Tag: bible

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PRAYER

Of all the spiritual disciplines, I would without hesitation admit that prayer is my weakest. Prayer has often felt more abstract and difficult to grasp for me than a more concrete discipline such as reading my Bible regularly. Reading the Word has a definitive start and stop to it. You can track quantifiable progress. You can check it off your mental to-do list for the day. I’m a list person, so that’s really appealing to me. 

But with prayer, it’s so much more open-ended. We are called to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), which simply means to always have an open line of communication with God. It would be like in the “old days” when people called their friends instead of texting, but after you got them on the line, you simply never hung up. God has given us the privilege of having that kind of access to Him—where we could literally talk to Him at any moment of any day and He leans in to hear us. I’m blown away by this reality and the gift God has given us through this kind of access. Yet, I still struggle with it. Perhaps it’s because I’m too mentally distracted with a million thoughts and to-do lists running through my brain at any given second that I can’t mentally attend long enough to have an actual conversation with God. Or perhaps it’s because I’m a go-getter, “I’ll-solve-the-problem-myself” kind of person who only feels the need to bring my concerns to God when I’ve failed to come up with a proper solution myself. And if I’m being completely honest, some element of my struggle with prayer is the fear of feeling let down if God doesn’t answer my prayers the way I want Him to. 

These are issues I’ve wrestled with for years, and God is gradually helping me work through them. In the face of a few very stressful situations recently, my husband and I have been reflecting on a couple of my favorite verses: “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 understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7).

In these verses, we are invited to surrender our anxiety and trade it for peace. Sign me up! At first glance, it seems to indicate that this sweet exchange is simply a result of making our requests known to the Lord. Seems easy enough… but, if you’ve been walking with the Lord any length of time you will know that God is not a genie and prayer is not as trivial as rubbing a magic lamp and asking for what we want. Spoiler alert: God does not always give us what we ask for. 

So there has to be more to this anxiety-for-peace trade-off. Making our requests known to the Lord is just one part of a healthy prayer life. God does want us to share our hearts with Him. He beckons us to ask that we might receive (Matthew 7:7). But that’s not all. If you zoom in on the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus provides an example of how to pray, we do see an example of supplication, or a request being made in the line “give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). However, this supplication is following what I deem to be a much more challenging aspect of prayer—submission. It reads: “Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). True submission means surrendering your will to God’s. We can still make our requests known and share what our hearts desire. But ultimately, we are called to trust that God’s will—what He has for us—is always the best. 

Jesus is such a rockstar that He not only modeled this for us in His “sample prayer,” but He lived it out in practice in the Garden of Gethsemane during his final hours. Deeply anguished by the suffering He knew lay ahead of Him, Jesus “fell on His face, and prayed, saying, ‘O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will’” (Matthew 26:39). Being fully God but also fully human, Jesus knew the reality of pain, torment, and fear. Crucifixion was known to be one of the most brutal forms of execution. Understandably, Jesus asked to be spared its anguish as He candidly made His requests known to God. YET, He completely surrendered and submitted to the Father’s will, recognizing that God would not subject Him to anything that would not be worked for our good and His glory. I love that Jesus gave us such a beautiful example of how prayer is the place where supplication and submission meet. 

Spiraling back to our Philippians verses about prayer, I notice yet another means of trading in our anxiety and ushering in peace—thanksgiving. When we take time to begin our prayers by giving thanks to the Lord for who He is and what He has done for us, we are shifting the focus from our present trials to a reflection of God’s past faithfulness. When you choose to not rush the thanksgiving part, but really take the time to dwell there for a bit, something shifts in our hearts and minds. God allows us to revisit all the times that He has been there for us and walked us through the valleys of life. This remembrance is evidence that if God was faithful then, He will be faithful today and tomorrow as well. Reminding ourselves us this gives us the confidence we need to submit to His will above our own. He may not remove all our difficult circumstances, but He will get us through them. God is absolutely worthy of our praise and thanksgiving, but I’m willing to bet that He wants us to pray this way for our good. 

So, I invite you to join me in the beautiful, challenging, mysterious practice of prayer. Let’s work through the tension of supplication and submission. Let us give God the thanks He deserves and trust Him with what lies ahead. Let us trade in our anxiety for peace. God is listening and He eager to hear from us. 

If you too have struggled with prayer, I highly recommend Paul Miller’s The Praying Life. I’ve revisited this book a couple times and found it both challenging and encouraging. I don’t receive commissions or anything—I’m just a friend recommending a good book.

