Category: Prayers from the heart

Prayer of Dependence on God-7

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Christian prayer aiming for true Christian growth

Gracious Heavenly Father, even though we sometimes have a lack of passion Lord, and struggle with apathy, you do not change. Your purposes remain constant and fixed as surely as you are All-Wise and All-Powerful Oh Lord! We know this is an important thing to pray about, but lack the know-how for exactly what to pray! We all sense mistakes have been made by our economic leadership, perhaps some bad choices may have been directed by your hand for a greater good still to come. Many in the US sense a cognitive decline in our President Oh Lord, and see him as the fragile leader of the free world. Lord, some of us are embarrassed by our stagnation in our corporate conscience towards the self-protection of our republic. We avoid confronting the obvious issues of decline we see in our president seemingly just waiting to see if someone will “do something” to snatch the US from the flames of an implosion coming from the effects of this “Emperor with no clothes”. We quietly worry that our lack of political sensibilities in the US could result in bringing us down several notches in protection on the world scene and reduce our self-sufficiency and defense capabilities to basically a laughing matter in the eyes of our enemies—if those things have not happened yet! Lord, I pray the US is not in such a state as was the nation of Israel in Habakkuk’s time who cried in 3:16 “I heard, and my inner parts trembled; At the sound, my lips quivered. Decay enters my bones, And in my place I tremble; Because I must wait quietly for the day of distress, for the people to arise who will attack us.” But whether there may be coming a time like this or not, may we still be as strong as Habakkuk in 3:17-19 as likened to one who instead of crying over the fig tree that has failed to blossom, is still praising God anyway. It reads, “17 Even if the fig tree does not blossom, And there is no fruit on the vines, If the yield of the olive fails, And the fields produce no food, Even if the flock disappears from the fold, And there are no cattle in the stalls, 18 Yet I will triumph in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. 19 The Lord God is my strength, And He has made my feet like deer’s feet, And has me walk on my high places.”

Lord, although the slump in the economy many say comes from our hefty sanctions on Russia, and our lack of fuel solutions from the fact that the Saudis who are our “ally” would not answer the telephone when the White House called to make deals about oil, the truth is some of our difficulties could be you lifting your hand of protection due to our sin in the United States. Please guide us in a country regarding our much needed repentance, and it’s many areas of needed repentance. Like Habakkuk may we still praise you and worship you. May we become worshippers who defy the enemy because we fix our eyes on Jesus, the Author of our hope, The Lord our God, our Maker. Amen

Keep on growing in the Word! LG

Prayer of Dependence on God-6

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Christian prayer aiming for true Christian growth

Dear Heavenly Father, we come to you today seeking your face, seeking to lift up your name and to ask your will to be done. We surrender our hearts. You have taken us your people through some painful times. At times we have faced insurmountable odds, extreme situations that seemed to press on our hearts as much as an olive press would press the olives in Bible times, and found your grace pulling us through tricky situations that show us that your ways are not our ways but are keeping us ever so dependent upon you. We praise you that we have seen your hand of love move on our behalf. We give you praise for your unmerited favor. We praise you for bringing us through fire, deep waters, things like hailstorms, windstorms and spiritual earthquakes. We give you praise for taking our brokenness, our inabilities, our failure, our weakness, our griefs and doing something with them we could never do that point to your shaping ability, shaping our lives to praise you through our pains and suffering. We praise you Lord for how excellent you are at getting your will done, and we get to go along for the ride, and you are placing your fingerprints more deeply into our lives. We praise you for showing your goodwill toward men, and for somehow making something of us that we never could have become without you, till something else in our lives points to your glory and goodness. We praise you for the fact that it is you alone who sustains us, provides for us, grants hope to us, for putting into us personality characteristics, gifts, talents, potential and limitations that you are somehow sovereignly shaping by your goodness to shape us into the image of your Son, and for giving us the Holy Spirit Comforter to bear with us in our weaknesses and to somehow bring something through our lives that will reflect your light, bear witness of you, and spark hope, endurance, perseverance, virtue and the stamina of your Spirit by your heavenly power. We praise you for the Comforter, who cries with groaning that words cannot express to bring or birth something into our lives, or out of us for a witness to the world that will in hope make us vessels fit for your use, and endue us with your heavenly garments, as we are sown a mortal body, and one day we believe we will be raised a spiritual body. We are sown in dishonor, but one day we will be raised in honor, we are sown in weakness, one day we will be raised in power, we are sown in corruption, and one day we will be raised in incorruption… I believe the following passage will greatly encourage those of us who are going through the pains of the death of the flesh, so let us consider carefully the words that Paul has written, and stay encouraged, friends.

