Prayer for Composure in Trial

"Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in Your sight." Matthew 11:26

O my Father, I come into Your presence this night, rejoicing that amid all earth's vicissitudes, I have in You - a Rock that can never be shaken. You do according to Your will in the armies of Heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth! You do all things well - and nothing but what is well. There is no finite wisdom in Your dealings - all is the result of combined faithfulness, power, and love. 

Let me repose in the righteous ordinations of Your will. If You withhold from me earthly blessings - let me feel that the very denial is precious, because it is Your sovereign pleasure. Covenant love and wisdom cannot lead or teach me wrong; every burden and affliction are imposed by You. The lot may be thrown into the lap - but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.

O You who turn the shadow of death into the morning - may every wilderness-storm only drive me nearer Yourself, my true shelter. You take the sting from every cross - and the bitterness from every cup. Let me recognize in all that befalls me - the tokens of my Heavenly Father's love! And if sense and sight should at times fail to spot "the bright light in the cloud," may I see written over every dark trial - Your own unanswerable challenge, "He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?"

Lord! the end of all Your sovereign dealings - is to subjugate my wayward will, and to unfold more of the preciousness of Jesus. Blessed Spirit of all grace! Take of the things that are Christ's - and show them unto my soul. Let me not stagger at the promises through unbelief. Let me see nothing but love in the past, love in the present, and love looming through the mists of a cloudy future. You, O my Father, are seated by my every furnace - all is meted out, all is provided for; all has a "need be" in it! 

Magnify the power of Your grace in me, by a sweet spirit of patient submission to Your righteous ordinations. May I seek to have no other prayer than this, "Father, glorify Your name." Impart that inner sunshine which no outward darkness or trial can obscure. May the peace of God, which passes understanding, keep my heart.

May Your Holy Spirit shed abroad His blessed influences over the whole Church. Revive Your work, O my God, in the midst of the years. In wrath, remember mercy. May Your ministers be more faithful. May Your people be more holy and consistent in their walk with You. May the young be growing up in Your fear and favor; may the aged find in You the staff of their declining years. May the sick and afflicted pillow their head on Your promises. May the dying fall asleep in Jesus.

I commend myself, my friends, and all belonging to me - to Your paternal care and keeping. And when earth's long night-watches of trial and sorrow are ended, may I wake up in the sorrowless morning of glory, to enjoy uninterrupted fellowship with Yourself. Through Jesus Christ, my only Lord and Savior. Amen.

"Let my prayer be set forth before You as incense - and the lifting up of my hands, as the evening sacrifice."

This Prayer is an excerpt of John MacDuff prayer written in 1856

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I went from someone who knows nothing about prayer, embarrass to open my mouth in front of people to a life of total commitment to prayer where when I am addressing my father, I do not care if my English is right, I do not care about my grammar, and basically do not care at all about who is standing next to me. Your rank, status, style, education or what have you do not matter to me because when I am praying, even if the room if full with people, it is personal and it is about me and my dad. This is not something you develop overnight. Through practice it took me almost a decade. It is a life where God takes us gradually by the hand and teach us in the way we should go. Psalm 109:4 says “….But I am a man of prayer." Some versions say: “…but I give myself unto prayer” -- or “…But I continue to pray.” The Psalmist did not mean by that he prayed when he had a problem or when they attacked him.  It is a life totally committed and given up to Him

While God expects all of us to be given up to prayer exactly like Jesus Christ did when He walked the earth, but it is not a life for everyone. This does not mean you are off the hook because it is not for everyone. It does not mean that you are not going to have to answer to God for not having cultivated this life. It does not mean you will be off the hook for all the people that could have been blessed through your prayers. You will not be off the hook for having trodden the sacrifice He made on the Cross to bring us the freedom to approach Him at any time. While this life is not for everyone, but it is certainly for those who love Him with reverence, fear and gratefulness in their heart, so, in this sense, yes you will have to answer for your lack of love and fear. The prerequisite for this life of prayer is: love and gratitude in the soul.

The frequency we turn our eyes and heart to Him is very important. You might say well, I do not have the time. Well, I say to you, if you have time to surf the internet for your own entertainment you made a choice between God, eternal things and wasting fifteen minutes of your life that you will never get back. I am not being harsh, but it is about prioritizing. While you are walking toward the washroom, pay attention to what occupy your mind. While you are washing dishes, cooking etc., the time you spent thinking about the cares of this world could have been given to God.

