December 26, 2013
With Prayer
The Apostles questioned why they were unable to
eradicate a demon from a possessed man and Jesus told them that this particular
demon could only be driven out by prayer.
Certainly when we have a loved one in the throes of addiction we
coalesce around them in prayer. However, I’m wondering if any of us ever bother
to ask the person who is imprisoned, ‘Are you
praying to the Lord, and if so, what exactly are you praying for?’ It may well
be that the person we see being held captive doesn’t even want freed from his
situation. For all we know his prayer may be simply that his family get off his
back. Jesus said, “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer,
believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And
when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so
that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.” (Mk 11:24-25 NIV)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----I was so perplexed by Jesus’ formula for success. I was even more perplexed by all the reasons offered for why it so rarely works. If it were such a great formula for success, then my life would be vastly different now, being it then would have been changed by all the things I asked in prayer and would have received. So would millions of other lives.
-----I remember a debate I tangled into with a friend. He maintained my pickup was any color I believed it was. I maintained it was faded brown regardless of what I thought. The fact that Maaco is yet in business verifies that I was right - we can‘t change the color of our cars by belief alone. The fact that Jesus sits at the right hand of our Father in heaven verifies that He was right - ask anything believing and you will have it. Yet Maaco exists, too. What gives?
-----I agree with your assessment of the addict and everyone’s prayers. Reality offers perpetual food for thought. But we don’t prepare enough mental meals of it. We fatten upon imagination. Do you know how disparate one person’s imagination is from another’s? Yet reality remains what it is for everyone to find alike, while everyone imagines what they know is real. But to find it, they must accept it whether they’ve imagined it or liked it or not. The failure of doing so frenzies the imagination and desires, which frenzy becomes an addiction of its own.
-----God is an other. I think we don’t ponder that enough. And He has an imagination. And desires. But one of the vast differences between us and Him is that He accepts reality for what it is. Yes, He created reality. But the evil of Satan expressed through his “angelic” followers and mankind and all the violence of the beasts has made reality not what God made it. Yet, He accepts it and deals with it realistically and imagines about it and desires for it rightly. In short, His desires for it are that it be shed of all its twists unto utter straightness. And He can desire for it the good He imagines, because He can imagine what He meant by its creation. We can’t without a whole lot of “being like Him” going on in us.
-----I’ve come to believe that our prayers are highly driven by our desires and shaped by our imaginations. Or at least, I surely believe they should be. “Desire” gets badly badmouthed, especially by ol’ Buddha and his buddies. But it is a very big part of the human soul created by God. It has a place defined by Him as well. We must live in a twisted reality and deal with it appropriately. Yet it is desire shaped by the Word of God which springs our imaginations forth as straightening forces upon evils twisting. Yet, those forces can not be applied without engaging reality, twisted as it is. And so, the pattern for prayer Jesus taught was expressing our desire for His kingdom’s coming and His will being done as the contextual matrix into which all our other requests mix. They will mix well there and set in firm answers the more the desires of our hearts bridge from what reality is over to what our Father wills it to be. Knowing Christ as that bridge and the basic desires of our hearts, our imaginations will be readying to meet reality.
-----To know what reality is, ask the addict, just like you’ve said. He’s a part of it, being what he is. To know what God desires of it, ponder everything by His Word. Then desire what you begin to know, and ask for that. And success will become the more as you learn the more.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment