Imagine for a moment that you’ve been given the location of a buried treasure. You’ve been told where it is and given everything you need to dig it up. This treasure is vast: not only would it change your life, but with it you could do a great deal of good in the world. And yet, you leave it buried in the ground-of no value to you or anyone else.

John Calvin, the 16th century pastor, said that’s what Christians do if they neglect the practice of prayer: “To know God as the master and bestower of all good things, who invites us to request them of him, and still not to go to him-this would be as of little profit as a man to neglect a treasure, buried and hidden in the earth, after it had been pointed out to him… It is, therefore, by the benefit of prayer that we reach those riches which are laid up for us with the Heavenly Father.”

Communing with God in prayer is a privilege of the Christian life. We can run to him in prayer, not only to ask things of him, but just to get him. After all, he himself is our “exceedingly great reward” (Genesis 15:1).