The Lord's Prayer

I have been doing a Bible study with some ladies in my church, and we are studying the Gospel of Luke. We recently had a lesson that focused on prayer, and in it we looked a bit closer at the Lord’s Prayer. I appreciated the way the authors of this study looked at the Lord’s Prayer and I wanted to share a brief overview of this prayer that is so well known to us. It’s a simple overview, but it’s always great to be reminded of…

“Father…”
While Jesus was not the first person ever to call God “Father,” He did make this title central to our relationship to God in a new way. Jesus also added “new depth and content” to this way of addressing the Lord of the universe. Contemplate the difference it makes to begin each day by praying to God as your Father.

“Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come…”
In this, both our prayers and our lives become God-centered. We pray that our lives will reveal God’s holiness to everyone around us and that our first concern will be God’s kingdom.

“Give us each day our daily bread…”
This reminds us of our dependence on God.

“Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us…”
Praying for forgiveness reminds us that we need to receive and practice forgiveness as much as we need food to live.

“And lead us not into temptation…”
The petition on temptation recalls Jesus’ wilderness time (and our own) and leads us to approach each day with the humility of knowing we need the Holy Spirit to guide our every step.

To pray to God as Father in this way each day is to take regular steps toward the primary goal of our lives – to become Christlike, conformed to the image of Christ. As Christians, we will receive and radiate the saving life from God that Jesus brings. We can enter the mystery of this transforming process by the simple yet profound practice of starting each day by praying the way Jesus teaches us to pray.

The Great God

The following is another prayer from The Valley of Vision:

The Great God

O Fountain of all Good,
Destroy in me every lofty thought,
Break pride to pieces and scatter it to the winds,
Annihilate each clinging shred of self-righteousness,
Implant in me true lowliness of spirit,
Abase me to self-loathing and self-abhorrence,
Open in me a fount of penitential tears,
Break me, then bind me up;
Thus will my heart be a prepared dwelling for my God;
Then can the Father take up his abode in me,
Then can the blessed Jesus come with healing in his touch,
Then can the Holy Spirit descend in sanctifying grace;
O Holy Trinity, three Persons and one God,
inhabit me, a temple consecrated to thy glory.
When thou art present, evil cannot abide;
In thy fellowship is fullness of joy,
Beneath thy smile is peace of conscience,
By thy side no fears disturb,
no apprehensions banish rest of mind.
With thee my heart shall bloom with fragrance;
Make me meet, through repentance,
for thine indwelling.
Nothing exceeds thy power,
Nothing is too great for thee to do,
Nothing too good for thee to give.
Infinite is thy might, boundless thy love,
limitless thy grace, glorious thy saving name.
Let angels sing for
sinners repenting,
prodigals restored,
backsliders reclaimed,
Satan’s captives released,
blind eyes opened,
broken hearts bound up,
the despondent cheered,
the self-righteous stripped,
the formalist driven from a refuge of lies,
the ignorant enlightened,
and saints built up in their holy faith.
I ask great things of a great God.

Make My Life A Prayer To You

Keith Green has always been one of my favourite musicians because so many of his songs have such beautiful lyrics. This song is an absolute favourite of mine:

Make My Life A Prayer To You
By: Keith Green

Make my life a prayer to You
I wanna do what You want me to
No empty words and no white lies
No token prayers no compromise

I wanna shine the light You gave
Through Your Son You sent to save us
From ourselves and our despair
It comforts me to know You're really there

Well I wanna thank You now
For being patient with me
Oh it's so hard to see
When my eyes are on me

I guess I'll have to trust
And just believe what You say
You're coming again
Coming to take me away

I wanna die and let You give
Your life to me so I might live
And share the hope You gave me
The love that set me free

I wanna tell the world out there
You're not some fable or fairy tale
That I've made up inside my head
You're God the Son and You've risen from the dead

The Snare of the Fowler

“Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler.”

– Psalm 91:3

God delivers His people from the snare of the fowler in two senses. From, and out of. First, He delivers them from the snare or does not let them enter it; second, if they should be caught therein, He delivers them out of it. The first promise is the most precious to some; the second is the best to others.
“He shall deliver thee from the snare.” How? Trouble is often the means whereby God delivers us. God knows that our backsliding will soon end in our destruction, and in mercy He sends the rod. We ask, “Lord, why is this?” not knowing that our trouble has been the means of delivering us from far greater evil. In this way many have been saved from ruin by their sorrows and their crosses; these have frightened the birds from the net. At other times, God keeps His people from the snare of the fowler by giving them great spiritual strength, so that when they are tempted to do evil they say, “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?”
But what a blessed thing it is that if the believer comes into the net in an evil hour, yet God will bring him out of it! O backslider, be cast down, but do not despair. Though you have been a wanderer, hear what your Redeemer says: “Return, O backsliding children, I will have mercy upon you.” But you say you cannot return, for you are a captive. Then listen to the promise: “Surely He shall deliver thee out of the snare of the fowler.” You will yet be brought out of all evil into which you have fallen, and though you will never be able to cease repenting of your ways, yet He who has loved you will not cast you away. He will receive you, and give you joy and gladness, so that the bones He has broken may rejoice. No bird of paradise shall die in the fowler’s net.
(C.H. Spurgeon)

