Written by Pastor Jack Wellman– E.M. Bounds
Honoring the Lord Our God
How can we honor the Lord? Certainly we can honor Him with our substance or what we have been blessed with (Prov 3:9). We can also hallow or revere His name, which is how Jesus showed the disciples how they ought to pray (Matt 6:9), and we can also do so by giving honor to the elderly man or woman, as God says in Deuteronomy 19:32, “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.” There are also ways that we can honor God in prayer because prayer does honor God, or at least it should.
The Priority of Prayer
When I begin my day, the first thing I do is pray to God because I want to give Him the first portion of my day and show Him that He is of first importance in my life. David wrote in Psalm 5:2-3, “Give attention to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to you do I pray. O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.” The psalmist also wrote, “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1). He declared, “You are my God, and I will praise you; you are my God, and I will exalt you” (Psalm 118:28). Isaiah wrote, “My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you. For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness” (Isaiah 26:9).
In the Morning, Noon, and Night
Jesus knew how important prayer was, and if the Son of God sought to be in continual fellowship with God, how much more important is it for us to do the same thing? On more than one occasion, “Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God” (Luke 6:12), and it was the psalmist who wrote, “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night” (Psalm 63:6) and “When I was in distress, I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands, and I would not be comforted” (Psalm 77:2). Again, the psalmist writes, “O LORD, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch” (Psalm 5:3). Jesus’ custom was “rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35).
Conclusion
We honor God by seeking Him in prayer in the morning, in the night watches, and in the noon hour because we admit our need for Him. God wants us to cry out to Him both day and night and acknowledge our need for Him continually. When we do, we show God that we cannot go a day without seeking to speak to Him. This shows just how important He is to us, and by doing so, we honor God by praying to Him.