1 Corinthians 15:37-58 reads, “And as for what you sow—you are not sowing the body that will be, but only a seed, perhaps of wheat or another grain. 38 But God gives it a body as he wants, and to each of the seeds its own body. 39 Not all flesh is the same flesh; there is one flesh for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. 40 There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is different from that of the earthly ones. 41 There is a splendor of the sun, another of the moon, and another of the stars; in fact, one star differs from another star in splendor. 42 So it is with the resurrection of the dead: Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; 43 sown in dishonor, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power; 44 sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 So it is written, The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 Like the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; like the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 And just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. 50 What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor can corruption inherit incorruption. 51 Listen, I am telling you a mystery: We will not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we will be changed. 53 For this corruptible body must be clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body must be clothed with immortality. 54 When this corruptible body is clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body is clothed with immortality, then the saying that is written will take place: Death has been swallowed up in victory. 55 Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting? 56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! 58 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” Amen!

Keep on growing in the Word! LG

Is It Our Weakness, Or God’s Opportunity?

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Devotional and prayer

Jeremiah 9:23-25 “‘This is what the Lord says: The wise person should not boast in his wisdom; the strong should not boast in his strength; the wealthy should not boast in his wealth. 24 But the one who boasts should boast in this: that he understands and knows me—that I am the Lord, showing faithful love, justice, and righteousness on the earth, for I delight in these things. This is the Lord’s declaration. 25 “‘Look, the days are coming—this is the Lord’s declaration—when I will punish all the circumcised yet uncircumcised:

So having a circumcised heart goes right along with knowing the Lord who delights in faithful love, justice, and righteousness on the earth. The Lord shows that he overrides a person’s strength, money, and wisdom to put them level on the same playing field as the man or woman without these things that still knows the Lord. It is a true blessing to be able to come to God without wisdom necessarily, without strength per se, without wealth as a prerequisite, and to receive the benefit this scripture speaks of which is the privilege still of being able to understand and know God, and to be among those who have a circumcised heart.

Isaiah 40:28-29 Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary; His understanding is beyond searching out. 29 He gives power to the faint and increases the strength of the weak. 

So, the Lord overrides the weak man’s weakness and faintness, and he blesses them with strength. It is a true blessing to be able to come to God being on the verge of fainting, and to receive the benefits this scripture speaks of which is the privilege still of having your power and strength to be increased.

Romans 9:16 So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy.

What else could it be but the mercy of God to override our lack of will and lack of taking action and grant us something good we don’t deserve? It is a true blessing to be able to come to God being on the verge of not having your own will set for action, and without your body set for performance and this scripture speaks of the privilege still of being a candidate for God’s mercy.

2 Chronicles 20:12 O our God, will You not judge them? For we are powerless before this great multitude who are coming against us; nor do we know what to do, but our eyes are on You.”

So, Jehoshaphat had faith that God could override the power of his enemies and level the playing field and take the powerlessness of his own army, and “work something out on their behalf”

I am not one to promote lack of wisdom, poverty, lack of taking action, weakness, or a lack of battle strategy or to say we don’t need to apply ourselves in our faith-walks. But it is encouraging to know that in all these situations it was clear the messages God is showing us are  that when we feel like we have absolutely nothing to give out or draw from out of our personal reserves, we can lean upon our God, and his strength will be made perfect in our weaknesses.

2 Chronicles 20:3-4 Jehoshaphat was afraid and turned his attention to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. 4 So Judah gathered together to seek help from the Lord; they even came from all the cities of Judah to seek the Lord.

In Jeremiah 9:23-25, Isaiah 40: 28-29, and the Romans 9:16 scriptures, what we see highlighted are the wonderful transcendent virtue attributes of God, based on God’s initiative and willing action on his people’s behalf. But when a little bit of fasting gets involved, then this happens: In 2 Chronicles 20:3-4, Jehoshaphat was afraid and turned his attention to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. 4 So Judah gathered together to seek help from the Lord; they even came from all the cities of Judah to seek the Lord. Then later in vs. 21-23 When he had consulted with the people, he appointed those who sang to the Lord and those who praised Him in holy attire, as they went out before the army and said, “Give thanks to the Lord, for His lovingkindness is everlasting.” 22 When they began singing and praising, the Lord set ambushes against the sons of Ammon, Moab and Mount Seir, who had come against Judah; so they were routed. 23 For the sons of Ammon and Moab rose up against the inhabitants of Mount Seir destroying them completely; and when they had finished with the inhabitants of Seir, they helped to destroy one another. 25When Jehoshaphat and his people came to take their spoil, they found much among them, including goods, garments and valuable things which they took for themselves, more than they could carry. And they were three days taking the spoil because there was so much. 30 So the kingdom of Jehoshaphat was at peace, for his God gave him rest on all sides.

