prayer

Captivated

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I’ve been thinking about a sermon I heard today. Not the whole thing or even the main point. Just a side comment that the guest speaker made.

He said that we won’t ever be captivated by a list of things to avoid. A list of sins and bad behavior to not do. We won’t ever be captivated by a desire to escape hell, if that’s all there is to our beliefs.

What we need– what I need in my own life and what I need to see in the lives of others– are people captivated by Christ. People who are so enthralled by the hope of the Gospel that no price is too high to pay so that people really know how much God loves them.

I think people are tired of professing believers whose devotion and faith are lukewarm and halfhearted and to whom Jesus is one of many priorities and not a supreme passion in their lives. People are sick and tired of those who talk like devout believers but live like atheists. Those who profess Christ with their lips but deny Him with their lifestyle (to borrow a quote from Brennan Manning).

I am drawn to people who are passionate. People who love what they do. I think people are naturally drawn to those who have come alive, and people will be drawn to a faith that has captured and captivated the hearts of men and women.

If what I believe doesn’t enthrall and excite me, how can I expect it to enthrall and excite anybody else. Until my whole heart is set on fire for the beauty and glory of Christ, I won’t ever really go out of my way to tell others how wonderful He really is.

That’s my prayer for you and me: hearts that have been captivated by this love of Christ that passionately and relentlessly pursues our hearts every single day. That we are wide-eyed and in awe of the grace of God that stays with us after all the mistakes and screw-ups and failures.

My New Daily Prayer (Stolen from Mother Teresa)

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“Dear Jesus, help me to spread Thy fragrance everywhere I go. Flood my soul with Thy spirit and love. Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly that all my life may only be a radiance of Thine. Shine through me and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with may feel Thy presence in my soul. Let them look up and see no longer me but only Jesus. Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as you shine, so to shine as to be a light to others.”

A Missionary Blessing

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May God bless your mind and give it unity of thought and focus, so that you are totally committed to building the Kingdom of God and helping people find freedom and deliverance through Jesus Christ.

May God bless your hands so that your hands become God’s hands and your touch brings healing and restoration and people who’ve been around you will know that they have been touched by the very hand of God.

May God bless your feet so that you walk in His footsteps and every place you go is no longer sin’s domain, but the place where God reigns. So that wherever your foot lands becomes holy ground.

May God bless your eyes so that you see beyond yourself and see lost and hurting people, see the pain in their eyes, see the need all around you, and see that the fields really are white unto harvest.

May God bless your heart so that it feels what God feels and yearns for what God yearns for. May what breaks God’s heart break yours and may His perfect and complete love flow through you to everyone you meet.

May you not only speak Jesus and live Jesus, but be Jesus everywhere you go. May you be the pleasing aroma of Christ in every place and may every breath you take be a prayer and every word you speak be a praise.

Go forth and turn this upside-down world right-side up again. In the name of Jesus.

Amen.

5 Minutes

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I’ve been trying to lose weight and get in shape. Lately, that means putting in an hour on the elliptical. For me, that’s a lot.

Some mornings, I feel there’s no way I can last that long. So I try for the first 5 minutes. After that, I try for 10. And so forth. If I break an hour down into 5-minute segments, it’s not nearly so bad.

Life is like that.

Some days, you think there’s no way you can survive for the next 24-hours. You feel completely and utterly overwhelmed. Don’t try. Just take the next 5 minutes and breathe deeply and slowly and think to yourself, “I can survive the next 5 minutes.”

Sometimes, you are held captive by your fears telling you that you’ve really messed it up this time and that friend is gone for good. It’s tempting to try and fix what really isn’t broken (which never works, by the way). Or you take the next 5 minutes and are able to start seeing the cracks in the fabric of that lie.

You can do anything for 5 minutes. You can pray or be silent or wait. You can breathe slowly and deeply. You can remember one blessing God has given you and dwell on that.

