You know, Eric, we're always encouraging people to spend time with the Lord, to spend time
in His presence, to -- to value the secret place.
How does a person cultivate, a rich, vibrant prayer life?
I think doing it. there's no better teacher on prayer than
prayer itself. So I think the first step is getting away.
Make sure that you get away from people, from others, and then shut the door, shut the noise
of life out and just sit with Him. Spend time, allotted time, carved out time,
to just practice being with Him, with no other agenda but simply to be with Him.
And this will teach men, women, even children how to find Him and walk with Him.
Now what is somebody says, "Well Eric, come on, look, I'm a single mother, I'm raising
kids, I work two jobs. This may be easy for you but I don't have time"?
Right. What do you say to them?
I probably -- everybody's got time. Jesus had time.
He made time. The world was coming to Jesus, laying on the
law, and I’m sure all over, looking for Him everywhere.
He made time to be with God. I'd probably tell them to turn off "Dancing
with the Stars" or something, you know? Whatever they've got going on I'd just turn
it off and go be with Jesus. It goes back to the value thing that you said:
if you value Him in His presence -- see, everybody loves to sing, "I love His presence."
But I'll tell you who really loves His presence: the person who spends time with Jesus.
Your calendar testifies more truly about your life than your songs of worship.
Yeah, and I mean in this day and age I think if you were to take all the time we spend
on Facebook, or on YouTube or watching television, whatever, you'd discover that we actually
have a lot more time in our day than we think we have.
Yes, so true. And a person who really wants something bad
enough, they'll find a way to do it, you know. I used to -- to be this way with, you know,
fitness, you know, going to the gym: I could never find time.
And one day I just decided to stop making excuses for it.
And even on the road, you know, I'll, I'll do whatever it takes to, to make it happen.
But it comes down to a matter of desire. But that brings up the next question: where
do you find that kind of internal desire to do something that's difficult like that?
In my, my personal opinion is the Holy Spirit is our desire.
No one really wants God apart from the Holy Spirit.
So we need to -- we yield to Him. We say, "Listen, I recognize what I am apart
from You, and that I can't get to You without You."
"I can't love You without You, I can't want You without You, I need You."
I recognize the wickedness and blackness of my own heart, so I look to You to help me,
for Your aid." And the Holy Spirit will come in, as the scripture
tells us, He sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts -- the Holy Spirit does this.
He makes it erupt out of us. That's the presence of the spirit.
So really when a man repents and receives the spirit, in the Holy Spirit man has all
that he needs to find God, to experience God, to touch God, to hear from God.
The Holy Spirit is the key. So it all comes back to brokenness, humility
-- Yes: dependency, these things.