When we aim to add fasting, praise and worship, to our seeking God out of our weaknesses, we can expect him to magnify his gracious attributes before us despite our weaknesses, however ugly they may seem to cling to us or cover us, and His glory is shown in spite of what we are not.

Let’s be encouraged in who our Gracious Heavenly Father Is— “the Lord, showing faithful love, justice, and righteousness on the earth, for I delight in these things”, He says.

Prayer: Dear Heavenly Father, as we meditate upon your Godly attributes which you possess in your reliable self-autonomous self-existence, you shed your grace upon us. How wonderful it is that you are so unchangeable, and your steadfast love and your loving-kind ways are often magnified before our very eyes. Your desire is towards your people Oh God, and you draw us with chords of compassion. May we meditate this week on the countless ways in which your strength is made perfect in our weaknesses, and may those who are led to do so fast, pray, and worship you Lord! For you are worthy above all else and above everyone else, Oh God our Gracious Rock and Redeemer! Amen!

Keep growing in the Word! LG

Prayer of Dependence on God-5

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Christian prayer aiming for true Christian growth

Lord, we come to you to seek nearness to you. We seek your presence in a deep and profound way. We pray for a visitation from you Lord.  (Psalms 80:14 Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine;) We want to leave behind our fleshly tendencies and actually draw closer to you. (James 4:8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded) We are tired of a powerless existence in which there seem to be just a few we are ministering to, and some people seem uninterested. (I Cor 4:20 For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.) It is not that it’s about us, and it’s not that we are ungrateful, but we seek you because we believe that you really can move among us through your word, through our seeking you, through our worship, and other ways and we believe that your ministry among us can be greater and more noticeable and we would like to see that shown in fruitfulness in more lasting, deeper and life impacting ways on a broader scale. (Acts 4:13 Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus.) My prayer for us is that when people see us they would not see just us,— but you Lord– looming bigger than we ourselves in the light of all that’s happening. I am impressed with the reality of the scripture “He must increase, and I must decrease”. (John 3:30) I pray you would lead us all in seeking that. I ask for you to be magnified, and for us to step back out of the way to get a better glimpse of you. (Luke 19:1-10) We devote our hearts and minds to you Lord afresh today. We devote our attention and thinking processes to you Lord. (Provers 4:20 My son, pay attention to what I say; turn your ear to my words.) I repent on behalf of myself and others for how the daily responsibilities press on us and we are in a battle with both the enemy and with you and the battle is the pull on our attention. Oh Lord, it is right to place our eyes and attention on you when we have things happening that are little things in comparison to who you are, pressing on us. (Hebrews 12:2-3 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.) I want to lead us all in a surrender of our daily pressures. Lord, we believe you care —the Bible tells us to not worry and to be of good cheer—you care about the whereabouts of our phones, you care about if something was stolen from us today—you care about how much money we will need to cover our next 6 months of bills, you even care about every need for the rest of our lives. You care about our protection—whether we are remembering to put on our armor, or not. (1 Peter 5:7  casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.”) Lord you remind us to put on our armor so we can stand in the evil day and to continue to stand. You care about our transportation, our homes, and everything around us. You care about the people in our lives, you care about what is going through their minds and you care about us and what is going through our minds. You desire truth in the inner man, what a man desires is kindness, (Proverbs 19:22) you care about that we are walking in your Spirit, and you care that we are able and willing to lean upon you Oh Lord! You would have us to recognize that you are fit to run every section of our lives, the parts that we do understand, as well as the parts we don’t understand. (Genesis 1:1, Psalm 146:6) You would have us to grow in our understanding, and grow in our awareness of what you do and who you are. You would have us to be teachable, to receive the impressions of your word being written upon our hearts. (Proverbs 8:32 “Now then, my children, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways.) You would have us to ask you: “What is it you want to do with me and in me? With as many weaknesses as I have, and as many insufficiencies as I have—am I seeing it right –what you want to do with me, Lord?”—yes the Lord looks at us differently than we look at ourselves. Can we still depend on God in the same way after we receive a gift as we did before we receive the gifts he will give us? We can pray a very strategic prayer—“Lord how would you have me to minister to you and to other people right now?” and “what would you have me to learn or practice?”. Lord help us to not be so taken with your Sovereignty that we adopt a “whatever will be will be attitude” and not be against your sovereignty that we forget that you fully know everything that we are going through and forget your interest in our lives. May we also not forget the war we are in and the draw from You Lord to fight the good fight of faith in every area. Help us to be pliable clay in your hands, (Jeremiah 18) that we would think on how to please you, but surrender our questions. Help us to not come out of our Christian personality in the midst of the challenges we face. We ask for your nearness and fully bring ourselves to you, our weaknesses, our ugly parts, and our clean and tidy parts. Lord, blow upon us, wash and cleanse us, send your river of life through us and fill us with yourself afresh. May your virtue and strength be infused within us and turn us back to you! May our hearts not waver in our pursuit of you and if it does, strengthen us again until we are more molded into your image. Lord, we lay aside impatience, bitterness, jealousy, exhaustion, and exasperation, and greed, selfishness, overeating, pride, doing things our own way, and looking down on those that we think are not as spiritual as we are. We repent of any of these things that may have jumped off the page and waved hello at us. Please forgive us, wash us, cleanse us, as we lay our filthy rags at the foot of the cross. (Isaiah 64:6) We ask you for the white linens of your righteousness that Jesus paid for with his blood for us to put on and keep upon us day and night, and every day of the week! Please renew us Oh God! Please grant us to draw near to you today and may we really start going deeper into partaking of your spiritual victories, and letting the victory you won Lord on our behalf to change us from the inside out! Amen!

