Tag: Religion and Spirituality

The National Day of Prayer is Today

It can be so easy at times to forget that prayer is the duty of every believer and follower of Jesus. While I cannot say that I do this as I should, I understand that the leaders of this country need the prayers of the people, but not for the reasons that you might think. Many times our prayers descend into a kind of political jockeying with God. Here is the bottom line.

God is NOT interested in our politics.

As a matter of fact, God could care less about the political situations in this world. God is more interested in accomplishing his purposes through his people. Therefore, it is important for us, the children of God, to quit trying to get God to change the political situation due to some preference we might have. This could very easily descend into a rant, but I will keep myself from that!

My desire on this National Day of Prayer is this: That we as Christ followers would not pray for God to change the political situation or climate or whatever. I would like for us to pray that God would change the hearts of the politicians toward himself. I want my confidence to be in God, not in some man or woman that wants to represent “my interests.” The only one I trust with my interests is God.

And I want to leave it that way.

Prayer

Most Gracious God,

You are greater and more wonderful that any political system, philosophy, or candidate. I pray that we, your people, would spend more time trusting you, rather than some elected official.

Father, I pray, that as a follower of your Son, I would call out to you for the heart and soul of every member of Congress and every elected official. I ask that you would transform them and conform them into the image of your Son. Trusting in others for what only you can provide will lead us toward idolatry and hopelessness.

Help us to increase our trust in you. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

Eat your way into heaven!

Over the last several years I have struggled to lose weight. I know that I can’t continue to eat like it will be my last meal and expect to maintain a healthy lifestyle and weight. But, eating is so good. If there were a way to keep eating, but not get full, I think that many of us would probably eat all of the time. Food is a gift from God. We were designed to eat so that we could live and not the other way around.

So let me ask you a question: if food is needed to sustain your physical life, what do you need to “eat” in order to sustain your spiritual life?

It can be so easy to think that the physical and the spiritual are in the same condition, but that would be a mistake. The problem that many of us have is that we are very good at diagnosing where we are spiritually. I would strongly recommend Donald Whitney’s book Ten Questions to Diagnose your Spiritual Health. I can read the questions and some of my thoughts on each here in Part 1 and Part 2.

Back to my question, what do you have to “eat”? I have found that the only spiritual food that God has provided for us is his word. Listen to what Jesus said to the Devil after forty days of fasting,

3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written,

“‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

(Matthew 4:3-4, ESV)

“Every word that come the mouth of God” is what provides the nourishment that we need in order to feed our spirit. One of the things that we have to realize is that we do not truly know how spiritually malnourished we are until we have fed our spirit healthy food. The more junk we take in the weaker we become. I would challenge you to begin reading scripture on a daily basis, three times a day even, and see if your spiritual life does not improve.

There is no way that you can eat too much of the word of God. And, there is an added benefit to eating scripture, you will grow more healthy with each bite!

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