Growth

Still + Praying

Often times there are things we say (or text, or write) glibly out of habit without considering the full weight of their meaning. Awhile ago, I realized that my response to some situations in my friends’ lives fit into this category. I would follow-up on something that was going on, get the update and then quickly respond, “Still praying!” It was my way of letting them know that I hadn’t forgotten and that I was still shooting up prayers on their behalf. This is a good thing, but the nature of my prayer time wasn’t. I would petition God  on their behalf,  but it would be a quick request hastened to the Throne Room, and I would immediately be about whatever I had previously been doing. I had forgotten the “still” part of being prayerful.  In this case, my prayers were a one-way conversation, intent on checking that prayer request off the list.

This isn’t to say that “arrow prayers,” as we used to call them in Sunday School, are a bad thing. Shooting requests and praises to God at the moment of their recognition is good and is part of the way that we fulfill the command to pray continuously. However, just like our conversations with loved one wouldn’t be very fruitful if all we were doing is quickly going through the list of things we needed to tell them, so our prayer life is poor when our conversation is mostly about us. Prayer is the process of putting ourselves at Christ’s feet – to honor and worship Him and to align ourselves with His priorities. It is not about having our priorities become His.

This means that at least some part of our prayer life needs to be in stillness before Him. We need to meditate on Who He is and what His Word says. We need to allow His Holy Spirit to speak to us rather than our prayer time being consumed with our voice. We need to keep praying for things, to be sure, but we also need to make sure that there are times that we are still, and we are praying.

After all, the Christian life is about following Christ, and if our prayers are only about our desires, it’s going to be very hard to know and submit to His.

 

How do you make sure that there are times of stillness before God?

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Growth

Inside Out

Every once in a while the cleaning instructions on an article of clothing will state to “wash inside out.” Those are odd directions, if you think about it, because people don’t see the reverse side of your clothes. They see the outside – the place with all the decoration and adornment. Yet the manufacturers know that if the inside of our clothes are cleaned, this will be reflected on the outside. It may seem odd, but it’s also effective.

We, however, place a lot of significance on outward appearances, forgetting that what remains on the inside may not be what we expected. Looking at a beautiful house from the street, we may never guess that a disaster awaits inside. A family that appears to be loving and close, may be broken and distraught. We judge by what we can see – and often the reality of what’s happening on the inside is obscured from our view.

God, however, sees the heart. So His concern isn’t primarily on what our outside appearance looks like, but what’s going on on the inside. He cares about our thoughts, and our motives, our inclinations and our desires – knowing that if these things are aligned with His Word, then the part of our lives that people see will reflect that too.

Yet sometimes we try very hard just to make the outside pretty. We put on window dressing that makes it appear as if our hearts are aligned with God. We “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” so that in our own effort our lives look like they are conforming to God’s standards. And we may be effective at it for a while. Eventually, however, just as the truth of the broken family will emerge, the realities of our hearts will eventually be revealed.

This is why it’s so important that our lives are cleaned by His grace from the inside out – that our actions don’t just conform to God’s standards but our thoughts, our motives, our inclinations, and our desires do as well. As this is true, what’s reflected on the outside will also conform to His will.

 

Now it’s your turn ….If we focused on the fact that God looks at us from the inside out, how would our lives change?

 

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