Daily Devotional

Hey guys. It’s been a while.

So my good friend just started blogging last night, and she was telling me about it, all excited. And that’s how it is with everything! When something is new, you use it a lot. I always want to wear new clothes over old ones that I’ve had forever. When you get a toy at Christmas, you play with it a lot in those first few days/weeks.

All new things lose their shine though.

Kids get bored with new toys. New clothes get replaced with newer ones. Blogging gets tedious and time-consuming.

Suffice it to say, I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging very much. Or at all. In a month. But that’s water under the bridge.

The great thing is that even when I neglect God, He’s still there, waiting for me, even pursuing me. I get so psyched about the greatness and newness of the newfound strength in my relationship with God, my friends and experiences in college, and all of these other things that are partly alluring because they arenew.

God is steady. Constant. Rock-solid.

All the things I’m not.

And really, that’s something I’m thankful for every day.

What kinds of things do you pray for?

In middle school, I often prayed for God to help me on my schoolwork, as if, by divine inspiration, I would receive the right answers. In high school, I prayed a lot for the well-being of my friend’s little brother. I prayed that God would heal him and heal his family, and then when he died, I prayed that God would heal my friend’s broken heart. I’ve prayed that God would help me find lost items, I’ve prayed that God would comfort me.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to ask the Lord for these things. I’m really not. The Bible says, “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.” (NIV) Ephesians 6:18. God wants you to bring Him your concerns, and you should!

So what’s the catch?

Your concerns should not be material, worldly. Your concerns should be for God’s Kingdom, for the eternity that is quickly approaching each and every one of us, and where your family, your friends, your enemies, and complete strangers might spend that eternity. Will they spend it with the King?

Paul didn’t pray for his wounds to heal, nor his discomforts to go away. He prayed for the people around him, that they would come to know the Lord in the same passionate, intimate way that Paul knew Him! In Ephesians, Paul goes on to ask the church at Ephesus to pray for him, saying, “Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.” (NIV) Ephesians 6:19-20

Even though Paul calls himself an ambassador in chains, meaning that he was in jail for proclaiming the Gospel, he didn’t ask for the church to pray that he would be released. He asked them to pray that God would use him there, that God would give him the right words to reach the guards, other prisoners, and whoever else he came into contact with.

When Jesus taught the disciples to pray, the only thing he mentioned for body preservation was to “give us this day our daily bread.” The rest of it is asking for God’s will to be done on Earth, for our sins to be forgiven, and for our souls to be kept safe from evil. That’s what was important enough for Jesus to pray to His Father for.

The importance of this day lies in the difference between grace and karma. Karma is the basic idea that whatever you put into something, that is what you also get out of it. While I believe this to be true of a lot of things in life, I believe that it is not true of life, itself. Our lives depend upon God’s grace, His mercy, His goodness that we don’t deserve, and never possibly could.

Jesus’s death on the cross and His resurrection and ascent into Heaven are all displays of God’s infallible grace.

I love my family to death. I really do. My parents are some of my best friends, my sibling and I are on different wavelengths than we are with anyone else, and I can be totally and completely myself with them.

But.

Recently, I’ve been growing in my faith in incredible ways. I am so thankful to the Lord that He has opened my eyes to really take a challenging look at my life. Where I used to feel His presence or seek Him out only at church or at youth groups or on mission trips, I now find Him everywhere. I walk with Him daily, and every decision I make is made through His will, everything I see is seen through a clean viewfinder, seen from the point of view of a true follower of Christ.

Now, this isn’t to say that I’m perfect now, because I’m definitely not, but in Christ I am a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17), and now I am truly in Christ.

Hallelujah!!

Now, who I am is no longer the same person that grew up with my family. They say they believe, they are involved in church, but they don’t live every day with God in their hearts. They don’t base everything else on their faith. They don’t trust the Lord to have control and to provide for them, but instead cling to the things of this world, leaving God and their faith at the bottom of their priority list, if it’s even on there.

I am afraid. I am afraid that they will go to Hell. I am afraid that they will forever be separated from the love of God. I am afraid that they will never know the peace that I know, or have the love that I am just beginning to tap into.

And, selfishly, I am afraid that they won’t support me when my faith calls me to do radical things. If God is calling me to a third world country, I will go, but I feel like my family either won’t support that or won’t understand it. I’m not sure which is worse. I’ve never felt like they didn’t understand me, and I don’t know how to proceed.

So what do I do? I turn to the Bible.

“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.” (NIV) 1 Timothy 4:12

Though God commands me to obey my mother and father, He also tells me that He is sovereign. I will be an example to them as much as I can, showing them God’s love and what a difference it has made in my life. I will show them that my faith is not some phase that I’m going through, not some crazy thing conjured by my teenage passions, but a lasting relationship with the Creator who made and loves me infinitely. This is a relationship for eternity.

This past weekend, I went to the beach with the women of my campus ministry, and it was a great, albeit emotional, time. The seniors ran the show, and each of them had an opportunity to share their wisdom and testimony that they had developed over the years, though they all readily admitted that they still had a lot of learning to do.

One of the things one of them said really struck a chord with me, and it was about how God had used her passions and skills and matched them with an opportunity for next year. She said, “God will use the desires of your heart, and if He thinks you are better suited elsewhere, then He will change the desires of your heart.”

OH MAN, DID THIS EVER HIT ME HARD.

For years now, I’ve had the worst wanderlust. I want to see everything and go everywhere, and yet, I’ve never been outside my country’s borders. Recently, I’ve started wondering if this is something I need to surrender to God, and the answer, of course, is that I need to surrender everything to God, including this. But I’ve wondered if traveling is a selfish ambition, and that’s kind of been bumming me out.

What I learned this weekend (one of the many things I learned this weekend), was that God can and will use me wherever I am, and if He needs me somewhere else, He will close the doors that need to be closed and open the doors that need to be opened.

And stronger than my wanderlust is my thirst for God and my hunger for a stronger relationship with Him. If God needs me to stay where I am, then that is what I will do, and that life will be more prosperous and fulfilling for me than any life I could plan for myself.

“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord. ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’” (NIV) Jeremiah 29:11

This post is simply a passing thought, but I believe it says all that needs to be said:

Faith is not a part of life, it is a way of life.