A shepherd boy made king wrote from his experience about his God. David penned these words as he contemplated the felt presence of his God:
Were can I go from Thy Spirit? Or where can I go from Thy presence?
If I ascend to heaven, Thou art there, if I make my bed in the depths, behold Thou are there. If I take the wings of dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there Thy hand will lead me and Thy (strong) right hand will lay hold of me. If I say "surely the darkness will overwhelm me and the light around me will be night",
Even the darkness is not dark to Thee, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to Thee. (Psalm 139:7-12)
The gift that we call prayer is much more simple than we make it most of the time.
Oftentimes, we tend to handle prayer like a ritual or like a prescription. The gift that we have been given is more like a conversation. We are not making a heavenly phone call to a God in some far off place. We are merely discussing the ups and downs, the ins and outs of our lives with the ever-present God.
Even more intimate than this is the plentiful knowledge of this ever-present God. David states, "O Lord, Thou has searched me and know me. Thou dost know when I sit down and when I rise up; Thou dost understand my thought from afar. Thou dost scrutinize my path and my lying down and art intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, behold, O Lord, Thou dost knowest it all". (v. 1-5)
We easily ascent to the understanding that God knows everything but we handle the details of our lives as if we were independent.
The illusion of independence is same spirit we discover in the garden of Eden when Adam chose his desires over God’s. We fool ourselves into thinking that what we do won’t matter.
Contrast your view of your life and your relationship with your Creator with the view that the shepherd boy had:
"Thou hast enclosed me behind and before, and laid Thy hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is too high, I cannot attain to it." (v.6)
So now, the only question that remains is which life will we choose: the existence of the fool or the life with God’s presence?
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1 comment:
What a timely message about prayer.
I am reminded of the Lord Jesus' warning to not pray like the heathen do with their endless repetitions, thinking that they might cajole an answer out of their deity through sheer redundancy. I would be offended and insulted if one of my children approached me in such an insulting way. How much more our heavenly Father? The Lord Jesus prayed with loud cries and groaning at times, and at the apostle Paul tells us in Romans Chapter 8 that the Spirit prays on our behalf in ways that sometimes are even beyond our understanding. God wants us and our heartfelt and sincere communication to him not some kind of lifeless and wrote prayer that is not from our inner man.
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