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God and the Next Breath

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“Lord, I come to you with empty hands. If all I have today is You and the next breath, that will be enough.”

A friend taught me that prayer a long time ago, and I was reminded of it today seeing it in my Facebook memories. I think that prayer of gratitude and dependence is the perfect antidote to this culture of pervasive entitlement and greed.

Really, all I bring to God is a pair of empty hands. I bring nothing. Anything in me or from me that’s any good at all was first a gift from God to me. All that I have that wasn’t given to me by God is God Himself, and even that is a gift.

If all I have in the next 24 hours is God and nothing else but the next breath, that’s enough. If I have all the riches in the world and all the knowledge in the world and not God, I have nothing. I seem to recall a Bible verse about gaining the whole world and losing your soul in the process being futile.

Basically, every moment from here to eternity is a gift. I didn’t earn the next breath. I don’t deserve the next breath. God’s grace is what sustains me and keeps me going.

I think if I lived like I believed that, there’d be a lot less anxiety and a lot more adoration. There’d be a lot less worry and a lot more worship. There’d be a lot less talk about the weather and sports and politics and more of me sharing the goodness of God out of the overflow of a heart made full by gratitude.

Lord, I really do come to You with empty hands. If all I get from You today is You and the next breath, that’s enough. I’m good. In fact, I’m more than good. I’m blessed. Amen.

Learning to Pray

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This one is from Dr. Mike Glenn (but for all the Kairos folks out there, he will always be Uncle Mikey):

“In Luke 11, we have his version of the Lord’s Prayer. To introduce the prayer, Luke tells us the disciples came to Jesus and asked Him to teach them how to pray.

I’ve always been fascinated with their request.

For one thing, I’m not sure it’s what I would’ve asked Jesus.

Knowing me, I would’ve asked Him to teach me to walk on water (we know how that worked for Peter) or to raise the dead. I would’ve gone for something impressive, something flashy.

But this isn’t what the disciples wanted.

Why?

I think they could tell there was something powerful yet intimate in the way Jesus prayed. Things happened when Jesus prayed. People changed when Jesus prayed.

And the disciples knew if they could learn to pray like this, they would be able to do more than they had ever imagined.

Too many times we treat prayer casually. It’s something we do before we go to sleep or before we eat, but we rarely pray knowing there’s potential in our prayer to change the world, to change someone’s life.

This is what the disciples wanted to learn how to do.

It’s what we in the postmodern church need to learn as well.”

Prayer isn’t a last resort when all else has failed. It should be first on the agenda of any major (or minor) undertaking. As Oswald Chambers said, prayer isn’t preparation for great and mighty spiritual battles. Prayer is the battle. Everything else is akin to cleaning up the spoils after the victory has been won.

Jesus, teach us to pray as you taught your disciples. Let us always remember the words you taught them so that we can use them to guide our own requests and petitions or simply fall back on them in time of need:

“Our Father in heaven,
Reveal who you are.
Set the world right;
Do what’s best—
    as above, so below.
Keep us alive with three square meals.
Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.
You’re in charge!
You can do anything you want!
You’re ablaze in beauty!
    Yes. Yes. Yes.” (Matthew 6:9-13, The Message).

Useless Time

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“The world says, ‘If you are not making good use of your time, you are useless.’ Jesus says, ‘Come spend some useless time with me.’ If we think about prayer in terms of its usefulness to us – what prayer will do for us, what spiritual benefits we will gain, what insights we will gain, what divine presence we may feel – God cannot easily speak to us. But if we can detach ourselves from the idea of the usefulness of prayer and the results of prayer, we become free to ‘waste’ a precious hour with God in prayer. Gradually, we may find, our ‘useless’ time will transform us, and everything around us will be different” (Henri Nouwen).

I guess in a sense that prayer is useless, speaking in human terms. We like to measure success and progress in tangible terms. We want to be able to check all the boxes on our to-do lists and see the results of what we do all day.

But prayer is different. We may pray and from our limited perspective nothing seems to be different. We may not hear an audible voice from God. We may not even sense God speaking at all. In fact, we may feel exactly the same after as we did before.

But when you look back over a month or a year, you can see you’re not who you were then. The people, places, and things you prayed for may not be different, but you are. You see a little more with God’s eyes and have a bit more of an eternal perspective on your life.

Sometimes, it’s good to detach from the world and simply to be still. You don’t need to ask God for anything. Sometimes, you don’t even need to say anything. Just sit at Jesus’ feet and breathe in and out slowly and above all pay attention. Be mindful in your silence and ready to obey whatever you hear from the Lord.

It may seem useless to a world that glorifies busyness, but in eternity’s perspective, nothing is more important than time spent in prayer.

The Purpose of Prayer

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“Every time we pray our horizon is altered, our attitude to things is altered, not sometimes but every time, and the amazing thing is that we don’t pray more” (Oswald Chambers, in The Place of Help).

Oswald Chambers also said something else that I’ve thought a lot about over the years. He said that prayer doesn’t so much change the things around me as it changes me and I change things. I think maybe I’d say that when I pray for God to change my circumstances, what I really want is a shortcut out of the difficult season. God wants me to endure the season so that I am changed by it.