I know I like mentioning the washrooms and there is a reason behind it. I was working for a Bank where I used to give them at least twelve hours per day, plus about three hours travel time to and from fighting the traffic. Plus most of the time I had to go in on Saturday just so I could catch up. I was constantly tired. One day, I knew I had to make a decision to learn to cultivate a prayer life at least something that seemingly resemble to Christ’s.  Until then my prayer time was like a duty. My problem was the fact that there was not enough time in the day for me to pray. I also felt I needed every waking moment at work to keep in mind what needed to be done. I started my prayer life by accepting the fact that my job needed all my attention, yes, but the time that I was taking to walk toward the washroom was mine. So at least three times a day, I would go to the washrooms just to turn my mind to Jesus. All of it was done in my heart. It was hard at first but before I know it I started going to the washrooms just to be with Him. As time went by, I learned to take away from my sleeping time and shared it with Him. That too was extremely hard but God knows when we make sacrifices just to be with Him, and He does uphold and blesses us. The point is, you need to do whatever it takes to acquire this prayer life.

Suffice to say this verse that Oswald Chambers expounded in today’s devotional, is a deep verse. It is one of those verses where it will take God years to develop it in your life. Even after He develops it in your life, there will still be a bigger part of it that He can only show you on the last day. But, for Him to develop it in your life, it requires a life of abandonment at His feet. It is a life that takes your all, yet you do not have to worry about how to get there, but just start where you are and with the little time you have to offer. While you might be constrained by time and it is understandable to some extend, but do not be stingy in your attitude toward Him. Do not be stingy in your yieldedness either. God really makes provision for us to reach the point where we need nothing else because we have such great spiritual light and knowledge of Him. This does not mean that we know everything, but it will certainly mean that we know everything we need to know to rest secure in His bosom in this life. It is not a fake rest where we muster in our own strength, but one that comes directly from the oneness we share with Him.

When His Salvation touches your soul, you can never go back to the meagre and useless life you knew before. When you truly know Him, it is actually depressive to live your ordinary life on this earth, yet you are propelled forward because you know too much to settle for what you can see today. In a way, there is no rest for you until you see Him again. Make no mistake, the more you experience God, the more difficult it is to live out this life on earth, because you have tasted the sweet nectar of the heavenly life. Life down here is depressive because there is nothing that could ever satisfy what your soul is longing for which is living an uninterrupted, passionate, majestic and all around a wonder of heaven kind of oneness with Him. Yet, while you are longing for the life to come, in a paradox, you find rest in Him. This rest comes from an attitude of the heart. 

This attitude of the heart comes from having been led up to the heart of God the Father Himself. The journey of finding the heart of the Father starts with Salvation yes, but if there is one lesson I learned in the wilderness with God, Oswald says it best in the May 27 devotion “…Our waiting is not dependent on the providence of God, but on our own spiritual fitness. It is not the baptism of the Holy Spirit that changes people, but the power of the ascended Christ coming into their lives through the Holy Spirit. We all too often separate things that the New Testament never separates. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is not an experience apart from Jesus Christ— it is the evidence of the ascended Christ.” The evidence of the ascended Christ in us is never invisible to us or people around us.

Being able to submit and start a prayer life right now with God that after a while become bigger than life, is the evidence of the ascended Christ in you. Cultivating a life of prayer is not a life apart from your Salvation, it is Salvation in your soul being worked out with fear and trembling. Sure, there will be pruning through it and the vinedresser will appear to be harsh sometimes. But, it is a path that only you can take and you have to meet with Him alone. I guarantee you that you will stumble and fall and He will help you get right back on your feet, you dust your bottom and continue. He will break you and you will carry the invisible scars, but through the pain you will find daddy’s heart. If you think knowing Christ bring joy to your heart and soul, wait till you find the heart of God the Father, it is a joy simply out of this world. Would you submit to it? Would you let Him show you? Or, are you too busy finding your thrills for this life in the care of this world?  Make the right decision!

Unquestioned Revelation

05

28

2013

In that day you will ask Me nothing —John 16:23

When is “that day”? It is when the ascended Lord makes you one with the Father. “In that day” you will be one with the Father just as Jesus is, and He said, “In that day you will ask Me nothing.” Until the resurrection life of Jesus is fully exhibited in you, you have questions about many things. Then after a while you find that all your questions are gone— you don’t seem to have any left to ask. You have come to the point of total reliance on the resurrection life of Jesus, which brings you into complete oneness with the purpose of God. Are you living that life now? If not, why aren’t you?

