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Praying with a Friend

Monday, January 28th, 2013

Praying-with-a-Friend-2

I just returned from a wonderful visit with a friend from my childhood. During the time that I was with her, we prayed and talked and spurred each other onward in our walk with Christ. We went to a coffee shop almost every day and prayed for most of the morning. Praying with a friend is so fulfilling. My burden for prayer was lifted and shared, so that it was more than twice the joy. Most of the time when I pray by myself, it’s a mind struggle because my kids interrupt me, or I think of an urgent chore that needs to get started. I have to force myself to set everything else aside to spend time with Him.

Well, this past week was heavenly as far as prayer was concerned. My friend and I have similar people that we pray for, although I have people from the Czech Republic and other pastors and missionaries that I pray for as well. My friend prayed for Christians all over the world who are being martyred for their faith, and for the specific ministries that she is supporting.

Because my private prayer life never gets heard by anyone but God, I didn’t notice that I pray some of the same sanctification issues for many people. “It seems like you could just combine those people so that you don’t have to pray for the marriages of each couple, for example, one by one.” She freed up my prayer time to be more led by the Spirit because I wasn’t saying the same things over and over for each person. Since I had more time than usual with no distractions, it was so much easier to have refreshing new prayers.

By the way, praying with a friend will help you to know if you are praying something contrary to Scripture. You need to run your prayers through a friend occasionally to make sure you want the will of God rather than seeking your own pleasure. Often people pray the wrong things. A more mature believer will pray that a circumstance would cause you to draw closer to Christ rather than constantly praying for ease in your own life.

When you pray with a friend, you can go back and forth if you think of something to add. I loved this! I didn’t mind at all being interrupted when I paused, because my heart was already lifting that person up to God, and I was able to expand the prayer for that person. My friend thought of things to pray for my sister that I hadn’t even thought of. When both people are praying in the Spirit, there is a fervency and depth that is difficult to equal when alone, especially if it isn’t a prayer request about your own life. We often prayed with tears, begging God for a dear friend to repent, or for the healing of deep pain in the destroyed lives of those around us.

I felt so full of the Spirit after praying with my friend that I wanted to get up and start leading people to Christ in the coffee shop. My friend asked several people how we could pray for them, and it meant a lot to a man who was returning to his family, after having spent time in jail and a rehab program. He was nervous to see his wife and kids, because he was now a broken and changed man through the power of Christ. We prayed for him fervently, and I could see in his watery eyes how much it meant to him that we cared enough to pray.

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Shining the Joy of Jesus

Sunday, December 23rd, 2012

shining-the-joy-of-jesus

Pulling up to the church, I walked into the sanctuary, where the rest of the choir members were gathering. This was the first time for me to ever be in a Christmas choir. When an invitation to join the choir was announced a month ago, I knew I had no time for it. My husband said, “You will never have time. Do it if you want to do it.” It meant than my husband had to watch the kids on Thursday nights for four weeks. He said he didn’t mind doing it. I loved the rehearsals. Our choir director has a fun sense of humor.

After practicing for an hour, the church members started coming in, so we descended from the stage. At the right time we lined up along the wall and stepped up to the risers. I looked out over the people. We were here to lead them in praise to God. As we started singing, I felt like I was with the angels in heaven. Joy emanated from my soul.

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An elderly man came up to the stage to lead us in communion. He is one of the elders, a man with the sweetest, gentlest expression I’ve ever seen, like he has spent his whole life with Jesus. That’s the expression I want when I’m old, I said to myself. Have you noticed how elderly people are either bitter toward life (cranky and never satisfied with anything) or sweet (contented with life and easy to be with)? I want to be in the second category.

christmas-choir

Last year this same elderly man gave the Christmas sermon. He had trouble walking up the stairs. Then he messed up several of his lines, but he quickly corrected them. And every time he finished with one of the pages of his notes, he would drop it to the ground. He apologized that he had to drop his papers, but it was impossible for his hands to turn them at his age. At the end of the sermon when the people were filing out the door, I went up to him and said, “I loved your dramatic flair in dropping each page as you were finished with it. I’ll have to remember that for when I do public speaking.” He laughed sweetly as I told him how moving his sermon was.

The elderly gentleman stepped down, and we sang our last song. “Joy, unspeakable joy rises in my soul…” Joy filled my soul, and when I looked into the faces of the people in the audience, their faces lit up with joy as they looked into my face. I must have looked like the gentleman, the one I want to be like, shining the joy of Jesus as we sang this Christmas service.

