By loud shouting disobedient Israelites only made their situation worse. It caused their enemies to mobilize and fight against Israelites. Faith is not emotions.
Faith is obedience to the voice and word of the Lord.
Faith is acting based on obedience and command of the Lord.
Faith is positive response of the heart to God’s instructions.
Faith is being on the same team with God.
As you know, human life consists of habits. There are also good and bad habits. Any habit that brings a positive outcome requires some efforts and discipline from us. Unless we have a habit of praying our prayer life will never become effective neither fruitful. Let me quote the statement of an Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle who once said about habits – “We are the product of what we repeatedly do”. In other words, our habits are our essence. Therefore, in order to excel at something, we have to make it our habit.
The whole world lies in wickedness and darkness, but, looking at the people that have made prayer their priority #1, you realize that – so to speak – they are from another planet; they do not live in darkness because they seem shining. They have problems and their life is not any different, but they approach their problems in a different way and they look forward into the future in a different way. Prayer so alters their lives and strengthens their relationships with God that they do not notice things that others do.
If you put the necessary effort and overcome all the obstacles to climb up this mount of prayers, the glory of the Lord will be with you everywhere you go.
Dear brothers and sisters, dear pastors and leaders, dear ministers! Do you have your mount of prayers? Do you have this time when you stop in all of your rush in order to seek God in prayers Who is the only source of life?
God so desires for us to seek Him early in the morning. He so desires for us to return to Him. He wants to heal us and to bind up our wounds. God so wants to revive and restore us, so that we could live before Him. When we seek the Lord, when we seek to know Him, He comes and immerses us into His presence; He pours out His rain on us and waters the earth.
Yesterday we talked about how Moses set up a tabernacle outside the camp for all seekers of the Lord. We also saw that instead of entering the tabernacle and seeking the face of the Lord, Israelites were simply observing how Moses spoke to God and how God answered Moses.
“The righteous cry out, and the LORD hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles”(Psalm 34:17). God hears you when you cry out to Him and not when you sink in our despair and misery, when you grumble and ‘have pity parties’. There is a cry of faith, which God always hears, because He finds a call for help and intervention in it. In this prayer cry God sees faith in Righteous, Just, Loving and Almighty God.
Let us look at some expressions that we often use, ad let us see what God says about the same things in His Word.
*YOU SAY, “It is not possible!”
*GOD SAYS, “All things are possible for God!”
*Bible verse: Luke 18:27
“Jesus replied, “What is impossible with men is possible with God.”
“There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” (Proverbs 16:25)
Our task is to train our spirit to hear what God is telling us. And even if your intellect is fighting and heart does not agree with what God says to you, anyway, say to God, “I do not know how it happens, I just believe in You!”
In order to hear God’s voice, it is necessary that you learn to stop and calm down – calm down your mind, feelings, emotions, and only then you can hear what God says to you. When you learn to hear God’s voice, not only will you have eternal life, but also life in abundance, which is concealed in you. There will be problems, but you will be able to rejoice, because you will be sure that your God has an answer for any question, your God is able to solve any problem. Human mind tries to calculate everything – how are all things going, how everything must happen. Our minds work like fast processors. But the problem is that situations appear in our lives, and we cannot solve them. What happens to our mind-processor then? It falls out.
There is another voice that we hear – it is the voice of other people and the voice of human standpoint. For example, the voice of experts goes in this category – a doctor who proclaims what the medical equipment indicates. A doctor may tell the patient that he will die in three days, because the medical equipment, the analyses and his own medical experience show that. Praise the Lord for our doctors, but we must know that the last word always belongs to God. God often says the totally opposite to what experts say. In such cases, it is necessary that we, while being respectful towards different specialists, put aside the expert conclusions and trust God, not people. The more you trust the expert conclusions and not the Word of God, the less God can give you life.
