Father God, I pray for your mercy to cover the people of southern California now during this time of crisis. You are the God of the miraculous, and I pray that you would intervene in California in a miraculous way to turn tragedy around for your glory. I pray for Your divine intervention in the weather conditions in California, that the Santa Ana winds would die down and that rain would quench the flames.
I lift up to Your care the people impacted by the fires. I pray for Your comfort and Your incomprehensible peace to fill their hearts in the midst of the material and personal loss. I pray that You would be with each of the evacuees and that You would turn their eyes upward to You rather than around to the flames. I pray for Your protection over the homes and properties that are still in danger of being destroyed. I pray for medical care and mercy to reach them in the evacuation centers, and I pray for peace and harmony in these centers.
Lord God, I pray for a hedge of protection around firefighters battling the fires and among volunteers who are giving their time to help the people impacted by the fires. I pray Your blessing upon each of the relief workers and upon the state, federal, and private relief efforts. I pray that You would work through each of these people to reveal Yourself to southern California and to the rest of the nation.
Father, above all, I pray that you would use this devestating situation to turn hearts to you. In the name of Jesus, I come against all efforts of the enemy to turn people away from You during this crisis. I praise You, Lord, that You are greater than our enemy, that You are greater than our material wealth that we treasure too much in this country, and that You are greater than all of the trials and tribulations of this life. I pray that You would move in this situation in such a way that no one can question the divinity of Your intervention. I thank You, Lord, that no matter the heartbreak we cause You, it is not Your will for any soul to be lost. You are merciful and kind and loving beyond anything our feeble minds can understand. I ask that You enter into this situation and reveal Your power, love, and mercy to a watchful country. In the holy and mighty name of Jesus. Amen.
I am a sensitive person, and this makes it difficult for me not to take certian criticisms very personally. This character flaw of mine presents a big challenge in my chosen career since the nature of public education exposes me to regular attacks, something I never anticipated when I first chose this path because I didn't have parents who would attack educators as freely as a lot of other parents do. Now that graduation is over, my goal for the remaining days at my current school has simply been to transition out of here as smoothly as possible. But any hope of leaving here without incident was shattered this morning when I came in to an angry email from a parent threatening to go to the school board over an incident that her child had with a teacher. As the counselor, I thought that I had handled the situation professionally, but the parent felt that I could have done more and this is what she is angry about. Her email bashed the teacher, an assistant principal, and myself over the handling of the incident. Of the three parties, I was actually the most innocent and the least criticized, but because of my personality, I took the email the hardest.
Speaking from much experience, if we don't consciously put on our spiritual armor (Ephesians 6:10-18) every morning, it's easy to feel beaten down by the attacks we face. It's also easy to forget that our enemy is not the hurt, frustrated, fallen person who is executing the attack. Daily putting on our armor reminds us that our enemy is not our neighbor, our enemy is Satan who treads all over the world wreaking havoc on tender hearts and sensitive spirits, leaving many of us hardened out of a feeling of self-preservation necessity. Yet all we really need for self-preservation is to daily ready ourselves for the battle. The enemy would have us believe that there is no battle beacuse if we aren't alert and ready to fight, then we aren't really a threat to him at all. Don't fall into his trap. Even though we can't see everything that is happening in the spiritual realm, we are living in war torn world and we have the carnage all around us to prove it. We are spiritually hurting people who are hurting others out of our own hurt. We are also people who serve a God who sees the battle from a different vantage point and has empowered us to victory through His son.
In Isaiah 54:17, we are promised, "'No weapon that is formed against you will prosper; and every tongue that accuses you in judgment you will condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and their vindication is from Me,' declares the LORD." We have to stand firm in our armor, but God has already won the battle. Through Christ, we have the power to walk through every attack waged against us in the war for our souls and come out unscathed. In fact, in Luke 10:19, Jesus says to His disciples, "Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing will injure you." Satan knows of our power and the more aware we are of our power, the larger our threat to Satan and therefore the harsher his attacks will be against us. Instead of being beaten into a position of self-pity by Satan's attacks, we need to quickly and confidently face our attacker with the power and authority of Christ's name. No enemy can harm us when we take Christ into the battle with us.
