Growth Hope

Pain & Praise

In Christian circles there is a lot of talk about “giving God everything.” Jesus made it clear that being His followers meant abandoning all rights to “my” in order to receive “His” (Mt. 16:24). It’s not an easy task and this side of eternity we will have to be constantly saying “no” to ourselves in order to say “yes” to Him.

It is often instructive, though, to think about those things that we easily give to God, and to think about those things that we hold back. We may easily turn over 95% of our lives, and yet want to hold 5% for ourselves. This was the struggle of the rich young ruler (Mt. 19:16-30). He was willing to sacrificially obey the commands of God, but not part with his wealth. Being a Christian means giving it all to Christ, and daily living in the truth of that relinquishment.

What we may not remember though is that when God says He wants it all, what He means is that He wants it all – the triumphs and the struggles, the joys and the sorrows, the healing and the hurts. As a song [affiliate link] recorded by Enfield and written by Ryan Foglesong states “In season of sorrow and blessing I give you my pain and my praise.”  We tend to want to give God one or the other. We turn to Him only when things are bad, when it’s obvious (to us) that we need His help. Or we think that we get things in order for ourselves, before we can turn to Him – we wait until things are good so that we can present Him our futile gifts. But Jesus doesn’t just want the good times, and He doesn’t just want the bad. He wants it all. In season and out of season – He wants you, His child, simply to be His.

It’s sorrowfully ironic that in an age where we “just want to be wanted” the King of Kings desires us, yet we hold back. And the reason we do so is that at some level we don’t trust Him. We don’t give Him our all, because we’re afraid of what relinquishing that control means. Yet, time and time again, He’s proven faithful and true. He’s demonstrated that He works in the good and the bad. He’s shown that He wants our pain and our praise.

If only we would give it to Him.

 

Share your thoughts – is it easier to give God our pain or our praise? Why do you think that is?

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Growth

A Prayer of Blessing

Knowing what to pray can sometimes be difficult for Christians.  We might have a whole list of things that we want, things that we think should happen, but we don’t know if they are also what God wants. Sometimes our prayer life can turn into a litany of requests as we go down the list of things that we desire. Much like children write out their wish list for Santa, we present ours to the King of Kings.

While God graciously lets us present requests to Him, as many have observed before, this wasn’t what His Son modeled when He prayed (Mt. 6:9-13). He spent considerable time extolling the goodness of God before He started making requests. And His first petition wasn’t even for His own needs. Instead, He prayed that God’s kingdom would come on Earth. His first instinct was to give God glory, immediately followed by the plea that His glory would be demonstrated in this world.

It’s something that we should keep in mind. We’re tempted to do our own thing, and ask God for assistance, when really we should be seeking God’s way and aligning our life with Him. As Robert Pierce, the founder of World Vision, is quoted as saying, “I don’t ask God to bless what I do. I pray He will help me to do what He blesses. ” This was the model of our Savior. Yet, our lives often fail to emulate it.

How do we do this? How do we pray so that our petitions are for God’s will rather than our own? Quite simply, we acknowledge that:

1) As Creator  He is the best person to arrange the details of this world to align with His plans (Gen. 1:1).

2) 3) As a Holy God His ways are not our ways, and therefore He knows things that we simply can not (Is. 55:8-9).

3) As a Just God He ways are trustworthy. (Deut. 32:4)

4) As a Loving God He longs to lavish good gifts on His children, and therefore His ways will not only bring Him glory, but will be for our good (Mt. 7:11)

In other words, in acknowledging Who God is, we remind ourselves that what He has planned is far better than the requests that we can generate.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t ask God for things. Much like a dad wants his kids to ask for the help he already knows that he needs to provide, our Father wants us to know that we can turn to Him with our requests. However, it does mean that in making our request, our first and primary concern should be that we would do the things God desires, not the other way around.

 

Share your thoughts:

Why is it hard to pray like Jesus did – for God’s will to be done?

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