Author: Lisa Groen
Category: Devotional and prayer
Lord, I am reminded today that “Unless the Lord builds the house the workers labor in vain who build it.” Lord we ask that our hearts would be pliable moldable and our mouths yours and yours alone. My prayer is Lord, show me what I don’t see about myself that is keeping me from serving you more fully—wholeheartedly. Show me if I have any hidden sins that I need to surrender. Help us to count the cost that it takes to serve you at the level you have called us to so far, and Lord please forgive us for any way we have been lagging behind the leading of your Spirit.
By nature we are worshippers. Our hearts were designed by You Lord to long for something or someone to worship. Help us Lord to not make the false assumptions that what I long for in the here and now is as good or better than the goal Paul speaks of to lay hold of that to win the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Phi 3:14 I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus. Help us not to worship the goal of worshiping itself. Help us not to be in love with the idea of having “awesome friends” or for that matter, having “great ministries” or even having some spiritual mileage and think we “know our way around the mountain” because by those acts and presumptions we cloud our own vision and secondly we abort the very work we thought was being done “by your Spirit” Oh God!
Prayer: We ask to be cleansed from entertaining temporal loves. We ask to be freed from the delusions of the false promises by people and plans we wanted to give the benefit of the doubt to that at times ended up dragging us and them along in directions that neither we nor they needed to go! Forgive us when our pious grandiosity about our fitness for “the job” ended up doing more harm than good! Forgive us for playing with the false promises this world offers. Forgive us for our pride and self-love, and forgive us for eating it up when people we know may seem to point to that as a viable option about ourselves Oh God! Turn us forever away from the creeping slime of filthy pride that like sewage spreads out along the gutter and seeks to fill our lowly places like water draining into the sewer vents that are open to the world above ground! May we spit out the poison if it has gone past our lips and may we vomit forth a thrust of air and may we reject it with the rejection of evil that Jesus cultivated with firmness and conviction even as a toddler in Isaiah 7:15 which reads “He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right”. And so you had REAL power to reject evil even as a toddler which is clear that you cultivate in your people Oh God before it comes near us or touches our lips again! Oh God! May you give us courage to warn others, and may you touch us to cleanse us as we seek your cleansing, and may you purify our tastes as we commit again our whole beings again to you Oh Lord that we may truly and forever “Taste and see that the Lord is Good! Oh God! Help us! Cleanse us and purify us oh Lord for pure fellowship with You, in our seeking you, and in your love eternal Oh God! Amen!
Keep growing in the Word! LG