Most Christians will tell you that they don't believe in luck. Luck implies there is some chance to the world, and that contradicts the sense of security that Christians like to cling to with the belief that nothing happens that God doesn't say gets to happen. Job is certainly evidence that even bad things that happen pass through God's filter. Of course, the book of Job also provides evidence that there is a whole lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that we will never be privy to. Perhaps our limited vision and complete inability to understand the whys behind the whats is the reason we came up with the concept of luck, which for simplicity's sake is what I will refer to in the rest of this post.
Overall, both my life and John's has been quite blessed. I could write paragraph after paragraph about my day to day bad luck when things go wrong for no apparent reason and John's day to day good luck when things go right for him even when the odds are stacked against him. I could also write about how now that we are married our two differents kinds of "luck" seem to have collided. I won't bore you with those details or with the details of our early conflicts about the concept of good luck being at all connected to good living. What I will say, is that whether or not you consider it luck or you consider it Satan trying to screw us over, we have had a few pretty unfortunate adventures since we've been together starting with the freak early-July hurricane on what was supposed to be our wedding day. Fortunately, even when bad luck strikes, we have been able to see God working through the fire.
Between last night and this morning, we had two unlucky things happen in a 12-hour period. First, our dog started choking on a piece of rawhide last night. She panicked and started whining and then yelping when she couldn't figure out what was happening. John managed to grab her in her state of panic and hold her down. He was somehow able to maneuver her until the rawhide came loose, and in doing so he saved her life. Both Felicia and I were quite traumatized by her near-death experience, but God gave John the grace to remain calm. Then this morning we locked ourselves out of our new house. We went out to the garage and the door locked behind us. We had no keys, no cell phones, and no jackets. Lucky for us it's been an oddly warm December in Maryland! This time, John was more upset than I was. He wanted to break a window. I wanted to knock on a neighbor's door and call my mom with the spare key. He started hitting our door knob with a softball bat. Metal banging on metal at 6:30 in the morning. I can only imagine how much our neighbors love us. Then I noticed our neighbor from across the street getting into his car. This is someone who introduced himself to us when we were moving in, so I already knew him a little bit. I walked as fast as I could in my heels across the street to ask him if he had a phone we could use. He did, and he was happy to let me borrow it and even walked to our house to see if John needed him to help with anything. Right after I called my mom to come with the key, John managed to break our doorknob off and use a fire poker to trick the lock and get us inside. We will have to replace the door knob, but that will be cheaper than the door and certainly cheaper than a window if John had broken one. And we still managed to make it to work before first period began!
In our lives the good luck moments surely outweigh the bad, but usually the bad luck situations make for better stories. Especially when the bad works out. Even in the lives of people where the bad seems to outweigh the good, it is still true that we will all have seasons of suffering and seasons of rejoicing, and moments of suffering and moments of rejoicing in all seasons. The ratio of good to bad for each of us is for God to decide, and we should trust that He has His reasons. He holds all of eternity in His hand, and He can see the purpose behind what we see as chaos. God knows the whys behind the whats, even in a situation like this morning where I can see no why behind us being locked out. God is in control in both the blessings and the curses. Just as He gives, He can take away, and if we follow Him, we must be willing to accept both (Job 2:10). When we put God in the driver's seat, we soon learn that we're just along for the ride, wherever He may choose to take us. Maybe some days like this morning, all He wants is for us to look to our side and remember who's in charge.
I'm exhausted. I'm tired of thinking, and I'm tired of trying. I'm tired of putting forth my personal effort to do good only to see my efforts fall flat. I'm tired of questioning myself when all my exertion seems for naught, and I'm tired of exerting myself to make a difference that I simply cannot make on my own.
Fortunately, there is hope. Hope that hearts have cried out for long before mine and hope that God has promised thousands of years before my generation walked the earth. Hope that the prophet Isaiah proclaimed to my predecessors who battled with their own broken hearts and weary spirits.