Keep growing in the Word! LG

Man in the Cold

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Devotional and prayer

Today after I went to Walmart, I took the freeway home and came up to a stop light as I was exiting from the freeway. This corner was less than one block from a friend’s home. He was married to a former roommate of mine from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. That’s when I recognized him standing on the corner under the traffic light holding a sign that said: “Anything Helps, God Bless!”. When he saw me looking at him he pulled his mask over his mouth and pulled his hood tighter over his head. I had just hired him about 2 months ago for about an hour to move some large boxes of books, a shelf and end table out of my apartment which were a bit awkward for me to manage. He has been a most reliable friend for many years, and he actually loves to pray for people. I have no doubt that his faith is measured in the scales of heaven with favor and the Lord looks down upon him and smiles. This friend of mine serves in church and has basically taken on the role of butler to the pastor of his church. His faith is sincere and sweet, but he honestly has some misunderstandings of what it means to be his pastor’s “Armor Bearer”. He believes that his struggles on the job and loss of employment mean that there is more time to serve his pastor and believes that if he puts his pastor first and does everything the pastor wants him to within reason, then the Lord will count his faith as worthy of rewarding and will promote him with a better paid job because of sacrificing this way in how he “gives to the Lord”.

His own testimonies over the years have testified of his misunderstandings of the Holy Spirit. There have been at least 2 jobs that he has lost in the last 20 years from him falling down, rolling on the floor and laughing hysterically, because he said he got hit by the Holy Spirit with “Holy Laughter” and the people he worked for were not “sensitive to the Holy Spirit”. In addition to this there are at least 2 other jobs in which he got fired from his bosses not understanding why he laughs a bit too long, too hard, and too freely over jokes that are not really that funny. In fact, many of them are not funny at all. He truly acts like he thinks he is experiencing the Holy Spirit every time he laughs. This is why he gets fired, and this is why he struggles financially. My friend is living in the church building as the caretaker of the church he attends, and I am guessing he would be homeless if it were not for his subservience to his pastor. He may have had a short time being addicted to drugs, but that part of his past is more than 18 years old.

I really don’t want to open up a doctrinal can of worms or gravitate to mentioning the false teachings of Rodney Howard Browne, the original “Holy Ghost Bartender”. However, I do think that it is worth mentioning that the belief in many false teachings have cost numerous people a lot of jobs, relationships, and just the plain opportunities for having a “normal life”. In fact, the belief in false teachings have GIVEN numerous people a lot of jobs, relationships, and the unusual opportunities for having a “wealthy life”, up to the “King of The Hill”—even millionaire status. God forbid that and may our doctrine always be checked carefully!

While it is true that God has made us His peculiar people, he does not make us peculiar alone, as if “peculiar” was its own reference point to describe us without God choosing to leave his fingerprints on us. However, aside from being a peculiar people, what we all have in common with my friend, is that he and we are all “beggars– before the Living God.” I would remind us that everything we have received from God has always been a gift. We are the beneficiaries of God’s extensive benevolence. It will never be accredited to us as one who has “worked our way to heaven” or “earned a gift from God”. I came to a crisis point several years ago and I became keenly aware that every breath I took was because of the gracious mercy of God. Every beat of our hearts is a gift, every blink of our eyes is a gift, because we can move only by the mercy of God, every thought we can think is a gift, every drink of water, and on up from there. Each day we all literally experience thousands upon thousands of gifts from the benevolent mercy, kindness, and watchful eye of our Gracious Heavenly Father.

