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

Place Yourself in God’s Hands

This concludes a three-part series. You can read the other parts here and here.)

We talk a lot about things “happening” to us in life. We say things like “It was the luck of the draw” or “That’s just how it goes sometimes.” And there are a great many things in life that are outside of our control. We can’t determine when they will happen, if they will happen, and how bad they’ll be when they do happen. We just know that they do happen, and we have to respond to them.

For Christians, when the unexpected occurs, we are bound to say that “it’s all in God’s hands.” The statement is correct. After all, a sparrow doesn’t fall to the ground without our great God being aware of it. He controls the moon and the stars, causes the sun to rise each day, and is the only reason that we take another breath. So the inconveniences and the tragedies of our lives are definitely within His control. But we need to make sure we place ourselves in His hands too. We can’t just assign Him control for the events of the day, we must give Him control of our response and our lives.

This isn’t a passive thing. As I wrote about previously (here and here), recently I was standing in a hospital room as a friend was diagnosed with brain cancer and given only a short time to live.  Her response was to turn to her God in prayer – first to thank Him for all she had been given, and then to lift up others who needed His strength. The last thing that she did was to place herself in God’s hands. She immediately recognized that she needed to be firmly in His loving grasp – not trying to respond to this tragedy in her own strength, but to respond as a child wrapped in her Father’s embrace. She needed to be where He was, not in a passive sense, but to get her heart and her mind aligned with His.

It’s a discipline with which I think we often struggle. We are a society of independent, go-getters, and what we fail to recognize is that we’re dependent beings. We can’t handle the bad times or the good times on our own. We are nothing apart from God. Therefore, what we need to do is to put ourselves in His care – recognizing that not only are the things of this life safe in His hands – but so are we.


How would our response to things change if we were intent on placing ourselves in God’s hands?

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