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February 19 - April 1, 2018
The plans of God are only revealed in the presence of God. We don’t get our marching orders until we get on our knees! But if we hit our knees, God will take us places we never imagined going by paths we didn’t even know existed.
If you establish a prayer routine, your life will be anything but routine. You will go to places, do things, and meet people you have no business going to, doing, or meeting. You don’t need to seek opportunity. All you have to do is seek God. And if you seek God, opportunity will seek you.
Don’t try to manufacture your own miracles. Don’t try to answer your own prayers. Don’t try to do God’s job for Him. Stay humble. Stay patient. Stay focused. Keep circling.
We need to work like it depends on us, but we also need to pray like it depends on God.
I know there is a fear that if we give more of ourselves to God, there will be less of us left, but it’s the exact opposite. It’s not until we die to self that we truly come alive. The more we give to God, the more we have and the more we become. It’s only in losing our lives that we will really find them.
To live is Christ. To die is gain.
Jonathan Edwards is famous for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which helped spark the first Great Awakening. Along with his pastorate in North Hampton, Massachusetts, he served as the president of Princeton University. Of his known descendants, there are more than 300 ministers or missionaries, 120 university professors, 60 authors, 30 judges, 14 college presidents, 3 members of Congress, and 1 vice president. That’s an impressive family lineage! And that legacy, like every spiritual genealogy, traces back to a moment of consecration. On January 12, 1723, Jonathan Edwards
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Sometimes the purpose of prayer is to get us out of circumstances, but more often than not, the purpose of prayer is to get us through them.
The primary purpose of prayer is not to change circumstances; the primary purpose of prayer is to change us!
When we act in faith, we aren’t risking our reputation; we are risking God’s reputation because He’s the one who made the promise in the first place.
It’s the impossible prayers that honor God because they reveal our faith and allow God to reveal His glory.
Faith is not a noun; it’s a verb — an action verb. The greatest and truest statement of faith is a life well lived. It is faith fleshed out through risks and sacrifices. It is daring to go after a dream that is destined to fail without divine intervention.
So true.
Bold prayers honor God and God honors bold prayers.
And we just keep reading the Genesis account as if nothing happened. Granted, there are more spectacular creations than the simple seed — the sun, moon, and stars, for example. But the seed may be the most amazing example of God’s prolific creativity. And we certainly owe God a thank-you for every kind of seed every time we bite into the fruit they produce — orange seeds, apple seeds, strawberry seeds, grapefruit seeds, pomegranate seeds, watermelon seeds. Can you imagine life without any of these seeds? William Jennings Bryan, famous for his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, once
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Oh the wonder of our Creator!
Faith is what keeps those dreams alive, even when it seems as though they are dead and buried. But that is the very nature of seeds. They go underground. They disappear. And while it may seem like they are dead, they are not. They’re just germinating beneath the surface!
That phrase will echo in my auditory cortex forever: vision beyond your resources. That phrase has become a mantra at National Community Church and is inspiring us to continue dreaming irrational dreams. We certainly practice sound financial management, count the cost of every vision, and steward every penny in a way that honors God, but we refuse to let our budget determine our vision. That would be poor stewardship because it’s based on our limited resources rather than on God’s unlimited supply. Too often we butcher our God-given dreams because we forget the simple fact that God owns the
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Faith moves mountains!
“Say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.” MATTHEW 17:20 There comes a moment when you must quit talking to God about the mountain in your life and start talking to the mountain about your God. You proclaim His power. You declare His sovereignty. You affirm His faithfulness. You stand on His Word. You cling to His promises. Goliath held an entire army captive through fear. His weapon was intimidation. And that is how our enemy operates. He prowls around22 like a roaring lion. But the important word is like. He’s an imposter. Jesus is the Lion23 of the tribe of Judah.
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Thoughts to ponder this morning.
Long before we woke up this morning and long after we go to sleep tonight, the Holy Spirit was and is circling us in prayer.
O Lord, our heavenly Father,32 high and mighty King of kings and Lord of lords, who dost from thy throne behold all dwellers on the earth, and reignest with power supreme and uncontrolled over all the kingdoms, Empires, and Governments; look down in mercy, we beseech thee, on these our American states who have fled to Thee from the rod of the oppressor and thrown themselves on Thy gracious protection, desiring to be henceforth dependent only on Thee … Be Thou present, O God of wisdom, and direct the councils of this honorable assembly … Shower down on them and the millions they here represent,
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Like Dr. Duche prayed with American revolutionaries, I'm #prayingforsyria - God be glorified.