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REMEMBRANCE

For the last five years, we have used Shepherd’s birthday as an opportunity to reflect on the past year and remember all the ways God has blessed us, answered prayers, and shown His faithfulness to our family. Each year, we come up with hundreds of examples, both big and small, that are evidence of how God is with us and for us. We write our blessings on birthday-themed “confetti” and decorate our walls. 

The more time I spend in God’s Word, the more I notice the call to remembrance. It is a steady theme throughout scripture, but I’d like to highlight a few examples that have stood out to me. 

The book Deuteronomy largely acts as Moses’s last big send-off speech to the Israelites as he was about to pass the baton of leadership to Joshua before they headed into the Promised Land. In reading through Moses’s parting words, I was struck by how many times he called for the Israelites to simply REMEMBER God. He urged them to:

Remember how God freed you from slavery.

Remember how He delivered you from your enemies.

Remember how He led you day and night through the wilderness.

Remember how He provided manna and water and met your every need.

Remember how He never left or abandoned you.

Remember how He was faithful and kept His every word.

God even established annual feasts and holidays, rich with tangible symbolism, for the Israelites to commemorate these momentous events in their lives and to help them remember Him. God knew they were a forgetful bunch so He graciously gave them yearly parties to help them in this department. 

Following in Moses’s footsteps, Joshua led the Israelites faithfully into the Promised Land and witnessed the power and provision of God countless times. From miraculous military feats with unlikely battle tactics to stopping the flow of the Jordan River to allow the Israelites to pass through on dry ground—these people witnessed the impossible and knew God alone deserved the credit for their victories. If you want to have your mind blown, read through the book of Joshua—who but God brings military defeat through marching, trumpets, shouting, giant hailstones, and making the sun stand still? There is far too much to detail here, but the takeaway is that God is all-powerful and when His people look to Him for their help, victory is certain.  

The miracle of God holding back the waters of the Jordan River for the Israelites to walk through it was reminiscent of how He’d parted the Red Sea when His people fled Egypt forty years prior. Since the latter miracle was displayed for the previous generation of people, it is likely that God was reminding this new generation of what He was capable of. God did not want his people to forget that He was their all-powerful provider, protector, and way-maker, so He instructed Joshua to have a man from each of the twelve tribes gather a large stone from the center of the Jordan. They would bring these twelve stones into their camp and set them up as a memorial— a tangible reminder of God’s hand at work. The intention behind the memorial stones was that one day their children would see them and ask what they meant, giving the Israelites the opportunity to not only reflect on God’s faithfulness themselves, but also to teach their children about all God had done for them.  

Fast forwarding many years in the biblical narrative, we see the idea of tangible reminders yet again in the book of 1 Samuel. After the Israelites turned from their idols and repented of their wayward living, God granted them victory over their enemies, the Philistines, in a supernatural way (1 Samuel 7). Their leader and prophet, Samuel, set up an Ebenezer as a stone of remembrance saying, “Thus far the Lord has helped us” (1 Samuel 7:12). Samuel wanted the “stone of help” to be a physical, visible reminder of how God had acted on His people’s behalf every time the Israelites saw it. 

Throughout scripture, God’s call to remembrance is not only for the Israelites, but for us as well and it serves more than one purpose. God desires for us to have humble hearts of gratitude and acknowledge that the blessings in our lives are not due to our own striving, but due to His abundant mercy (Deut. 6:10-12). He also wants us to recognize the consistency of His faithfulness so we can face all future circumstances without fear, knowing that God will always be with us just as He’s always been (Deut. 7:18-19). 

Corrie Ten Boom, one of my favorite pillars of faith once said, “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” This type of fearless faith is only possible when you choose to REMEMBER who God is and what He has done for you.

Our family has found the practice of remembering God’s faithfulness to be critical for us in combating our fears and cultivating humble, grateful hearts as well. Shep’s birthdays have a way of unearthing our grief over what has been lost and our fear over what the future holds for him and our family. We’ve learned the best way to fight grief is with gratitude. The best way to fight fear is clinging to faith in our faithful God. Our gratitude and faith are increased when we take the time to look back and remember who God is and what He has already done. We can trust God because He’s proven Himself trustworthy. 

Our annual reflections have not only been a spiritually healthy practice for us, but they have been an amazing opportunity to teach our kids about God’s faithfulness in a way that is personal and applicable to them as well. Writing our blessings out on tangible pieces of “confetti” is powerful as it gives us a visible display of the abundance of God’s goodness— plus, it’s super festive! Win win!

This is my encouragement to you to adopt a habit of remembrance as well. Whether you opt for ebenezers, memorial stones, or blessing confetti— find a tangible way to represent God’s faithfulness and remember just how good He’s been to you. Watch your gratitude and faith increase as you fix your eyes on who He is and what He’s done for you.