Prayers at work!

I love looking through this past year and seeing God’s mighty hand work in our lives! We serve an awesome God, don’t we!?

Over this past week I’ve been seeing how He works and the prayers He answers! There have been thousands of prayers lifted up for my dad and I can’t be more grateful for all the prayer warriors we have out there! God is to be praised!

This week has made me think about my dad and how special he is to many people! Pop’s strong love for the Lord always shows.  He has a big heart for the lost and homeless on skid Row.  He has dedicated himself to serving God by helping the lost and needy in downtown LA.  I admire him and my Mom for their faithfulness to God and each other.  When Brian and I were engaged we gathered in my parent’s bedroom. Our family and a friend who was a pastor shared communion and we had a prayer time.  Pop presented us with a family Bible, a blanket with a marriage message on it, and a rock from a prayer altar built by his great grandfather in South Carolina.  Pop stuck the rock to a piece of a wood taken from the stump where he proposed to my mom many years before.  He also shared with us the importance of praying together in marriage.  This is something I don’t think I ever really thanked Pop for, but it has surely meant a lot to Brian and me.  To this day that piece of stump with the prayer rock stuck to it sits on our headboard as a reminder to us to come together and pray.  I don’t think we’ve missed a night praying together in all our 11 years of marriage (except for when Brian was gone for the Men’s retreat).  I can’t thank the Lord enough for Pop and the special things he has done and still does for us.  Now during this hard time in his life we are lifting him up in prayer and seeing God work to heal him!  We will continue to pray and see what God has in store for him!

Love all my church family and thank you for your prayers! God is great and greatly to be praised!

Not just words!

Each night Brian and I pray with our boys. Sometimes we pull out our prayer journal and write down the things about which we want to pray or we may look at the pictures of people we want to include in our prayers. Other times we’ll just gather together and pray about our concerns of the moment. Each of the boys pray, then Brian and I pray. We have been doing a family prayer time since Gregory was a baby. We feel it is very important to come before the Lord as a family and pray.

The other night, as I snuggled the boys down into bed, Gregory prayed “Lord, please help us when we pray, that we don’t just speak words, but that we mean what we are praying and when we do our Bible study, that we will not just read it, but that we will understand it”. I think my 7 ½ year old is teaching us something. We don’t want to just come before the throne of God and ramble off words just to get them off my “to do” list. We want to have Faith and trust God is going to answer our prayers. We also want to pray with purpose and meaning! Same with our quiet time with God, that we will desire to understand. Let us all pray for understanding and growth in our daily walk! I think having a daily prayer time becomes easier once we have established the habit of having a daily time with God. People can get into a “rut,” but we don’t want that in our lives. Each time we come before the Lord or dig into His Word, we want to keep it exciting: a journey of spiritual growth! It is important to have DAILY time in prayer and study. But it's important that we don't make that time just "going through the motions or just spouting out words". We need to make each day meaningful and special otherwise it's wasted time.

Thanks Gregory for helping me think on this!

Have you Prayed about it

How many times do we jump in to try to figure things out or manipulate our circumstances? We often make a mess when we should be waiting for God to step in and do His thing.

Through our suffering and adversity, or through a person who provokes us, we can come to know God in a way that we might not otherwise have ever come to know Him.

God wants to use our life experiences to change our agenda, to change our perspective, to change us, because He has a purpose for us.

Read or listen to the whole thing here
Be sure to be on Friday, jan 11th
By Nancy Leigh Demoss