Tag: prayer

Luke 21:34-38

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
            We are now in the first season of the year on the Christian Calendar – the time of Advent.  Advent literally means “anticipation” as we anticipate Christmas, the coming of Jesus the Messiah.  While we wait, we pray.  Jesus himself tells us to “watch yourselves… stay awake at all times, praying….” The reality of our lives is that there is no patience apart from prayer.  Show me an impatient person and I will show you a person who has little discipline for prayer.  But show me a patient person and I will show you a person given to prayer in all circumstances for all kinds of matters.
 
            This season of the year, despite all of its secular busyness and rush, is one of the most ideal times in the Christian Calendar to reconnect with a disciplined prayer life.  Many Christians throughout the world desire more of God than a once-a-day quiet time; they want their entire lives to be a continual offering of prayer and connection with Jesus the Messiah.  If one is not in the habit of punctuating each day with short designated times of prayer, perhaps beginning with taking the time in both the morning and evening to intentionally read Scripture, sing, and pray might be the place to start.  More outgoing persons may want to recruit others to participate with them.  However it is done, let this Advent season be the reconnecting with prayer that so many long for.
            O God, you know I desire to know Jesus better.  Please show more of yourself to me in this Advent season.  Help me to persevere in prayer as I anticipate your glorious coming.  Amen.

Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
            Restoration is a beautiful thing.  I don’t often watch makeover shows on television, but if I am channel surfing and catch an old house which seems best suited for the wrecking ball getting restored to its original charm and beauty, I’m hooked.  We as people seem to resonate deeply with things being repaired and rejuvenated to looking brand new again.
 
            For that to occur, someone needs to have the vision to see the old become new.  If not, then the drab discouragement of a gray and dreary environment can easily take over, forgetting the original shine of how things once were.  In the context of today’s psalm God’s people once enjoyed the covenant and the promises of God.  But over time the relationship was not maintained and cared for; the people gradually slid into disrepair.  Centuries of sheer neglect brought a situation where it seemed that the only recourse was to do away with the people and begin again.
 
            The psalms have been the prayer book of God’s people for millennia.  Suffering and hard circumstances provide the backdrop for many a psalm.  Sometimes the difficulty is external – another nation oppressing the people.  But other times, like here in this psalm, the problem is internal – sheer neglect of God’s commands over time to the point that God is just plain angry over the whole dilemma.
 
            I certainly do not want to make God angry.  No, I much rather would like to enjoy his favor.  The work of prayer becomes the tool we need to begin restoring our broken lives and churches back to their original beauty.  God is patiently waiting for us to come to him.  And we must come to him, again and again.  Like the persevering of using the hammer, pounding nail after nail, so we must offer our prayers morning, noon, and night, day after day, crying out to God with the great cry of the church:  “Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved!”
             O loving and gracious God, bring restoration to my life, to my church, to my family, to my workplace, and to my community.  Things are not as they once were.  Send your Holy Spirit so that we might enjoy seasons of blessing again.  Restore, renew, revive and rejuvenate our disordered churches.  May your face shine upon us once again through the mighty name of Jesus.  Amen.

Esther 7:1-10

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year ALeave a comment
            If you are anything like me, you have found yourself more than once in a circumstance that is like quicksand.  It is as if you are stuck with no way out.  Queen Esther found herself in such a situation.  By no fault of her own she was thrust upon the stage of being the intercessor between life and death, salvation and elimination.  The wicked Haman, high official to the king, had it out for the Jews and orchestrated a devious plan to do away with them once and for all.
 
            But God had their backs.  Esther humbly and prayerfully entered the king’s presence on behalf of her people, the Jews.  As a result, the tables were turned with the Jews being joyously delivered and Haman literally finding himself at the end of his rope.  Even though the book of Esther does not once pronounce the name of God, his influence and sovereignty are evident throughout the story.  God seems to specialize in hard cases.  He inevitably gains the glory and his people are wonderfully saved from circumstances well beyond their ability to help themselves.
 