It’s like the old story of the cocoon and the butterfly. If you “help” the caterpillar out of the cocoon rather than watch it struggle, you deprive it of the strength it needs to fly. When we pray for God to take us or those we love over an obstacle rather than through it, we are robbing ourselves of sweetness of learning to know God deeper through the struggle and coming out of it more like Jesus.

I don’t think my problem is not praying enough as much as it is praying the wrong way. I still pray to God like I used to write to Santa Claus back in the day. I have my list of what I want, and when the list is over, I’m done. But prayer really is so much more than getting from God as it is getting to know God. And getting to know myself in the process.

“Prayer is not getting things from God. That is a most initial stage; prayer is getting into perfect communion with God: I tell Him what I know He knows in order that I may get to know it as He does”(Oswald Chambers, Prayer: A Holy Occupation).

A Mic Drop Moment

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“Whenever the insistence is on the point that God answers prayer, we are off the track. The meaning of prayer is that we get hold of God, not of the answer” (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest).

I almost want to make this a mic drop moment and end this post here. There’s such a misconception about prayer being a way to inform God of what He didn’t already know or to ask Him for things He wasn’t aware that I needed.

Prayer isn’t about getting God to see things from my point of view but getting me to see things from God’s point of view. It’s not so much about answers as it is about awareness of God’s presence. When I pray, I’m acknowledging in that moment my deep need and God’s deeper provision.

What would I want from God apart from Himself anyway? As the old song says, “I’d rather have Jesus than riches untold.”

It’s like when Job asks all these questions to God. When God responds, He doesn’t answer a single one of those questions. Instead, God asks Job some of His own questions. At the end, what Job realized was that he needed not answers but God’s presence. He needed to know God hadn’t left him or forgotten about him.

My own prayers can easily become rote and full of requests. They can almost sound like the letters I used to write to Santa Claus before Christmas with my list of everything I wanted under the tree that year. They can be very me-focused when the idea of prayer is to get me very God-focused. It’s to help me see God’s purposes and plans for His entire creation and not just my own little world.

Sure, God answers prayer, but that’s not the main point of prayer. My character being transformed into the character of God and my will being transformed into His is.

No Matter What

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“Our prayers for guidance (or for anything else) really begin here: I trust him. This requires abandonment. We are no longer saying, ‘If I trust him, he’ll give me such and such,’ but ‘I trust him. Let him give me or withhold from me what he chooses” (Elisabeth Elliot, God’s Guidance: A Slow & Certain Light).

It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to bargain with God. Something along the lines of “I’ll trust you if you will give me a) a job, b) a spouse, or c) lots of money.”

It feels more like a transaction than faith. If God does X, then I’ll do Y. The trouble is that I’m in no position to bargain with God. He’s the Eternal Lord and King of the Universe who has every right to destroy me because of my sin, and I’m the one who’s only alive at this moment because of His grace.

The truth is that if all God ever did was to save me from an eternity in hell and leave me alone, that would be way more than I deserve. That alone would merit my praise from now until 10,000 X 10,000 years have passed.

But that’s not all God did. He has sustained me and blessed me and been with me through every kind of joy and sorrow, triumph and trial. All He asks in return is my allegiance. My loyalty. My surrender. Me.

It’s not wrong to ask God for things, but the more I spend time with God and in His word and the more I grow in Christlikeness, the things I ask for change and my desire to have them changes.

God doesn’t owe me anything. Even the next breath is a gift. I owe God everything, more than I could possibly ever pay in a million lifetimes. Yet all God asks for is me. I think that’s a good enough reason to trust Him no matter what.

The Sweetest Lesson

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“Spread out your petition before God, and then say, ‘Thy will, not mine, be done.’ The sweetest lesson I have learned in God’s school is to let the Lord choose for me” (Dwight L Moody).

I love the imagery of spreading out my petition before God. It comes from 2 Kings 19 where King Hezekiah receives a threatening letter from the Assyrians who are poised to invade the land. Instead of rushing into rash action, Hezekiah takes it before the Lord, literally spreading it out as a kind of offering of submission.

I also think of King Jehoshaphat who faced another massive army, but responded with the prayer, “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chronicles 20:12, ESV).

In short, they both chose to let God fight for them. They decided to let God choose for them.

In my lifetime, I have had several instances where I chose for myself and it did not go well. I was like the greedy man who took the wrong grail cup in the Indiana Jones movie only to hear the words “You have chosen . . . poorly” and basically shrivel up and die.

But every time I have been wise enough and patient enough to let God decide, I have never regretted the outcome. That’s assuming my patience lasted long enough for me actually to wait on the outcome, no matter how long it seemed to take.

Maybe it’s a good idea to literally take whatever it is that is troubling you and spread it before the Lord. It could be unpaid bills or a jury summons or some other document that gives you great anxiety. Or maybe you can spread out your hands in a posture of surrender.

