Breathing is involuntary. You don’t have to think about it. Nobody has to tell you to do it. Your body just naturally does it.
A few weeks ago, however, I visited a member of my church who had been intubated, i.e., he had a tube placed down his throat to help him breathe. After consulting with the doctors, the family made the difficult decision to remove the tube. Before being intubated, the man had been breathing on his own, but with much difficulty. No one knew if he would be able to breathe again on his own once the tube was removed.
When the tube came out, a few seconds passed without the man taking a breath. Suddenly, one of his sons blurted out, “Dad, breathe!” The man gasped and began to breathe.
Sometimes we need to be reminded to breathe.
The life of a Christian is a conversation with God. To engage in any conversation, you need to do two things: speak and listen. Both parts are important. If you do one without the other, you are not having a conversation.
In our conversation with God, we speak to him in prayer, and he speaks to us in his Word. Both parts of the conversation are important. Both are elementary, integral, and essential components of Christian life.
Prayer and Bible Study are how we breathe as Christians. When we go to church, when we read our Bibles, when we listen to God’s Word, we are inhaling the life-giving oxygen of the Holy Spirit. When we pray, we are exhaling all our fears and worries and wants to God.
Hearing God’s Word and praying – that’s what we naturally do as Christians. It’s as natural to us as breathing. It’s as important to us as breathing. It’s what keeps our faith alive.
But because we are also sinners, sometimes we stubbornly hold our breath.
We get so busy, we forget to breathe. We don’t take time to go to church. We don’t take time to read our Bibles or devotional books during the week. We don’t take time to talk to God in prayer. And then we wonder why we faint and falter in our faith.
Sometimes we hold our breath because we don’t want to face God. We know we’ve messed up. We know that we are doing something God doesn’t want us to do. So, we stop praying. We stop going to see God in church because we don’t want to face him and what we’ve done. Soon our faith passes out due to lack of oxygen.
Hearing God’s Word and praying regularly are not optional for us as Christians. That is how we breathe. It is what keeps our faith alive and strong.
I don’t know who of you out there needs to hear this, so I am going to say it to everyone: Don’t forget to breathe.
Pastor Andrew Schroer has been a pastor for over 25 years and is currently serving at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Edna, Texas. You can find his latest books, “364 Days of Thanksgiving” and “364 Days of Devotion,” on Amazon.com.
