Posts Tagged ‘prayer’

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True Guilt and False Guilt

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

true-guilt-and-false-guiltHave you ever been in the presence of God in prayer, wondering why you weren’t connecting? Did you have a vague feeling of defeat, knowing you probably sinned more times than you could count, and that you just weren’t making progress in your walk with God? And then your mind condemns you. You ask God for forgiveness, and the sin doesn’t go away. You’re just sitting there feeling defeated, and how can you pray?

One way that you can know that you are experiencing false guilt is if the enemy throws in your face a sin from the past that you already repented of and that God already forgave you for. I John 1:9 says that “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” If we have already repented of the sin, it’s gone. Stand on the truth. Don’t let the enemy throw it back in your face.

Secondly, God is never vague about sin. He is definite and specific. If you feel a general sense of defeat and yuckiness, you can know that it’s not from God. God wants us to walk in victory over sin (I Corinthians 15:57). Our enemy, however, doesn’t want us to have victory. So he uses our hormones to make us feel defeated. But we do not have to be fooled by his schemes “so that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes” (II Corinthians 2:11).

True guilt is when God convicts you of a recognizable sin that you haven’t repented of. There is a definite solution to the problem, which is confession and repentance. The sin will go away instantly. If it doesn’t, I’ve picked up the phone to call a mature sister in Christ, who prays for me. At that point I am always released from sin.

Do not let the enemy tangle you up in a web of lies that keeps you away from having fellowship with God. Conviction and condemnation are different, even though they feel similar. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” Romans 8:1-2

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Letting Go of Worry

Monday, February 18th, 2013

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“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:6-7

According to John Underhill and Jack Lewis from the Bible Study Foundation Illustration Database, an average person’s anxiety is focused on the following things:

  • 40% are things that will never happen
  • 30% are about the past, which can’t be changed
  • 12% are about criticism by others, mostly untrue
  • 10% are about health, which gets worse with stress
  • 8% are about real problems that can be solved

If you notice on this list, either you can do nothing about a situation, or you can take pro-active steps to solve it. There is absolutely no point to worrying. You can’t add a single hour to your life by stressing out about your circumstances (Matthew 6:27). Allowing your mind to dwell on something that causes you to worry is sin. We must take our thoughts captive. Our wandering minds should not rule us. God should rule us. We must put on the mind of Christ (I Corinthians 2:16).

There is a direct link between prayer and trust in God. Worry is eliminated when we trust God completely. We need to realize that God is in complete control of the universe. In Him all things live and breathe and have their being (Acts 17:28). He holds all the atoms in the universe together. Consider Job. Satan had to ask permission to do anything to him. So God has parameters on exactly what our enemy is able to do in our lives, and it is always for our spiritual growth (Romans 8:28).

So if God is in charge of the entire universe, we can pray to Him. He rules. He can strike dead and give life. He created all things. He has incredible power. Anyone who has met God has fallen on his face in fear and trembling. God rules the universe, and He is our Abba Father. We are to approach Him as His children. He knows how to give good gifts to those who ask (Matthew 7:11) But we must ask. Keep in mind that God wants our sanctification more than anything else, so go ahead and align yourself to that, and all the power in the universe is behind you. If we ask anything according to His will, He hears us, and we know that we have what we asked of Him (I John 5:14-15). It’s true. Align your will to God’s, and all your requests will be granted. God’s timing is perfect as well. Don’t rush God but wait on Him.

Fretting and worrying is when we take matters into our own hands, and we don’t want God’s will. We find ourselves fighting against God. When I stressed about money early in my marriage, I did not believe that God would provide my needs, so I functionally believed He was a liar, since He promises to take care of those things. And did I ever starve? No. I fretted and felt like I was drowning and screamed at my husband, and all that worry was sin. I finally released it to God and had peace, even though we were about to go bankrupt. I felt supernatural peace and had no stress whatsoever when we were going to lose everything. Why? Because God was my rock, and I put my trust in Him. Your circumstances don’t matter. Your circumstances are divinely placed there by God to cause you to grow closer to Him. Yield to God. Inwardly you will have the strength of God Himself as He fills you and causes you to be a rock to other people.

“Fussing always ends in sin. We imagine that a little anxiety and worry are an indication of how really wise we are; it is much more an indication of how really wicked we are. Fretting springs from a determination to get our own way. Our Lord never worried and He was never anxious, because He was not out to realize His own idea; He was out to realize God’s ideas. Fretting is wicked if you are a child of God… All our fret and worry is caused by calculating without God.” (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest)

“Casting all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you.” I Peter 5:7

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Praying with Your Spouse

Wednesday, February 13th, 2013

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Praying with your spouse will deepen your marriage in incredible ways. The wife will see her husband’s spiritual heart, which will help her to honor and respect him the way that Scripture commands her to in Ephesians 5:33. All Christians desire to please God. If you don’t desire to please God, you are not saved. So if your husband is saved, you will be attracted to him spiritually when you pray. Even if you only pray for less than five minutes, the oneness you experience as you grow in your prayer life together is wonderful.

What do you do if your husband doesn’t want to pray with you? First of all, pray that God will change his heart about it. Most men do not want to be spiritually vulnerable with their wives. My own husband had someone rip his prayer to shreds one time while in college. He was praying aloud to God with all his heart, and afterwards a man criticized his prayer. He never wanted to pray aloud again.

If your husband has similar baggage, God needs to heal him. Talk about it, and let your husband know that you don’t care what he says in his prayers, that you love and accept him for who he is. What initially caused my husband to pray with me was my desperation in a particular situation where I had nowhere else to turn but to my husband.

how-to-pray-with-your-spouse

Another thing you can do is to make sure you never preach at your husband through your own prayers. I know people who do that. The person is talking to me and not to God because they are trying to convince me about something. Don’t ever do that. Men know when they’re being preached at, and they despise it because it’s pretentious.

If your husband doesn’t want to pray out loud, you can talk about a particular issue, then you can hold hands and close your eyes and pray together silently. It doesn’t have to be out loud. Just this simple act can draw you together, and eventually you can transition to praying out loud whenever you feel ready.

I’ve heard testimonies of couples who were fighting, and they decided to pray together while they were still angry. Each one asked God to forgive what they did wrong. After praying, they had already made up! That’s because all the other person wants is for you to admit whatever you did wrong. This is great for “not letting the sun go down on your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26), which means that you never go to bed angry with your spouse so that bitterness does not get a foothold (Hebrews 12:15).

One absolutely transforming way that God has used my husband to lead me as a wife spiritually is through my husband praying with me over specific sin issues in my life. Sometimes I will tell my husband I am struggling with anger or pride towards someone, and my husband will pray with me, and I feel released from the sin. One time my husband told me that I didn’t trust God, so we asked God to help me trust Him more. God answered in a huge way over the following months, just in response to that one prayer that my husband said over me that one night. God works in incredible ways when we join together as one with our spouse before the Lord in prayer.

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Praying with a Friend

Monday, January 28th, 2013

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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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