Either way, you and I both need to let God choose. The old prayer still works: Thy will be done. One of my favorite fictional characters, Father Tim Cavanaugh, calls it the prayer that never fails because you truly can’t go wrong asking for God’s will over and above your own.

Thy will be done, no matter what. Thy will be done, even if it means my will is undone (with a nod to Elisabeth Elliott). Thy will be done. Period.

40 Days of Prayer

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Last year, my church participated in a Chronological Bible reading plan that involved all nine campuses. This year, we’re starting off 2025 by doing a 40 Days of Prayer initiative where we focus on specific local, national, and global partners in the gospel going forth to all nations in all the world.

I’m also doing my own personal prayer focus with books like the Book of Common Prayer and The Orthodox Christian Prayer Book. I’ve always believed in the power of prayer, but this year I’m trying to be more intentional and not just haphazardly praying whatever comes to mind.

I truly believe that the greatest and most underutilized weapon in the Church’s arsenal is prayer. We very rarely spend any significant corporate time in prayer other than between the worship set and the sermon. For those of you who remember the old Wednesday Night Prayer Service, you know that most of the time that ended up being just another regular church service with full sermon and not a lot of actual praying.

There’s something powerful about agreeing in prayer as a body of believers. Samuel Chadwick once said, ““Satan dreads nothing but prayer. His one concern is to keep the saints from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, he mocks our wisdom, but he trembles when we pray.”

William Cowper also said, ““Satan trembles, when he sees the weakest Saint upon his [or her] knees.”

There is untapped power in prayer as both individual believers and together as the Church of Almighty God. I’m convinced that if Satan can keep us busy doing anything and everything but praying — even if that is worship and preaching and evangelism — he will have succeeded, because nothing is more impotent than prayerless worship, prayerless preaching, and prayerless evangelism. We end up going through the motions with nothing to show for it.

I confess that I’m not very good at praying. My mind wanders all over the place and it’s easy for me to get distracted by social media or a song on the radio or something on TV. Many times I will fall asleep in the middle of prayer.

But even my weak attempts at prayer are better than not praying at all. Satan trembles when any of God’s children — including me — get on their knees to pray because He knows the power is not in the pray-er or even the prayer but in the One who hears. Satan knows that we have not because we ask not but when we do ask, the heavens are opened and God’s riches and blessings are unleashed.

So I’d love to pray for you this year. If you want to email me your prayer requests at gmendel72@icloud.com, I’d love to pray over you in 2025.

A Bold Prayer

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“Bold prayer : “God, change anything about me that isn’t about You” (Taylor Johnson).

I posted this little prayer on Facebook 11 years ago today. That was a good prayer in 2014 and still is in 2025. It probably will be in 2026 and beyond until Jesus comes back.

Another way of praying it is “Thy will be done,” the prayer that never fails (for those who are familiar with Jan Karon’s Mitford series and Father Tim Cavanaugh, you will get the reference).

It’s the prayer of the refiner where everything that is dross in us is burned away until all that remains is refined and the Maker can see His reflection in us.

Of all the things I could pray for and ask for (and there are lots), I think nothing trumps this one. To be more like Jesus is the ultimate goal, the endgame, the final destination because Heaven beyond all the gold streets and mansions and pearly gates is where Jesus is and where we’ll finally be fully mature and where our faith will finally be sight.

So in the meantime, my prayer is still “God, change anything about me that isn’t about You.”

Make me a disciple who makes disciples and who isn’t ashamed of the gospel. Make all of us bold in our faith to have gospel conversations with anybody, anytime, anywhere wherever we live, work, or play. Amen.

Those Two Little Words

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If I were to quote a passage, do you think you’d catch it if I left something out? Like this:

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! Let your considerate spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition 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” (Phil. 4:4-7, Legacy Standard Bible).

Did you notice anything missing? Now let me quote the verse with the missing part put back in:

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! Let your considerate spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition 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” (Phil. 4:4-7, Legacy Standard Bible, emphasis added.

I added the bold to make it obvious. Two little words “with thanksgiving” were missing from the first quotation. But that’s what is missing in a lot of our prayers and petitions. At least I can speak for myself and say that I go through a lot of requests in my prayers without ever giving thanks. But I think that’s the key.

I’m not saying that a few magical phrases will automatically make God grant you everything you ask for. But I wonder if sometimes if the gratitude part is what keeps us from seeing God at work in our petitions. Maybe the giving thanks part is like praying in faith believing you have already received what you ask for.

The answer may not always look like what you expect. But you can be sure that God honors His promises to give us what we ask when in faith with thanksgiving.

And note that it does not say that we’re ever to give thanks FOR everything but IN everything. We shouldn’t be thankful for cancer or car wrecks or wildfires. But we can give thanks in the midst of those things because God is working even in those cases for good. Out of those ashes will come something beautiful.

But let us be thankful people, regardless. Even if God did nothing else for us from here until eternity, we’d still have a million reasons for gratitude and thanksgiving. We could still give thanks if for nothing else than salvation and the next breath.

So let’s not leave those two little words out next time. Or, maybe I shouldn’t leave out those two little words next time.