Devotional 280809

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. I can’t believe it is Friday again. When life is so abundant and full, you just wished that the sun would come to a halt. It is like going a buffet dinner; you wished your stomach had more room and the delicious food would not make you fat. But this is not the reality. We have limitation. We only have 24 hours each day to enjoy our abundant life in Christ. Seize the moment to make life as meaningful and fruitful that God empower you to have. And one of them is to draw close to Him each day.

"Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1). It is not part of the life of a natural man to pray. We hear it said that a man will suffer in his life if he does not pray; I question it. What will suffer is the life of the Son of God in him, which is nourished not by food, but by prayer. When a man is born from above, the life of the Son of God is born in him, and he can either starve that life or nourish it. Prayer is the way the life of God is nourished. Our ordinary views of prayer are not found in the New Testament. We look upon prayer as a means of getting things for ourselves; the Bible idea of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.

"Ask and ye shall receive." We complaint before God, we are apologetic or apathetic, but we ask very few things. Yet what a superb courage a childlike child has! Our Lord says - "Except you become as little children." Ask, and God will do. Give Jesus Christ a chance, give Him elbow room, and no man will ever do this unless he is at the end of his intelligence. When a man is at the end of his intelligence it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get into touch with Reality. Be yourself before God and present your problems, the things you know you have come to the end of your intelligence. As long as you are self-sufficient, you do not need to ask God for anything.

It is not so true that "prayer changes things" as that prayer changes me and I change things. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of Redemption alters the way in which a man looks at things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man's character.

Indeed, prayer changes our character and nature. It causes us to realize that we are not the center of the universe. We are not God. We cannot be self-sufficient. We are not totally reliable simply because we are not omnipotent. As we pray, we admit to God that we are only a finite human being; we have limitation and we are not perfect. We go to God in such humility and seek His divine intervention in our finite world. As we pray, we rely on God’s provision and protection. We surrender our whole being to Him and give Him the freedom to do His cleansing work and creative healing. The more we pray with this kind of attitude, the more we are shaped to be more like Christ. We begin to perceive or judge things differently. Just as Paul described in 1 Corinthians 2:15-16, “The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment: "For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.” When a person is having the mind of Christ, pre-Christian friends will not be able to understand his or her mindset, because it is so different from the norm. This is how prayer will accomplish in those who seek to know God through it. May God continue to work in your mind as you surrender to Him each day! Have a wonderful weekend to enjoy the presence of God.

Love you in His name,
Lawrence