Year2010

As I made mention of a couple of weeks ago, I'll be taking the next season to write simple, random thoughts from my heart. I will refer to books but I won't be going through any one particular book for awhile.

II Corinthians 11:2,3 "I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ."

I pray that the Year2010 will be a year in which urgency related to prayer and the end of the age will mark your life significantly. God's judgment always starts with His own House, and I believe the difficulties that are beginning (and will increase) are first of all to win His Bride's undivided devotion and allegiance so that the end-time people of God will be filled with His goodness and power and light!

God bless you with increased desire for experiencing the love of His Father heart in Jesus so that you are empowered to love Him and make His love known to others.

Teach Me to Pray - Final Week (#34): A Life of Prayer

"Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances." I Thessalonians 5:16-18

In the final chapter of Murray's book, Teach Me to Pray, he summarizes his teaching with the challenge to a life of prayer. Early in this book Murray spoke of Jesus "living to pray" (Heb. 7:25) and made the statement that because Jesus lives to pray, He can teach His followers to live to pray as well.

One of my greatest desires is to see a shift take place among God's people from a mindset of "praying to live" to a mindset of "living to pray." In other words, we orientate our life with the goal of effective prayer rather than orientating our life with prayer simply as a means to a better life. I'm asking the Lord to do this in me first of all and to do this for His Church at large. I'm convinced that the Holy Spirit is doing this in these days as I hear many people testify to how prayer is becoming much more important to them than before.

There is a vast difference between praying to live and living to pray. The Holy Spirit says through Peter in I Peter 4:7 that "the end of all things is near; therefore, be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers..." This is a startling word! When I was younger in my walk with God, I thought that I needed to pray in order to be disciplined; but here the Lord says that I need to be disciplined in order to pray. This makes prayer the number one objective in one's life.

Because real prayer is perhaps the hardest thing to do, it requires that I order my practical life so that I can be alert and effective in prayer. This gets down to hard decisions about how I spend my days and what I give my time and energy to. It boils down to putting prayer into my schedule as priority, making everything else fall into place around it rather than tacking prayer onto my day as something I hope to fit into my schedule.

It's like giving money to the Lord. If I wait to see if I have enough left over to give to God after I've taken care of everything else, it's more likely that I won't have any left for Him. But if I make Him the priority in my finances (which means giving to Him first before the other needs are cared for), then I discover that I have enough for those needs.

Prayer is a form of giving of my time to God. If I make Him priority in my time (which means giving to Him of my time before I give my time to other needs), then I discover that there is time enough for other needs in my life.

Murray's challenge in this chapter is to become people of prayer who serve rather than people of service who pray. As this mindset begins to take hold in us and the ordering of our day falls into line with this, we will discover that we are praying all the time everywhere (as we are admonished to do in I Thess. 5:17). We become praying people by prioritizing making time for conscious prayer.

I've quoted before from a saint in the distant past who said, "You will never pray all the time everywhere until you have prayed some of the time somewhere." In other words, without our calendar being affected by prayer, we cannot hope to become one who prays continually. God longs to meet with us regularly when we are giving Him the best time of our day and our attention. As we do this in an ongoing way, over time we will be delighted with the discovery that we are in communion with Him night and day.

Every person and circumstance has its peculiarities, so I suggest that you seek the Lord about how this should look for you. He is gracious and so wants a unique prayer life with us that He will help and patiently lead each of us. All we need is to have a strong enough desire and grace to obey His leading.

In closing I'll quote Murray: "Where the child of God truly lives and walks in the Spirit, where he is not content to remain carnal, but seeks to be spiritual, in everything a fit organ for the divine Spirit to reveal the life of Christ and Christ himself, there the never-ceasing intercession life of the blessed Son is revealed and then repeats itself in our experience.

"...our true aim must not be to work more, or to pray enough to keep the work on track, but to pray more and then work enough for the power and blessing obtained in prayer to find its way through us to others."

Lord, thank You for Andrew Murray and the gift of this book to us today. We cry out to you again and again that You would put within us the prayer that Your early disciples prayed: "Teach us to pray, Lord." Would you pour out Your Spirit upon us and strengthen desire within us to be a people of prayer who move according to what we have heard and seen in communion and union with You. Raise up a people at the end of the age who are characterized by effective, believing prayer that brings glory to You in the eyes of the nations of the earth and in the eyes of our own families. For Your name's sake, Jesus, we ask you for this and thank You for hearing and answering...Amen and amen!

Teach Me to Pray - Week #32: Our Boldness in Prayer

"This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us - whatever we ask - we know that we have what we asked of him." I John 5:14,15

The apostle John is giving us the basis for confidence in prayer when he says, by the Holy Spirit, that whatever we ask God in accordance to His will is heard by God; and if we know that He hears us, then we have the assurance that we have what we have asked for.

There are two things I want to point out here:

1. It's possible to know the will of God but we need to make the effort to find that out. Without this firm in our hearts, we'll never be able to pray with confidence and faith.
2. There are general promises in the Word of God concerning His people that we must take hold of by faith and apply to the circumstances of our lives. Comprehension of God's will for each of our lives is spiritually discerned, not simply a matter of logic. "Herein is the wisdom of the saints, to know this special will of God for each of us according to the measure of grace given us...It is to communicate this wisdom that the Holy Spirit dwells in us." In other words, we need both the Word and the Spirit to know the will of the Father for our particular situation.