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, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. --Isaiah 40:28-31
I am weary because I've been relying on my own efforts when I should have been calling out for God's supernatural intervention. I am not the only one. In our human frailty, we cannot muster within ourselves the power to do His work well. We grow weary, even in our vigorous youth. God does not grow weary. God has so much strength that He freely lavishes it on the weak, increasing their power and their endurance for life's uphill hike.
Self-pity has no place in a God-empowered heart. The enemy wants us weakened and weary and ineffective. God wants to renew us and strengthen us and increase our potency in a world that desparetly needs potent people to spread the truth. God is the everlasting power source, and He will graciously flood us with His power to further His kingdom without growing weary. We need only to fall to our knees and ask.
Immediately the boy's father exclaimed, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" --Mark 9:24
Not too long ago, I finished a study about believing God. You would think that being so fresh off of that study, my faith would be at an all-time high. Yet this weekend God confronted me once again with my own unbelief. I've been praying about a particular issue, and I have felt God's assurance stronger than usual that He heard my prayers and was going to answer them. It is not on every issue that I clearly feel God's assurance about something, but with this prayer I have. Nevertheless, I wanted a sign. So I meddled, got a sign, and then felt ashamed that I ever doubted.
Even after my study, my own faith still bears no resemblance to Abraham's. In Romans 4:19, we're told that "Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead--since he was about a hundred years old--and that Sarah's womb was also dead." Abraham could have looked at the facts--age and infertility--and doubted God's assurance to him. But Abraham chose faith over fact. He knew that God was capable of what looked impossible to man. Abraham never wavered in believing that God listened to him and that God would answer him. I cannot boast the same faith.
I would save myself so much worry and heartache if I would just trust God like Abraham did. It sounds so simple, but I am more like the man in Mark, desperately needing God to fill in the gaps in my faith and help my unbelief, than I am like Abraham, trusting God even in the face of seemingly insurmountable facts. Fortunately, I serve a God who is willing to help my unbelief and forgive me for it. And, even better, He doesn't change His mind even after I doubt. His plan is more powerful than my unbelief, and I thank and praise Him for that.
Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." --2 Corinthians 12:8-9a
I know God has the power to provide complete healing. I know He is still the God of the miraculous, just as He was when Jesus healed the sick. He is the same yesterday, today, and for eternity (Hebrews 13:8), so I know that His power to heal is just as potent as it was 2000+ years ago. Sometimes He chooses to heal, sometimes He does not. His power is the same in both cases, His choice is a matter of motive. God's motivation is always to bring about the greatest good for us and the greatest display of His glory.
I have experienced His complete healing first hand. He has delivered me from my struggles with food and body image in a way that I know was all Him. My eating disorder problems were a long time in development and long time in action. Yet somehow, when I gave it over to Him, He set me completely free from the mindset that got me in trouble in the first place. It wasn't my limited experience with therapy or any self-help book that did it, God Himself relieved me from duty in what is typically a lifelong addictive battle. I don't know how He did it, but I know that one day I woke up and I was different. I struggled long enough to know what suffering was like, but in His time, God set me instantly free. God set me free because it glorified Him more for me to walk in freedom from that struggle. He set me free so that I would know His power. That is the lesson I learned from my miraculous deliverance.
I have also experienced what He told Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:8-9 first hand. In the midst of shortness of breath and coughing fits that I can't control, I have prayed repeatedly (probably more than Paul's three times) for deliverance from my asthma. I don't want to be dependent on medication every day for the rest of my life to function like a healthy person. I've prayed for God to take me out of that battle. God has chosen not to. I know from my other experience that it is not because He does not have the power to set me free. In this case, however, He has a different lesson for me to learn that another easy deliverance could not teach me. In this area of my life, God wants to teach me the lesson He taught Paul--that His grace is sufficient for me.
