To connect means to bring together or into contact. Considering God as the essence of eternal reality, the best and most common ways to connect with God are usually prayer, the Bible, and worship.
•Prayer is listening to God—waiting and absorbing what he communicates to us.
•Prayer is spending time with the one who loves us—the way we would spend time with any loved one.
•The best thing for a consistent prayer life is a consistent time and place of prayer each day. This builds in habit and expectation. Without this, your prayer time will fall by the wayside of busy schedules and interruptions.
•Guard your prayer time. Get away from phones and computers, jobs to do and messes to clean. Set a time period for yourself for how long you will pray—and this is not legalism or performance. Rather it’s like a picket fence surrounding and protecting a garden. The fence of time and space gives you freedom and peace from interruptions that would otherwise encroach.
2. Read the Bible•One of the biblical terms for word is rhema, (“something said”), and is used to indicate a precise, spoken word for a specific situation, the Bible in its most personal application. It is the sense that out of God’s written Word, he is speaking personally to us. Jesus says that we live by such words (Matthew 4:4), and Paul indicates their power when he calls them the “sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:17).
•I strongly encourage having a systematic Bible reading plan, not to make God happy or fulfill a religious obligation but to be spiritually alive and healthy. Sometimes a word or phrase will jump at you and strike your heart and mind (a rhema). When that happens, stop reading and focus on what hits you. You will be blessed.
3. Worship
•Worship is not fundamentally about music or how we feel. The object and focus of worship is God. Forget about yourself, your likes, your issues. Focus your attention on bowing before and honoring God.
•When we praise God, we superimpose words and ideas from Scripture over our own thoughts.
•When we give glory to God, he reflects it back on (or shares it with) us. This happens in two particular ways: 1) He lifts us to a higher level. 2) He becomes to us what we praise him for.
•The most genuine praise and worship comes not from joyful feelings but from faith—regardless of how we happen to feel.
•The two words for worship in the Bible mean a total obeisance of bowing to our faces on the ground and everyday acts of service with a worshipful attitude.
•Worship with music or without, loudly or quietly, in a group or alone. Worship with total focus on God. Worship daily by doing things as unto God.