Until recently, I attached an ASAP to every prayer. I wanted God to answer as soon as possible. But this is no longer my agenda. I don’t want easy or quick answers because I have a tendency to mishandle the blessings that come too easily or too quickly. I take the credit for them, or I take them for granted. So now I pray it will take long enough and be hard enough for God to receive all of the glory. I’m not looking for the path of least resistance; I’m looking for the path of greatest glory. And that requires high-degree-of-difficulty prayers and lots of circling. Very rarely does our first
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ALAT: praying for perseverance to keep praying.
If your cause is ordained by God, then the battle belongs to the Lord. It’s His victory to win, not yours.
Don’t lose heart. Don’t lose hope. Don’t lose faith. Don’t lose patience.
Sometimes God will push us to our absolute limits — the limits of our faith, of our patience, of our gifts. That is how God stretches our faith and builds our character.
Don’t seek answers; seek God. And the answers will seek you.
Prayer will sanctify our waiting, so we wait with holy expectancy.
This doesn’t mean we will start predicting the future; it means we’ll start creating it. How? Through our prayers! Prayer is the way we write the future.
The key to praying without ceasing is turning everything into a prayer.
Think of worry as a prayer alarm. Every time it goes off, you put it to prayer.
It’s the book of Acts. And if we said less and did more, I believe we would have the same kind of impact the first-century church had. And while we’re on the subject, we should be more known for what we’re for than what we’re against.
I wonder if the lack of awe in many churches is directly attributable to the lost art of the testimony. Churches that see people radically saved are usually churches that allow radically saved people to share their testimonies.
If we don’t share our testimonies, we are robbing God of the glory He deserves.
We can’t just know what we believe; we need to know why we believe what we believe.
You never know when your prayer will collide with someone else’s prayer and result in a miracle.
When we hit our knees, we pick a fight with the enemy.
In the words of Walter Wink, “History belongs to the intercessors.”
Shortly before his death in 1831, Father Nash recorded these words in his journal. I am now convinced;77 it is my duty and privilege, and the duty of every other Christian, to pray for as much of the Holy Spirit as came down on the day of Pentecost, and a great deal more … I have only just begun to understand what Jesus meant when He said, “All things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”
“God cannot reward Abraham yet because his seed is still multiplying.”
One of the mistakes we make in reading history, whether biblical history or history in general, is thinking that those who lived before us were different from us. They weren’t. If God did it for them, He can do it for us. And if we do what they did in the Bible, I’m convinced that God will do what He did.
The greatest legacy a person can leave is a complete surrender of their life to the lordship of Jesus Christ.
In retrospect, I’m glad it took as long as it did to purchase our piece of our Promised Land. And I’m glad it was as hard as it was. Why? Because we learned to dream big, pray hard, and think long. It may sound redundant, but if it hadn’t taken a miracle, it wouldn’t be a miracle.
We tend to view the goal as the goal, but in God’s economy, the process is the
goal. It’s not about what we’re doing at all; it’s about who we’re becoming in the process. It’s not about doing great things for God; it’s about God doing great things in us.
They concluded that God appeared to Moses in a burning bush for one simple reason: to show that no place is devoid of God’s presence, not even a bush on the backside of the desert.
God knows where I am.”
no one can live off someone else’s experience, someone else’s story. We need our own epiphany, our own testimony.
why did God ask them to take off their sandals? I think it was an act of humility, an act of worship. It was a way of acknowledging absolute dependence on God. It was a way of removing any obstacle that could get in the way of God and Moses, God and Joshua.
This is holy ground. This is a holy moment. Right here. Right now. Take off your sandals.
Notice what the disciples didn’t ask. They didn’t say, “Lord, teach us to preach.” They didn’t say, “Teach us to lead,” or even, “Lord, teach us to disciple.” All of those endeavors are noble. But they have one request: “Lord, teach us to pray.”
If we change the way we pray, everything changes. It changes the way we work, the way we parent, and the way we lead. It changes the way we prioritize and strategize. It changes the way we think, the way we feel, and the way we speak. Prayer changes everything from the inside out.
