Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.-Ecclesiastes 5:1

Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations–I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. -Isaiah 1:13-14

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.-Hebrews 11:6

“…For truly I tell you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”-Matthew 17:20

I seek Immortality

My God, My God
Why have you withdrawn from me?
My heart echoes with your absence
And my mind screams guilty pleas.
There is a chasm between us
And it seems I’ve let it grow;
By performing these rituals
That are nothing more than show.
I feign devoutness
Through the motions of my ruse.
Hoping I can fool you
With this approximation of the truth.
I fear I’ve lost the right
To ask for your forgiveness.
So I wallow in self-pity
Pretending to be sinless.
A life apart from you
Is being only half alive.
In fear of the enemy
Hoping only to survive.
I want to live in your grace Lord,
I want to worship at your feet.
You promised immortality, Lord,
It’s a promise I know you’ll keep.
So now, I will seek the path
That will lead me home to you.
Please allow my heart to open Lord,
Let my faith be born anew.
I want to take the first step now.
Lord, please help me to believe.
So, I can keep my promise, Lord
Of being willing to receive;
©Linda Troxell 11/21/2016

There have been times in my life when I was doing everything right, everything God calls us to do and still I was getting none of the results He promises. I was getting no peace, no joy, and no patience. I did not feel close to God, I did not feel like I was protected or that my footsteps were being guided, I did not feel I was filled with the Holy Spirit. During these times I always wondered why God had disappeared from my life; why He had withdrawn from me. After all, I was going to church every week, I was praying, I was reading the Bible; so why did I feel so alone? Why had God forsaken me?  But in truth, I was asking the wrong question. The real question was not why had God withdrawn from me, but why had I withdrawn from God.

What I learned later in my life, when I really became serious about being a Christian, is that, even though I was doing the right things, I was doing them for the wrong reasons. God is not interested in rituals we perform for show. He is not interested in watching us go through the motions to fulfill some religious doctrine. God does not care about religion, God cares about His relationship with his children, you and me. You see, at those times in my life when I was doing all of the right things but getting none of the desired results, I was not really seeking a relationship with God, I was seeking to be a “Good Christian.” But the Bible tells us Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.-Ecclesiastes 5:1.

We do not receive the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, by performing mindless rituals. We do not please God by reading the Bible for the sake of fulfilling an obligation. We please God and we receive the fruits of the Spirit when we seek a relationship with God. We please God when we show him we have faith when we invite Him into our lives, and when we show Him we believe that He loves us so much that He sacrificed His son so that we might have eternal life with Him in heaven. God is not impressed with flowery prayers that are empty of emotion. Prayers that sound heartfelt but, in reality, are faithless, are meaningless to God. Did He not tell us just that? “Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations–I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. -Isaiah 1:13-14 Right there, in plain words, He told us He hates all of the meaningless offerings, which in modern times means the elaborate rituals and pageantry which are meant for show and not to actually worship or glorify Him.

God wants us to glorify Him by obeying His two greatest commandments to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. He wants us to worship Him through prayers that establish and nurture a relationship with Him. God knows what we need before we ask. In fact, God knows just what we are going to pray for before we pray. So, if He already knows what we need and He already knows what we are going to pray, why pray at all? We still pray because the larger purpose of prayer, perhaps the most important purpose, is to build a relationship with God. Heartfelt prayer tells God that we want to have a relationship with Him and it shows Him that we have faith in Him; because let’s face it, we must have some amount of faith or there would be no reason to pray at all.

As important as prayer is, most people have a tendency to be passive in their prayer. Effective prayer, a prayer that is meaningful and life-changing is not passive. So often we treat God as a fairy God Mother who grants wishes. We pray for what we want or need and then we sit back and wait for God to deliver. Can God simply deliver the results we want? Of course, He can, He’s God. But remember that old adage: God helps those who help themselves? It isn’t just a clever saying to put on a bumper sticker or to embroider on a pillow. What it means is that prayer is most effective when we take action to participate in its outcome. And while it’s true that God has unlimited ways in which He can answer prayer, He most often answers them through people. So, once we have shown God our faith through prayer, once we have shown Him we believe He can and will answer our prayer, we need to participate in the outcome by taking action. 

