My Prayer

Faith, prayers, tears and groanings

My dad doesn't use an alarm clock. He just prays that God will wake him up when he should wake up everyday and that he'd get to work on time. And everyday he wakes up and gets to work on time.

It would make sense if my dad had an 

8-5 job his natural clock would be set and conditioned to wake up at the same time every day in order to get to the office on time, but that's not the case. 

My dad works at local hospitals and his patients arrive at different times every day so the times he would have to leave the house at different times, not to mention he works at different hospitals in the area so the travel time varies from day to day. There isn't a certain time he is conditioned to wake up, God wakes him up. That's the faith of my dad and God has proved Himself over and over through it. 

Then there's me, completely dependent on an alarm clock. However, here lately I've been praying that God would wake me up when He wants and that if it was Him, I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. This morning He honored that prayer.

My alarm was scheduled to scare the living daylights out of me at 5:19 and 5:24 a.m. (yep, not just one but two alarms), so I could hit snooze for about 40 minutes, make it to the shower around 6, spend time with God then make it to work at 8:30. But God had other plans. 

Hello 4:30 a.m. Hello wide-awakeness. Hello world. Hello heart-wrenching burden. 

The kind of burden squashing my heart is something I can't explain. I'm not going to lie, I tried to go back to sleep. That didn't work. I tried getting on Facebook. That didn't work. So I started praying. (What kind of last resort is that? Why it was not the first obvious choice, I don't know.) 

 After writing several pages of prayers asking God for deliverance for a certain one of my disciples, the tears were blurring my vision and I gave up writing and just started crying out to the Lord asking for help and His leadership, wisdom and sensitivity. 

The battle was intense. Our enemy is so strong. But praise God, our Lord is stronger. 

Before long I opened up His precious Word and went to Romans 8:26, but before I made it there I started reading verse 18. The truths of these verses were like aloe vera on a sunburn, so soothing.

"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. ¹⁹ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. ²³ And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴ For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. 

²⁶ Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. ²⁷ And He who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. ²⁸ And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose. ²⁹ For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. ³⁰ And those whom He predestined He also called, and those whom He called He also justified, and those whom He justified He also glorified."  

³¹ What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? ³²  He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? ³³ Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. ³⁴  Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised— who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. ³⁵ Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? ³⁶ As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;

    we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

³⁷ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹ nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

-Romans 8:18-39

The amount of gratitude I have for the Word of God is inexpressible. And if His sweet Word--filled  with exceedingly great and precious promises--wasn't enough, it tells us the Spirit Himself is interceding for us. It says that twice then goes on to say Jesus Himself is sitting beside the Father in heaven praying for us, interceding on our behalf, begging our Dad next to Him to hear and answer us and so fulfilling His High Priestly duties. 

Although I was doing some tear-filled groaning with the Spirit this morning and it wasn't the most comfortable feeling, I pray it is the first of many mornings to wake up in prayer and feel the Lord fighting for me. 

He really is the best.

My encouragement for you is that you remember you are not in this battle alone. You have brothers and sisters that want to help you fight and you have a Comforter and Savior who is not only interceding for you, but One who has already clinched the battle. "It is finished."

God's Wallet

The World's Largest Wallet, measuring 10-feet high and 21-feet wide, set a Guinness World Record in December  2010 in Harvard Square, Mass.

While praying for God's provision for a need in our church last night, Dave Weaver said,

"God, You have a bigger wallet than any of us."

That one line in his passionate and heart-filled prayer has been swimming around in my brain ever since and is changing the way I view God.

It's not like the fact of God's big wallet is new, no, I've heard my whole life, "God owns the cattle on a thousand hills," and the like. But this was different. It placed in my head an entirely different mental picture to ponder.

When Dave prayed that, it was as if I could see God up on His throne reaching in His back pocket and pulling out this ginormous, fat wallet and then distributing it to us, His kids, almost like an allowance.

Except, an allowance (in today's society) is supposed to be based on doing your chores. When the dishes are done, the room is sparkling and trash is no longer decomposing and contaminating the trashcan, then the kids are given their allowance (at least that's how it was for me, although my parent's called it "commission").

But God (the two best words in the entire world) doesn't base His provision off our performance. God gives to us because His Son has already given the highest performance by sacrificing Himself on the cross and swallowing our curse. He provides for us out of His grace, not because we did our chores this week.

Sometimes God doesn't provide like we want Him to or think He should, but the Bible promises that He will provide everything we need (Philippians 4:19). If we don't have it today, we don't need it today. 

And now I have a different picture of God providing for us in my head. Here we are, His grubby little kids approaching His throne asking for a house or roof, or car or paycheck, and God reaches around and finds the pocket in His big flowing white robe, pulls out His God-sized wallet and doles out the provision as He sees fit.

"If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!" -Matthew 7:11

God is our Father and He loves us more than our earthly fathers ever could. I encourage you to read Matthew 6:25-34 and seek Him not only as Father, but first among anything or anyone else.

Why praise the Lord?

Why praise the Lord? 

Not because your situations or circumstances are going well, but because He deserves it no matter what is going on in our lives.

Join me in praising Him because of Him, not because of us. 

Dirty Jobs: Christian Edition

Mike Rowe has a TV show called Dirty Jobs. He dives into the messy, muddy and mucky jobs of everyday people, and from garbage men to sewage workers to shark taxidermists and maggot farmers, Rowe covers the dirtiest of the dirtiness.

But what if there was a Christian Edition?

