Pretty much every Christian knows it is time to pray and trust God, when things get so bad that He is the only hope left. However, most athletes know you can’t wait for the big challenge to start trying to win. Most of them know you have to practice, play some smaller events, and develop your talents, skills, strength, and training before the main competition. We don’t want new premed students operating on us. We want trained, experienced, qualified surgeons working on us. We don’t want to practice faith in God at the last minute when we have an impossible situation. We need to be ready by learning how to trust, believe, rely on, and depend on God for the small and medium issues we go through. This helps us learn to trust God for every issue of life.

You wouldn’t want to go on a long trip in a car you didn’t get ready for the trip. If the tires were worn out, the oil hadn’t been changed in a long time, the fuel tank wasn’t full, and the engine wasn’t working very well, you probably wouldn’t get very far.

When we start out on our walk of faith in God, there are a lot of things that can hinder the answers to our prayers. We need to know what those things are and get them solved in the early stages of our efforts of faith. The great thing about our wants and needs is they inspire us to start looking to God for answers. We don’t like problems and needs; but, if we really want a close relationship with God, we need to use them to help us find out where our spiritual problems are. Spiritual problems affect God’s solutions and answers to our physical needs and problems. If we didn’t have needs and problems, some of us wouldn’t have grown in our relationship with God. It was during some personal crisis that we turned to God for help and got acquainted with Him.

Ask Jesus to help you use ALL your personal problems and needs as opportunities to learn the walk of faith in God. Ask Him to teach you how to look to Him for solutions. Let Him teach you how to use your faith to succeed in life. Ask Him to help you trust Him with your relationships, emotions, financial situations, and physical needs.