to be breaking down each month with a different topic this month. We're going to talk about creating better daily habits.

And we're going to have a few different topics throughout the course of the month that we're going to discuss within that category. And this week, we're going to talk about developing better daily habits when it comes to prayer. And so with that, let's get right to it. 

Well, John, you made mention that throughout this month, we're going to spend some time specifically talking about, you know, habits. habits and kind of developing, you know, good spiritual habits. You know, we, we often talk, even culturally there, there's a lot of talk about habits where at the beginning of you know, a new year and a lot of people are, you know, they'll talk about building a positive habits.

They'll talk about kind of taking down maybe some bad habits that they, they thought that they had had. And so it's something I think that a lot of people are familiar with. I did look up the definition of, of habit. I thought that was, you know, just kind of interesting and the end of it is what really kind of caught my eye, but just, you know, a simple kind of dictionary definition is a settled or regular tendency or practice, you know, that makes sense.

But then there was a comma and another statement and the other statement was especially one that is hard to give up.  And, you know, that. makes sense to a lot of us, you know, when it comes to, you know, the bad habits that we often have. We say, man, you know, that's just a bad habit that I have. And it's really, really hard to not do this thing.

But rarely do we talk about it in regards to good habits that we have. And and I think it's really interesting when we bring that definition and that idea into the spiritual realm where we are this month is, you know, can we establish strong daily habits? So just prayer, as we're going to talk about for a few minutes today, to the point that we feel sickened or bothered or, you know, turned, you know, just, it, it, it messes our day up if prayer isn't a part of it.

In a lot of ways, I mean, that's the definition about what a habit is. Yeah, you know, when I was, you were reading that definition and I was, Just thinking about how that looks in our lives and how we go about developing healthy, good, strong habits. One of the things that comes to mind is repetition, obviously, in order to develop that habit.

Habits aren't formed after doing something one time. Habits aren't formed after doing something two times. It takes repetition. In order to develop a habit around something, and a lot of times in the early stages of developing those habits, you have to force yourself to do something. If you're trying to develop a habit around exercising some mornings, you're not going to want to get up.

You have to force yourself to do it over time. That becomes much easier as the habit forms. And I think the same is true when it comes to something like prayer. If you find yourself in a situation where you're just not in a regular routine of praying. Doing it once or twice is not going to develop a habit around that practice.

And there may be some times where it feels awkward and you're uncomfortable with it, or you don't know when to do it, or you don't know where to go to do it, or you don't know what to say. And you need to get past that by just pushing yourself. In a positive way to participate in this communication with God.

And that's really what prayer is. It's us communicating with him, talking to him. And over time, we'll begin to feel more comfortable with that practice, but we can't let ourselves get discouraged and give up in the early stages of that. Because it feels uncomfortable or awkward or weird at first, but over time that process will pay off for us and our relationship with God will grow deeper, but just like with any habit, that's going to take time.

Yeah, I mean there are lots of examples, I think, in Scripture that kind of point to, you know, strong spiritual characters that, you know, exhibited  good prayer habits or communicating with God habits. I mean, you know, a couple that come to mind. I think Moses is an example of that. We often don't think of his conversations with God as prayer as we, you know, think about it today.

But he's communicating with God and he does so on a very regular basis. I think David is another example of that. The book of Psalms helps us to kind of see the habit that he had. per scripture. We don't see it certainly as much as Moses and David, but you know, scripture gives us that specifically with Daniel and Daniel chapter six.

When his adversaries were looking to get him, they couldn't find, you know, anything. Well, they went to his habits and they said, well, listen, he, he prays every day and he prays at this time every day. And he prays in this place every day. And the text tells us that, you know, Once he knew that decree was signed, Daniel kneeled down, you know, by his window as his custom was and prayed as he continually does.

But really the greatest example of that, I think, in a lot of ways is Jesus. And, you know, there's a passage in Mark chapter 1 that really I always find striking because there's a picture that Mark gives us at the beginning of Jesus ministry of just how ridiculously busy That Jesus was and how many people were pressing on him just all the time.

He had so many things going. He had so many people coming at him.  And towards the end of that passage, we're told there in Mark chapter one in verse 35, that the morning having risen a long while before daylight, he went out and. Parted to a solitary place and there he prayed and then we're told Peter's kind of, they're looking for him and they can't find him and you know, everybody's kind of pressing to be around him.

But here Jesus, he is sacrificing sleep. He's sacrificing things because this habit of his was so important to him. And that's what you do. When something is so important to you that back to your definition, you would miss it if you didn't participate in it. When, when something is that important to us, then we make time for it and everything else gets moved so that.

This particular practice, whatever it might be can be done. And we want to get to that point where prayer occupies that space in our life, where if work needs to be put to the side for a moment, so I can pray, work gets put to the side. If sleep needs to be sacrificed and sleep needs to be sacrificed, the, what, what is important to us?