Let’s take some time to go through our homes and hearts, look around, and be thankful for what we have received, and been endowed with, with our abundance, and thank God as well for any lack we have, and also pray for those neighbors of ours who are less fortunate than we are. Paul said, “I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound.” It is for certain, that at some time in our lives we will have experienced both.

The links I have attached are of Steph Macleod, a professional singer/songwriter/worshipper from The United Kingdom. He has a testimony of living on the street due to alcoholism and got saved when he went to a shelter/mission for those living on the street. His song “Man In The Cold” is autobiographical for him and you will sense the heartbreak and loneliness in hearing his song. His song “When I found Jesus” is also autobiographical and is a real winner of a song capping off how his life was changed. I added it to complete the picture in his testimony and give poetic justice to say the least. It tells of the way Jesus found him in his utter brokenness and lifted him up from there. My friend who was holding the sign up today is another Jesus has lifted up quite a ways since I met him in 1989, but still needs prayer of course—then again, we ALL need prayer!

Prayer:

Our Gracious Heavenly Father, how easy it is for myself to quickly pray for many things in any one day and keep asking for more, and miss enjoying what you have already done. It is even a gift to be thankful, because we get to magnify your goodness in thinking through things one at a time and mention your name as the one who thought to bring that thing into our lives. How quickly and swiftly you move, like you were dancing through our prayer requests, and showing your glory, and goodness and your kindness. I thank you for what I have seen of You Oh God! How wonderful Lord it is to meditate upon the fact that you think my prayers are worthy of your consideration! And how even greater it is to think that when my prayers are not worthy of your consideration, you move to change my heart to provide for me opportunities to have my prayers become worthy of your consideration! Oh Lord, we bless your name for bearing with us in our brokenness, in our imperfections, in showing you are alive and living through us and blowing your wind through our lives. As cold as it’s been outside, You’re the One to warm the coldest heart! You’re the One to change the most stubborn of us all! How gracious you have been in letting us work, in giving us skills and talents, and gifts to share with the world, for granting us transportation and granting us food, clothing and shelter. Thank you that you grant us friends and family members to love us and talk to and share with, and people to “practice” our loving skills upon. Thank you that you have given us things to be involved with to do with others, to work towards, and people to serve, and songs to sing to you, truths to celebrate, meals to share with one another during holidays, and special times, and some get this opportunity every single day. We are blessed by your hand Oh God! And enriched in countless ways!

We pray for those who are less fortunate! We ask that you would be with them and help them. We ask that you would guide many out of false doctrines, and grant them stability, hope, an anchor for the soul, and grace to grow and learn, and move things out of their lives that they may have been tripping over. We ask you for your heart to warm those neighbors of ours who are out in the cold, just hoping that someone will give them an extra buck or two to make ends meet. We ask for their dignity to not be diminished, we pray that you would speak to them and to sharpen their sense of hearing. We pray you would help meet every need in their lives. We ask that they would lose all their taste for drugs, if that is the problem, and lose their taste for false doctrine if that has been something stealing from them. We ask that they would lose their taste for anything they have been tripping over, anything that gets them fired, anything that keeps them from being a good roommate, anything that keeps people from wanting to work along-side of them. Give them I pray, and us as well, a deep hunger and thirst for you Oh Lord! May you warm us to your love and mercy! May we exude our love and mercy for you in our praise and worship. May we lose our judgementalism for those out in the cold who are begging, maybe life has just gotten so confusing for them they don’t know what else to do. Give them the vision of themselves that you want them to see,–may they truly see themselves in their true spiritual condition—Lord in the light of you. Some are in you, and some are not, and we pray that those that are not would see your love, and mercy and goodness and that it would draw people to you for your kingdom. For those that belong to you, may they see their true spiritual condition in the light of you—we pray for eye salve! We ask for the light of your countenance to shine upon them and enlighten them! Help them all, the unsaved and the saved to overcome the battles they are now in—help them to see the hope they have in you! Renew their faith so they don’t give up and throw in the towel, or commit suicide. Give them hope so they don’t believe the lies they have stumbled over. Help them to overcome! Lord, please grant us as your people, and all our neighbors and spheres of influence to be moving toward you! May you help everyone to throw out whatever belongs to the sinful nature, and really do spiritual house cleaning, so that those who need to get saved will become saved, and so we will put on Christ and together be able to truly present ourselves and those we minister to for eternity in whatever way you have led us, to become “perfect, sanctified, stable, and whole” before you on the day that you return to take us home to be with you, Oh Lord, our God, King, and Gracious Heavenly Father! Amen! And Amen!

Man In The Cold (Live) | Steph Macleod  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Uu7omVMes

When I Found Jesus (Live) | Steph Macleod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTUV5G9gLsY

Keep growing in the Word! LG

Swing the Sword of the Word, Thou Prayer Warrior!

