Skip to main content

Making Time to be with Jesus, by Pastor Charlie Handren


Making Time to be with Jesus
By Pastor Charlie
In John 15:7-8, Jesus makes a stunning promise:
“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples” (emphasis mine).
The call to abide in Christ, to allow his words to abide in us, and to ask for whatever we wish assumes something very basic but extremely important: we must actually spend time with Christ. We must actually speak with him. We must actually ask. Prayer is a vital part of a relationship, and relationships require time and speech.
Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) received a call to serve as a missionary to China early in his life. Although he didn’t know it, his parents had devoted him to the Lord for this very task but then wisely allowed the Lord to work in his life and clarify the call without their direct intervention. Almost as soon as he received his call from the Lord, Hudson knew that he had to be a man of prayer in order to bear fruit. But like all of us, he struggled with the practical, daily aspects of it.
Hudson Taylor was a normal boy living a busy life. Whether as a clerk in a bank or assistant in his father’s store, he had many temptations, and when a lively cousin came to be his roommate, it was not easy to keep first things first and make time for prayer. He knew, though, that without prayer there could only be failure and unrest. Taylor had to learn that there is no substitute for real spiritual blessing (Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, Littleton, CO: OMF Books, page 13).
It’s a mistake to think that the heroes of our faith did not struggle with prayer, for every one of them did. What separates them from most of us is that they simply would not give up until they learned what it means to pray without ceasing. They read the Bible, listened to the words of Jesus, fought, failed, and pressed on in grace day by day.
In the coming months, we will hear many stories of faith and answered prayer from some of the leading lights of the last two centuries. The most important lesson we will learn from them is this: to be a house of prayer requires personal and corporate intentionality, discipline, and community.
Prayer Focus: Pray that Jesus will help us see the importance of time and speech in our lives of prayer. Pray that he will give us a spirit to fight this good fight until we know what it means to pray without ceasing.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

To Have My Soul Happy in the Lord, by George Muller

To Have My Soul Happy in the Lord By George Muller “It has pleased the Lord to teach me a truth, the benefit of which I have not lost for more than fourteen years. The point is this: I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord, or how I might glorify the Lord, but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. “I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God—not prayer, but the Word of God. And here again, not the simple reading of the Word of God so that it only passes through my mind just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what I read, pondering over it, and applying it to my heart. To meditate on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed. And that thus,...

Reflective Glory: How the Moon Displays the Mercy of God

Our sun is a fitting metaphor for the glory of God. In the context of our solar system, it is massive, bright, beautiful, powerful, self-sufficient, heat-producing, life-giving, and dangerous. It is, by far, the dominant feature of our solar system and without it the system would fling apart and all living things therein would die.  On the other hand, our moon is a fitting metaphor for human beings, especially for those who believe in Jesus Christ. First, compared to the sun, the moon is tiny and dim. The sun is 400 times larger than the moon, its mass is 27 million times greater than the mass of the moon, and from our perspective its light shines 450,000 times brighter than that of the moon. The sun is so much greater than the moon that it’s difficult to quantify and express the difference. Likewise, the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is so much great than each and all of us that it’s impossible to quantify or express the difference. Indeed, the Lord is very great and greatly...

When Children Say "I'm Bored" By Julie Lowe

This Article is written by Julie Lowe and was originally posted on the CCEF blog.  I highlighted the areas of particular interest. I had already prepared a blogpost on dealing with boredom from a Christian worldview and then came across this. There is much overlap between the two, perhaps this one is more concise while my work attempts to explain the connection between the ability to think and the ability to be happy. You can visit the original blogpost in the link provided below.  https://www.ccef.org/resources/blog/children-say-im-bored   We have a common crisis in our home; it is the calamity of boredom. Our children might even consider it a catastrophe. “I’m bored” is repeated so often it would not be an overstatement to say that these words echo continuously throughout our home especially during any break from school. These are children with limited media time but still children with a Wii and Xbox system, a pool outside our door, multiple games, toy...