Five minutes for God

Greetings:
Sometimes just finding five minutes for God seems like a chore.
Sometimes devotions do not really seem like devotion, but work.
Have you ever been to a point that you wondered if God is even there, if he hears your prayers and if he is ever going to answer your prayers?'
Sometimes our faith does grow weak because our time with God is not where it needs to be. During times of doubt we can feel that it is difficult to have faith. 
Where is God in our difficulty?
How can you increase your faith when you see no evidence for it?
God’s Word remains the solid rock that we need when we're surrounded in this world by sin, trouble and doubt.
Spending time reading God's Word every day to combat the secular attitudes and actions around us is not an option, but a necessity. God's Word provides an armor of protection and helps our faith and soul weapons to grow in size, caliber and fire-power intensity.
Is abandoning ship and swimming toward shore the right way to navigate through stormy seas the right approach to take when crisis hits our lives?
Is God still God in the bad times just like He is in the good times?
The truth of the matter is, hard times are exactly that — hard.  But how we approach those hard periods in our lives determines whether we’ll just survive, thrive or sink altogether.
Being prayed up will help fear and doubt to stay beneath our feet where it belongs.
Fear is the believer's greatest enemy. When a believer has fear, he cannot have believing faith.
Fear paralyzes, frustrates and cripples us into indecision and no action.
Fear involves torment as in 1 John 4:18 where it states, “Fear is the prison of the heart.”
Trusting God in hard times requires refusing to be frightened, refusing to be immobilized, refusing to panic and learning to stand firm on God's Word.
The times in my life when the biggest storms struck, it was by faith and trusting God that I emerged.
I was battered and a bit beaten down, but God brought me through it because I was able to reach down and exercise faith and trust the things that I could not see, and watched as God moved in mighty ways.
God didn't promise us smooth sailing, but he did promise to be with us at all times.
We can not forget that God is God, and He is more than able to deliver us every time. Period.
No matter what the prevailing conditions in your life are, believe what it says in Ephesians 3:20 NLT: “Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.”
Faith is not the power of positive thinking or positive reinforcement or a gimmick.
Faith is not found within the will and understanding of our human mind.
Faith is not by any human effort at all except by the intake and breathing in of the Word of God and believing what that Word says.
In Hebrews 11:1, faith is defined. It reads, “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.”
Have the faith of a little child and just believe.
In Matthew 21:21-22 NLT, we read, “Then Jesus told them, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith and don’t doubt, you can do things like this and much more. You can even say to this mountain, ‘May you be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and it will happen. You can pray for anything, and if you have faith, you will receive it.”
So the key is to get prayed up and studied up and your faith will increase. It be standing ready when tribulations and troubles confront you.
But first, give God the time he deserves.
Be blessed.