Money

Money holds terrible power when it is loved. It can blind us, shackle us, fill us with anxiety and fear, torment our days and nights with misery, wear us out with chasing it. The Macedonian Christians, possessing little of it, accepted their lot with faith and trust. Their eyes were opened to see past their own misery. They saw what mattered far more than a bank account, and, out of "magnificent concern," contributed to the needs of their brothers. If through losing what this world prizes we are enabled to gain what it despises -- treasure in heaven, invisible and incorruptible -- isn't it worth any kind of suffering? What is it worth to us to learn a little bit more of what the Cross means -- life out of death, the transformation of earth's losses and heartbreaks and tragedies?God has allowed in the lives of each of us some sort of loss, the withdrawal of something we valued, in order that we may learn to offer ourselves a little more willingly, to allow the touch of death on one more thing we have clutched so tightly, and thus know fullness and freedom and joy that much sooner. We're not naturally inclined to love God and seek His Kingdom. Trouble may help to incline us -- that is, it may tip us over, put some pressure on us, lean us in the right direction.
(Elisabeth Elliot)

Nothing Less

“We were made for the love of God,

and nothing less will ever satisfy us.”

– Brennan Manning

~*~

“God wants us to know Him, love Him, and draw pleasure from our experiences with Him. It is then and only then that He can trust us and give us the other desires of our heart, knowing that we won’t run off and forget about Him the minute we get what we’ve been longing for. Love Him enough to be completely obedient simply because you love Him… Compelled by love, you actually consider how God would feel about the things you choose to do and passionately choose not to do anything that would grieve His heart.”
– Michelle McKinney Hammond

Keep Your Fork

I read this story quite a while ago and thought it was pretty neat… it’s called Keep Your Fork:


There was a woman who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and had been given three months to live.
So as she was getting her things "in order," she contacted her pastor and had him come to her house to discuss certain aspects of her final wishes.
She told him which songs she wanted sung at the service, what scriptures she would like read, and what outfit she wanted to be buried in.
The woman also requested to be buried with her favourite Bible. Everything was in order and the pastor was preparing to leave when the woman suddenly remembered something very important to her.
"There's one more thing," she said excitedly.
"What's that?" came the pastor's reply.
"This is very important," the woman continued. "I want to be buried with a fork in my right hand."
The pastor stood looking at the woman, not knowing quite what to say.
"That surprises you, doesn't it?" the woman asked.
"Well, to be honest, I'm puzzled by the request," said the pastor.
The woman explained. "In all my years of attending church socials and potluck dinners, I always remember that when the dishes of the main course were being cleared, someone would inevitably lean over and say, 'Keep your fork.' It was my favourite part because I knew that something better was coming... like velvety chocolate cake or deep-dish apple pie. Something wonderful, and with substance!"
"So, I just want people to see me there in the casket with a fork in my hand and I want them to wonder, "What's with the fork?"
Then, I want you to tell them:
"Keep your fork... The best is yet to come!"
The pastor's eyes welled up with tears of joy as he hugged the woman good-bye.
He knew this would be one of the last times he would see her before her death. But he also knew that the woman had a better grasp of heaven than he did.
She knew that something better was coming. At the funeral people were walking by the woman's casket and they saw the pretty dress she was wearing and her favourite Bible and the fork placed in her right hand.
Over and over, the pastor heard the question, "What's with the fork?"
And over and over he smiled.
During his message, the pastor told the people of the conversation he had with the woman shortly before she died.
He also told them about the fork and about what it symbolized to her. The pastor told the people how he could not stop thinking about the fork and told them that they probably would not be able to stop thinking about it either.
He was right.
So the next time you reach down for your fork, let it remind you oh so gently, that the best is yet to come.

Yielding to Distractions

This is a wonderful little excerpt from a reading found in Charles Spurgeon's Morning & Evening...

