Post-election Prayer

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As I woke up the morning after the election, admittedly feeling despondent about the results, my Bible opened up to Psalm 133, and these were the words that greeted me:

 How good and pleasant it is

when brothers live together in unity!

It is like precious oil poured on the head,

running down on the beard, 

running down on Aaron’s beard, down upon the collar of his robes.

It is as if the dew of Hermon

were falling on  Mount Zion.

For there the LORD bestows his blessing,

even life forevermore. NIV

One thing we are not right now in America, is unified. With just slightly more than half of our country voting one way, and the rest another, we are a fractious, quarreling, divisive group, who have re-elected a President who must somehow put all of us Humpty-Dumpty people back together again.

Whether you are happy or sad about the election results, a few thoughts stand out to me in the midst of it all.

  1.  God is not calling us to capitulate on our values and beliefs. He is calling us to pray. I am even more convinced of the need for prayer in America. We can follow Nehemiah’s example of prayer in Nehemiah 1:1-9 as he confessed and prayed for forgiveness for Israel before he began his task of rebuilding the wall. We have many problems facing us and much rebuilding that needs to be done on our country’s “walls.” We are facing trillions of dollars in debt, a “fiscal cliff” in January, illegal immigration, new health care, attacks on our embassies, continuing job losses, and social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, just to name a few things.  God reminds us in 2 Chronicles 7:14 that if we humble ourselves and pray and seek Him that He will hear us and heal our land. Let’s pray for God’s intervention in these areas.
  2.  We can pray that our witness for Christ will shine brightly during these times. We need to each be growing our relationship with our Savior, being conformed to His likeness, and then praying for the boldness and the leading of the Holy Spirit to reach out to others as God opens up the opportunities. God’s plan does not necessarily include a comfy, safe life for each of us. We need to be courageous in our faith–as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves.
  3. Pray specifically for President Obama and Congress. As we intercede for godly wisdom, courage, bi-partisanship, biblical morals, honesty, protection, and God’s blessing on our nation, God can move to bring down the barriers that divide us. He is powerful and can do immeasurably more than we ask or think (Ephesians 3:20).
  4. Pray that God will raise up godly leaders for our nation. It’s not too early to begin praying for 2016!

Getting Practical

Let’s join together in a powerful prayer effort for our country. I’ve put together a few suggestions on ways to incorporate this.

Monthly themes

We can take a theme and pray it for an entire month.

  • January–Debt, budget,
  • February–Bi-partisanship
  • March–Health care
  • April–Jobs
  • May–Biblical morals, revival, same-sex marriage
  • June–Foreign policy
  • July–Protection of life and the unborn
  • August–Immigration
  • September–Schools and teachers
  • October–Religious freedom
  • November–Godly leaders
  • December–Military

 

Weekly Themes

If you prefer to pray for all of these every week, you could split them up the following way:

  • Monday–Pray for debt, budget, and bi-partisanship
  • Tuesday–Pray for health care and jobs
  • Wednesday–Pray for biblical morals, revival, salvation, same-sex marriage and foreign policy
  • Thursday–Pray for protection of life and the unborn and immigration
  • Friday–Pray for schools and teachers and religious freedom
  • Saturday–Pray for godly leaders and our military
  • Sunday–Pray for President Obama

What are your feelings about praying for our nation? Please share any ways that you like to pray for America in the comments section.

Pray on!

Image courtesy of [Stuart Miles] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Morning Prayer

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I was reading through a book on prayer, and I came across this ancient prayer, which I later found out is an excerpt from a prayer called St. Patrick’s Breastplate. I love the cadence and beauty of the spoken words of this prayer.

 St. Patrick’s Breastplate

Christ as a light

Illumine and guide me.

Christ as a shield O’ershadow me.

Christ under me;

Christ over me;

Christ beside me

On my left and my right.

This day be within and without me.

Lowly and meek yet All-powerful.

Be in the heart of each to whom I speak;

In the mouth of each who speaks unto me.

