Today
I am spending time in Williamsburg, Virginia at an event where government
officials are asking citizens and churches to pray for our nation and to pray
for them. We must pray. It really is one of the most important things
we can do.
Take
some time and look at the website www.prayusa.com and choose to be part of this great
and important work! Here is a devotion
from My Utmost for His Highest by
Oswald Chambers and should remind us of the priority that prayer must have in
our lives.
…one
of His disciples said to Him, "Lord, teach us to pray…"
Prayer
is not a normal part of the life of the natural man. We hear it said that a
person’s life will suffer if he doesn’t pray, but I question that. What will
suffer is the life of the Son of God in him, which is nourished not by food,
but by prayer. When a person is born again from above, the life of the Son of
God is born in him, and he can either starve or nourish that life. Prayer is
the way that the life of God in us is nourished. Our common ideas regarding
prayer are not found in the New Testament. We look upon prayer simply as a
means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is
that we may get to know God Himself.
“Ask,
and you will receive…” (John 16:24). We complain before God, and
sometimes we are apologetic or indifferent to Him, but we actually ask
Him for very few things. Yet a child exhibits a magnificent boldness to ask!
Our Lord said, “…unless you…become as little children…” (Matthew 18:3). Ask and God will do. Give Jesus
Christ the opportunity and the room to work. The problem is that no one will
ever do this until he is at his wits’ end. When a person is at his wits’ end,
it no longer seems to be a cowardly thing to pray; in fact, it is the only way
he can get in touch with the truth and the reality of God Himself. Be yourself
before God and present Him with your problems— the very things that have
brought you to your wits’ end. But as long as you think you are
self-sufficient, you do not need to ask God for anything.
To
say that “prayer changes things” is not as close to the truth as saying,
“Prayer changes me and then I change things.” God has established things
so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at
things. Prayer is not a matter of changing things externally, but one of
working miracles in a person’s inner nature.
“There
is nothing, naturally speaking, that makes us lose heart quicker than decay—the
decay of bodily beauty, of natural life, of friendship, of associations, all
these things make a man lose heart; but Paul says when we are trusting in Jesus
Christ these things do not find us discouraged, light comes through them.”
The Place of Help
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