This is today’s entry on my pastor’s blog….very well said. Words to live by.
A beautiful answer to prayer
About two years ago, a friend of an attendee of our Friday morning bible study came for a few weeks to visit. During this time, she shared with us, tearfully, how, at 29, she had debilitating back pain. It was so bad that she had to crawl from one place to another because she could hardly walk. It was all she could do to come to our study and sit in one place for 2 hours. This had been going for a good part of her adult life and it was extremely difficult to care for her then 2 year old daughter.
At her last visit (she moved away shortly after), during prayer time, in a very spiritual moment, the group surrounded her, layed hands on her and prayed for healing for what seemed like a good 15 minutes.
I saw her last night for the first time since then - she came to visit our mutual friend for the 4th of July. I asked how her back was, and she looked at me funny…kind-of like…”why would you ask that, my back hasn’t been hurting.” Then it dawned on her what I was asking….she said that three days after the prayer, her back pain 100% disappeared! She has not felt a single bit of pain since!
Praise God!
Rain
Please join me in a continuous prayer for rain. It is so terribly dry here in South Texas. So many hard working families depend on the rain for their livelihood, farming.
A New Perspective
I am reading Jesus For President by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. Friday, in my reading, I came across this explanation of the word bless that has fully changed my perspective on the way I approach my God, my Father in Heaven.
Here is the paragraph:
God Bless America
Our friend Ched Myers does great work with the idea of “God Bless America” in his article “Mixed Blessing: A Theological Inquiry into a Patriotic Cant,” published in Nov. 2001 issue of The Other Side magazine (www.bcm-net.org). What he finds is startling. In the Hebrew Bible, the imperative “Bless!” occurs only thirty out of the several hundred times the verb barak (“to kneel,” as before the king) appears. Of those thirty occurrences, the majority are liturgical exhortations to “bless the LORD,” mostly in the Psalter (e.g., Ps 66:8, 6:2, 104:1). In other words, the act of blessing is most often directed toward heaven, not solicited from it! Only four times in the entire Hebrew scriptural tradition do we find requests in the imperative for divine blessing. Even more interesting (or troubling, from the point of view of the “patriots”) is the use of blessing in the New Testament. Of the forty-one appearances of the Greek verb eulogeoo (“speaking a good word”), only twice do we find it in the imperative mood. In neither case does it involve God. It does, however, involve us - and our enemies. In his famous Sermon on the Plain, Jesus invites his disciples to “bless those who curse you” (Luke 6:28). These instructions are later echoed by Paul: “Bless those who persecute you: bless and do not curse” (Rom. 12:14). The lesson is unmistakable: we would do much better to ask God’s blessing on the world, and to bless God by loving our enemies.
Pg. 199, Jesus For President, Copyright 2008
What I took away from this, besides the intended message, was, as I am so acutely aware of the blessings God has bestowed upon me, I must change my perspective, and teach my children this as well. Every time we pray together we ask God to please bless this and please bless that, bless me, bless our this, bless our that, blah, blah, blah. Why are we aways asking for God to bless us and things? While I am not saying that we should never ask Him for blessings, I do believe that we should align our thoughts, time, and actions with blessing others on His behalf. Am I wrong?
My mind is a whirlwind as I am on this quest to learn more, and I am thankful for the endless resources available to me to make this happen.
This is what it’s all about.
Father, let us all love with the reckless abandon that the TWLOHA team does. Thank you for this ministry.
I got this from my friend Misty’s blog (www.secretsoforual.blogspot.com) this is truly food for thought. I am left speechless.
If God has called you to be really like Jesus, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility, and put upon you such demands of obedience, that you will not be able to follow other people, or measure yourself by other Christians, and in many ways He will seem to let other people do things which He will not let you do…
Others may boast of themselves, of their work, and their successes, of their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing, and if you begin it, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.
Others may be allowed to succeed in making money, or may have a legacy left to them, but it is likely God will keep you poor, because He wants you to have something far better than gold, namely a helpless dependence upon Him, that He may have the privilege of supplying your needs day by day out of an unseen treasury.
The Lord may let others be honored and put forward, and keep you hidden in obscurity, because He wants to produce some choice fragrant fruit for His coming glory, which can only be produced in the shade. He may let others be great, but keep you small; He may let others do a work for Him and get the credit for it; but He will make you work and toil without knowing how much you are doing; then, to make your work still more precious, He may let others get credit for work you have done, and thus make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes.
The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch over you, with a jealous love, and will rebuke you for little words and feelings or for wasting time, which other Christians never feel distressed over. So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign, and has a right to do as He pleases with His own. He may not explain to you a thousand things which puzzle your reason in His dealings with you, but if you absolutely sell yourself to be His love slave, He will wrap you up in a jealous love and bestow upon you many blessings which come only to those who are in the inner circle.
Settle it forever, then, that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit, and that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue, or chaining your hands, or closing your eyes, in ways that He does not seem to use with others. Now, when you are so possessed with the living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule of Heaven.
“ I finished reading Blue Like Jazz last week, and there was a paragraph in there that has resonated through me in such a profound way. It was something I thought I knew, but the way D.M. put it, it was like a lightening bolt sort-of aha moment that solidified and put to words this ache that has been in my heart concerning the way we treat others, and the way our actions impact the very souls of others. (it’s from his conversation with his friend Paul on the subject of marriage) ” ‘…And because she loves me, and teaches me that I am lovable, I can better interact with God.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I mean that to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can’t accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people,’ Paul says. ‘That is why God tells us so many times to love each other.’ ” (p146-147 Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller) and by this , loving each other means really loving each other. Not just saying the words “I love you,” with no actions behind the words. Meaning that it doesn’t matter what or who the person is who is to receive the love. Totally completely, unconditionally. Period. ”
Knittingloca: March 2008