For example, if you're praying for a family member who needs an encounter with God, either for salvation or for the fullness of His life to be actively at work in him/her, you can have a measure of confidence that this is the will of the Father because we know from His Word that He wants all to enter into their destiny in Him.

However, greater confidence comes through waiting before the Lord in prayer and humility to hear His heartbeat for this particular person and entering into His zeal and burden and passion for that one. We also grow in confidence through wrestling with God over the issue and genuinely seeking Him out and asking the hard questions while remaining in a posture of worship, which is a posture of submission. The psalmist and Job didn't hesitate to ask 'why?' and to argue their cases in their attempt to understand circumstances that made no sense. Jesus Himself cried 'why?' as He faced indescribable darkness and confusion on the cross.

All of this slowly builds confidence in God as we genuinely grow to understand His purposes and ways; we are learning to have a real relationship with Him rather than a religious relationship in which we say the right words but our spirit is closed down in the midst of the pain of the circumstances. If we will ask Him, He'll come and gently help us open our spirit to Him to help us trust once again and to pray with confidence.

Murray says, "Believe that you canknow if your prayer is according to God's will. Live day by day with the anointing of the Spirit that teaches all things. Then you will understand how the Father's love longs to have His child know His will and to grant the petitions he has asked of Him. 'This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, he hears us' (I John 5:14)"
"A great deal of the blessing that God wills for His people never comes to them...Prayer is the power that brings to pass that which otherwise would not take place." As we abide in Him and He in us, we can ask whatever we wish and it will be given!

I encourage you this week to set your heart to ask for something impossible (that's what God specializes in). Ask with confidence, having God's promises in His Word and the Spirit's personal "yes!" backing it up. Wrestle with God for understanding of His ways and purposes while worshipping Him in the midst of unanswered questions. Our boldness in prayer isn't based on a feeling or a style of prayer but on our ongoing union with Jesus and the knowledge of His will.

Lord Jesus, teach us to pray!

Teach Me to Pray - Week #31: Christ the Sacrifice

"'Abba, Father,' he said, 'everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.'" Mark 14:36

In the previous chapter we saw Jesus as Intercessor; here we see Him as Sacrifice in the Garden of Gethsemane as He anticipates His death. In a matter of a few hours, His quiet words, "Father, the hour has come..." has changed into His agonizing cry, "Abba, Father!...Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will..."

Murray says, "Because of the entire surrender of His will in Gethsemane, the High Priest on the throne had the power to ask what He would. He has the right to let His people share in that power also and ask what they will."

Jesus' authority in intercession comes from His willingness to give up His own will, and it is in His not obtaining what He asks for ("take this cup from me") that we have the right to ask "whatever you wish" in prayer.

"To understand the prayer, let us note the infinite difference between what our Lord prayed a little while ago as a royal High Priest and what He begs here in His weakness. There He prayed for the glorifying of the Father and the glorifying of Himself and His people as the fulfillment of distinct promises that had been given Him. What He asked He knew to be according to the word and the will of the Father...Here He prays for something in regard to which the Father's will is not yet clear to Him. As far as He knows, it is the Father's will that he should drink the cup...(but) When the unutterable agony of soul burst upon Him as the power of darkness came over Him and he began to taste the first drops of death as the wrath of God against sin, His human nature shuddered in the presence of the awful reality of being made a curse."

Jesus' plea to be spared this "cup" was made in the context of a phrase repeated 3 times: "Yet not what I will." He was asking for something that He didn't have certainty about and so He made the request in the context of a will surrendered to the Father's will. Murray points out several mysteries related to Gethsemane:
1. The Father offers His beloved Son the cup of wrath.
2. The Son, always obedient, shrinks back and begs to not have to drink it.
3. The Father doesn't grant His Son's request but rather gives the cup to Him.
4. The Son yields to the Father's will.

"In Gethsemane I see that my Lord can give me unlimited assurance of an answer to my prayers. He won the privilege for me by His consent to have His petition unanswered. This is in harmony with the whole scheme of redemption. Our Lord always wins for us the opposite of what he suffered...Here in Gethsemane the word 'if you abide in me' acquires new force and depth. Christ is our Head, who stands in our place and bears what we must have borne forever."

I find this an intriguing and wonderful truth related to our prayer life in Jesus - we sinners deserve to have God turn a deaf ear to our prayers, but because Jesus suffered under the burden of this unanswered prayer and went to death as a result, His merit has won for me the answer to every prayer if I abide in Him!

Does this mean that I can expect answers to prayers that are selfish and outside of the Father's will? No, because the very meaning of abiding in Him suggests that "my will dies in Him, in Him to be made alive again. He breathes into it a renewed and quickened will, a holy insight into God's perfect will, a holy joy in yielding itself to be an instrument of that will..."

"The more deeply I enter into the prayer 'Not what I will' of Gethsemane, and abide in Him who spoke it, the fuller is my spiritual access into the power of His 'But what you will'...Being of one mind and spirit with Him in His giving up everything to God's will, living as He did in obedience and surrender to the Father - this is abiding in Him. This is the secret of power in prayer."

"Lamb of God, I would follow You to Gethsemane...With You, through You, in You, I yield my will in absolute and entire surrender to the will of the Father. I claim in faith the power of Your victory, conscious of my own weakness and the secret power with which my self-will would assert itself...In Your death I would daily live. In Your life I would daily die...With my whole soul I say with you, 'Father...not what I will, but what you will'...Lord Jesus, teach me to pray. Amen."