prayer coach

Every Christian seems to have their technique for keeping from sin. We have to—if we are trying to follow God, we will be aware of our sin. It must be dealt with.

The Easter season makes this more prevalent because of the so many participating in the tradition of fasting things for Lent. This is wonderful tradition to prepare us for the Easter celebration.

Some of the tools Christians use for motivation not to sin are the following:

• Accountability: If I sin, I’ll have to tell someone what I have done.
• Consequences: If I sin, I’ll do something. This may be 100 pushups, give someone money to pay “the fine,” run an extra mile, etc.
• Think It Over: If I sin, I’ll go contemplate how bad that decision was, how it made God feel, and how bad I feel afterwards.
• Guilt: If I sin, I’ll sit in guilt.
• Shame: If I sin, I’ll beat myself up. Sin is bad, and if I sin I must be bad.
• Ignore It: If I sin, I’ll quickly move on. That’s not who I am. Plus, I am forgiven already.
• Sense of Value: I am too good to sin.

I have heard each of these options from preachers over the years, and not all of them are bad ideas. Very rarely have I heard how God motivates us not to sin.

God’s main motivation is love. It’s His kindness that leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4). Jesus said if you love me, you will do what I have commanded (John 14:15). Find out what pleases the Lord and have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of the flesh (Ephesians 5:1-13). We are not to beat ourselves up over our sins. We are not even to focus on how bad it makes God feel when we sin. Sin has been dealt with. Our motivation for not sinning is an expression of love to the One who loves us. When Jesus comes to Peter after his denial, Jesus gets Peter to focus on his love. “Do you love me?”  (John 21:15-17)

• Abiding faith attracts the promises of God.
• Any area that doesn’t have an expectation of good is under the influence of a lie.
• Any revelation that does not bring us into greater encounter only trains us to be more religious.
• Anything you think you know about about God, that you can’t find in the person of Jesus, you have reason to question.
• Arrogance isn’t thinking too much of ourselves but thinking too little of others.
• Don’t grade yourself differently than God does.
• Don’t let the “how to’s” of worship distract you from the “Who to.”
• Don’t let what you didn’t get in your childhood keep you from what God provides for His children – a perfectly faithful Father.
• Evangelism is the overflow of worship.
• Every season of growth is rewarded with pruning.
• Everything we do for people is just to get them to experience the Father. Striving for a Christian only exists in the absence of realizing the Father’s love.
• Faith doesn’t deny a problems existence. It denies it a place of influence.
• Faith is generated in the atmosphere of experiencing truth.
• Faith is not the absence of doubt, it is the presence of belief.
• Faith is the offspring of grace.
• Faith moves Heaven, so that Heaven will move earth.
• Faith offends the stationary.
• Faith provides eyes to the heart. Faith sees.
• Fear often looks like wisdom to those in unbelief.
• For the believer most closed heavens are between the ears.
• Gifts are free, but their development is really costly.

David started out with great passion but in the end of his life, he allowed trauma to shock him into passivity. We all need to come out of passivity and speak life into our world.

For forty days the Israelites were kept in a prison of fear through the taunts of Goliath. One thing that is missed in this story is that the Israelites remained in fear because Saul offered no encouragement to their situation. His inaction led to a bubble of fear over his troops. David comes on the scene and bursts that bubble by speaking hope.

Some fifty years later one of David’s sons rapes one of his daughters. This sets up hatred between two brothers to the point one kills the other. The murderer flees to his mother’s hometown and hides for three years. Both the rape and the murder makes David mad and sad, but there is no record of him doing anything. His silence allowed things to fester. David’s children are left to figure out life on their own.

Joab wakes David from his slumber to go retrieve his son from excile. However David does not allow this son, Absalom, to see him. Left on his own, Absalom goes down the path of attempting to take the kingdom from his father. How much of this could have been avoided if only David engaged in their lives?

Avoidance does not make our problems go away. We only delay the inevitable and often make the confrontation larger because of the passage of time. God gave us the Comforter because His plan was to call us places where we would have to deal with things that were uncomfortable to us. If we are more than conquerers than we need to be in some kind of battle.

image courtesy of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

I have been reading Prince Caspian to my daughter and came away with a beautiful analogy on the fear of God. The fear of God has always been a tough concept for me to comprehend. How does fear and love coincide?

Like many I was taught that the fear discussed in the Bible referred more to an awe of God. While this helped ease my tensions about God’s love, I still had a hard time believing that was all it meant. Whenever people encountered the Lord, they always fell face down to the ground (Joshua 5:14, Ezekiel 1:28, Matthew 17:5-7, John 1:17). Gideon fear his life because he only recognized he encountered the Lord afterwards and had looked on the Lord face to face (Judges 6:22).