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God is Sovereign

Sunday, December 16th, 2012

God-is-sovereign

“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” (II Timothy 3:3-4)

We are seeing these very attributes in our society today. People are murdering innocent children in schools, gunning down audiences at movie theaters, and opening fire on shoppers at malls. The morality of our country has visibly gone downhill, even in the last few years.

Someone recently posted on Facebook: “Having a hard time right now, just trying to understand how we’re supposed to have any faith in humanity when every day there seems to be a shooting or some other tragedy going on? I know we’re supposed to give it up to GOD, but I have to admit I’m struggling….It just seems like this world is so full of hate and violence… Breaks my heart… I guess all I can do it keep praying…”

I answered: We’re commanded in Scripture not to have faith in humanity, who will automatically sin because they are born sinful and in rebellion to God. We must put our faith in God alone. God’s holiness shines in stark contrast to our selfishness. Even as believers we are selfish, so we can’t expect unsaved people to act in a way that is righteous.

Yes, God holds all the molecules of the universe together, and He can stop any event from occurring. But if He did, we would all be robots, unable to make our own decisions. The only reason sin exists is because God gave us free will. And yet God causes every event (no matter how hideous) to be transformed into good for us, even if evil was intended by the people who perpetrated it. God is good. He is good all the way through, with no evil anywhere. That’s what’s so beautiful about God.

God is sovereign. My husband mentioned last night that there are many calamities like natural disasters that we think are evil but aren’t. Over 100,000 people are killed instantly. God gives life and takes it because He is ruler of all, and the giving and taking of life is not sin for Him, because He made us and our days are numbered. All things, evil and otherwise, are divinely orchestrated by God to transform us into His image so that we can experience a closer walk with God. It’s easier to accept the death of a loved one if you understand that their days were numbered before the foundation of the earth, and they lived out precisely the days that God intended for them to live out.

Ultimately God is in control of all things. He knows about and predestines all things that will take place because of our depravity, and He weaves it into a beautiful tapestry. Someone once said that we see the back side of the tapestry, with all the knots and mess, and that when we’re in heaven, we will see the beauty of how God actually controlled even the evil things, setting limits for evil, and creating good out of the evil. And how are we to respond? Trust Him. If you have to understand everything before you trust God, you are not trusting Him. We will never fully understand God because He is infinite. And yet He is good. He commands us to walk in holiness, and we repeatedly rebel against that command. He finally gives us over to our sin until the entire nation collapses like Sodom and Gomorrah.

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The Star of Bethlehem

Thursday, December 6th, 2012

In the beginning, the Spirit of God hovered over the dark, formless void. And God said, “Let there be light.” There was no sun, no moon, no stars, only random chaos with light emanating from none other than God Himself. Other places in Scripture we are told, “God is light. In Him there is no darkness at all.” (I John 1:5) So at the beginning of the universe, the beginning of the space-time continuum, God begins emanating light in all directions. Behold the glory of God!

Angels sang (Job 38:4-7) as earth was created in full technicolor, glorious in all the realms of the universe with galaxies and stars and planets innumerable. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1-4;14) The very breath of God going forward in words was the action of Jesus forming life and holding all the molecules together through the power of His will. “For in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) and “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17)

And people beheld the glory of God in the face of Christ. “For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (II Corinthians 4:6) But was that glory visible? The face of Jesus could not have been shining with light, or everyone would have recognized Him as God. So He left His light glory behind, setting aside His mighty power and glory, taking the disguise of a slave and becoming like men. (Philippians 2:5-7)

And at the moment of His birth, a strange emanation of light was seen above where He was born, bright enough to be seen by astrologer magicians in faraway countries that had heard a prophecy that a King would be born when a strange light emanation (unlike a star) was seen. The magi packed up and traveled on the road for about two years (thousands of miles) until they arrived at the “house” where Jesus was. So the light emanation above Jesus remained there just long enough to lead the magi to the King, and then we hear no more about it. I wonder how those magician’s lives were affected, and why it was so important that those three men follow the star when no one else did.

I heard a sermon by John MacArthur over a decade ago, where he stated that the star was actually the glory of God. He used Scripture to support his view, pointing out that the star was moving, which means it couldn’t have been a real star. It “went on before them, until it came and stood over where the Child was.” (Matthew 2:9) Ever since then, I have been mesmerized by the star. I, too, want to follow.

Matthew 2:9b-11a: “And lo, the star which they had seen in the east went on before them, until it came and stood over where the Child was. And when they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And they came into the house and saw the Child with Mary His mother; and they fell down and worshiped Him…”

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