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Encouragement to pray the Word

I want to encourage us today that there may be some of us that seem like we may have been brought full circle in battle by the Lord which can be symbolized by a full 360-degree rotation of a swinging sword wielded by a warrior of an ancient kingdom. We may have had victories in one area or another, but we should not give up the fight or throw in the towel. We should not make light of previous battles we have fought and won but seem to be numb over. We should not downplay our previous spiritual victories as meaningless or powerless, because they did take real spiritual virtue in prayer and life and faith to fight successfully, and we needed God’s love in those areas of our lives to be victorious. Do not despise your previous battles thinking their spiritual size is just “small” in the “victory realm”  because they are not meaningless and not without spiritual “stakes” in the ground. We may need to regain strength, and regain flexibility, regain vital virtue, and goodness and kindness and love  in the areas we may have become systematic and militant in, or burnt out and robotic in or just going through the motions. Let us stretch again forward in faith and in our wielding the spiritual sword in prayer and live out this precious gift of faith and ask for God’s Spirit to fill our lives to overcome our battle fatigue and to overcome our own frustrations with our own cumbersome weaknesses and find his virtue. Let us find his power to hate our sin and by his unfailing love to maintain purity and passion, and to overcome by his Spirit our innate spiritual clumsiness because we have been granted to be filled with his life, strength, and grace.

Keep growing in the Word! LG

Fasting To Grieve Before The Lord

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Devotional and prayer

May we be careful of not trying to add fasting to times of the motions of drama where we might be prone to exaggerate our cries to God. I have been prompted to sort out my own emotions looking for signs of drama in my requests to God as I have taken on a long-term substitute teaching assignment in my community and I daily encounter the occurrence of drama and of over-realized “sensitive-trigger buttons which the students become overly vocalized about”. And I know at once it should not be something I let sway me as I realize that there can be floods of “whims” of students that may be unaware of the temptations pushing them to leverage control over the direction of the class. OOOh, how this renews my perspective of the carefulness of Our Loving Heavenly Father who must daily weigh what is best for us when it might or might not be a “virtue producing thing” for Him to answer our many rivers of egocentric prayers, and discern the best times for an optimum approach of His to produce more fruit in us even when He says “No!” Even in his “Nos” when he chooses them he is building in us a confidence that we can know he has our best interest in His mind. As I am in position to promote my hopefully healthy response to the flood of requests in my class, I need to use discernment and guard against forces who may try to veer my tasks off course in my teaching and building the classroom into a healthy environment.

God is in the salvation business so to speak, and God saves us by grace through faith—but not by our prayers exactly. God can clearly save people who can’t talk—so the verbal measure of prayer is not as important as the faith measure of a prayer because prayer can be done in the heart. Mourning over sin can be done in the heart as well, and yet in our running to God, let us remember that we need not to have every request heard by those around us nor every motion of fasting noticed by others! Public fasting and prayer is definitely not a bad thing, because we can see it OFTEN presented corporately in the scripture, so we know corporate fasts are something God uses in the Old and New Testaments, but let us also remember it can be done as a show, and people of faith should avoid that. But on the days we might slip in our footing and go sideways into “having too much of our prayer and fasting noticed by mere flesh and blood”– we may realize then that the power is not solely in the corporate fasting and praying we do with others or even with spouses, but truly having to do with the measure of our faith in God.

Isn’t this folly also in us at times? Is it not also a natural temptation for Christians to get tempted toward narcissism when offered free “asking privileges”, and shouldn’t the awareness of this really cause us to seek to make our requests do the opposite of narcissistic motions? May we seek to discern more greatly about “any drama or narcissistic tendencies” in us, and may we push vigorously away from them, and discern more greatly our true needs for real and fitting motions of mourning, grieving, and fasting, and seek to sorrowing over different categories of things in our lives worthy of our mourning, grieving and fasting…Have we freely found the right temper and persistence for….

Grieving over our sins, our lost ground, our missed chances for carrying out a prompting of God?

Grieving over our loved ones’ losses, or grieving about how distant we or they are from God?

Grieving over the lost on a larger scale, in our communities, in our nation, grieving over our lack of having a voice in our school board meetings, or over the missing power in our voice to prompt the legal system in our governments towards more righteous law making?

Grieving over the broken state of our churches, our missing times of “repairing the broken walls (as Nehemiah did)” or that we are missing the very “Nehemiah—like Leaders” who will bring a cry to the nation for our participation in the corporate need for spiritual building, fortifying, and healing?

