Monthly Archives: February 2023

WHAT HINDERS YOUR PRAYERS?

Christian Life, ,

WHAT HINDERS YOUR PRAYERS?

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the peace of God which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6, 7 NIV).

There are many things that hinder prayer; doubt, unbelief, sin, wrong motives etc, but there is one hindrance that often goes unnoticed, hinted at in the Apostle Paul’s exhortation to pray, as quoted in the verses above. He refers to anxiety, an emotion that is often very much part of our lives. There are many reasons why we become anxious but, according to the Apostle John: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear…” (1 John 4:18, NIV). Fear and anxiety are symptoms of our mistrust of God’s love for us. Mistrust is unbelief and unbelief is sin. In fact, any emotion that is not perfect peace will hinder our prayers because God always responds to faith.

Paul explains the process by which we can enter the peace of God that doesn’t make sense. Step one: Get rid of the anxiety. How? Since anxiety and the mistrust that underlies it, are sin, they need to be treated as sin by being brought into the light through honest confession and repentance. Our needs and concerns are not our problem. Our unbelief in the faithfulness of our heavenly Father is the problem that causes the anxiety, fear or whatever emotion underlies the mistrust in our hearts against God.

The next step in this process is worship. Paul said, “…By prayer and petition.” According to Strong’s Analytical Concordance, the Greek word translated “prayer” is the word for worship. Worship turns us away from ourselves to acknowledge and honour who God is, to focus on Him, and to open our hearts to Him in adoration and praise. Worship helps us to recognise that God is our Father, faithful, loving, and trustworthy, that He knows our needs before we ask Him and that, in every situation, He is working for our good and His glory. Worship and thanksgiving are the way we express our trust in God’s love and faithfulness.

The final step is petition, placing our requests in God’s hands. Petition should never be our first recourse in prayer, but rather the expression of our confidence in God’s love, entrusting to Him the situations for which we have no answer once we have dealt with our fears and anxieties.

Prayer is the expression of a loving and trusting relationship with our heavenly Father, who knows us intimately, who knows our needs and whose love for us always guarantees a favourable outcome not\ matter what our situation may be. God desires that our prayers should flow out of a heart at peace with Him. He allows circumstances into our lives that bring to the surface those attitudes and emotions which expose our mistrust of Him so that we can experience His peace.

God’s peace is the referee that blows the whistle when our beliefs are in error, or holds us steady as we keep trusting God in every situation.

THE THREE PHASES OF LIFE

Christian Life, ,

THE THREE PHASES OF LIFE

Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be. Psalms 139:16

Every human being lives life in three phases; nine months in the safety of a mother’s womb, a lifespan of years from birth to death, and an eternity of experiencing what started in phase one and two.

Phase one is a passive phase which begins the process of fulfilling God’s dream for every person born into the world. No-one chooses his parents or who he will be. He simply grows, in a protected environment, from a single cell to a complex human being with all the potential of adulthood packed into a tiny human form. The process of birth catapults us into the greatest challenge of all, living and learning from birth to death.

Phase two is the all-important time when we grow, learn, and choose the values that will shape us as we journey through life. We are not passengers in this phase; rather, we are apprentices, learning, practising, and preparing for the greatest adventure of all – the unknown hereafter when we will become what we are now learning to be.

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10

For those of us who have believed God’s Word and dared to entrust ourselves to Jesus, phase three is the promise of a life of perfection and peace in the presence of God, where we will live and reign with Him forever.

The second phase is all-important because what we do and become in our lifetime on earth will determine our role in eternity. Jesus gave us one simple instruction to help us to live wisely and serve our apprenticeship well; “Follow me.”

Firstly, He was a Son and He has given us the honour of becoming sons of God. “Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’” (Galatians 4:6, NIV). As a Son, Jesus lived in intimacy and perfect obedience to His Father. So must we.

Secondly, He was a servant, and we are also called to be servants. “Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve…” (Matthew 20:28, NIV).

Thirdly, Jesus came to reveal the Father and so must we. ”Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9b, NIV). Therefore, the Apostle Paul could say, “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children, and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us…” (Ephesians 5:1, 2, NIV).

Another qualification Jesus gave us is one we would not expect – how we steward our possessions. “If you are not trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?” (Luke 16:11, NIV).

The question we must ask ourselves during this second phase of our existence is, “Am I on track in my preparation for stage three?“ The way we manage what God has entrusted to us now will be the measure of our trustworthiness in the life to come. Our faithfulness to the tasks in hand will govern our position in the live to come

For the rest, who ignore this crucial phase of their existence and live it up as they choose, Jesus said they are destined for the eternal trash heap where the fire never goes out.

“…hell, 48 where
“‘the worms that eat them do not die,
and the fire is not quenched.’ Mark 9:47-48

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Bottom of Form

SLAVEDRIVERS

Christian Life, ,

SLAVEDRIVERS

Have you ever thought about how your life may be controlled by “slavedrivers”?

When God’s people were slaves in Egypt, their lives were controlled by their taskmasters. They cried out to God and He responded like this; “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slavedrivers and I am concerned about their suffering. So, I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land….” Exodus 3:7, 8.

God sent Moses to rescue His people because He had heard their cry and seen their suffering; however, they came out of Egypt with their slave mentality still intact. All they had known was the dehumanising cruelty of their Egyptian masters. They had been treated like machines, only valuable because they made bricks. Their dignity had been assaulted by their slavedrivers who thought they had the right to take their wives, their property and even their lives with no recourse to justice. And so, in their immaturity, God’s people were treating each other as they had been treated.

God called them into an intimate relationship with Himself at Mount Sinai and, through His Word, began to teach them how to live in freedom from fear, guilt, and shame and how to care for one another and to treat one another with dignity and humanity.

