Brian's Blog

If there is one topic that, by preaching it, any preacher could easily bring immense guilt upon a congregation, it would be the topic of prayer. Do we pray enough? Do we pray with freshness? Do we pray with passion? And after answering “no” three times you begin your trek up the aisle at the end of the service to dedicate yourself again to faithful prayer.

I often chalked up the lack of prayer in a believer’s life to that of laziness. However, I think Groeschel is probably more on target when he believes it is more a lack of believing that prayer truly works.

One of the greatest challenges I face with prayer is that of just speaking genuinely from my heart to God. There are so many phrases I have used for many years that automatically pop out with absolutely no meaning behind them – ie. “Dear God, thank you for this day” or how about this one – “Bless this food to our bodies” – oh, how original! God must get so bored with our meaningless verbage. Crazy how I can talk to God and seldom engage my brain. I often think how my wife, Lisa, would feel if I quoted the same identical phrase in every conversation I had with her. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too long before she questioned my sincerity through it.

Well, how sincere are our prayers? Are we honest with God when we pray? (It doesn’t make much sense to not tell the truth since He can see through it anyway.) Do we try to stay away from brainless ruts in prayer?

I’ll make a deal with you – let’s both ask ourselves one question throughout our prayers – “Did I really mean that?” After every main thought we express we can ask that simple question which, hopefully, will evaluate our sincerity in what we say to the God of the universe. Try it out and let me know what how it goes!

How many people have we loved or been loved by only to find out that love is now gone? My wife knows of my “little black book” of all the girls I had dated – none of which now gain any of my attention or affection – “I’ve lost that lovin’ feeling!” in fact, I only know where one of them is today since she is a missionary that we support (I’m not telling who though). My best friend growing up – I don’t know where he lives, who he’s married to or how many kids he has. I have sat in the same room with many couples who either pronounce love because they want to get married, or denounce love, because of their frustration and hurt.

Thankfully, God doesn’t love us in the same way that we love people or that others love us. Personally, I know this concept and I accept it, but I don’t know if I can truly comprehend it for all it is. I can grab the thought “that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from th love of God, that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I can see God’s love fighting off demons or traveling the distance to reach me, but what I struggle accepting is the fact that God would love me even though I have done such terrible things against Him. Would I love someone that cursed at me, disrespected and disobeyed me. Would I love someone who has more love for self than for me? And that’s when I get seeing the difference between my love and God’s love. I do love but God is love! Even when I was at my worst, God was true to His character and unconditionally showed His love by giving His all for my rescue. Now that’s love we can believe in and embrace!