Category Archives: Prayer

A Different Point of View

Imagine you live in Goshen thousands of years ago. You hold no position of power, you report to the leaders of the Hebrews who report to the taskmasters who answer to the King of Egypt. You are the bottom of the totem pole so to speak.

You cry out in prayers to the God of your fathers to be rescued from this torture but you don’t expect much. This life of slavery is the only life you have known.

A stranger walks into town. The old people recognize him, but you have never seen him before. This man says God spoke to him from a burning bush. This God says he has heard the prayers of His people and He intends to rescue them from slavery and from Egypt.

Your prayers are answered. God heard. He intends to rescue you.

Would you believe or would you have doubts? Maybe even doubts abut if you really wanted to leave. It is the only life you have ever known.

I am studying the Exodus from the point of view of the average person who was seeing the plagues and the King’s anger impacting their lives. What would I have thought? How would I have reacted?

Fear Shines a Light

Fear shines a light on those areas of our lives where we have not given up everything to Christ. Think about the Rich Young Man. When Jesus asked him to sell everything and to follow him, the young man went away sad.

There a secret areas of our heart where we fear God’s plan may not be our plan.

Think about Job. He jumped through hoops and performed religious acts almost in a superstitious manner to make sure God did not take what matter most to him.

A few years back, God took me on a long bible study of fear and faith. Every service I attended, every book I read and the studies I did on my own seemed to be focused on fear.

One pastor said Idols worshiped by people of old were physical representations of what they feared most. We do the same thing.

We pray to God asking Him to answer our prayers. When God’s answer seems to be no, we grab it back and say, I will handle this. We equate hard times and loss of someone we love or something important to us as being God not answering.

We place it before God when we think he is our only answer but as long as we think we can handle the issue we keep it in our control. Why? Because we fear God might say no.

Where there is fear we do not trust God to be in control and that if He says no in that area of our life than it is for His higher purpose. A purpose we may never understand.