faith

Prayer Thoughts…..

Greer, Arizona

The thought sunk like a stone in my being during prayer this morning. It was out of the blue, I was sitting there in quiet meditation and this thought came: “God is not all that concerned about your happiness.” What?? Where did that come from? The thought hit like a minor chord and stuck in my brain. I stopped praying and asked God what He meant by that. I waited……

“I am not here for you, you are here for Me.”

“But God,” I thought, “I am an American, you know, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and all that.”

“Yes, well that isn’t in my Book anywhere, go read about my Disciples.”

Ouch.

What does God want from me, from any of us? He deserves my whole self. A heart that is completely His. Undivided with the world. A world that everyday clamors for attention. It shouts, it screams, it jumps up and down and waves its hands wildly.

God whispers.

He cares deeply about me, but He cares even more about His lost sheep, those who aren’t His yet. Today I got a lesson that I wasn’t expecting. A thought that snuck up on me unawares. It made me stop, re-evaluate myself, pay attention to what God was trying to tell me.

I seek happiness. God says lose your life so you can find it. He wants me to be a light in the darkness around me, even if it means doing something that makes me uncomfortable. To my way of thinking God seems to do things backwards. But then I remember how much higher His thoughts are than mine. I seek happiness, and in the end I get something much better. When I seek His kingdom first, I get showered with the fruits of the spirit.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” Galatians 5:22,23

Thank you Lord, for helping me to realize again that you have already given me everything I could possible need, want or desire in the person of Jesus Christ!

The best reason to praise

Image by flickr
It happens to me at least once a day, especially this time of year with our Arizona monsoons……I am driving or walking and I see something in nature that makes me stop everything for just a moment and breathe a prayer of praise.

It’s a natural and spontaneous reaction that happens when you know that there is a God who is behind it all, and that even nature itself cannot help praising God. When I lift my hands or say, “Thank you God,” for a beautiful sunrise I am simply echoing what all of creation is already doing; praising our Creator for continuing to extend His mercy for one more day. Another day to hope, to believe in Him, to thank Him for His marvelous works and for our redemption.

One of the best reasons I can think of to praise God is because Satan absolutely hates it when we do. It’s like throwing cold water on the wicked witch of the west. He simply can’t succeed in anything he does when we are praising God.

The Bible has much to say about praise and not once does it say to praise Him only when things are going well. It just says to praise Him because He is worthy!
“But I will sing of your strength, in the morning I will sing of your love; for you are my fortress, my refuge in times of trouble.” Psalm 59:16

When Satan came before God’s throne in order to stir up trouble for Job, I believe he thought his victory was a shoe-in and that Job would surely cave in to despair and give up on God. But Job knew that whatever he was going through, it didn’t change who God was. He knew that in spite of everything, that God still loved Him; that for God to allow such grief there had to be a very good reason for it.

Absolute trust.

If you are despairing today, God has not left you. He has promised to be with you and see you through…

Another reason to praise is that we will be doing it throughout eternity, so we might as well practise now!

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” Revelation 5:13

Can you picture even the animals bowing their heads or lifting their paws in praise to their Creator? It could happen! How cool would that be?

Can you think of a time when it was very difficult to praise God and you did it anyway?

Faith like Noah

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.” Genesis 6:11-12

I am celebrating rain today. We finally had the kind of rain that people in the desert dream of. Sideways, torrential rain. All this rain puts me in mind of Noah. I am trying to imagine the kind of faith it would take to keep on building an Ark for anywhere between 55 to 75 years. (This figure was developed by a very smart Biblical research guy, not me.) I also could not find anywhere in the Bible where it says that the people taunted Noah while he was building it, but given the cultural climate I would say it is a strong possibility they did. The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. Genesis 6:5

Ever had someone say to you, “You really believe all that stuff?” Referring to the events in the Bible. They look at you with a bemused mixture of disbelief and bewilderment, and sometimes downright anger depending on who you are talking to. You may as well have just told then that aliens had kidnapped you from your bed and then flown you back to earth in time for work.

All the while Noah just kept hammering away, mixing up more pitch and sawing up more cypress. And watching the sky….It must have been very hard for he and his family. Lets face it, if we are to be honest, even if a 8 foot tall heavenly messenger came complete with thundering voice and glowing countenance, sooner or later they go away and you are left with insulting crowds and a clear sky with no rain in sight.

He just kept building. Just like we keep on believing. We belong to the family of Noah after all. When we really start to count up the ways we exercise our faith on a daily basis, we realize we have quite a bit in common with Noah after all. We pray to a God we can’t see and we believe He answers and we look to the sky just like Noah did.

“Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah.” Genesis 7:6-9

I wish I could have seen it. All the animals walking peaceably side by side, leopards, elephants, goats, crocodiles, as Noah stood by the door with his staff….Thank you God for Noah’s great faith, and for the rain.