Archive for the ‘Prayer’ Category

Communion with God, Prayer, Relationships, Spiritual living, Trust, Uncategorized

February 10, 2010

Connecting with God (Quest for Communion, Pt2)

Tags: connection, God, Holy Spirit, hope, Prayer, relationship, spiritual life, Spiritual living, transformation

If we accept that spiritual life is life with God at the center, then we need to be diligent about how we move to make that our reality. To have God at the center of our life means that we are in communion with God, connected to Him. When we come into a tangible relationship with God, the only place He can be in our life is in the center. Prayer is the path to communion. There are many kinds of prayer: devotional prayer, intercessory prayer, prayers of petition.

Years ago our Pastor, Larry Lea, taught us to pray using the Lord’s Prayer as a model, an outline. I want to share this with you because praying in this way will help you to increase your communion, your relationship with God.

Remember that you are praying to cultivate your connection with God, to share with Him your heart, and to hear His heart. There is no place for recitation or scripts here. Use the outline, but let it flow from your spirit. Listening is as important as speaking.

The scriptures are in bold type. You may have them committed to memory but pray them out loud, speaking to God.
Then, use the italics as suggestions, “ice breakers”. Follow your heart and spirit, using your own words.
Remember that you are after communication and connection. Listening is as important or more important than speaking.
If you pray out loud, it will be easier to discern your voice from His.
Find a quiet place, preferably at the beginning of your day and just as Jesus said, Pray this way:

Mat 6:9 .. Our Father, who is in Heaven, Hallowed by Your name.

Oh God, oh Father, You are the Most Holy (exalted, worthy of complete devotion) One.
God you are omniscient (complete awareness, knowledge).
You are omnipotent (almighty).
You God are omnipresent (present everywhere at one time).
I praise you and worship you God, Almighty God.

Mat 6:10 Your Kingdon come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.

God, today I say not my will, but Your will be done: for myself, my family, and in all facets of my life. I pray for Your will to be done and Your Kingdom to come.
Please show me Your will for my life so that I can pray for it, and be in concert with You.
For my (work, school, community, state, nation, world) God I pray for Your will to be done.
For my enemies and adversaries Lord I bless those that curse me, and I pray for those who use me. Bless them Lord.
God open my eyes to see what You see. Illuminate my vision and my hearing so that I can embrace what You are doing in me, and around me.

Remember to be listening, not just speaking.

Mat 6:11 Give us this day our daily bread;

God I know that You are my provider. Help me to be content with Your provision today, and to trust You for all my needs.
Lord, please tell me what my real needs are. What are the things that I don’t know to ask for?
Have You made provision for me that I’m not seeing?
Am I asking for things that You, by Your wisdom and love, are not wanting for me?
Please change my mind, and teach me to be content in You.
If I’m going one way, and You have a different way for me God, please show me, close those wrong doors, speak to me, help me.

Mat 6:12 and forgive us our debt as we also forgive our debtors.

God please forgive me of my sins. I am so sorry for the things that I have done ________________________ that are not pleasing to You. I am so grateful that You are a God that forgives.
I choose today to forgive all those who have sinned against me. Including _____________________ who have slandered me, injured me, gossiped about me, or stolen from me, undermined me or ________________ …. I forgive them Lord.
If I come up short on this today Lord, please help me to walk in forgiveness continuously.

Mat 6:13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the Kingdom and the power, and the glory, forever.Amen.

Today God please order my steps according to Your will and Your ways. God please put Your words in my mouth. Help me to see what You see, in people, in circumstances, in others.
You God, from whom no secrets are hidden, please deliver me from temptation and line up my thinking with Your thoughts.
Line up my feelings with You and what You are are doing.
Please put Your shield of protection around me/us and keep our enemies at bay.
You can do this because You are Almighty God, Creator and Ruler of the universe.
It is to You that all glory goes God. Help me to magnify Your Holy Name.
Thank you God that you are Almightly God. Amen

Remember, God already knows what you think. If you engage Him, and you listen to Him, you can know what He thinks, what He sees. He will speak to you and you will be changed.