Christians aren't perfect, the dirtiness of sin still remains, the difference in a true believer's life is their response (brokenness, grief and repentance) to the dirt. Our filth often includes (but is definitely not limited to) the "respectable sins" of pride and lust, gossiping and jealousy, anger and ungratefulness.

The dirty job isn't that we have those sins and struggle with them, no, that's the easy and natural part. The job comes in dealing with the root of the sin and breaking free of the bondage it enslaves us with.

It's hard to kill the flesh. It hurts. It's uncomfortable. And it isn't instantly gratifying. Besides, my mom has always told me God doesn't command things of us that come naturally. If it came natural for us, He wouldn't have to command it.

The dirty job of killing sin is pretty much a straightforward command:

"Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace." -Romans 6:12-14

It is our job as the church--the Body of Christ-- to come alongside each other and help each other continually present ourselves as slaves to righteousness. We don't need to be the TV host who just tells the viewers what the gross wild goose swabber or hot tar roofer is doing, but a host who actually gets his hands dirty and helps do the job. We should differ from Mike Rowe, however, in that we don't just stop after a few minutes of helping in order to check that off our "Christian To-Do List" but continually get our hands dirty in bearing the burdens of our brothers and sisters in Christ and helping them fight the battles in all its gory, disgusting, nastiness, always keeping in mind that we have those same gory, disgusting, nasty sins, too.

"But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses." -1 Timothy 6:11-12

Shower heads, laughter and the presence of God

As I laid in the bathtub tonight (taking a gloriously long hot soak for the first time in months) looking up at the shower head I thought how funny it would be if the shower just turned on a started spraying me and my book down.

If that happened I would have shrieked then laughed and asked God to quit playing around.

Then it hit me.

What if God really did do stuff like that?

I mean, He can. But what if He did go all Herbie-Fully-Loaded on us and played practical jokes as a way to get us to notice and spend time with Him?

Maybe then we would start realizing He is ever-present and always at work around us.

I'd certainly laugh more.

But God, in all His sovereignty, waits for us to come to Him. He never begs, just patiently waits to have mercy on us (Isaiah 30:18).

Still. I like to imagine God playing practical jokes on us. But then again, maybe He does and I just don't realize it.

Just a thought.

Getting uncomfortable

It's after midnight and I can't sleep. I've been reading Katie Davis' book Kisses from Katie and am questioning what is holding me back from completely throwing myself at God in complete abandonment and giving up everything to follow Him as His disciples did when Jesus called.

I'm sitting in my comfortable sweats in my comfortable bed, in my comfortable home on my comfortable street in comfort town, USA. I have everything I could ever need within the walls of my home and if that still wasn't enough I have an iPhone that can connect me to anything else I could ever ask for or imagine. I have an amazing family, friends and almost endless resources. Next Monday I start a full-time job I'm ridiculously excited about, next season I'll be covering Murray State basketball for the Associated Press again and in just more than six months I'll have a college degree. It's the American dream: go to college, get married and settle down to make money and kids.

But all of that is nothing without Christ. Everything is empty and meaningless and has no significance apart from the Lord breathing grace into our vain lives and plans (even the best laid ones... but you know what they say about those).

I am completely confident God has me exactly where He wants me and I could not be happier than to love on the middle and high school girls at my church and point them to the cross day in and day out, but in doing so I've not been granted permission to get comfortable.

We were not called to comfort. We were called to obedience. And most often that means getting uncomfortable.

Here is an excerpt of Katie's book:

When I imagine God creating each one of us and planting a purpose deep in our hearts, I never imagine that purpose being mediocrity. While the Bible doesn't tell every person on earth specifically what his or her life's calling will be, it does include a lot of general direction: 

"You are to find Me in the least of these." Yes. 

"You are to leave your earthly possessions and come follow Me." Yes. 

"You are to love and serve the Lord God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself." Yes. 

"You are to go and make disciples of all nations." Yes. 

"You are to entertain strangers and lepers and tax collectors." Yes. 

"You are to show mercy." Yes. 

"You are to live a life of mediocrity and abundance, holding tight to your comfortable lifestyle, lest you lose it." No. 

I don't think so. "Mediocrity and abundance" aren't there. However, mediocrity and abundance, comfort and ease do seem to be safe choices for many people, myself included. In stark contrast, leaving our possessions, following Jesus when we don't have a well-defined plan, and entertaining strangers--well, that does sound a little scary. But what if, just beyond that risk, just beyond the fear is a life better than anything we have ever imagined: life to the fullest.

We are not called to a life of mediocrity because with Christ there is no such thing. We are called to get uncomfortable because when that happens we discover He is our source of comfort. We are called to be patient in affliction because when that happens we discover He is our source of help. We are called to sacrifice our lives because He sacrificed His.

Don't gain the world and lose your soul. Don't settle for a life of mediocrity and comfort. God is bigger than your comfort zone and He wants to use you in His glorious work of redeeming the nations, including the one you're in. You don't have to sell all your belongings, pack a suitcase and fly to a third world nation and live in poverty in order to be uncomfortable or make a difference for His Kingdom. No, He can use you right where you are, but you must be willing to be uncomfortable.

The funny thing is, when we are uncomfortable for His sake we soon find more comfort than we could ever have known. Crazy how obeying Jesus' commands brings more joy than doing things our own way. He really does know what He's talking about.

Videos to watch when you're ready to reject comfort:

Here's to getting uncomfortable. For His glory.