Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.- Psalm 51:5

 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. –James 4:17

 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Romans 12:21

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. –John 1:9

 

Promised in Your Word

O God, my Lord, and savior,
Have I offended thee?
By walking through this life
As if it belongs to me.
When I know without your grace
I would have never been alive
Oh, I might have still taken breaths
But only to survive.
I have forgotten to be in awe of you.
I have neglected to kneel down.
I have treated you as ordinary
When I know you are renowned.
I hope you can forgive me, Lord,
One more time and once again.
And when you look into my heart
I hope you see more than my sin.
I hope you can see my love for you
My need and my delight.
I hope you remember all the times
I’ve walked by faith not sight.
You are my Holy Father
My refuge and safe place.
I want to hear I’ve pleased you
When we meet face to face.
So, my Lord, My God, my Savior
It is for you that I will live.
Now, bowing down I submit to you
As I humbly ask you to forgive.
Knowing full well your forgiveness
Won’t be based on what I deserve.
This I know with full confidence
Because it’s promised in your word.
Linda Troxell ©03/13/2020

 

Have you ever woken up one morning feeling out of sorts but unable to figure out why? Maybe you just felt grumpy but couldn’t identify a reason. Maybe you felt unusually sluggish not wanting to greet the world at all that day. Or maybe you felt some free-floating guilt and you didn’t know why.  You have probably had a day like this at some time.

I had one just this week. I woke up and immediately closed my eyes again. I did not want to get out of bed. This is not that unusual for me, I am not what you would call a morning person. However, most of the time I get up anyway and by the time I’ve let the dog out and poured a cup of coffee I’m ready to start my day.

But on that morning, I felt sluggish, and grumpy long after I drank my coffee. I thought about what I wanted to get accomplished and my only thought was nothing. I didn’t want to write, I didn’t want to read my email and I didn’t even want to open the curtains to let in the light. I was deep in one of “those” moods.

After about 30 minutes I thought about praying.  “Maybe,” I thought, “If I pray I will feel better.” Such a no brainer, right? But the more I thought about it the less I wanted to pray. So I started thinking back over my week to try to figure out what might have put me in this really ugly mood.

Well, it didn’t take too long for me to realize that I hadn’t spent very much time with God all week long. Oh, I had said some quick prayers throughout the days; that’s almost habit by now. Because I live alone I hold an ongoing conversation with God all day long, out loud. But as I thought back, I realized that I had not spent quality alone time with God.

My usual routine is to get up pour some coffee and then grab my God stuff, as I call it. It consists of my Bibles, I have to have multiple translations available, my phone where I keep my on the go notes and prayer list, a notebook, my journal, and some different color pens and highlighters.  I have to have all of this stuff spread out around me. Not necessarily because I will use it all, but because I like the way it feels. Yes, I admit that I’m a God nerd.

Then I begin my alone time with God. This is when God and I look closely at my thoughts, behaviors, and feelings to take stock of what is and isn’t working. It‘s when He deals with me and convicts me of my sin, especially the ongoing sin that I do not catch on my own. And it is when, once in a while, I hear from Him (No not audibly) about what He wants for me and from me.

I use this time to pray in depth for myself and everyone I love. I use it to look at my prayer list and pray for those who have asked me for prayer or those to whom I have offered prayer. During this time I also pray for the people and things outside my immediate circle. I pray for the president, the congress, our country, and other people or things I’ve read or heard about that are in need of prayer.

It is this time with God that makes the rest of my time reasonably pain-free, fear-free, and free of too much sin. It is this time that allows me to love my neighbor as myself to the extent that I do. And it is the time that allows my life to have the meaning it has.

I spend somewhere between 40-90 minutes with Him depending on what’s going on in my life. But I realized this day that I had not spent any real time with God in over a week. That distressed me on so many levels and for so many reasons.

It distressed me because I realized it was the reason I was feeling the way I felt right then. If I don’t begin my day with God then the rest of the day, at best, is unfulfilling. But it seemed that I had allowed many days to go by without spending any time with God, let alone starting my day with Him. How had I let that happen? When I examined it I found that it happened in the way all sin happens, a little bit at a time.

It goes like this. Something will happen first thing in the morning to postpone my prayer time. Someone comes over, or an important phone call comes through, or maybe I leave the sink running and flood the kitchen. Or, more likely, I read a text after which I get hung up on social media, my greatest diversion, and my worst distraction.

In any case, whatever it is, I don’t start my day with God. And if I don’t start my day with God then I usually will not spend time with Him at all that day. If I do, it is a shortened version of all that is important to me in my time with Him and thus not very satisfying. And it always gives the enemy a foothold into my heart and mind.

More often than not, I will not let two days go by without spending my needed time with God. If the day before I had been remiss. then the next day I make sure to take the time to spend with Him. Ideally, in the morning, but if not, the full time later in the day.

Because if I don’t, the enemy’s foothold becomes stronger and he is whispering in my ear about how I don’t really need time with God. “It’s been two days,” he tells me, “And nothing has fallen apart.” And when I wake up the next morning his is the first voice I hear. His foothold has become a stronghold.

But a more important level of distress comes from knowing that I’ve disrespected my God. I’ve treated Him as if He isn’t important. By not spending time with Him I’ve told Him that I can do it without Him. By distancing myself from the one who loves me the most and can help me the best I was saying I don’t need Him. And, it hurts me because I know it hurts Him.

For all of those reasons, it is important for me to guard my God time. When I do, my thoughts are less negative, I am more disciplined in doing what I need to do and my life goes more smoothly that day. So, why in the world do I let the time get by me?

We all know the answer to that question if we consider it. It is because of my sin nature. Thanks to Adam and Eve, our original parents, we all have a generational pattern of sin.