“In that day” there may be any number of things still hidden to your understanding, but they will not come between your heart and God. “In that day you will ask Me nothing”— you will not need to ask, because you will be certain that God will reveal things in accordance with His will. The faith and peace of John 14:1 has become the real attitude of your heart, and there are no more questions to be asked. If anything is a mystery to you and is coming between you and God, never look for the explanation in your mind, but look for it in your spirit, your true inner nature— that is where the problem is. Once your inner spiritual nature is willing to submit to the life of Jesus, your understanding will be perfectly clear, and you will come to the place where there is no distance between the Father and you, His child, because the Lord has made you one. “In that day you will ask Me nothing.”

Courtesy of: http://utmost.org/

Thinking Of Prayer As Jesus Taught Part 2

Those words A.C.T. S. meaning ADORE – CONFESS – THANKSGIVING & - SUPPLICATION truly describe prayer to a tee. As I learned to pray, I made sure I followed the script, because it worked for me. But, as God got hold of me and lead me to the wilderness so that I could be tested, unlearned things, be taught etc, within three years my prayer life had changed and I no longer needed the script because my life was becoming “the script”.

God knows what we have to offer is faulty, but He also wants to take us to a place where He gives us His best. One example of that is “love” When we first respond to God’s love, we do it with our own love and our own love is selfish because it is based on give and take. (Philos love) The first time God showed me how He needed to exchange my Philos love so that I can learn to love Him with His own Agape love which is unconditional love. I cried like a child because it was a period of intense love between me and the father and I found that I had nothing to offer back to Him. He had to take my faulty love, (Philos), and exchanged it for His agape love, which I use to love Him back. To me that was a sad thing because I wanted to have something that was mine that I could offer to Him. I found out we truly go into this relationship with empty hands.   

Like Oswald Chambers said “our thinking about prayer, whether right or wrong, is based on our own mental conception of it.”  It is true when we first start with prayer for a while our thinking process is not where it should be with God and yet He is okay with it because He knows only the triune God can get us to where we need to be with Him.

So, where do we need to be with Him? First of all, it is a life of abiding and John 15:7 gave us a tall order of where He wants us to be with Him “if you abide in Me and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.” Prayer is like food to our spiritual life and if you go too long without food you will die of starvation, prayer does the same thing in our spiritual life. This life of abiding in Him, while Oswald Chambers is right, often times you feel there is nothing different about you, and you wonder if you are abiding. I know by now that I do not need to worry about it because it is not about feeling. Abiding in oneness in Him becomes so much a natural thing, and it is so unconsciously done that you do not even notice anything different.

While we do not have to worry about abiding because it is His job to keep us there, but we do have to worry about NOT abiding. The Scriptures tell us with a strong warning not to grieve the Holy Spirit. When there is a disconnect in the abiding process we know it because the Holy Spirit let us know of the danger we are in, through this little voice within and our job is to heed and make things right with Him. This little voice acts like a sensor in a car that let you know when we are in danger of being out of oil. Hence why John 15:7 says “if you abide” the “if” is there for a reason. Oswald Chambers also said in his devotion below “if we are obeying Him….Be aware of anything that stops the offering up of prayer.” He also said something in this devotion that applied to all of us Christians “The danger we have is that we want to water down what Jesus said to make it mean something that aligns with our common sense” This is one of the reasons it is important to walk in the Spirit. Only, Him can reveal the proper way we ought to use God’s word according to His standards.

When you read James 5:13-16 you find that prayer is truly powerful and effective. But, he made sure to end it this way “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” Obviously it would be nice to have more and more Christians praying, but, throughout the Bible, God tells us that at the end of the day there are some conditions to prayers and He spelled them out of us. God is a good God and He takes care of even the worse unbelievers and they too have a certain amount of His grace. I mean by that, they are breathing, they get jobs, and they can put food on their tables etc., so of course He would take care of us in the body of Christ even when our prayers are not correct. But, He expects us to grow, obey more, trust Him more, and believe in Him more. In the end, what pleases Him most is the prayer of a righteous person. The one that obeys, the one that abide even when life is at its worse, the one that trust and believe in Him etc., those people, their prayers are powerful and effective.

