“Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:2-6 NIV)
Prayer is not a luxury or merely a spiritual exercise. It is the greatest integrative force we know. I don’t mean the kind of prayer that asks for things to support our lifestyle or prayer to vindicate the rightness of our understanding but prayer that with an open heart and open mind brings the things of our everyday life, our problems and concerns, and the people in our life to God. This prayer bridges the gap we so often sense between our daily lives and our spiritual lives. It relates everything to God in the knowledge that He cares and understands. And often in praying about the things that confuse us and pull us in many directions, we find that in laying them out before God the relative importance of things becomes clearer, we remember things we had overlooked, and in that we begin to sense something of God’s “grace and peace.”
-- Earl F. Palmer in “Integrity in a World of Pretense: Insights from the Book of Philippians”
#5093
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for sharing your comments about a quote or about this ministry. Please include your name and what state or country you live in. If you do not have a registered profile, you can login using the "Anonymous" tag in the "Comment as:" box below.
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.