It is the person of prayer who shakes the world. And it is when our knees hit the ground in prayer that the shaking begins.
Might we remember what God has saved us from in the past so that we might be saved from our fear of the future.
It’s never a fool’s errand to have goals bigger than what we are. Rather, the fool’s errand is believing that there’s no such thing as a God who’s bigger than what our goals are.
the most honorable and biggest reward that you could ever receive in life will be when you meet Jesus and His words: Well done, good and faithful servant
Impossible is a fact when it comes to people, but when it comes to God it’s nothing but bad fiction.
We assume the impossible to be just that…impossible. But when it comes to God, it’s impossible that anything is impossible. Therefore, if we understand this reality and if we dare to act it out in our lives, could it be that the word impossible is just an excuse?
At what point will I look beyond the rank pessimism of my own attitude and step beyond the jaded opinions of a culture gone sour in order to see that the opportunity for good will always outweigh the schemes of evil?
The only explanation that I can come up with to explain the passion that I have to do what I cannot is the existence of a God who can.
At those moments when life caves in and all falls dark, the space that I’ve created between myself and God feels impossibly vast. Yet, if I seek Him I will turn and suddenly find that the vastness I thought to be there was nothing more than the ‘assumption’ of His absence.
Faith is believing in something that I am not. And since the vast majority of this existence is made up of what I am not, I’m left wondering why is faith so difficult.
If it were believable, we wouldn’t have to stretch ourselves to believe it. Therefore, because God refuses to leave us trapped in the smallness of ourselves, He says things that are unbelievable so that we have no choice but to be stretched.
Maybe true beauty is when something quite ‘simple’ exercises whatever bit of faith it holds, and in the exercising it suddenly discovers that the ‘simple thing’ that it always thought itself to be only served to hide the ‘great thing’ that it always was.
If I can’t find something worthwhile in my own reflection, how am I ever going to see anything worthwhile in the face of another? Maybe I can solve all of this by seeing the face of Jesus in everyone, starting with myself.
Beating the impossible never starts when we reach for the stars. Rather, it starts when we fall to our knees.
I am terrified by the horrors that lurk all around me. But it would do me good to remember that those same horrors are terrified by the God who resides within me.
It is in boldly unleashing our faith that we effectively leash our fears.
If I understand death as a temporary loss that is irrevocably swallowed up by the eternal existence within which it occurs, I suddenly realize that it is the death of something that enriches the life of everything.
Prayer is where I trade the rhetoric of men the for the promises of God. It is where I petition perfection instead of count on those who someone survived an election. It is to accept the incomprehensible invitation of God to have this weak voice of mine thunder down the halls of heaven and roll up to the throne of the God of all eternity so that as small as I am, I might have an audience with this “King of kings.” It is where my fatigue becomes a stage upon which God can unveil His strength in stunning fashion, and where my fear is obliterated by His courage. Prayer is where I rise above this tangled world and find myself enveloped by a world that I visit today, but will live in tomorrow. Prayer is utterly indispensable to this cringing existence, for unless I rise above it I will be consumed by the darkness of it. Prayer is this and does this and will always be this.
I don’t fight battles by penning words or crafting syntax designed to bring people to tears by liberating their hearts or calling out their souls. Nor do I fight them by sitting with untold thousands and granting them counsel in the darkness of their darkest hours. No. Rather, I fight them prone on my knees in morning’s darkness before the sun has roused a wounded world awake to feel its pain yet again. I fight them throughout the day as I “pray without ceasing” because troubles befall us without ceasing. I fight them by praying for the impossible in lives devastated beyond redemption, for rogue nations that spread destruction as though destroying life was the answer to life, for the weak who stand teetering precariously on some emotional or relational or financial abyss, and for an impossible number of situations that everyone else has deemed as impossible. I fight in prayer. And despite the massive weaponry available to mankind, I am utterly convinced that a single man on his knees in humble petition before God exceeds the armament of all the world’s nations combined. This is what I believe. And therefore, this is how I fight.
How do I tell you what prayer is? It is everything that I need every time I kneel in the practice of it. It shakes the infinite alive and sets its armies afoot in defense of me. It will never run aground or find itself drowning in the waters of the adversity that I bring to it. Nothing it faces is insurmountable, for to think that such an adversary exists is to run a fool’s errand. It will shield me in its advance, it will beckon me to anticipate the miracles that it is about to wield, and in the midst of it all it calms me as it whispers, “Be still and know that I am God.” And because of these reasons and a million more, I find prayer the single greatest place that I could ever imagine being.