When I’m stressed out and can’t sleep, 5 minutes of meditating on the goodness of God can make all the difference. It can take me from almost falling back into my old approval-addiction, “nobody likes me” trap to remembering that I am still blessed with family and friends who surprise me all the time in unexpected ways with grace at every turn.

So set your stopwatch or your phone for 5 minutes. It may be a small start, but sometimes all Jesus needs in your life is the smallest place to start. Then He can do amazing things in your life.

I am living proof of that.

 

Some Reminders For You and Me

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Sometimes, I need to be reminded because I am forgetful and easily distracted. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who needs the reminder. So here is a list of reminders for us to consider.

1) God is for us, not against us. He’s not out to kill our dreams or take away what brings us happiness and pleasure, but to be our Ultimate Joy and show us true fulfullment by helping us become all He made us to be.

2) You don’t have to be an expert theologian or communicator to share your faith. You don’t even have to be good. You just have to have a story to tell and a voice to tell it.

3) God is much more interested in your inside world than your outward appearance. It’s no good to wrap yourself in good works and activities if you have a bad heart. God doesn’t want all your best efforts; He wants all of you. He doesn’t want to make you better; He wants to make you come alive.

4) You need to be less hard on yourself. So do I. If God can forgive us, why can’t we forgive ourselves? I read that we should be able to believe what God says about us, no matter how beautiful it may seem.

5) Freedom starts with honesty. I can never be free if I’m not honest about where I’ve fallen short. Sure there’s grace, but grace doesn’t cover denials, only confessions.

6) Sometimes, we can worship strong with our hands held high. Sometimes, we need others to hold our arms up. Sometimes, we need others to pray the words we can’t find and believe for what we can’t see.

7) OK, there’s not really a 7th point, but I really didn’t want to end on 6. It just didn’t feel right.

Most of all, may we be reminded every morning and every night that our Abba Father loves us and is very fond of us and delights in us and sings over us every night.

A Borrowed Easter Prayer

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“It is truly right and good, always and everywhere, with our whole heart and mind and voice, to praise you, the invisible, almighty, and eternal God, and your only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ our Lord; for he is the true Paschal Lamb, who at the feast of the Passover paid for us the debt of Adam’s sin, and by his blood delivered your faithful people.

This is the night, when you brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land.

This is the night when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.

How wonderful and beyond our knowing, O God, is your mercy and loving-kindness to us, that to redeem a slave, you gave a Son.

How holy is this night, when wickedness is put to flight, and sin is washed away. It restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to those who mourn. It casts out pride and hatred, and brings peace and concord.

How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and men and women are reconciled to God.

Holy Father, accept our evening sacrifice, the offering of this candle in your honor. May it shine continually to drive away all darkness. May Christ, the Morning Star who knows no setting, find it ever burning—he who gives his light to all creation, and who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.”

This is from The Great Vigil of Easter in The Common Book of Prayer, one of my favorite devotional/prayer books. It expresses my thoughts about Easter perfectly and I hope it becomes the prayer of your heart this Easter Sunday and every day after.

A Prayer for My Friends Tonight

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God, I bring my friends before you tonight. I know that You know what they need better than I do and even better than they do.

God, they are burdened and heavy-laden with work and with school, with spouses and with romantic relationships, with family and friends.

Grant them Your perfect peace tonight and enfold them in Your arms so that they can feel You near to know that You are just as near when they can’t feel You.

Grant them the joy than transcends circumstances and events, good or bad. Joy that can only come from You and that other people can only attribute to You.

Give them wisdom in their friendships. Bring people into their lives who will draw out the God-colors in them and inspire them to hunger and thirst after righteousness and to above all yearn for Jesus more than life itself.

Remove the people who hinder them being who You called them to be. Lord, even me, if I am a hindrance to Your work in their lives. Give them the grace to let the people go who You take out of their existance.

Above all, give them a single passion and vision: to follow hard after You, regardless of what it costs or what anyone else around them thinks. May they see only You and love only You. May their love for others be Your love flowing through them.

Lord, cause Your face to shine on them and be gracious to them. Take them to the lowliest people and let them be Your hands and feet to those who will never be able to repay what You do to them through my friends.

I pray for success and prosperity and good fortune for my friends. More than that, I pray intimacy and a deeper, wilder love for You, even if it comes at the expense of success and prosperity and good fortune.

Thank You for my friends. May they know how grateful I am. Much more than that, may they know each and every day and all through the night how You love them and how fond You are of them and how You call them beloved and how You are their Abba Father. May they each hear the sweet sound of You singing with joy over them in the deep waches of the night.

That’s my prayer for them tonight. Amen.

Why I Am a Fan of Henri Nouwen

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solitude

“In solitude we can slowly unmask the illusion of our possessiveness and discover in the center of our own self that we are not what we can conquer, but what is given to us. In solitude we can listen to the voice of him who spoke to us before we could speak a word, who healed us before we could make any gesture to help, who set us free long before we could free others, and who loved us long before we could give love to anyone. It is in this solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the result of our efforts. In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared. It’s there we recognize that the healing words we speak are not just our own, but are given to us; that the love we can express is part of a greater love; and that the new life we bring forth is not a property to cling to, but a gift to be received” (Henri J.M. Nouwen).

Henri Nouwen wrote that every single person ever born deals with aloneness, because every single one of us is unique and no one else will ever have our exact problems and issues and hang-ups and phobias.

He said we can either see our aloneness as a wound and thus turn it into loneliness or view it as a gift, where it becomes solitude. In solitude is where we can learn to be still and quiet and know that in truth, we are never really alone. God is with us.

Solitude makes us better people, better neighbors, better friends, better spouses, better lovers, and better disciples. We’re not clinging to each other out of a desparate need to not be lonely, but because we are finally comfortable with who we are in the times when we are alone with no noise to drown out our own thoughts.

That is my own wording of what I’ve been reading in The Only Necessary Thing, a compilation of Nouwen’s thoughts on living a prayerful life. Seriously, if you don’t read another one of my blogs, but read one of his books, I will be supremely happy. He’s that good.

That’s all for tonight. Let me know what you are reading that touches you deeply at the soul level. Maybe it’s a book that will do the same for me. And may the God of the earthquake and the God of the thunder also be the God of your silence and the God of your solitude. Amen.

Taken, Blessed, Broken, Given

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lifeofthebeloved

“During the meal, Jesus took and blessed the bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples: Take, eat. This is my body” (Matthew 26:26).

I’m in the middle of another Henri Nouwen book and I am loving it. He more than any other writer (except for maybe Brennan Manning) always seems to speak to where I am right here and now.

He says, “To identify the movements of the Spirit in our lives, I have found it helpful to use four words: ‘taken,’ ‘blessed,’ broken,’ and ‘given.'”

I had never thought about it that way before. I never looked at Jesus breaking the bread at Passover and made an analogy to my own life.

We are taken (or chosen) by God who loved us from the start. We are blessed by Him with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms. We are broken by our own sin and the broken and marred world we live in with so much poverty, injustice, and inhumanity. We are given to be God’s hands and feet to bring healing and justice and compassion into the world.

I read somewhere that my life is loaves and fishes. Remember the ones that Jesus used to feed the 5,000? In and of myself, I can’t do much. But if I am blessed and broken and poured out, God can bless so many more through me.

News flash: God takes and uses broken lives, scarred hearts, screwed-up pasts, and promises left unfulfilled. He can use anybody. In fact, He more often than not prefers the outcasts and nobodies and failures to be the ones to turn the world upside down (see the 12 disciples for examples).

Lord, may I be taken by You, Who chose me before I was born and gave me the name Beloved, and blessed with as much of You as I can stand. Break my heart for the things that break Yours and then give me out to those in need.

PS The book I’m reading is Life of the Beloved. Expect more blogs to come out of this. I’m not even halfway through. And, to throw in yet another shameless plug, go buy or download or pilfer or ingest this book as soon as humanly possible. It’s that good.