Grieving over our callousness, blindness, coldness, too thick-skinned-ness, our roughness, sharpness, failures to say the right thing at the right time, our failures to aim to “seek and save the lost”, for the feeling others may have had about us as in perceiving some “seeming deadness or insensitivity”, or in having an unawareness to the true needs out there, our denial, minimizing, living as if nothing is wrong, our justifying sin, our rationalizing, our spiritualizing, failure to grieve over holes and cracks in the broken walls, our failure to grieve thoroughly over the harvest that we are not just sure we may have seen falling to the ground, grieving over not crying out for needing more workers in the harvest fields, grieving over our failure to pursue a steady flow of steady spiritual growth if called to a long term many years of this and we have gotten tired—-and drifted from our calls, or to grieve because of the presence of more of these kinds of failures we tell ourselves aren’t happening—because no one ELSE is grieving about these things, that come to mind except maybe a few…

Is it that we believe too heavily in the Sovereignty of God that we convince ourselves our “fasting can’t add another person to the kingdom that God has not already predestined to come to Him?” If people believe this last statement, then I would say, “it must be you shouldn’t pray either then because if God uses NOTHING of the faith of people to get his will done, then, you must be saying our prayers to Him are meaningless!!” Didn’t Jesus demonstrate the very OPPOSITE belief and works of power throughout his ministry? We should never MINIMIZE our role in fasting and prayer or the use God may choose to put our fasting and prayer to.

It is a strange kind of thing that God does in his validating the faith of Ahab, in 1 Kings 21:25-29 in his remorse, prayer, fasting, and humility after saying he previously “SOLD HIMSELF TO DO EVIL”. Could it be that by the mourning, grieving, fasting, and sorrow of one of the most broken sinners, who was so unique in all of history that GOD Himself first says in 1 Kings 21:25-26 “Surely there was no one like Ahab who sold himself to do evil in the sight of the Lord, because Jezebel his wife incited him. 26 He acted very abominably in following idols, according to all that the Amorites had done, whom the Lord cast out before the sons of Israel.” —then later, how did this Ahab discover through fasting, mourning, grieving, and humbling himself, that he could receive some amount of God’s mercy, enough to save his life after God said he should die, even after being called so evil and “abominable” by God, that God made mention of him to the prophet Elijah after his repentance that his going about meekly, and remorsefully caught His attention so that He even spared his life? It is worth repeating even if to ourselves alone that God makes mention of the formerly evil person’s humbling himself with prayers and fasting even to the prophet, that God changes his plans for Ahab!  It says in 1Kings 21:27-29 “It came about when Ahab heard these words, that he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and fasted, and he lay in sackcloth and went about despondently. 28 Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying 29 “Do you see how Ahab has humbled himself before Me? Because he has humbled himself before Me, I will not bring the evil in his days, but I will bring the evil upon his house in his son’s days.” That is a good place to pause and meditate!

Prayer: Oh God our Gracious Heavenly Father! How deep is our need for you! How slow is our believing! How broken our lives and cities, and of the nations of the world! How dull we have been to hearing you! How slow we have been to keep in step with You! How many are Your mercies! How real is the hope that lies before us to grieve for the lost for their salvation! How entreatable You ARE! How quickly we forget we are in a war over our hearts! How much we need to do regular re-adjusting of our spiritual trajectory to fulfill all Your good will for our lives and to be fully shaped by You to bear the fruits of our ministries! Oh God! Please forgive us, renew us, grant repentance, faith, hope, grace, perseverance, pure motives and help us with walking daily as we should to reflect in our actions what we believe about you in our hearts! I pray Oh Lord, may Your mercy prevail! And please grant good fruit through this time of seeking You with prayer and fasting Oh Lord! May we truly be able to stretch forth our tent straps and may You fill our tents with more brothers and sisters in the Kingdom and may the fruit be to the praise of Your glory Oh Lord! I ask dear Lord in Your Name Oh God! Amen!

Keep growing in the Word! LG

“Getting our Worship Right”

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

Prayer of Dependence on God-1

Author: Lisa Groen

Dear Heavenly Father, we come before you today acknowledging your greatness, your authority, your power, your all sufficiency and your deep love for us and all the world, and grateful that we can know that because of Jesus’s payment for us, we are welcomed by you to come before you. We thank you for the reality that you are the God of our salvation and acknowledge your desire to save people is greater than we can fully know in this life. We acknowledge your keeping power of us your people is greater than we can fully know in this life. And we acknowledge that yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever. We seek that you would be glorified in our lives and in this prayer time. May the blessings of Psalm 1 be granted to all people in all our spheres of influence and that you would let us prosper in all we set their hands to do, and that you would establish the work of their hands as in Psalm 90:16-17…16 May Your work be shown to Your servants, and Your splendor to their children. 17 May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us; establish for us the work of our hands— yes, establish the work of our hands!

