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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Erin Banks

Prayer and How We Can Grow Closer to God

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this Sabbath day.

We thank you for bringing us here safely, for this new day of life that you've provided for us.

We thank you for giving us truth to understand and to learn from you.

Lord, we pray that because of your truth, we will be able to be changed and be more like you.

And we pray that your Holy Spirit will work this in us.

I ask, Lord, that today as I speak, that these will be words of truth and not error and that all the things I say will be acceptable before you.

I ask all these things in your name we pray amen.

Today I'm going to speak to you guys about prayer.

And I don't come to you as someone who's got it all figured out.

And as I was preparing for today, it was a blessing to learn a little bit more about prayer that I didn't know before.

And so my first question for you guys is what kind of connection do you have with God or what kind of connection do you want with God?

As they so eloquently sung, we need God every day and every hour.

And I think that's the kind of connection that we want with him, but life gets us down.

We have circumstances that bring us down, so sometimes we don't have that connection.

I'm gonna start out with a story of my own.

Many of you may know, I used to work for Starbucks, and I worked there for a long time, like 10 and a half years.

And it was an interesting journey of my life.

But I saw God working through me and with me in many ways.

So there is a particular instance where I basically had started to take my pre-reqs to go to nursing school.

And while I was taking my pre-reqs, I was at a different Starbucks store.

So you can transfer to different stores if you'd like.

And when I was at that store, I decided I want to go back to the original store that I worked at.

And so I spoke to my manager, I spoke to the district manager, they said it was okay, I could transfer back.

And so 1 thing that you should know is that before I got baptized, even though I was raised Adventist, I used to work on the Sabbath, I did all sorts of things and it was never an issue.

But after I became baptized and I started having Bible studies, I realized I didn't want to work on the Sabbath anymore.

So I told my manager that I no longer wanted to work on the Sabbath, and because I was going to school, I needed to cut my hours.

Unfortunately, a few weeks later, she scheduled me on the Sabbath, and so I went and spoke to her, and this quickly became some of the worst times of my life.

She reminded me that I used to work on the Sabbath, so I should continue to work on the Sabbath.

And I was trying to explain to her a little bit more about that, and she didn't care.

It became a problem that I wasn't listening to her, and that I just wanted to do whatever I wanted to do, and not put a store.

So I mean, it kind of blew up from there.

It became like I was in high school again.

She was talking to me, talking about me to other people that worked there, even though she was my manager, she had grandchildren.

She had told the district manager that I was being insubordinate and that I wouldn't listen to her.

She would spread rumors to some of the other people that work there And it was kind of crazy for me because I was trying to do the right thing, but I was being met with opposition.

And there were people who, I was told this later by a friend of mine, that 1 of the other supervisors, I was a supervisor at the time, was telling other people that I had stolen money out of the safe.

I don't know why nobody else told me I stole money out of the safe, but it was that kind of atmosphere.

People would go to the back and I would be left up front and there would be nobody to help the customers, I had to do it alone.

At 1 point, this is like the lowest point, the manager got her husband on the phone and he proceeded to yell at me about how horrible of an employee I was.

And when I finally was able to speak to the district manager, she said, I need to be more consistent, but she would speak to the manager and that would be the end of it.

But 1 thing, I could go on and on about all the circumstances that happened, but 1 thing I noticed is that I started to pray, and I started to pray really hard, and I shared a story even though it was so long ago because it really has stuck with me all these years, and when I prayed, I was praying for the circumstance to be changed, but then after a while, I started praying for them.

I started praying for how I could show them God.

I started showing them, started to pray about how I could help them or be kind to them.

And through that prayer journey with God, he started to change my prayers, which was an amazing thing.

And so at the end of it, I realized too that he wanted to lead me and for me to have faith in him and I saw that in a way that he would answer my prayers and he would tell me what to do.

I would start to bring in gifts for them.

I would, even though they were rude to me, I would still be nice to them in any circumstance that I could.

I was always thinking about how I could make it through that day, even though I was in the parking lot maybe half an hour before work crying about it.

And he would show me the things that he asked me to do in the Sabbath school lesson a couple of weeks later.

And so I do have to confess, though, even though I had such an amazing prayer journey with him at that time, I do see that while I've grown in other ways and I have grown in prayer, I still am kind of stuck in that mode where if I have a problem I run to God and pray.

Sometimes when things are going well, we don't pray as much because things are great.

And then when we're in trouble, we start to go, God I need you right now and we have the best prayer life ever but it's really inconsistent and then sometimes there are others who have a different journey where they are praying to God when times are good and they have a great prayer life and then when times are bad they have they struggle with praying and then there's everything else in between maybe you are consistent all the time.

But I want to talk about how we can have a consistent prayer life and how having that inconsistent prayer life is actually detrimental to our walk with him and how close we can grow to him.

So I was actually planning on speaking about a different subject but the more and more I read, God was leading me to just talk about prayer and how you can have a life with him in prayer.

We typically use prayer to speak to God when we feel like circumstances are tough and we speak earnestly and I was talking about that earlier through my experience.

We are so earnest and fervent in our prayers but a lot of times we feel that way because we're in danger.

We feel like, oh I I'm in temptation, I'm going through a trial, something bad is happening to me.

But I have to stop and think and say, aren't we always in danger?

Aren't our very lives always in trial and temptation?

We have an adversary who seeks to devour us.

So that's something that we should keep in mind.

It isn't from 1 hide to the next or 1 load to the next.

We really, really need to be consistent in our prayers because we are always under temptation.

Prayer is powerful and I think that as we were talking about, since we have that adversary, it is the key to overcoming any temptation that he sends our way.

And it's the key to making it through those trials.

And so we are severely unequipped when we go through life without prayer.

And so the biggest thing that I think we have an issue is that we feel like God does not hear us when we pray.

And sometimes we feel like God doesn't answer the way we should be answered or the way we want to be answered.

And so I would like us to go ahead and turn to Proverbs 1529.

We're gonna go through quite a few verses today.

And Proverbs 1529 says, "'The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hearth the prayer of the righteous.

And I started thinking when I heard that voice, wow, he hears the voice of the righteous.

Or maybe I'm unrighteous and he's not hearing my prayers.

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Prayer and How We Can Grow Closer to God

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