JAN 25th 2006 • 1 Comments
More and more recently I've been feeling God's pull on me to draw nearer to Him and spend more time with Him. Daily devotions are the best way I think to actually get to know God better. I have to spend time with Him if I want to know what His direction is for my life. But the discipline of daily devotions is hard! In the matter of praying, I have a prayer list that I try to pray through every day. Just general requests for my friends and for myself and my family. I also try to follow a little acronym that Laura and Aaron gave the youth group a few years ago: A.C.T.S. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. I think that one of the things I've been learning is that you can't just put your prayers into a formula too much. I don't want to just pray the same thing every day. The adoration part was always hard to do. How can I adore God and tell Him how much I love Him if my personal relationship with Him is un-developed? The only way that I found I can truly grow close to Christ is if I learn to pray with the right motivations. What am I seeking? Am I seeking to glorify God or myself? Am I praying for selfish reasons or for God glorifying reasons? In what I ask for in my prayers, is it going to serve to draw me nearer to Christ or to the things of this world? James 4:3 says, 'You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions." I can't remember where I heard this recently, but someone said that when you pray for the wrong reasons, it's like a wife asking her husband if she can go be with another man so she can commit adultery with him! God is a jealous God and isn't going to grant a prayer that only serves to grow my dependance on the world. He wants me to pray that I would grow closer to Him! That my dependance would be more on Him than on material things. So my prayer life is dead unless I seek to glorify Him with what I pray for.
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