For the past 16 years since my initial diagnosis with asthma and my first prayers for freedom, God has led me back to these verses over and over again. His grace is sufficient for me. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't struggled with this concept. I questioned what it meant for His grace to be sufficient and why He couldn't just extend His grace to set me free. God has slowly revealed to me that His grace has done far more than I deserve if all His grace did was open the door for me to come into His throne room. That promise alone should be sufficient for me to get up each morning with gladness and song in my heart. God uses my suffering in the flesh to remind me of my humanity and deepen my longing for the time when I will breathe freely at all times. He granted me complete healing from my eating disorder as a demonstration of his glory and power; He denies me complete healing from my asthma to teach me that an easy life should not determine the state of my spirit or impact my utter gratitude for God's grace. In both cases, God's motivation is for my good and His glory. His grace is sufficient. I need nothing else.
"You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you," declares the Lord, "and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you," declares the Lord, "and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile." --Jeremiah 29:13-14
God wants to lead us out of our captivity. Whatever we are captive to whether it is habitual sin, fear, anger, or an unhealthy relationship, God wants to set us free. All we have to do is ask. He promises us that if we seek Him and His deliverance with all of our heart, He will be found by us and lead us out of our captivity into the Promised Land. Our promised land can be as individual as our captivity, but the commonality is freedom. Freedom from our pasts and whatever tries to haunt us from there. Freedom from having to do it all on our own for the One who can do it all has made Himself found by us. If we ask Him, He will lead us out of the desert again and again and again. That's the beauty of grace. God takes us where we cannot go on our own, and He will lead us home as often as we ask Him to no matter how many times we fall into the same traps that separate us from Him. Sin is that which separates us from God. Our banishment, or separation, is what we bring on ourselves through sin. God loves us so much that He wants us to lead us out of that separation, but He won't drag us out. We have a choice. To access our promised freedom from captivity, all He requires of us is that we ask Him for deliverance. Seek Him and be led out of captivity. Seek Him and He will be found.
LORD, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy. --Habakkuk 3:2
You are amazing, Lord, and truly worthy of praise! You were there from before time began. You are beyond time and all time lies in Your hands. We praise You for the wonders of Your creation, for how You fearfully and wonderfully made each person that walks the earth (Psalm 139:14). We praise You for your mercy, for the way You led a rebellious people out of slavery and oppression in Israel and how You showed them Your wonderous power all along. Even more, we praise You for the merciful and selfless loving act of sacrificing Your only Son to save all future rebellious peoples from condemnation (John 3:16). We praise Your for the miraculous deeds You performed through Peter and Paul and others who followed You in the early days of the church. We praise You for the miracles You are still performing today. Father, we confess to You our own unbelief and the unbelief of many in our generation. We have become so self-sufficient in our abundance that we forget what it means to fall on our knees and depend solely on You. Father, we thank You for Your patience with our unbelief (Mark 9:24-29) and we pray for a renewal of faith throughout Your body that we might see Your glory displayed more often. Lord, just as Moses cried out in days of the exodus out of Egypt, we cry that You would show us Your glory (Exodus 33:18). Lord, many of us in the body have heard of Your awesome deeds but have not seen them first hand. We believe, Lord, but we long for the fresh revival of faith that you are beginning to move throughout Your people. Father, some say that the time of miracles has passed, but we know that You are unchanging and You are just as much a God of the miraculous today as You were 2000 years ago. Our hearts cry out to see Your glory, Lord! We pray for a renewal of Your awesome deeds in our day. Lord, for the sake of Your name and Your fame, renew Your wondorous works and make them known throughout our world. Father, in the midst of Your wrath at our spiritual laziness, remember the mercy You have shown us for thousands of generations. Bless us with a fresh glimpse of Your glory and Your wonders. Renew our spirits, our hearts, our minds, and our souls with a fresh revelation of all that You are and all that You can do if we would just believe You (Matthew 17:20). Lord, we praise Your holy name and thank You for the power that You want to exercise in each of our lives by faith. Oh, Lord, we want to see more people fall on their knees in awe of You!
Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? Will God? No! He is the one who has given us right standing with himself. Who then will condemn us? Will Christ Jesus? No, for he is the one who died for us and was raised to life for us and is sitting at the place of highest honor next to God, pleading for us. --Romans 8:33-34
Enough could never be written about the work Christ did for His children on the cross. He suffered a painful death in order to make us right with God. He who had no sin took the condemnation of our sin upon Himself so that we would no longer have to bear it. Thanks to Christ, we are now what we never could have been without Him--right with God. And after the magnitude of the act of dying a sinner's death for a sinful world, Christ continues to sit on His throne and plead (intercede) on our behalf as we continue to lead lives that are less than righteous before God.
For too many of us who have been Christians for a long time, this message has been repeated so much that we are almost desensitized to it. Many of us no longer feel in our spirits what He did for us because we accepted Him awhile ago, and we have gone on living lives that, while changed, no longer reflect the power that God gave us when He sent His Son to overcome the darkness within each of us. For us, it takes a powerful movie like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ to move us emotionally towards recognition of the depth of what Christ did for us. And that emotional high may only last a couple days before we revert back to our state of non-excitement.
God does not want us to always seek the emotional high, but neither does He want for us to lighten the weight of Christ's sacrifice to a point where we are not down-on-our-knees-grateful on a daily basis. Even on the days we don't feel the emotional freedom that Christ has given us, we are wrong to take His sacrifice for granted. He has bridged the gap between us and God, something that could not have otherwise happened. If we are not constantly overwhelmed with gratitude, then a good place to start would be to read Romans 8:31-39 outloud every morning until God has firmly written the words on our hearts and the sacrifice He made for us is ever-implanted into our consciousness. We need to fully grasp not only the nature of the sacrifice itself, but also all that the sacrifice did for us. One act with more power than we could ever muster without God's help.
"Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible. Faith begins where man's power ends." --George Muller
But Jesus looked at them and said, "With men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible." --Mark 10:27
Some Christians believe that miracles were only something God did in early church times. I disagree. I don't think that God ever quit the miracle business. I think that we are just more unbelieving and less inclined to pay attention to Him, and, at the same time, we are more inclined to seek rational explanations for everything. Well-meaning Christians even try to "prove" the faith to non-believers using scientific data. The problem with such an approach to evangelism is that it misses the point of faith. According to Hebrews 11:1, faith is Biblically defined as "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Faith is all about what we can't see or rationalize or prove. That was God's purpose and that is where He is more glorified. If there was scientific data and everyone believed in Him like they believe in gravity, then there would be no value in faith at all and no glory for the God who longs for us to seek Him and believe Him even though we don't see (see John 20:29).
Part of the problem with proof seeking is that it limits God to human understanding. God is too big to fit in our little boxes. In fact, His reign is higher than all our boxes stacked on top of each other and multiplied by 150. Rationalism requires concrete evidence and contain only that which is possible. While God is possible, but He is also more than what is possible by human standards. A focus on the possible hinders the power of our prayer. If we don't believe that God is still a God of the miraculous, we won't ask Him to do what is impossible, and He will not be glorified. Yes, even when we pray small prayers, God may still choose to show Himself in a more powerful and amazing way than we imagined, but He's not as likely to do so as He is when we ask Him to do the impossible.
The other issue with our asking God for the impossible is our motivation. Our society is very self-focused and self-seeking. If we ask God for a miracle with self-focused and self-seeking motivation, He will most certainly not oblige (Mark 8:12). God does not exist for our glory; we exist for God's glory. If we are seeking for God to do the impossible so that we will be proven right or so that our will shall be done, God won't listen to us (James 4:2-3). God does the impossible, like raise week-old corpses from the dead (John 11:38-44), when it will bring Him glory and increase His creation's faith, not when it will bring His creation glory instead of Him.
God's glory comes out of His will being done and His plan being carried out, and sometimes miracles can play a role when we are open to receiving the miracle for what it is--God doing the impossible. God is glorified when we have the faith to believe Him for the impossible even when all we see and hear is the possible. He is still just as much a God of the impossible--i.e., the miraculous--as He was in Biblical times. If we aren't seeing miracles, it's either because we aren't looking for the impossible or because He's patiently waiting for us to look at Him with our hearts of faith instead of our minds of logic.