As a shadow has no power because there is no substance in it, even so a supplication in which a man’s proper self is not thoroughly present in agonizing earnestness and vehement desire is utterly ineffective, for it lacks that which would give it force…
The common fault with most of us is our readiness to yield to distractions. Our thoughts go roving hither and thither and we make little progress towards our desired end. Like quicksilver our mind will not hold together, but rolls off this way and that. How great an evil this is! It injures us, and what is worse, it insults our God. What would we think of a petitioner, if, while having an audience with a prince, he were playing with a feather or catching a fly? … Prayer must not be our chance work, but our daily business – our habit and vocation. As artists give themselves to their models, and poets to their classical pursuits, so must we addict ourselves to prayer. We must be immersed in prayer as in our element, and so pray without ceasing.
Lord, teach us to pray that we may be more and more prevalent in supplication.

(C.H. Spurgeon)

Darkness Into Light

You, O LORD, keep my lamp burning;
my God turns my darkness into light.

- Psalm 18:28

Boredom

Elisabeth Elliot wrote the following bit about boredom, which I thought was a great read!

Boredom

Dorothy Parker was famous for her wit before she was thirty. She had great charm, a fine education, a fascinating kind of beauty, and many interesting friends. But she was utterly bored. She thought of suicide, and was quoted in John Keats' book You Might As Well Live as saying:
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Her life story seemed to me the exact illustration of acedia, or accidie, which is an old word for boredom, but a word that includes depression, sloth, irritability, lazy languor, and bitterness. "This rotten sin," wrote Chaucer, "maketh a man heavy, wrathful and raw." Poor Miss Parker had been so irritable and raw with people -- she had treated even her friends unspeakably badly -- that she spent her last years alone in a hotel in New York, her pitiful, neglected dogs and her liquor bottles almost her only companions.
Gertrude Behanna says, on her record, "God Isn't Dead," that she has come to believe that it is a real sin to bore people. When we stop to think about it, most of us would readily agree. But how many of us have thought of boredom itself, so long as it affects only ourselves, as a sin? The Bible speaks of joy as a Christian virtue. It is one of the fruits of the Spirit, and often we find that it characterizes the people of God whose stories we read in the Bible. The worship of God in the Old Testament was accompanied by the most hilarious demonstrations of gladness -- dancing, shouting, and music-making.
Joy is not a word we use much nowadays. We think of it poetically as the opposite of sorrow, another word that does not often come into conversation. Both words represent experiences one does not normally have every day.
But I think we are mistaken. I think joy is meant to be an everyday experience, and as such it is the exact opposite of boredom, which seems to be the everyday experience (am I being overly pessimistic?) of most Americans. I get the impression that everybody is always hoping for a chance to get away from it all, relax, unwind, get out of these four walls, find somewhere, somehow, some action or excitement. Advertising, of course, has done a splendid job of creating in us greed for things we would never have thought of wanting, and thereby convincing us that whatever we have is intolerably boring. Attributing human wants to animals, we easily swallow the TV commercials that tell us that Morris the cat doesn't want tuna fish every day, he wants eight different flavours.
"Godliness with contentment is great gain.'' Those words were written a long time ago to a young man by an older man who had experienced almost the gamut of human suffering, including being chained day and night to a prison guard. Contentment is another word which has fallen into disuse. We think of it, perhaps, in connection with cows -- the best milk comes from contented ones, doesn't it? -- but it doesn't take much to content a cow. Peace and fodder are probably all it asks. We are not cows. What does it take to content us? How could Paul, after what he had been through, write as he did to Timothy?
C. S. Lewis, one of the most godly and civilized men I have ever heard of, exemplified what Paul was getting at. Lewis wrote that he was never bored by routine. In fact, he said, he liked it. He had what his anthologist Clyde S. Kilby called "a mind awake." Why should routine spoil it? Pictures of him show a joyful man. But he was not a man unacquainted with poverty, hard work, and suffering any more than Paul was. He knew them, but he knew, too, what lay beyond. "All joy," he wrote to a friend, "(as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."
Those wantings lie in the deepest places of our being, and they are for the kind of joy that, according to Lewis, is "the serious business of heaven." So we waste our time, our money, and our energies when we pursue so frantically the pleasures which we hope will bring us relief from boredom. We end up bored with everything and everybody. Work which can be joyful if accepted as a part of the eternal order and a means to serve, becomes only drudgery. Our pettiest difficulties, not to mention our big ones, are cause for nothing but complaint and self-pity. All circumstances not deliberately arranged by us look like obstacles to be rid of. We consume much and produce little; we get depressed, and depression is actually dangerous and destructive.But there is another way. Paul made it perfectly clear that his contentment had nothing to do with how desirable his circumstances were. "I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities." It is no list of amusements. How, then, did it work? It worked by a mysterious transforming power, something that reversed things like weakness and hardship, making them into strength and joy. Is there any chance that it will work for us? Is there for us, too, an antidote for boredom? The promise of Christ was not for Paul alone. "My grace is sufficient for you." It's a gift to be accepted. If we refuse it, nothing will be enough and boredom will be the story of our lives.