Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord...

I'll bet most of you can repeat the rest of this nighttime prayer. Unfortunately this is as far as a lot of folks get in their prayer time. There are probably as many reasons for not praying as there are people who need to pray.

For some, prayer is foreign to them because they don't have a belief in God. For others, they believe in a God, but they do not believe their God cares enough for them to want to hear for them. Some think God can not possibly hear all the prayers of all the people on earth, there are just to many of us. Or perhaps they feel God is working on other situations much more important than yours. Maybe, they are like me, I just didn't know how to pray! I’ve been around men who gave long inspirational prayers; they covered all the bases, invoked the name of Jesus and God in the same prayer. When they finished, you wanted to give them a standing ovation. But for me, these prayers were validation I didn't know how to pray. I did not want to offend God with my awkward prayer. So I didn't pray.

Over the years, I have learned a few things about prayer. My prayer life has improved steadily. My relationship with God has improved. I feel better about talking to God. There are two passages in the scriptures which have been instrumental in improving my prayer life.

The Golden Verse of the Bible

I think it is safe to say, in our modern culture we demand brevity. We don"t like long books; baseball games are too long; we criticize our preachers if they preach over thirty minutes. We don't like long winded speakers or sales presentations or negotiations. The head of a company to whom I was making a presentation say, "Stop, tell me in ten words or less, 'What is your point?'"

The task of reading the Bible through requires a great deal of patience particularly when you get to books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy with all those laws and rules. Half way through you want to plead with God, "What's the point? Can you tell me in as few words as possible?"

Brevity has another benefit, perhaps it's most beneficial. Once in our history, people, having few books, committed things to memory; family linage, historical events, important documents, anything worthy of remembering. With the advent of the printing press, these things could be written and copied and recorded and saved. There was not need for memorization. Frankly, our attention span grew shorted. We no longer memorized long passages; brevity became the key to memorization.

So, you ask, what does all this have to do with the title of this article? In God's infinite wisdom, the problem is solved by the inclusion of a single verse in the Bible which is short and to the point and is easy to memorize.  That verse I call the Golden Verse of the Bible. It is in John 3:16.

I just do not understand.

I have to admit, there are things about God and Jesus and the Bible that I just do not understand. I am not saying these things are wrong, I just have trouble with them. Maybe my problem Is I do not know enough about the Bible. One of my Bible study guys said, "Everything you want to know is in the Bible." He may be right, but I still do not understand some things..

I do not understand, "Why the Jews?". Presumably God could have chosen a group of people from the vast area we call China or maybe from India or Europe or even the Americas. There were people in those areas. Why not there; why not a group of people from one of those other places? Why Abraham? Why Issac and Jacob? And on a related subject, once the people who would later be called Jews were chosen to receive God's attention, what about all the other people in the earth? Did God abandon them? Did basically say to Chinese ancestors, "Sorry guys, you lost out on receiving my favor. You are on your own. I'll see you in 4000 years when I send missionaries to tell you about Jesus."