The following is a sermon illustration that I recently used…

“One day a father decided to take his son to play at the local park. The boy quickly gravitated to the sandbox and found himself mesmerized by the colors and textures surrounding him. After a short time, he began digging around to see what treasures might reveal themselves to him.

As his hands plunged under the sand, he discovered something rather large, and having pushed enough of the sand away, realized it was a large rock. Instantly he knew he needed to move that rock, no matter how big it was. This rock was the obstacle to his dreams of a sandbox clear of all extraneous matter.

So, the boy tried as hard as he could to move the rock. He pushed and pushed and pushed, and finally he was able to get it to the edge of the sandbox. But the next step would be the hardest. How could he get it over the edge? Again, the boy pushed and pushed until his energy was completely fried. The rock’s “stuckness” matched the boy’s feelings of the situation. Eventually he started to sob.

The boy’s father watched all this, and just when the meltdown began, the father went over to his son and began to comfort his overtaxed, dejected son.

“Why didn’t you use all the strength available to you to move the rock?” the father asked.

The boy was confused, “I did daddy, it’s just too heavy.”

“No son, you didn’t. You didn’t ask me to help.” And at that, the father lifted the rock with a single hand and tossed it out of the sandbox.”

Sadly, isn’t that how we are with God so much of the time? We have all of His unlimited power at our disposal to overcome whatever life brings us, yet we neglect to turn to Him, ask Him, and rely on Him for help.

God gives us two offensive weapons against the enemy, the Sword of the Spirit and prayer. I believe, that for most Christ followers, we do not use our weapon of prayer nearly as much as we should. We have excuse after excuse on why we don’t make an intentional commitment to spend more time before God’s Throne of Grace. We can actually call on the Almighty Ruler of the whole universe. We can come before Him with anything that is on our hearts—and He will hear and help.