Friday, August 23, 2013

A Private Conversation with Your Father

My Utmost For His Highest
 
‘Prayer is an effort of the will. After we have entered our secret place and shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. We cannot seem to get our minds into good working order, and the first thing we have to fight is wandering thoughts. The great battle in private prayer is overcoming this problem of our idle and wandering thinking. We have to learn to discipline our minds and concentrate on willful, deliberate prayer.’ CHAMBERS
 
Two of the most important disciplines of our faith … reading the Bible and praying … Our vital link to our Father who is in heaven. On the one hand He speaks to us … and on the other we speak to Him.  Chambers is saying when we talk to God, the conversation must be focused.  Have you ever been talking to more than one person at a time?  It is like that when our thoughts wander during prayer … the things that come to our mind are not things that we want to talk to God about, but about things that we must tend to. Matthew 22 says that we are to love God with every fiber of our being … but what does it say about our devotion when we cannot have an uninterrupted conversation with Him?
 
We are teaching a Bible study and we ask that everyone turn their cell phones off during the study.  One person puts their phone on vibrate and then responds to the phone during the study.  If I were to ask what the emergency was .. I am certain I would be told there was no emergency … Have you ever seen someone reading a book in the middle of a crowd of people with noise all around them? How do they do that?  They focus.  And so it is with us.  If we say we can’t help but be distracted, we are really saying we choose to be distracted … Do you really think that it is impossible to do what God asks you to do when He has given you His Spirit to help you?
 
Bondye Beni Ou (God Bless You)

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