Thursday 24 Jul 2008

Thursday Reading: Psalm 116:1-2
 
Key Verse: Psalm 116:1
1  I love The LORD because He hears my voice and my prayers.
 
Devotion:
So many times in our lives we don’t think of the obvious solutions because we are looking for complex ways of fixing our problems that we think are so complex! So many people search for God in the most complicated ways whereas He has given us the most direct and uncomplicated route we can imagine. God wants us to talk to Him in prayer. Simple! He does not want us to have to jump through hoops so that we can belong to a certain religion, nor does He want us to have to go through elaborate ceremonies before we can get to know Him.
 
This psalmist begins by declaring his love for God because he knows that his God listens! He declares this with the simplicity of stating any given fact because he knows it to be a fact. He does not have faith that God will answer some of the prayers that he has prayed in the past because he already knows it for a fact. That then gives him the knowledge that God is going to answer his prayers that he will lift up to God in the future. His faith is based on a fact! We need to take this psalmists example to heart and live with that same faith because we will see it become a fact in our lives too. God does answer prayers and He answers them so that we can know He is real and know about His absolute love for us.
 
We should not have to wait until we start to feel trapped before we lift up our prayers to Him. We should not have to wait until we feel that we have reached rock bottom, not wait until we have tried everything else… God’s way is simple and should be our first port of call. When we lift Him up as first in our lives we will begin to know that He is watching, listening and answering our prayers. The more that we get to know Him, the more we realise how much He does do for us. The more we find that He does for us, the stronger our faith will be because we see that faith turn into fact each and every time.
 
God is here. He listens. Don’t wait for rock bottom… Call out to Him with absolute faith now because He is the one answering our prayers!
 
Points to Ponder:
How often do you struggle to find the right things in life?
 
How often do you choose to seek God first?