If you are changed, if you are transformed by God, others around you will be as well.

(All scriptures are from the New Living Translation, and no, I do not know how to create a footnote or end note in Wordpress.)

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Communion with God, Prayer, Spiritual living, Uncategorized

January 18, 2010

Quest for Communion

Tags: communion, God, Prayer, spiritual, Spiritual living

Spiritual living is life with God at the center. We are born self-centered. As we grow and mature in spiritual wholeness, we move from self-centered to God centered. A God centered life is lived in communion with Him.

Communion with God is our objective, but moving from an intellectual understanding of the objective into a dynamic, flourishing relationship can cause even the most intent of us to flounder. The answer though may be simple.

Many of us learned to pray by reciting words, most often in the form of requests, to God. We didn’t learn to listen, and our Western minds calculated the substance of our prayer life by the measure of answered prayer. While we know this isn’t really the measure of our prayers, and we also know that often answers to prayer come in forms we have not been looking for, our framework for understanding and evaluating drives us back to this conclusion. Tangible and expected answer to prayer = connection to God. Waiting for answers = a lot of discouragement mixed with questions like:

Does God hear me? Apparently not.

Does God care? Apparently not.

Do I matter? Possibly not.

And so on. (You don’t have to admit any of this.) Things that we have an intellectual understanding are not true, can still feel true.

The truth is that prayer is not substantially about a “grocery” type list that we take to God and hope he will fill. Prayer is really about communion, communing with God.

The problem is that since we cannot always see and touch and feel God in our natural state, it isn’t very easy to “chat”. Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation with someone who didn’t respond to you? It throws you off your rhythm, doesn’t it? God of course does respond to us, but we need to learn to listen. We need to find our rhythm, so to speak, for communion with God.

In truth there are several kinds of rhythms, several kinds of conversations you might say, that we have with God. There is the liturgical rhythm, there is the “grocery” list rhythm for things like a new job, more revenue, health and healing, and then there is the dramatic, “oh God, oh God” (aren’t you paying any attention) rhythm for those surprises and emergencies that cross our paths from time to time.

My experience and my preferred rhythm, is to begin my day with God. Some people like coffee in the morning, some people need to get their newspaper out of the way (maybe just news?). Whatever you do to get your day started, I would like to challenge you to make spending time with God your first daily priority. Let me assure that this is not for God’s benefit, but for yours.

If you will enter into communion at the start of your day, I am very confident that you will find it an amazing and fruitful experience. Your mind will be set on the things of God, you will be in a place of communion and you may find that your entire day goes better, because you embarked upon it with Him, instead of trying to summon Him in a moment of need or desperation later on. You see, if you enter in communion with Him in the morning you will be highly unlikely to then say something like, “Nice spending time with God but I need to get to work.” Or some such thing. Get up in the morning, put your hand in His, and stay there. You don’t have to stay in that chair or room. You go shopping with friends, go to lunch with other people, why not go with God?

Have you ever spent time with someone who was expert in some area, only to realize afterwards that you have more understanding or insight into that area yourself now? The same thing happens when we spend time with God. Our mind is set on spiritual things, and as we go about our day we are much more attuned to the spiritual overlay of our natural world.

Make no mistake. The spiritual realm is senior to the natural realm. Nothing occurs in the natural but what is a result of something in the spiritual realm. By seeing the spiritual and the natural we see better what is happening, what is going to happen, and hopefully we will see it as God wants us to see it.

When I married Greg I didn’t have much of an opinion about football one way or the other. Greg on the other hand played football in high school and then at the Air Force Academy. He liked football, and without any real conscious decision, I began to like football too.

The same thing happens with God. If you hang out with God, you will pick up His interests. You will start to see things that you would have missed before, and things that were not important to you in the past, will take on meaning. You will become more like Him. That is communion, and that is the real reason that we should pray.

(To be continued..)