Tag: He wants the best for you

Prayer…does it work?


Does prayer work? Yes, it absolutely does work! Praying for healing or comfort and just a better day or week than you had last week all work and God answers them IF you have faith that He will answer your prayers. Faith and belief go together, you can’t have one without the other and when your belief and faith are strongest is when your Christian life is usually better and more productive.

Jesus prayed every day. Many days He prayed more than once, whether it was for a healing or for strength or even for lunch, He always prayed to God for these things. Thanking Him for His gracious mercy and love and asking for something specific, not just a general blessing. If you read the gospels, Jesus never prayed in a general way. He always asked for something specific, such as multiplying the fish and the five loaves or for a blind man to receive his sight.

We tend to ask God to bless us, but we don’t ask for a specific blessing such as health or prosperity. Most of us just ask for His blessing on our life and then wonder why we didn’t get what we wanted or needed at the time. God knows what you need but He wants you to ask Him for it. Also, God bases His answers on needs more than wants, necessary things rather than luxury items.

He gives us our air and water and the ability to earn a living wage so all of this is part of the blessing which we already have from Him. Prayer is our link to the Creator for our comfort and our blessing in ways that those who don’t know Him can’t understand. It is the most reliable wireless service available to us and yet many people don’t make use of it.

We muddle our way through life, thinking that we can make it without God or His help. But, when life or some other circumstance throws a curve ball in our direction then we cry out to God. Sometimes we do it the first time this happens, sometimes we wait until there is no human alternative and we have to seek Him for our help. If you are wondering what the point of this missive is, it is this: God listens to your soul, if you belong to Him but He would like to hear from you too.

Just as human parents know what their children need, we would like to hear their dreams and their ambitions, their aspirations for a life away from home but we would like to stay connected to them too. That is the kind of relationship which God desires from us. Not a once per week visit for an hour or so. Not a once every year visit on the day that the resurrection of His Son is celebrated. God desires to be in your life, in your day and your nights, in your family, in your business and in your work!

It is a daily walk with Him that is most fulfilling, not just a weekly or yearly visit. I mean, how would you feel if that is all your wife or husband was around you or if that was the only time your children came to visit? It would not be much of a relationship at all, would it?

Seek His Kingdom and His presence daily because that is the best way to live a life of love and compassion toward others and with your Creator too.

Consumption


This word is what our entire economy is based upon these days. We do not produce anything which is exported to other countries, except for printing money. So, what is our country good for? Even the value of our money is suspect and dropping in the eyes of the world, so why do we live this way?

Mostly because of the culture that we live in today, but it started about fifty years ago and it has only gotten worse. When fast food became popular in the fifties, actually that was the start of “instant gratification”, so my estimate is off by about ten or more years. My point is this…when we got to the point of getting something fast or for free, things really started going downhill from there.

Our world was not designed by God to be based on consumption in this manner. We are supposed to produce our food, eat it and work to produce more. In today’s society, this has been replaced with our governments providing for us without even the need to work at all! The Bible says that “if you don’t work, you shouldn’t eat”, but we ignore that and go right along with all of the consumer driven economies and businesses that are available. The chart below shows that the number of structures (buildings) in each area have crossed over, so that now we have more retail structures than production facilities.

My ideas don’t really go along with our economy because we have more electronic consumer abilities today than we have ever had before. I use them as well, so I am not trying to get rid of it entirely. But, when I was growing up, my grandparents grew their own vegetables and we had a herd of cattle which we could choose to have at least one butchered each year for our own use. So our trips to the grocery store usually had to do with getting things which we did not grow or produce like coffee, flour, corn meal, cooking oil, and bacon (although we did have a few hogs which we could use at times too).

Our country and the people in it would be more healthy in every way if we went back to at least a partial agrarian economy where there were more local farmers who produced wholesome, organic foods. The problem is that we don’t have anyone to teach us how to do this anymore! Big farms and the regulations from the FDA have pushed small farms like this out of business.

We were meant to live this way, but we have allowed so much regulation and rules to interfere with our daily lives until the freedoms which our grandfathers and great grandfathers fought for don’t really exist like they once did. It is nobody’s fault but our own, so we can’t blame anyone but ourselves.

God’s Word says that we should live on and work the land that we have and eat the produce of it. Are we doing this? No, we are not and have not been for quite a while. We need to learn God’s way of living and working so that we can be more productive for Him and for us. His advice for this is in His Word, all we need to do and should do is to read it and learn from it.