How should we talk with God? Like this …

We shouldn’t need a national holiday to get us to purposely and consciously give thanks to God, but we do.

That’s because the average life is one lived full of busyness, with God pushed to the margins, often only addressed when we need or what something, when things get hard, when we’re afraid, or when we have yet again gotten ourselves into trouble that comes with ugly consequences.

That’s no way for a Christian to live.

How we should live, according to the Apostle Paul, is a life that is intimately shared with God, and that closeness accomplished chiefly by a persistence of conversation with Him.

How do you stay connected and share life with your spouse? Primarily by your conversations with one another. Communication is your chief bonding agent with husbands and wives, children, family, friends — it’s our conversations that connect us to people and enable us to share life together.

The same is true with God.

And so Paul writes this:

“Devote yourselves to prayer with an alert mind and a thankful heart,” Colossians 4:2.

Parents of younger children often yearn for a moment of silence from their children. Youngsters can pepper parents with such an abundance of questions and ramblings that moms and dads wish their kid would just stop talking for a while.

Our heavenly Father isn’t that way with us.

Instead, Paul tells us, “Devote yourselves to prayer …” Put another way, be devoted to conversing with God, which is what prayer is. The word used for “devote” indicates a sense of fervency or persistence. Paul would write to the Thessalonian Christians, “Never stop praying” (1 Thess. 5:17).

For the Christian, prayer isn’t something we mumble before a meal, or perhaps get a little more serious about on a national holiday, it’s devotion to a fervency of ongoing conversation with God.

Along with Paul’s instruction to be devoted to prayer are a couple insights about how to go about our conversing with God.

The first thing Paul notes is that we should be devoted to prayer “… with an alert mind …”

Have you ever caught yourself in a conversation with someone and suddenly realize you weren’t really paying attention to what they were saying? Not only is that commonplace for us, we also say a lot without giving much thought to what we’re actually saying. In other words, we’re often not very “alert” when in conversations with other people.

We’re often the same way in our conversations with God.

Paul tells us not to be that way.

Instead, we are to devote ourselves, fervently so, to ongoing conversation with God “… with an alert mind …” meaning we should:

Pay attention to who you’re talking to, who just happens to be your Creator! Talk to Him as if He is God, not your “bro”!

Pay attention to what you’re actually saying. If you can’t recall what the content of your prayer was two minutes after taking with God, you might need to be a bit more self-aware of what you’re communicating.

And because prayer is conversation, pay attention to what God might be communicating to you as part of the conversation.

The second thing Paul notes about how we should converse with God is “… and a thankful heart.”

If you think about how God sustains our lives, that there isn’t a moment, an hour, a day that our human existence isn’t dependent on Him, how could we possibly ever come before God at any time with a heart that is anything other than thankful?

Sadly, if truth be told, it’s likely that most of the time when we talk with God our posture toward Him isn’t primarily punctuated by a thankful heart.

That’s because we’re too busy to be devoted to prayer, and when we pray it’s often not with an alert mind.

Even though the one thing we have to say to God more than anything else is “Thank you!”

Thanksgiving Day can serve as a sobering reminder that we need more than a prayer life, we need a life of prayer! That we need to develop the habit of praying with an alert mind, and the chief posture of our prayer should be talking with God with a genuinely thankful heart.

Scotty