            Prayer, sensitivity to God, and the humility to listen undergirded Esther’s decision and courage to act.  Prayer is not optional equipment for the believer, but absolutely essential to facing each and every difficult situation because it is God, not us, that ultimately brings deliverance.  Saving ourselves from impossible circumstances is way above our pay grade; only God can bring true deliverance – the kind that genuinely changes people so that divine purposes are accomplished.
 
            Our discouraging situations; our hard cases; our difficult people problems; whatever the situation – God has your back and he delights to answer our desperate pleas for his deliverance. 
            O God, please work within the hearts of your people so that they will have the courage and commitment to follow through with your will.  Please direct the hearts of those who oppose you and your people so that it is evident there is a God in heaven who listens and who delivers.  For the sake of Jesus I pray, Amen.

Praying the Psalms

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
           

 

 
            Historically, the Old Testament psalms have been the church’s prayer book.  The medieval church so valued constant prayer that many people in the middle ages made substantial donations to monasteries so that monks and nuns, largely freed from manual labor, could become “professional” pray-ers on behalf of the rest of society. Many of them lived a life of prayer, praying day and night.  Most Benedictine monks and nuns chanted all 150 psalms once a week in a cycle of seven daily “hours.” The first thing required of them was learning to read, if they did not already know how to. Next, they had to memorize the Psalms, which might take anywhere from six months to two years.
 
            In the New Testament book of Acts, when the original apostles were put in a position to clarify what their most sacred obligations were, they decided that they must give their attention to prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4).  The New Testament writers pray and quote the psalms more than any other book of the Old Testament.
 
            The best introduction there is to the psalms is to begin praying them because the psalms teach us how to pray.  The psalms are meant to be prayed and fully engrafted into the life of the believer.  Learning the psalms means praying them, and praying them means praying them over and over again.
 
            If you are not yet convinced why we ought to pray the psalms, let me offer some more reasons:
 
1.  Through praying the psalms we learn the promises of God and how to pray relying on those promises.  It is both appropriate and necessary to take God’s promises, remind God of them, and look for God to fulfill them.
 
2.  We learn how to pray together as a community, and not just as individuals.
 
3.  We discover that the heart cannot pray by itself because we often need to pray contrary to our hearts.  I am a believer and an advocate of pouring out our hearts to God; yet doing that in and of itself does not teach us to pray.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who was part of the resistance to Hitler in the last century said, “The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.”  The reason for this is because our hearts can be very deceitful, but if we can tether our hearts to God’s Word, we can pour out both our praise and lament according to biblical truth and not to things never promised to us.
            What is more, if we make it a practice to always follow our hearts, we may find ourselves only praying when we feel like it.  It is a common temptation of Satan to make us give up the reading of the Word and prayer when our enjoyment is gone; as if it were of no use to read the scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and as if it were no use to pray when we have no spirit of prayer. The truth is that, in order to enjoy the Word, we ought to continue to read it, and the way to obtain a spirit of prayer is to continue praying. The less we read the Word of God, the less we desire to read it, and the less we pray, the less we desire to pray.
 
4.  Praying the psalms teaches us to speak to God with confidence and joy, just like a small child boldly asking for what she wants in wonderful anticipation of getting it.
 
5.  Praying the psalms provides direction for our lives; it is the GPS for our souls.
 
6.  When we pray the psalms we join a praise and prayer team that has been going on for thousands of years by believers across the ages in all kinds of cultures.  They serve as a great cloud of witnesses testifying to the power of God to sustain and grow our faith, hope, and love.
 
7.  And maybe most importantly, in praying the psalms we discover the heart of God and adopt his heart as our heart.  When praying according to God’s Word and God’s Way, we get to know who God is and discover the prayers that he delights to answer.
 

 

            In other words, we bring our own situations and experiences to the psalms and permit the psalms to reshape our thoughts and our prayers.  This forms us into God’s people by re-directing our lives with God’s promises and plans.  The psalms are meant to transform us.  Repeated exposure to God’s Word and daily praying his Word through the psalms (even if it is small) will change the way we live our lives and will change the way the world works.