This day be within and without me,

Lowly and meek yet All-powerful.

Christ as a light;

Christ as a shield;

Christ beside me

On my left and my right.

Amen.

This is such a beautiful, simple prayer to start off your morning prayer time, yet so comprehensive. The prayer begins by reminding us that Jesus is our light for the journey of life that we are on (John 1:4-5), and that each morning we can pray for Him to guide us through our day, to help us stay on His path and not wander off of it.

The next verse reminds us that Christ is our shield, our protection, as Psalm 3:3 tells us. And we need only read through Ephesians 6:10-20 to see the importance of having our shield of faith securely in place for the day. It is only with this shield that we can quench all the fiery darts of our enemy.

The next four verses are so lovely. They remind us that Christ has us completely enveloped with His love and presence. This evokes Psalm 139: 7-12 for me. How completely reassuring to realize that Christ has us hemmed in! Sometimes the words hemmed in have a bad connotation, but not in this instance. We can be assured that Jesus is with us everywhere, always. He’ll be with us in that presentation for work, at home with the children, as we travel, when we have that difficult conversation.

We are then reminded to pray for ourselves and those we meet throughout the day as James 5:16 says, to remember that life is not just “all about us.” Christ wants us to shift our focus onto the people in our circle of influence.

Finally, this prayer points us to Jesus’ character and attributes. Though he was born to a lowly family, He is the All-powerful One as seen in Ephesians 3:20, which means that nothing we face is beyond Jesus. He can handle it all and, consequently, so can we. Actually, His word says we can do above all that we think possible with Him by our sides.

I love praying some of the ancient prayers of the faith. They encourage me in my walk and then inspire me to tell God the thoughts and prayers of my own heart.

I hope they do for you too.

Do you have a favorite prayer? Share it below if you’d like.

Pray on!

 

What Does Sacred Reading Look Like?

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In my last post, we explored the spiritual discipline of sacred reading. Today I’d like to show you an example of what this looks like from my journal entries. I’m certainly not an expert on this, but sometimes it helps to see what a discipline looks like for someone else when you’re trying to learn it yourself. On this particular day, I read from Colossians 4:5-8. I was following along with my church as we were doing a study on the book of Colossians. So, using the four steps of sacred reading 1) Read, 2) Reflect, 3) Respond and 4) Rest, this is what my entry looked like that for that day.

1) Read. The part of scripture that jumped out to me was “Walk in wisdom toward those who are outside, redeeming the time,” and “Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt that you may know how to answer each one.”

2) Reflect. The answer to the question, Where do I see myself in this passage? was that I felt like God was talking about the importance of time and making the most of the opportunities He gives us. Also, the thought that God wants us to spend some time evaluating our speech–about the words that come out of our mouths on a daily basis–seemed to jump out to me too.

3) Respond. In this third step of sacred reading, I had to pray about how God wanted me to personally respond to the scripture. In this case, I felt like God was telling me to get braver about sharing my faith in those opportunities that He gives me–not to force it, but to watch for the opportunities the Holy Spirit opens up and then be obedient and follow through. I can be shy to share this part of my life with strangers, because of how I might appear. God was convicting me to get past the obsession of worrying that others might think of me as weird if I talked to them about Jesus.

Next, I also felt like God was showing me to pray about my words to others, especially to my husband, Mark. I was being patient with other people, but not so much with him, the most important person in my life. God was telling me to build him up with my words, not tear him down.

4) Rest. During this time, I just sat quietly and reflected on what I had learned. I also wrote a short synopsis on a sticky note so that I didn’t forget that day’s lesson. Then I stuck it right in front of me while I was working in my office. Finally, I  thanked God for His wisdom and prayed for help to do make the changes that I needed to make.

I’ve found the practice of sacred reading to be so valuable in teaching me and continuing to mold me into the person Christ wants me to be.

I hope you do too!

Pray on!

Image: nuchylee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net