We must (MUST!) pray as believers in Jesus. Prayer is the oxygen of our spiritual life. We must breathe, or else. When I go to my doctor she puts an 0ximeter on my finger so she can assess how my lungs are using oxygen. I suppose if we would put it on our “spiritual finger,” might it reveal something?
We don’t know exactly how to pray, I think communicating with God isn’t natural. We must be taught. The disciples wanted desperately how to pray–they didn’t know how, (Luke 11:1-2). So, we too must have Jesus teach us.
We can only learn how if the Spirit teaches us.
Also, we must practice praying. We may do it terribly rotten, but we should never give up–it’s not natural–it’s supernatural. But we learn by doing. We may get discouraged but keep at it. Even if you’re a pro, the Holy Spirit will make sure you keep learning. Our walk should always grow deeper.
For me praying the Psalms is good practice, and there are 150 of them. The Jewish people have a 4000-year start on us–they’ve used the Psalms as their prayer/praise book. My sense is that this covers every human need–the entirety of our spiritual walk!
I think that Psalms 103 might be a great place to get started.
I’ve been told by some that the “Lord’s Prayer” is quite useful as well. I guess if you honestly take it phrase by phrase, something good will happen. I’m still learning (and I suspect I still will).
Below we find a way to jumpstart our prayer life. I hope you can use it.
One more thought. “Conversational Prayer” is a good thing for me lately. Talk with Jesus as if He was in the same room with you (He is) and just converse. Share your ups and downs, and it’s okay if you feel messed up. Relax. He’s your Father!
We’re to be energized by contact with God’s Spirit. He fills us up, enables us to run full tilt, stretching and straining. The muscles in the neck popping out, and lunging for the tape. This is Paul’s understanding of his daily walk.
Paul was an athlete in the Spirit.
These days, developing a spiritual athleticism would not be such a bad idea. We live in a society where we sit and watch the NFL: there are 22 men on the field, desperately in need of rest, and they’re surrounded by 50,000 people desperately in need of exercise. We have become a society of observers and that is a shame.
God loves us, sent his only Son to die for us. God sets us up with a energy-packed, Red Bull. And I respond with an anemic, 2% milk religion. And that perhaps is the real tragedy.
There’s a real tendency for entropy as a follower of Jesus. Things have a real tendency to wind down, and start moving in the opposite direction. I think all of us can relate to the “Sunday Syndrome.” In this truly wonderful world of fellowship, worship and the Word we seem to come together. Life is good on a Sunday morning. And it should be.
But we wind down, and by Thursday we have sinned and compromised a hundred times or more. Life is not good on a Thursday afternoon. Because of our mental illness this degradation downward is usually worse. We experience a whole lot of shame and guilt. And that poisons our spirits.
Throw into the mix some depression, anxiety, or OCD and it makes consistency even harder. It’s a challenge to maintain a credible Christian walk. It’s kind of the deflated feeling four hours after downing three Red Bulls.
Paul, always an interesting fellow, described his own personal walk with Jesus in Philippians 3:10f. in the Message Bible.
10-11I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering, and go all the way with him to death itself. If there was any way to get in on the resurrection from the dead, I wanted to do it.
12-14 I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this…
“...but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.
Can you really tap into all of that energy?
Paul is downright aggressive here, he models a “muscular Christianity” that pushes through every obstacle, whether within or without. Most of our translations use the word “work” when translating “effort”. The Church fathers used the word “energy” instead. There is a distinction.
Energy, or “energize” denotes an outside source for power. I energize my electric razor when I plug it in at night. It takes a charge and runs accordingly on demand.
We are told to press in, and to reach.
We’re to be energized by contact with God’s Spirit. He fills us up, enables us to run full tilt, stretching and straining. The muscles in the neck popping out, and lunging for the tape. This is Paul’s understanding of his daily walk.
Paul was an athlete in the Spirit.
