One Thing Is More Important Than Anything

When it comes to your relationship with God, how do you rate it? Do you judge it by how often you go to church? Or how many scripture verses you’ve memorized…maybe the length of your prayer time? Does any of that really matter?

Well, the answer to that is yes and no. Yes there’s a benefit to attending church. Sure it’s good to know the Word of God. And prayer—well, you really can’t pray too much. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re sitting in a pew every time the church doors open or even if you can quote the whole Bible. It doesn’t matter how long or loud you pray!

That may sound like a contradiction but it’s not. Yes, go to church, worship and fellowship with other Christians. Certainly we should learn God’s Word and know how to apply it to our lives. And like I said, you simply cannot pray too much. But no…none of that impresses God or proves anything to Him. He is not logging your prayer hours.

You see, Christianity is not about our weekly church attendance. A lot of the time we go to church so often and hear so many sermons, but hardly put much of what we learn into action. Christianity is about having a personal, intimate relationship with Christ. It’s about learning to live an abundant, purposeful life.

We can go to church each week and hear a powerful, life-changing message every time. But when we hear a sermon, we need to focus on what really touches our life in a personal way. That’s most likely the thing God wants to deal with us about. Then we need to go home and meditate on it, study more on the subject in God’s Word, and spend time in prayer seeking how to apply that truth to our life.