Prayer – I had no idea

Let me start off by saying if you don’t think prayer is very important, or don’t like doing it, you’ve got a lot to learn.  Prayer is one of the most wonderful things that God has blessed us with.  For so long I was ignoring this awesome gift, and I never realized the potential it had.

With that out of the way, here’s what I’ve got to say about it.  David sets the bar for prayer in scripture.  In 2 Samuel 7 he prays to God with enthusiasm, praise, and unselfish desires.  “How great you are O sovereign LORD!” “There is no one like you, and there is no God but you.”  David praised God fervently from his heart.  What I’ve learned is that once we encounter God, once we establish a relationship with Him and see His glory, we can do nothing but praise and worship Him.  When we see how awesome He is, our natural response is to fall on our faces in humility and praise Him.  In God’s presence we realize how much greater He is than us.  His holiness makes us see how unholy we are, and we almost feel embarassed; its impossible to have pride in His presence.  But thankfully God makes us clean and unblemished in His sight through Jesus Christ, and this is where our praise for Him comes from.  I am in awe of the fact that I am worth so much to God that He would sacrifice His son for me.  I know how unworthy I am of this gift, but God still gave it to me.

David also says, “Do as you promised [(bless my family)], so your name will be great forever.”  He makes a request from God, asking that He would keep His word and bless David’s family, but he doesn’t ask this out of selfishness.  David wants the blessing so that his family can glorify God and make His name known.  In everything we ask for we should ultimately want praise to be given to God because He is more than worthy of it.  This may seem like something difficult to do, because we are selfish people and we want things for ourselves.  It might be difficult to ignore what we think we need or want, but the fact is we doget something out of this.  Something that I am still being convinced of is that God completely satisfies.  We don’t need anything but God to be satisfied.  This is a lofty thought that I still have trouble grasping, but it keeps proving itself true.  In order to pray with selflessness, we must realize that God alone will totally satisfy us.  We don’t need other things in our lives, just God.  So with this thought in mind we don’t need to ask for anything else but God in our lives.  We have God, so what else could we possibly need, apart from more of God?  I don’t need money, or a girlfriend, or sucess, or anything else in this world.  With that out of the way I am freed up to pray unselfishly.  I can pray for others, and for God’s praise.

In all of this, the most important thing that I’ve learned is that to pray effectively, we have to be seeking God’s heart.  We have to find what He wants and pray for it.  What does God want you might ask?  Well that’s something you’ll largely have to find out for yourself.  I know for a fact that God passionately desires for all of his children to come home, and that drives a large portion of my prayer.  I also know that He seeks glory, not because He’s power hungry or obsessed with Himself, but because He truly is the most awesome thing in the universe, and it doesn’t make sense to worship anything but Him.  God is the greatest, the lovingest, the kindest, the most powerful, the wisest, the most intelligent, the most creative, the most beautiful, the most awesome, the biggest, the best, and the most perfect God who was, is and ever will be.  He is the only one worthy of our praise, and He knows it.  God wants our praise because nothing is more worthy than He. 

Apart from His desire for us to praise Him, and His desire for us to seek Him and find comfort in Him, you’ll have to discover what God’s heart desires on your own.  But we have to make sure that our prayers are driven by His desires, whatever we find them to be.  Trust me, we want His desires because they are the best thing that could happen.  God knows everything, and he knows what’s best for His creation.  So in everything we must seek God’s heart and, when we pray, let His desires motivate us.

The Lord Seeks True Worshipers

I stumbled across some scripture recently that rocked my world.  John 4:23-24 says, “Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshiper will worship the Father in the spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”  Say what?!  This is talking about us!!  We are those worshipers God has been waiting for.  If the Holy Spirit is moving in us when we praise the Lord, then we are the kind of worshiper God has been seeking.  The sole reason we are placed on this planet is to glorify and praise the Lord, and it is mind blowing that he seeks that from us.  If you feel like you have no other purpose in the world, you can take comfort in that one thing.  The Lord seeks you  out personally as a worshiper who is in spirit and truth,  so worship Him with your everything and hold nothing back.

What the heck is Sin anyways?

I am always amazed at how poorly I grasp even the simplest of Christian concepts:  Sin, grace, salvation, obedience, the Holy Spirit, prayer, etc.  I have to give a message on Sin this Monday for our high school ministry.  It’s not even a long talk, 5-10 min, but something about breaking down this concept to it’s simplest components seems like a daunting task.  I sat down this morning to begin planning my talk and realized that I had no clue what to say.  Do I even understand Sin?  I wikipedia’d Sin in the general sense: “an act that violates a moral rule, or the state of having committed such a violation,”  and more specifically in the Christian sense: “a legal infraction or contract violation [with God].”  A contract violation?  I guess this makes sense because we do have a contract with God, a covenant or testament.  The law, given through Moses, is that contract.  We should not murder, have sex outside of wedlock, envy, lie, worship idols, steal, take the lords name in vain, have other gods before the real God, disobey the sabbath, or disobey our parents.  But there seems to be a deeper meaning behind Sin, apart from these commandments.

What is behind the commandments?  What dictates whether or not we follow them?  James 1:14-15 states, “but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.  Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”  So something precedes sin: evil desire.  Man has an evil desire within him, and sin comes from this desire.  So the real problem is not our breaking the commandments, but it is our evil nature, the problem on the inside.  Lets refer to this problem as “capital S” Sin and the breaking of the commandments as “lower case s” sin. 

Capital S Sin is the big problem.  It severs the connection we have with God and causes us to break our covenant with Him.  Obviously the story doesn’t end here.  Jesus died as a payment for our sins, so that we could have eternal life.  But there’s also talk in the bible about being set free through Christ.  Not only did Christ die, but he was resurrected as well.  We now have new life in Christ’s resurrection, and we are born again in the spirit.  Jesus says in John 3:3, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again,” and again in verse 5, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.”  So what does that mean, and how does Christ set us free from Sin?  In one sense He releases us from the consequences of Sin, so we are no longer bound by its punishment (although this is not an excuse to live a life of sin: Galations 6:7-8).  There is another sense though, one less obvious and harder to place a finger on.  Christ allows us to live a life with less Sin.  Somehow he enable us rid ourselves of the evil desire we have, so that we can be with God.  The best way I can exlain is this: When we accept Christ as our savior, He begins to dwell within us, causing us to sin less and less.  He does this through His Holy Spirit.  So in essence, allowing Christ to dwell in us more, cause us to sin less.  Because the real problem is our evil desire, the cure is Christ’s presence in us.  Therefore, we cannot become more righteous by attempting on our own to obey God’s commands.  The only way to become righteous is to allow He who is righteous to dwell in us.  By spending time with the Lord, he attains a stronger presence within us, and so we consequently sin less.

So to sum that up, Sin is a condition of evil desire within us, and the only cure to Sin is God’s presence within us, which can be attained through spending time alone with Him.  We will by default do good deeds when God is in us, but we cannot achieve righteousness by trying on our own.