Generational patterns are real things. They aren’t real excuses, but they are real things. And having a sin nature is handed down generation to generation just as other dysfunctions are.  Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. –Psalm 51:5

And just like other generational patterns, a sin nature is powerful. I’m not sure exactly how either of them works but I know how they are broken. They are broken with commitment, a lot of self-discipline, and hard work. They are broken by the grace of God and with His ever-present help that we access through prayer.

And that is why we all have to be vigilant about keeping our connection with God open and our prayers consistent. Prayer and praise is the only way to connect with God. And they are the only things that will keep the enemy at a distance.

The enemy is always there waiting to take advantage of any lapse in prayer on our part. He knows how difficult it is to break the generational pattern of our sin nature. He was responsible for its creation after all.

I hope each of you is faithful about your prayer life. I hope each of you spends time with God every day. I hope you are keeping the enemy at bay so that he doesn’t get in your head and convince you that it isn’t that important to pray.

Once he has gotten a foothold in our minds, it so easy for him to convince us that one more day without prayer will not make a difference. He knows just how to exploit our natural tendency toward sin.  

And if we listen to him and we are not in regular contact with God it will kind of make sense to us. “After all, it’s been 2 or 3 or days since I spent time with God and nothing disastrous has happened” we will tell ourselves. But we won’t look closely at what has happened in that time that if left unattended will lead to disaster.

It’s so easy to overlook that we probably haven’t spent much time with our loved ones either.  It is easy to rationalize the fact that we have been yelling at the kids more or arguing more with coworkers. After all, we have been busier than usual. And haven’t the kids been more defiant and aren’t the coworkers being unusually dense?

No, we are not more busy than usual. In fact, since we aren’t spending time with God we have more free time. And the kids are no different than they have ever been and our coworkers haven’t changed either.

The enemy is right, not spending time with God has not caused a disaster in our lives, yet. But if we keep it up, our love ones will grow tired of our neglect, our kids will quit spending time with us, and we will have no support at work.

Regular prayer and consistent time with God is what keeps these small things from becoming big things that we can’t control. Things that are disasters in the making. It is what gives us the peace we need to make our lives work well.

Without God, we can do nothing of any importance. We just can’t get away with ignoring or disrespecting God for long. At least I can’t.  So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. –James 4:17

I am thankful that God didn’t stop nagging me on that really bad day I had. Because eventually it got through to me and I realized that I had been treating God as a convenience rather than my king.

I had neglected to kneel down to Him in respect and awe as He deserves. I had forgotten that without Him the best life I can have is one that is uncomfortable and uninspiring. Without Him, the best that I can be is moody dissatisfied, and unhappy.

So, on that day, right then I got all of my God stuff and I kneeled in prayer asking God to forgive me. I told Him that even though I had been treating Him as ordinary, I knew that He is extraordinary.

I told Him that despite the sinful way I had been behaving, in my heart I know that I need Him and that I am delighted by all of the time I spend with Him. I let Him know I was ashamed of my behavior and my neglect and I asked Him to forgive me. And I wasn’t once afraid He wouldn’t forgive me.

We can’t ever allow the guilt of our bad behavior or the fear that we cannot be forgiven to keep us away from God once we have realized our sin. We can never let the enemy tell us that we’ve been gone from God too long or our behavior has been too bad to be forgiven.

Whether we’ve been gone a day or a year or a decade and no matter what we’ve done God wants us back, He misses us and He can’t wait to give us His forgiveness when we ask for. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. -Romans 12:21

I am so grateful that I have always known that no matter how long we ignore Him and no matter how disrespectful we are to Him, God has enough grace and love to always forgive us.

You may wonder how I have such confidence. Well, there have been many ways in which that confidence has developed and been strengthened over the years. Let me share a few with you.

I am confident in God’s willingness to forgive us because He loves us so much that He sent His son to die in our place so that we could live. I am confident He will always forgive us because no matter how shamefully and unfaithfully I have behaved in the past, He has been faithful to be there for me when I needed Him.

However, most of my confidence in God’s willingness to always forgive us comes from His own words, the Bible. which we know is both indisputable and inerrant.  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. –John 1:9

Let’s Pray,
God, we want to please you and we want to worship you every day and in everything we do. Our lives are better when we spend time with you every day. But somehow we get lazy or we get unmindful and we skip a day of prayer and that allows the enemy to get into our minds and convince us that we don’t really need to pray. And if we give in to him just once then he has a foothold in our minds and our hearts. And when we realize how wrong we’ve been we feel unworthy to come to you afraid that you will not accept us back into your heart. But Lord, that too is just a tool of the enemy. Because if we read your word it tells us that you will not reject us if we come to you humbly and with remorse. So Lord, help us to be disciplined to spend time with you every day in prayer so the enemy will not have an entrance to our hearts and minds. But Lord, when our sin nature gets the best of us and we fail in our discipline, help us to remember that you are always there waiting for our return with your heart and arms open. Help us to remember the enemy is the father of lies and he can do nothing but lie. And help us to remember that you are the definition of love and all you do is love. We pray this in the Holy Name of Jesus Christ, Amen!

Points for Pondering or Prayer
Or
Perhaps for Putting Pen to Paper

Do you spend regular time with God in which you read the Bible, praise God, repent of your sin, and pray for others and for yourself?     How long is a typical session with God?        How often do you do so?

What happens if, anything, when you neglect this for a period of time?

Does it affect your mood, your outlook on life, or your relationships with others?

Write a paragraph about what happened the last time you skipped prayer for a period of time.

Have you ever been afraid that something you’ve done or something you could do would be so bad that God would no longer love you or forgive you?  If yes, do you still believe this? If you do write about where you think this belief came from.

How do you think you can change that belief?