As we grow spiritually, each one of us is changing into an offering that constantly live at His feet. The life we live now, take shape and slowly become an act of ADORATION & THANKSGIVING. We become inwardly bi-product of those words. We adore Him though our reverence for Him, abiding in Him and our obedience to His word. We are thankful for whom He is and who He made us to be, and since we trust and believe Him we can give Him our all to have His way with us.  As you pray, you realize you no longer say Lord I adore you through “just words”, but as you are saying those words, your soul is gazing into His face and you can see yourself like a child at His feet because that’s where your spirit lives. Thus, pray without ceasing is not only an act of the will that we do to obey and honour the father, but it changes each one of us slowly as we become “the offering.” Your life becomes a constant prayer to Him! As you fulfill the adoration and thanksgiving part the rest of the acronym supplication and confession they are a given because it takes humility to be truly thankful. Through being thankful you give Him the praise and honour due to Him, etc. As for the confession part, if is a given that you are taking confession of sins very seriously, hence why you can sit at His feet and live there. It is because you confess, with a repentant heart that you are cleansed of all unrighteousness and abide constantly in oneness.

In the same way Christ needed to be in constant prayer so the life of God could be manifested in Him, we need to be in constant prayer so the life of Christ could grow stronger and be manifested in us. So, in this sense, prayer is a tool at our disposal to enable us to become an act of worship to Him as we become intimate with Him.

Thinking of Prayer as Jesus Taught By Oswald Chambers

05

26

2013

Pray without ceasing . . . —1 Thessalonians 5:17

Our thinking about prayer, whether right or wrong, is based on our own mental conception of it. The correct concept is to think of prayer as the breath in our lungs and the blood from our hearts. Our blood flows and our breathing continues “without ceasing”; we are not even conscious of it, but it never stops. And we are not always conscious of Jesus keeping us in perfect oneness with God, but if we are obeying Him, He always is. Prayer is not an exercise, it is the life of the saint. Beware of anything that stops the offering up of prayer. “Pray without ceasing . . .”— maintain the childlike habit of offering up prayer in your heart to God all the time.

Jesus never mentioned unanswered prayer. He had the unlimited certainty of knowing that prayer is always answered. Do we have through the Spirit of God that inexpressible certainty that Jesus had about prayer, or do we think of the times when it seemed that God did not answer our prayer? Jesus said, “. . . everyone who asks receives . . .” (Matthew 7:8). Yet we say, “But . . . , but . . . .” God answers prayer in the best way— not just sometimes, but every time. However, the evidence of the answer in the area we want it may not always immediately follow. Do we expect God to answer prayer?

The danger we have is that we want to water down what Jesus said to make it mean something that aligns with our common sense. But if it were only common sense, what He said would not even be worthwhile. The things Jesus taught about prayer are supernatural truths He reveals to us.

Courtesy of: http://utmost.org/thinking-of-prayer-as-jesus-taught/

Leonard Ravenhill Quotes

 “Today’s church wants to be raptured from responsibility.”

“The early church was married to poverty, prisons and persecutions. Today, the church is married to prosperity, personality, and popularity.”

“If weak in prayer, we are weak everywhere.”

“How can you have a dead service with a living Christ?”

“A man may study because his brain is hungry for knowledge, even Bible knowledge. But he prays because his soul is hungry for God.”

“Men give advice; God gives guidance.”

“Many of us are hunting mice – while lions devour the land.”

“A man who is intimate with God will never be intimidated by men.”

“No man – I don’t care how colossal his intellect – No man is greater than his prayer life.”

“Better for you to have one sleepless night on earth than millions in hell.”

“Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?”

“A sinning man stops praying, a praying man stops sinning.”

“Let your iniquities be given speech and hiss and torment you until you repent!”

“The only reason we don’t have revival is because we are willing to live without it!”

“God pity us that after years of writing, using mountains of paper and rivers of ink, exhausting flashy terminology about the biggest revival meetings in history, we are still faced with gross corruption in every nation, as well as with the most prayerless church age since Pentecost.”

“Church unity comes from corporate humility.”

“Nobody else can give you a clean heart but God.”

“Smart men walked on the moon, daring men walked on the ocean floor, but wise men walk with God.”

“You can’t develop character by reading books. You develop it from conflict.”

“I doubt that more than two percent of professing Christians in the United States are truly born again.”

“One of these days some simple soul will pick up the Book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed.”

“When there’s something in the Bible that churches don’t like, they call it legalism.”

“Why is there this criminal indifference to the lostness of men? Our condemnation is that we know how to live better than we are living.”

“The Church used to be a lifeboat rescuing the perishing. Now she is a cruise ship recruiting the promising.”

“The opportunity of a lifetime must be seized within the lifetime of the opportunity.”

“My main ambition in life is to be on the devil’s most wanted list.”

“If Jesus had preached the same message that ministers preach today, He would never have been crucified.”

“No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. The pulpit can be a shop window to display one’s talents; the prayer closet allows no showing off.”

“Entertainment is the devil’s substitute for joy”

Courtesy of: http://www.leonard-ravenhill.com/quotes