Many of us have never lived in literal slavery although some have. Worse than the misery caused by people who oppress us is the misery that the Evil One subjects us to because of the internal ”slavedrivers” that hurt us. Emotions like guilt, fear, anger, jealousy, envy, and coveting keep us captive to the people who ensnare us. What about addictions like gambling, alcohol, drugs, food, sex, cigarettes and pornography? We think that we can get free whenever we want to, but we know in our hearts that we are enslaved.

The apostle Paul said, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” (Galatians 5:1, NIV). Jesus bought our freedom at a great price. He still hears the cries of those who are oppressed by slavedrivers. How can we be set free? The children of Israel cried to God. The first step to freedom is to acknowledge that you are in bondage and to cry to God. Just as He heard His people long ago, He will hear you. It takes humility and courage to be honest about what is driving you, but it’s a small price to pay for freedom.

Jesus claimed Isaiah’s prophecy as a picture of Himself. “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners. He gives beauty for ashes….” (Isaiah 61:1, 3, NIV)

The second step is to forgive…forgive all who have ever hurt of demeaned you. Addictions are pain-managing ways to mask your pain. Forgiveness is the only way to free yourself from those who ”own” you by your anger, resentment, and hatred. When you cancel the debt of those who hurt you because Jesus has cancelled your debt and theirs, freedom is the prize.

RESURRECTION IS COMING

Christian Life, ,

RESURRECTION IS COMING

2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers, and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 5 If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. James 1:2-5

For 15 months I inched my way through Luke’s Gospel, and what a fascinating journey it was! I walked with Jesus from the cradle to the cross. I watched and listened as He interacted with all sorts of people, from hypocrites to hooligans, from pious people to pagans. I was amazed at how He mirrored and modelled the Father in all He said and did. Now I also have a much clearer picture of who the Father really is.

I uncovered many treasures on this journey. Let me share one with you. Jesus is lying dead in the tomb. A small group of women stumble through the early morning light to carry out their last act of love – to anoint His body with spices, a gesture for which they had to wait until the Sabbath was past.

In their grief, they want to freeze this moment in time, to hold on to their pain and get the most out of it because of their love for Him. Beyond this moment, they must forget about Him and move on, but right now they don’t want to let go. All their hopes lie broken with the body in the tomb. They want to savour the memory of touching Him once again and of saying a final goodbye.

But when they got to the tomb He was not there. The tomb was empty. God was moving on. How much grief they had wasted! How much pain they had endured! If they had only remembered that Jesus said He would rise again! If they had only trusted Him, they could have saved the devastation and disappointment they had felt and the time and the work they has wasted preparing for His burial.

How frustrated He was with the two on the road to Emmaus. They were speaking as though their whole world had come to an end. “We had hoped…” they whined in the presence of the risen Jesus!

How much like them we are! We don’t enjoy our pain and yet, somehow, we want to hold on to it just for a while, to feel the emotion of it so that we can lock it in our memory forever. We want to freeze our moment in time. We are so caught up in our fear, anxiety, and anguish that we forget that nothing takes God by surprise. His plans and His agenda are in place. While we sit and mourn our situation, He moves on and we are in danger of being left behind.

We discover too late that, if we had only trusted Him, we could have saved ourselves the pain and wasted energy of our disappointment grief or loss. If we had simply waited on God, we would have seen the next step opening before us.

James said, “When you don’t understand your trial, trust God, and ask Him for wisdom. He’ll give it to your freely and then you’ll know and experience joy because you’ll realise He is maturing you.” (LAC)

PRAYER – VALUING THE NAME

Christian Life, ,

PRAYER – VALUING THE NAME

9 “This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name, Matthew 6:9

Prayer is a fascinating subject.

I regret that it’s taken me so long to learn from Jesus what prayer is about rather than from listening to others pray.

Take for example praying in Jesus’ name. In our prayers, saying “In Jesus’ name, amen” is rather like an “over and out” ending to a two-way radio conversation, or like saying, “You have to answer me, God, because I prayed in Jesus’ name.” Is that what it really means?

At Mt Sinai, God gave “Ten Commandments” to His people as a guideline for living the best kind of life. The third commandment said that they were not to take God’s name in vain. We have reduced that to getting mad when people at work or on TV say “God!” or “Jesus!” and not doing it ourselves. But is that really all it means?

Part of the covenant God set up with His people was the right to use His name. That means that He gave them power of attorney to “sign cheques” in His name for whatever they needed to get the work that He assigned to them done.

Jesus passed that assignment on to us. “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you…” To do what? Basically, to live like He did to show the world what the Father is like.

There are three ways in which we can take God’s name in vain; we can justify what we are saying or doing wrong by claiming that God “understands”. We do this by rationalising. ”I know it’s wrong to have an affair but I love him and I don’t love my husband any more. God is love, so what’s so wrong with that?”

Secondly, we claim to speak in God’s name things that contradict who He is or give “a word” to people that He didn’t authorise. In our enthusiasm for God, we forget that it is a serious thing to speak for God what He has not spoken. False prophets were severely dealt with in the Old Testament.

The third way is by making demands of God in prayer and tagging Jesus’ name on the end like a magic formula. Jesus gave us a tough assignment – to be like Him in the world so that the world would know what the Father is really like. That means that He expects us to live exactly opposite to the way the world lives.

The world is greedy – we must be generous.

The world criticises and condemns – we must be merciful.

The world wants to be first – we must serve.

The world lives for self – we must die to self.

To pray on the name of Jesus is to be so one with Him in heart and mind that we think what He thinks and ask what He wants so that He can carry out His will through us here on earth. It means praying only what He authorises according to who He is. Praying in His name is to honour Him so much that we would not dream of saying, doing, or asking for any thing outside of who He is.