Lord we seek you to fight off the enemy as in Exodus 14:14 which says “The Lord will fight for you while you keep silent.” And because of  Numbers 6:24 The Lord bless you, and keep you; The Lord make His face shine on you, And be gracious to you; dear Lord, may those blessings be granted again to us. Lord, please protect us and everyone in our spheres of influence as we seek you and your will and as we seek to live out our faith and callings before you. We seek that you would show lovingkindness to us your people, as is written in  1 Kings 8:23 … that you would “…keep covenant and showing lovingkindness to Your servants who walk before You with all their heart,”. Lord we are grateful that Jesus fulfilled the covenant and fulfilled the law of God in any place that we fall short, so that we are simply recipients of your grace oh God (Romans 4:4; 11:5–6; 2 Timothy 1:9–10), so may we be given your help, and enabled with strength to follow you, to fulfill our callings and accomplish all your will for our lives. May you fill us with power to will and to act according to all your good pleasure as you desire for our lives. Lord, the many great ways and promises you granted on behalf of your people in the old testament still hold great promise for us today and so we ask that you may grant that you would establish us before you as your holy people as is written in Deuteronomy 28:9. And that the promise of Isaiah 32:18 would be true in our lives which says “My people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation and in secure dwellings and in quiet resting places;” We pray for that security and rest and safety in our habitations. Lord, as you are aware of the many people that we have loved or that have been close to us over the year have been affected with illness, hardships, losses and deaths, may you avert the enemy from attacking in any unnecessary way and keep the enemy from hindering us in accomplishing your will. May your will be done and not the enemy’s will Oh Lord. I remember your promise Lord that you are the protector of Israel, and you neither slumber nor sleep, and you watch over your garden day and night lest anyone hurt it. Please may that continue to happen in our lives and spheres of influence. May you guide us in our personal prayer times and devotion times and as we recognize that from you comes any power that we could ever have to do any ministry, or to bear any good and lasting fruit, so we pray that you would continue to use us as you see fit, and make us fruitful in your kingdom. Please heal up any breaches in our walls in any way that our protection may have been damaged, or in any way the enemy may have gotten a foothold. Please deliver, keep the devourer from devouring and grant our loved ones and us too, the safety, health and deliverance they need and that we all need to follow you strongly and to keep our eyes on you as we should, and that we would continue to seek you in everything and that our hearts would be wholly and fully yours. I am reminded of 1 Kings 8:61 Let your heart therefore be wholly devoted to the Lord our God, to walk in His statutes and to keep His commandments, as at this day. And think of 1 Chronicles 22:12 which says “Only the Lord give you discretion and understanding, and give you charge over Israel, so that you may keep the law of the Lord your God.” And Lord, we do want to keep following you, and you alone are our protection and from you alone comes all of our success, so we ask specifically for the discretion we need, and the understanding we need, and I ask for good discernment also in our plans, our choices, in our motivations and in our work and rest as well. In any way our discernment may have failed, please forgive, and cleanse us and grant discernment and the right responses to situations that we need for the ministry we are doing and at the level we all need to follow you would be granted that we can wholeheartedly and to fully do your will and to fulfill our callings. Moses prayed in Exodus 33:15 “If Your Presence does not go with us,” Moses replied, “do not lead us up from here. Lord, we want to be of the same mind as Moses and have the same approach. We want the approach of David who sought your direction in 1 Samuel 30:8 … saying, “Should I pursue after this raiding party? Will I overtake them?” And He answered him, “Pursue them, for you will surely overtake them and will surely recover all.” But in 2 Samuel 5:23 And when David enquired of the LORD, he said, Thou shalt not go up;…” May we have the responsiveness before you to have the ears that truly hear you even when you might say to us “You shall NOT go up…”

Lord, I pray for those of us and others in our spheres of influence that have been assaulted or wounded by the enemy in the line of battle, we seek you for your healing of us as in Psalm 12:5 “Because of the devastation of the afflicted, because of the groaning of the needy, Now I will arise,” says the Lord; “I will set him in the safety for which he longs.”

May you grant us to have the mind of the spirit which is life and peace and grant a peaceful meditation before you as we go on our way today keeping our eyes on you.

Psalm 121

1 I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; From where shall my help come? 2 My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth. 3 He will not allow your foot to slip;
He who keeps you will not slumber. 4 Behold, He who keeps Israel Will neither slumber nor sleep. 5 The Lord is your keeper; The Lord is your shade on your right hand. 6 The sun will not smite you by day, Nor the moon by night. 7 The Lord will protect you from all evil; He will keep your soul. 8 The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in, from this time forth and forever.

May you be mindful of the prayers of Your people Oh Lord, Amen!

Keep growing in the Word! LG