The image in Prince Caspian comes right after the children had made a long detour trying to get to Caspian. There is a small hint of this in the movie, but the book brings it out in more detail. Lucy had seen Aslan before the detour, but could not convince the others to believe her. In the end they made a long trek in the wrong direction.

When the children started back in the right direction, Lucy sees Aslan again. As they talk we find out that Aslan had wanted her to follow him even if the others had not. Lucy had feared the opinions of her siblings over what Aslan wanted her to do.

Here is the definition for the fear of God: to care more about what God thinks than anyone else.

The fear comes in the disappointment of hurting the one you love so much. Susan expressing this when she admits that Lucy had been right about Aslan. She said she could have had believe Lucy from the beginning but she listened to her fears. As she apologized to Lucy, she expressed anxiety of what she would say to Aslan.

image courtesy of Put Me in the Zoo by Robert Lopshire

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” – John 10:10

Shame speaks lies to us. Instead of letting us know when we make mistakes, shame tells us we are a mistake. The Scriptures tell us that there is an enemy that is the father of lies, and his goal is to steal, kill, and destroy. He will continue to use shame to feed lies in our hearts to keep us from living out of who God made us to be. Jesus said, “I am the way the way, the truth, and the life,” and “the truth will set you free” (John 14:6 and 8:32). Living out of the truth will free you up to live out of who God created you to be.

It takes time to transform our minds, but repeating truth instead of the lies will get us there quicker. We have grown up with lies that the enemy placed there through misinterpretation of events in our childhood. The lies are about ourselves, God, and others. While we may never agree intellectually to the lie, they feel true so we live out of them. We must choose to believe the truth Jesus has said because truth is whatever Jesus says is true. Here are some of the truth statements that God has gave me to replace the lies of shame that I have been living out of.

1. God loves me, my wife loves me, and there are many other people in my life who love me for who I am.
2. I am a godly man of integrity, and the people who know the real me are drawn to me.

image courtesy of the World Wildlife Fund

Thinking about the post Heaven is Where God Is, I was taken again to Jesus’ statement that the spirit is willing but the body is weak (Matthew 26:41). A couple week’s ago we looked at this in the post about What Motivated Gethsemane. It highlighted Jesus’ desire for prayer at that time.

Our spirit is strengthened in the presence of God. This is why staying in God’s presence is so important for ministry, prayers, and life. Important decisions need to be made in God’s presence. Our prayers need to be made there. We want our spirit as strong as it can be because it is the part of us that is always desiring agreement with the things of God.

To take this further, God deliberately takes us to greater levels where we need less body and more spirit. This is how He encourages us to die to ourselves and take up our crosses (Luke 9:23). God’s ways are not our ways and as long as we trust in our own abilities, we will be in danger of being led askew (not necessarily toward evil, just away from God’s plans).

We need to die to anything that keeps us from saying yes to God. We need to hand all of our fears over to God. Nicodemus was afraid that God would ask him to give all of his money away, and that fear kept him from following Jesus. He just might call you to live in the bush of Africa; He might ask you to seek money from others; He send your to Iran to hand out Bibles; He may nudge you to give your car to someone; He may tell you that you need to vote Democrat (or Republican). We need to die to our rights to these things. Why is it important that I die to my rights to these decisions? Because each death is a statement of faith that God’s ways are better than ours. And, with each death we get closer to the resurrection.

A willing spirit + a resurrected body = supernatural power!

• Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.
• We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense.
• We pray when there’s nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.
• We don’t want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of ‘good time’ is seldom in sync with ours.
• The remarkable thing about God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else.
• Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.
• We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties.
• One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God.
• If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.
  
• The most important aspect of Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the surrounding influence and qualities produced by that relationship. That is all God asks us to give our attention to, and it is the one thing that is continually under attack.
• There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what God prizes.
• Intercession is putting yourself in God’s place; it is having His mind and His perspective.

I marked this daily reading from John Eldredge’s as something I wanted to share. With the last two posts on fear (Jesus not having fear and We are not to be afraid), I thought this would be a nice place to add this angle on fear. Fear can come in many ways, and as Eldredge himself admits here, this is not one we typically think. Enjoy

Embracing the Glory
4/10/2011

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us . . . And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. (Marianne Williamson)

When I first read this quote, I thought, No, that’s not true. We don’t fear our glory. We fear we are not glorious at all. We fear that at bottom, we are going to be revealed as . . . disappointments. Mandela is just trying to make a nice speech, like a sermon, to buoy us up for a day or two. But as I thought about it more, I realized we do fear our glory. We fear even heading this direction because, for one thing, it seems prideful. Now pride is a bad thing, to be sure, but it’s not prideful to embrace the truth that you bear the image of God. Paul says it brings glory to God. We walk in humility because we know it is a glory bestowed. It reflects something of the Lord’s glory.