Pray with Faith

James 5:13-16

Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise.  Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord.  And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven.  Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

It seems that everyone around me, at home, at work, at church, has been sick lately.  My son, still too young to really understand, sat crying because he was so miserable.  He kept telling me that he didn’t want to be sick and didn’t like it.  As a parent, you just want to fix things, you want to make them feel better.  Yet there are times that you really can’t do anything.  After having been up with him for hours through the night, I sat on the couch with him, just praying over him.  While there was nothing that I was really able to do, I prayed that God would give him rest.  Of course I prayed for healing as well. 

When you pray, do you have faith that your prayer will be answered?  This is one that I am not always great about.  It isn’t even so much that I don’t believe God will answer my prayers, however sometimes those answers aren’t exactly in line with what I’m hoping for so sometimes it seems like the prayer is not being answered, even though it is, just not how I had hoped. 

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we are told to pray for one another.  We are told to pray in faith.  Each of us is sick.  We are sick with a very deadly disease called sin.  How often do you pray that God will heal you from those sins? 

Today I pray that each of you will start or will continue to pray with faith.  Know that God answers prayers, even when it’s not always the way that we had hoped for.  

Thursday Devotional - Double Standards

Romans 2:19-24     “if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, ²⁰ an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of little children, because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth— ²¹ you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? ²² You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? ²³ You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? ²⁴ As it is written: “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”           Romans 2:19-24

Here, Paul is bluntly confronting the self-righteous Jews. Sometimes I skim over these verses thinking I’m not like these Jews. I don’t think I set expectations of others that I don’t set for myself. However, if I really examine all my behaviors and thoughts, I am hypocritical. I don’t always meet my own expectations for myself, much less God’s expectations.

Just last night I got on to James and Sarah several times for talking at dinner with food in their mouth. One of the times I realized I still had some food in my mouth when I was telling them to wait to talk until they had finished chewing!!!

In your and my areas of responsibility, what are you and I teaching others (co-workers, spouses, children, peers, communities, church members)?

Are you and I holding ourselves to the same expectations? 

Do you and I expect our co-workers to be diligent and not waist time, but do you and I waist time in different ways?

Do you and I expect our family members to be considerate, but do you and I always think of their needs first?

Let’s ask God to help us recognize (and address) where we are being self-righteous, hypocritical, or holding double standards.

Alice

It Ain't Easy

After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.  The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'”  Matthew 4:2-4

We all have household chores that we either love or hate.  For example, I love shoveling snow.  It’s not that I look forward to it, but when I have to go out there, it feels a fun challenge to shovel the area around the house.  However, I absolutely hate cleaning the garage.  One never knows what crawls out from under a bag or the dust the flies up agitating my allergies.  If there is something I can avoid doing, the garage is it.  In either case, the task must be done whether I like it or not, and it is for the good of the household once completed.

Being in servitude to God means there are going to be times where we do what we would prefer not to do.  In today’s verses, Jesus is tempted by the Devil in the wilderness.  As we see, the Devil tempted Jesus like he often does us; at His weakest point.  If you are like me, we typically are not thinking straight when we are hungry.  Here was Jesus who had fasted for forty days!  Pretty safe to say that hunger might have been an issue here.  So the Devil appealed to His ‘son of God’ side noting nothing is impossible for Him.  Why not indulge yourself a bit, and make some bread to eat.  One of Jesus’ greatest attribute is His devout servitude to God at all times.  His response was predictable noting it is of greater importance to live on God’s word than it is to serve myself.  This story reminds us of that simple phrase, “Easy to say, and hard to do.”  The reason it is so difficult to uphold is we love so many things that it at times clouds our judgment as to what do we love more.  I love God, but sometimes I feel like I love my wife, my children, and even more troubling, myself more than God.  I say this as admission of my own flaws hoping others might ask themselves the same question.  We must always remember that serving God when it conflicts with other wants and needs is an absolute must.  We may not like or enjoy it.  However, our spiritual growth is dependent on it.


Serving God is both humbling and a blessing.  He does so much for us in terms of love, grace, forgiveness, and protection that we may not truly understand the depths of the blessings given to us.  Furthermore, He gave us a shining example of how we are to live through His son Jesus Christ.  This is indeed a tall order for as Paul humbly wrote why is it so difficult to do what I ought not do (Romans 7:15).  However, Jesus took that burden on the cross so that we would be able to connect with God in spite of those and other flaws of ours.  So get out of your own way, and serve as He is worthy to serve.  How will you respond when your wants conflict with God’s?  What steps can you take to ensure your love for God supersedes love for other things?  My prayer is that we continue to grow in our love for God realizing that at times, it ain't easy.  Amen.

Tues Devo: Me focus

Hello,

Last week I wrote about reliance on God’s amazing power – and us trusting Him. This week I want to take the opposite angle, and talk about ourselves and the things we can control. While it may not feel in this culture that we need encouragement to spend time on ourselves – we really do. But instead of time on our self-promotion and self-indulgence, we need that time on self-building and self-control.

There are things in our control – are we focused on working on those? Are we willing to be accountable before God on those things, and commit to growth?

Ephesians 2:29-32 “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” (NASB)

I hope this challenges all of us!

Will Hill