These days, developing a spiritual athleticism would not be such a bad idea. We live in a society where we sit and watch the NFL: there are 22 men on the field, desperately in need of rest, and they’re surrounded by 50,000 people desperately in need of exercise. We have become a society of observers and that is a shame.
God loves us, sent his only Son to die for us. God sets us up with a energy-packed, Red Bull. And I respond with an anemic, 2% milk religion. And that perhaps is the real tragedy.
“My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.”
2 Corinthians 12:9, NLT
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
— C.S. Lewis
I think I am often a creature of habit, far more than I’d like to admit. I rather think we choose our habits and inclinations. They, in turn, decide our paths. But I suppose we give ourselves too much credit, to decide and direct. Simply put, we are not that big. I honestly don’t think we have the power to steer our lives the way we like. That is what I’m thinking about today anyway.
Somebody once told me, “The purpose of life is not to find your freedom, but to find your master.”
I don’t live that way, at least my inner propensity does not include God. Did you ever think something like this? “I wish God did not exist. I want to be in charge, and I want to do, how I want to do, when I want to do it!”
Living it all with no rules and no accountability! Somehow I still seem to find myself sitting on my throne. I like this!
But as we get older, our hair goes gray and we look in the mirror and see bags and wrinkles, we realize how vulnerable and how tenuous life really is. If we are honest and sufficiently self-aware, we understand that we will never be able to seize control of the known universe.
“Life is what happens while you are making other plans,”John Lennon observed.
It seems that reality springs on you, and you have this bolt out of the blue that shocks you to the core. Life has happened, and you didn’t even realize it.
I sometimes look at myself in the mirror, not in vanity, but in steady amazement. The ugly tattoos, and the ‘track marks’ are from another life. I have scars on my wrists from a couple of suicide attempts. I have an amazing surgical zipper scar from a brain tumor. I have severe ataxia that makes me walk with a cane. I have lost the use of my right hand in an accident. But I am also learning how to be broken. And everything that has happened has happened for a reason.
C.S. Lewis once said, “Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.”
I sense that he did learn, otherwise he couldn’t have said that.
Re-reading this I decided that I ramble a lot. Forgive me. Maybe there is scrap or two in it for someone.
“Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you.”
Ephesians 4:32, NLT
Great hearts are often brought through experiences that demand intense forgiving.
The Father tutors us through out our earthly lives, with many visits to this classroom. It’s here we get our learning. It will happen several times in our walk, and we carry different nuances, or slants. Each time we are required to forgive authentically. The course is set for us. We can’t choose to skip these lessons without injuring ourselves, and harming others.
We are learning to love– it is our calling and destiny. There are no “accidents” or misaligned ‘drop-outs’ here. We step into our classroom, and the Teacher and Comforter begins His instruction. Many things will strike you as diabolical. Deep inside us we have simply no idea of how “this” will turn out for good. And you’d be right. But the power of God steps in, and “all is well”.
Corrie ten Boom– Writer, speaker, Christian
Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch Christian.
After her release from a Nazi concentration camp, she began traveling the world and speaking to any who would have her. The needs of postwar Europe were desperate. She traveled as an evangelist telling people who Jesus is and spoke about His redemption. She gave many people hope.
Through her travels she came in contact with a few of the guards that had been a part of the Nazi regime and had to practice forgiveness that only Jesus can bring. The first encounter with one of her previous jailers proved to be most difficult.
Here is an excerpt from her book, “The Hiding Place”.
“It was a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face.
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,” he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.
I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.
She then took his hand and the most incredible thing happened.
From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
Corrie’s Wisdom for Us
There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.
Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.
It is not my ability, but my response to God’s ability, that counts.
When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.
Faith is like radar that sees through the fog-the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.
Trying to do the Lord’s work in your own strength is the most confusing, exhausting, and tedious of all work. But when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you.
For her efforts to hide Jews from arrest and deportation during the German occupation of the Netherlands, Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983) received recognition from the Yad Vashem Remembrance Authority as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” on December 12, 1967.
Broken Believers 