What are our habits around prayer? And is it something that we would miss? desperately miss if we weren't actively participating in it. That's where all of us want to be. And I think Daniel's a great example. You, you mentioned several good biblical examples there of individuals who we can see in their actions that their immediate reaction to a situation was prayer that tells us that this was habitual on their part.

They didn't have to think about, I wonder what I should do in this situation. No, they, they know exactly what to do. They didn't have to process it necessarily because it just came so naturally to them. Hezekiah is another great example of someone who, who kind of embodies the same practices where He receives bad news, whether it's an attacking army or whether his health is being taken away from.

He receives this news. His immediate response is to pray. That's someone who didn't have to think about what I do in that situation because they had developed healthy, strong habits around prayer, and that's where all of us should be wanting to get to as well. Yeah. I mean, there's no question about that.

And, you know, as we, you know, kind of start to think about, I think everyone would kind of agree that, you know, when you talk about prayer. It's something we think it should be a habit, right? We all think that that's important, and I think in a lot of ways, we want to strive to have that habit. And so, maybe for a couple minutes, we could talk about some ways, you know, to kind of establish that.

And we talked about one of them that I think is really important, is just acknowledging how important prayer is, and the power that it possesses. And when you really spend the time to realize what prayer is, You know, that opportunity to speak to the Creator, to God, to Jehovah, and you understand the power that it has that only is going to help in building a habit of prayer.

Yeah, there's a passage that I love around this topic in Psalm 55, and I think it speaks to kind of two different aspects of what we've been talking about here. Number one, understanding who you're praying to and what God is capable of doing in your life. And then two, the repetition around that in Psalm 55 beginning in verse 16, it says, As for me, I will call upon God and the Lord shall save me evening and morning and at noon.

I will pray and cry aloud and he shall hear my voice. I think there's. Something to be said about, obviously this is David writing the Psalm. He understands that God is capable of saving him. And so he knows that he needs to talk to God and take his concerns and his worries to God. But then he also acknowledges the need to do that repetitively.

And certainly there's no set time period in which we have to pray. There's no magic number of how many times a day we have to pray. But I think there is something to be said for, especially in the early stages of developing some of these habits, maybe you try to set a goal  First thing in the morning, sometime middle of the day in the evening, you're spending time with God in prayer and you use those benchmarks through the day to begin developing some of those habits.

I think that's a good practice to utilize and maybe over time you shape shift around those times a little bit, but you begin that process with kind of a schedule, if you will. to just help yourself get into the routine of regularly stopping your day and praying. Yeah, and I think, listen, we see that biblically with, with Daniel in the passage that we mentioned in Daniel six, as was his custom, he's praying three times a day.

And I think, you know, in order to kind of help build, you know, that habit a little bit, you know, I think your point is maybe even a little bit stronger than, you know, if you try to put a time on the clock, like it eight o'clock in the morning, I'm going to pray or 10 o'clock in the morning or 12, I'm going to, and maybe that will work for you, but you, you, you set it next to something that always happens, right?

You don't know, you don't always know what's going to happen at 10 or eight or noon. You don't, but you always know you're going to wake up, right? And you put into practice that when I wake up. I'm going to pray. You're always, at some point that day, going to go to bed, and you start to put into practice that, you know, listen, when I lay down to go to sleep, I'm going to pray.

You're always going to eat lunch. You're always going to do something, and, you know, everybody's day looks different, but there are very common things that happen in our day, and now you start to, you know, you set prayer next to that, and I think that is one way you can really start to build, you know, habits.

There's a book Called Atomic Habits. That's really well known, very popular book. And he, the author uses that exact idea to, to help people begin to, as he says, stack habits on top of one another. Use something that you know, you do all the time already and use that.  To stack other good habits on top of and so it's a strategy that certainly has you know secular use in a lot of different ways I think we can utilize some of those same strategies Spiritually speaking as we begin to try to develop some of these good habits.

Yeah, we'll go ahead and put the brakes on it here I'll kind of you know Give us a little precursor for what we're going to talk about next week, just per your, you know, your, you know, comment that you made about the importance of stacking habits. Next week, we're going to talk about building the habit of studying from God's Word.

And here, in a lot of ways, can be two habits that can be stacked together. That when I get up in the morning, I'm praying. And I'm, I'm reading a little bit of God's word or whatever time during the day, very easy habits to stack together. And I look forward to that conversation more next week. Well, let's close and we'll do so as we commonly do with the passage and it's a very short one until the point the apostle Paul in writing to the brethren in Thessalonica, he's kind of going through a bullet point kind of a rapid fire succession of some admonitions.

And he gives one that is short. But certainly to the point and very profound, 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 and verse 17, the very simply pray without ceasing.