Blogging With Purpose

I am not a consistent blogger.
There - I said it and for the nine of you that read my blog - you already know this!
However, I am committed to changing that pattern because I want to increase the impact of sharing how God works in our lives as believers.
 
It is my hope and prayer that God will use my musings to motivate people to be:

• more fervent in their personal prayer life
• more passionate to serve others - in and out of the church
• more intense in their "farming" efforts to plant seeds of the gospel and see a harvest 

So - I will schedule this into my routine - like I am scheduling the above items into it also!

I have discovered that my prayer life is the key to seeing God move.  Truthfully, it is not so much the key to seeing Him move but it is the motivating and driving force in my life to watch Him move and to know when and where He is moving! 

 

I do not pretend to think that by my prayer - God decides to act.  But I do know that the more that I intentionally pray and the more that I let God speak to my heart through listening to His Spirit, I tend to find myself in the right places at the right time to be His instrument!

Second - I have also discovered that I get a great joy out of serving others.  I have found that those that I know who follow God the closest and most wholeheartedly also serve others and lift them up before themselves!

Third - When the first two things are happening - I find that I am more bold in noticing opportunities and speaking into people's hearts about what an amazing God I get to serve.  In other words: When I pray regularly and stay in tune with God's Spirit in me AND when I look for ways to serve others first, I run head long into chances to share about God and to plant the seeds of the gospel.  Lately, it has happened more and more often.

Rather than sit and regret what could have been - I am excited about what is!

I hope to share with you the importance of building your schedule around prayer, service and farming!

What can you do today?

• Start praying and asking God to open your eyes to what He has for you (every day)
• Start looking for people that you could help (invest some time)
• Start thinking about what God has accomplished in you and think about how to verbalize that to others!

Train like you want some results other than what you have always been getting!

Praying the Prayers of the Bible

I like reading through the Word of God and discovering how many recorded prayers there are and then looking how I could pray them today.  

I ask - what effect would these have on life today if we approached it this way?

For instance, Ezra, Nehemiah and Daniel all prayed prayers of confession for their nation.  They did not exclude themselves from the confession but included themselves in it.  In other words - they took responsibility for the condition of their community as well as the sins of their community.  

Ezra 9:6-7 (NIV) ⁶ and prayed: "O my God, I am too ashamed and disgraced to lift up my face to you, my God, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens. ⁷ From the days of our forefathers until now, our guilt has been great. Because of our sins, we and our kings and our priests have been subjected to the sword and captivity, to pillage and humiliation at the hand of foreign kings, as it is today.

Nehemiah 1:6-7 (NIV) ⁶ let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel. I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father's house, have committed against you. ⁷ We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses.

Daniel 9:4-11 (NIV) ⁴ I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed: "O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands, ⁵ we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws. ⁶ We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. ⁷ "Lord, you are righteous, but this day we are covered with shame--the men of Judah and people of Jerusalem and all Israel, both near and far, in all the countries where you have scattered us because of our unfaithfulness to you. ⁸ O LORD, we and our kings, our princes and our fathers are covered with shame because we have sinned against you. ⁹ The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him; ¹⁰ we have not obeyed the LORD our God or kept the laws he gave us through his servants the prophets. ¹¹ All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away, refusing to obey you. "Therefore the curses and sworn judgments written in the Law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out on us, because we have sinned against you.

We can learn so much from prayers like this and the many others in Scripture. 

I enjoy Wednesday nights in my office looking at these kinds of prayers and asking how we can pray them together for our families, our church, our community, our city, our state and our country. At 6:45 PM we meet to briefly talk and then to pray together.  Just pray. 

• No lists
• No agenda except to read a prayer, talk about it and pray it.

Pray is the process of fighting the daily battles of a war already won!

Is This In Your Nature?

Watch this video first.  Click below and let it open in a new window then come back here.

Are Your Eyes Open and Your Heart Willing To Act?

Sometimes I think that I am so caught up in my own world, my own agenda, my own friends and my own thoughts that I miss what God wants me to do.  
Not so with my wife!

• We will sit in a restaurant and she will see an older man or woman sitting alone and wonder what their story is. Then she bats her beautiful eyes as she asks if we can anonymously pay for their dinner.  How do you refuse that sort of generosity (or those eyes)?
• We will be leaving Aldi's and she walks the cart over to someone just arriving and gives them the cart (and the quarter) and says, "Have a great day - I just wanted to pass a blessing on to you."
• We will be leaving a parking lot and she will see someone struggling to get something in the trunk of their car and ask me to help them.  
• She will see someone digging in their purse for a few coins at a checkout counter and will offer to help them with her grocery money.
• She wants me to pay for the people behind us at toll booths just because its fun to bless someone without them knowing it is coming.

All of the things in that video - are in my wife's nature.  

Why can't we all be that way?

Why can't each of us walk around with our eyes open and our heart willing to see the need and meet the need?

I love the heart that my wife has for seeing needs and willingly, immediately, without hesitation meeting that need - sometimes at great sacrifice to her own desires and needs.
What if we actually lived out each day the love that we claim to have toward God by "loving our neighbors as we love ourselves"? Matt 22:37-40
What would this world look like then?