 For example, if we are asking God for healing, we need to have faith that God can and will heal us. Then we need to say a faith-filled prayer telling Him we believe He will do what we have asked of Him. And then we need to see a doctor. Because the easiest way for God to deliver a healing is by using a doctor. So, in order to make our prayer more effective, we need to research our condition, find the best doctor to treat it, see that doctor and follow his or her advice. God can most easily work through that doctor to heal us. There are other actions we can take to help make our prayers more effective. We can read God’s word, there is power in reading the word of God. We can hear His word, there is power in hearing God’s word and we can speak His word, there is power in speaking God’s word aloud. And, of course, any action that keeps the enemy out of our head and out of our life is helpful to the outcome of our prayer.

There is no question about the importance of faith in our relationship to God, in fact, the Bible says that without faith we cannot please God.  And without faith it is impossible to please God because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.-Hebrews 11:6 To pray in faith is to pray believing that God can and that God will. Only then are we praying in a manner consistent with His glory, and with His goodness.  But, make no mistake, that doesn’t mean that we must have great and unquestioning faith in order to pray an effective prayer. For, the Bible also tells us that faith as small as a mustard seed is powerful. “…For truly I tell you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”-Matthew 17:20

I have heard people say that they have faith that God exists and that He answers prayers, but they cannot have faith that God can or will answer their prayers. Well if we don’t have faith that God will answer our prayer there are only two possible reasons for this lack of faith.  Either we don’t think God can do the particular thing we are asking for, or we don’t think that He will do it. If we don’t believe He can do what we ask of Him, we are questioning His sovereignty and His power. If we believe He won’t do what we ask we are questioning His goodness. To question either one of those things about God is to question God’s very existence.  Absolute sovereignty and absolute goodness are at the very foundation of who God is. If we have no faith that He is sovereign and no faith that He is good, we have no faith that he is God.

Sometimes people tell me that they won’t pray for something because they can think of no way in which God could possibly give them what they are asking for. That’s just another way of questioning God’s power. When we limit God to our own imagination we are saying that we don’t truly believe God is greater than we are. So often we try to understand God’s infinite mind, including His infinite imagination, with our finite mind and imagination. And when we don’t believe that God can do something because we cannot think of a way it could happen, our faith is not in God it is in our own imagination. When Mary told Jesus, at the wedding, that the host was out of wine, she had a brief conversation with Jesus and then told the servants to do whatever He told them to do. The Bible says that this was Jesus’s first miracle. So Mary had never seen him perform a miracle before. But because she believed, that is, she had faith, that He was the son of God, she also believed He was omnipotent with the power to do anything.

If we want to pray in faith, and we want our prayers to be effective, we have to borrow a page from Mary’s playbook. We have to believe that God is omnipotent and there is nothing He cannot do for us. We need to believe that God is good and because He loves us, there is nothing He will not do for us. But we also have to be willing to participate in the outcome of our prayers. We have to be willing to add action to our prayers and not treat them as a wish made to a Genie in a bottle.

Points of Prayer and Pondering

1. 1. Are you now, or have you in the past, done the right things as a Christian but for the wrong reasons. Have you ever prayed, read the Bible or gone to church seeking to be a good Christian rather than seeking a relationship with God? Write about that experience and how you changed it.
2. Do you sometimes have difficulty believing that God, can or will answer your prayers? Did you realize this is actually a lack of faith in God? What would it take for you to feel confident in God’s ability to answer your prayers?
3. Hopefully, you realize now that empty prayer and reading the Bible as a duty is of no interest to God. So, if you have been going through the motions of prayer or reading the Bible only because you should, you know now that it has been wasted time. Knowing that, what would you rather be doing with that time?