Celestial Communication

It has always amazed me how much we as human beings can take things for granted.  I remember being at my great-grandfather’s funeral nine years ago and saying that I didn’t realize how much I loved him until he was gone.  Unfortunately, I usually have to learn this lesson the hard way.  It isn’t until something’s been taken away from me that I often realize how much I underutilized it and underappreciated it.  Thankfully, I have come to one of those realizations ahead of time tonight.

At services tonight, we did something a little bit different.  We had a prayer service.  Each person praying was assigned a different topic.  The topics included praise and thanksgiving, the sick, struggles of all kinds, young Christians, the elderly, and edification.  The end result for me was very emotional.  As we as a congregation were praying to God and giving Him praise and thanking Him for all that He has done, it was nearly overwhelming.  The more I think about God’s involvement and the evidences of His presence in my life, the more I realize that I haven’t really responded with the kind of dedication as should be natural.  I’ve asked God for a lot of things in my life.  He’s given me some of those things.  I haven’t truly been grateful all of the time.  I may not have scorned His blessings, but I also haven’t recognized that I’m nobody in comparison to God.  Anything and everything that I do in the kingdom that has any positive result I only have because God has empowered me to be able to do it.  God doesn’t need me. I do need God; and for some reason, I haven’t been talking to Him that much.

Prayer has got to be one of the most underutilized privileges in the history of mankind.  Prayers have brought down kingdoms, ended droughts, saved the lives of millions, granted wisdom, given children to the barren, rescued many from temptation, and rescued many in times of peril.  Yet for some reason, I still find myself having to push myself to pray many days.  Why?  Maybe because it is humbling. 

Prayer forces me to realize that I’m nobody.  It forces me to realize that everything that I’ve ever done that has done anybody a shred of good is insignificant in comparison to what God has done for me and for the entire human race.  But guess what?  That’s good for me.  Mankind was not made to focus on themselves and what they can get for themselves.  They were made to serve God and aspire to be as much like Him and emulate His character as much as we possibly can.  The encouraging thing is that with God as our Father and our encourager, we could get a lot closer if we would just let God work with us.

The result from the prayer service tonight is very emotionally based. That might mean that it won’t stick, but I hope that isn’t true.  I’m using this to motivate me to be more dedicated to God and building a closer relationship with Him this week than I was last week; to be more dedicated tomorrow than I have been today.  I hope you will make the same your goal.

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next." - C.S. Lewis