Prayer is Powerful – Part 4 of 5

Prayer walking is another great way to pray. Just take a walk around the neighborhood, and pray for your neighbors. They don’t have to know you’re praying, but God knows. He will honor your prayers.

God wants us to commit everything to Him in prayer, but do we? Often we assume that God is right there tagging alongside us, so we don’t see the need to pray. Sure, God is there, and He’s promised never to leave us or forsake us. However, God gave us the earth to have authority over it, and through Adam we gave it to the devil. Now, we must take our authority back in Jesus’ name. As we pray, we bind the work of the enemy and release God to do His work.

Does that mean that God can’t work if we don’t pray? No, God often works despite us, but He has chosen to partner with His children. If He wanted to do everything on His own, then there would be no reason for us to pray. Instead, He commands us to pray.

As we pray, we also need to consider where we focus our prayers. When I was frustrated with fruitless prayers, the Lord showed me that I was focusing on non-believers more than on believers. At the time, I thought that this was what was expected of me.

Actually, the truth is that we should pray for both. We need to cultivate a heart for the lost and pray for them, but not to the detriment of fellow Christians. How much of our prayers are actually spent on praying for those who, because they chose to follow Christ, would doubtless be under attack? The devil tries hard to stand in the way of believers who are trying to make a difference in their world.

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Thankful in Times of Opposition – Part 2 of 4

If you have lost your God-given dream or never dared to have one, I’ve got good news for you. God hasn’t lost it or forgotten it. Your past failures and disappointments don’t have to hold you back from living out your destiny. God uses the positive as well as the negative experiences to shape your future.

God is not looking for flawless people but for real people willing to offer their strengths and weaknesses for His service. Perhaps Moses seemed an unlikely candidate, but God wanted him because he had become a humble man and was therefore ready for God to use. He was used mightily in signs and wonders and on such a dramatic scale. Perhaps an even greater achievement was that God used him to write the first five books of the Old Testament.

God believed in him before all of these great achievements had taken place. God could see what no one else could even imagine. And because Moses obeyed, the unimaginable happened. Yet the Israelites didn’t believe in Moses the same way God did. They didn’t fully trust him as their leader. They also didn’t trust God Almighty. How come? Wasn’t it obvious that God was someone they could trust? Wasn’t He the God of their forefathers, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?

Well, a long period of slavery took its toll on them. They were stripped of their identity as God’s chosen people and, for most of them, their Jewish faith had become a thing of the past. Many of them by now were following the idolatry of the Egyptians. They did so because idolatry was more tangible to them than an obscure God.

God was dealing with people who had forgotten who He was, and they needed proof in order to believe in Him again. That’s why God performed such awesome miracles in their sight. He was also demonstrating to the rest of the known world that He was the only God; there was no other god beside Him.

No matter how many times God proved Himself to them, they continued in their fear and unbelief. As you already know, because of this, almost an entire generation never inherited the land that was promised to them.

Ongoing sin in their lives, for which they never willingly repented, as well as their past slavery, caused them to see themselves as weak and powerless. They didn’t believe that they were able to make a difference in their world. Ultimately, they didn’t believe that with God they had what it took to make their lives and their futures a success.

Of the first generation that originally left Egypt, only Joshua and Caleb ever entered the Promised Land. They helped the second generation take hold of their inheritance because they had refused to succumb to fear and unbelief.

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Discovering Your Potential - Part 5 of 5

Most people will not champion you beyond their idea of what is possible. Therefore, you have to be willing to go where others refuse to follow. Many people are trapped in boxes of their own making. They feel either threatened by or jealous of anyone who ventures beyond their limited understanding. They take comfort in surrounding themselves with others who are doing the same.

Christians are not exempt from this kind of thinking. We are all tempted to hold on to what is familiar and to build our walls around that. When we ask the Holy Spirit into our lives, we aren’t immediately set free from the temptation to think like this. We still need to renew our minds by studying the Word of God, and we must develop our spiritual eyes, which are eyes of faith.

Sadly, sometimes it’s the Christians that will fight the hardest to prevent us from being who God intended us to be. However, our fight is not with people, but with evil forces (Eph. 6:12). We must look past our hurts and forgive those who try to stand in the way.

The right path to take is sometimes less visible and less traveled, but the trials we face along the way can only make us stronger. At the right time, God will open doors for each of us as we remain on course and in step with Him.

That doesn’t mean that life is always going to be exciting. The task, whether great or small, should be done with excellence. When we have the right attitude even toward the mundane we’ll experience more release in our lives. If we are faithful in the smallest things, God will bless us with bigger things (Luke 19:17).

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Poem - Blue Ribbon

You might not receive a blue ribbon
at the end of the day
And being a mother is not
a job that will pay
But your reward is the journey
every step of the way
And “Well done!” are the words
that my Father will say.

by Christina A. Morley

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