Imbibe

To my emails, I have been attaching a thought I had the other day, "When we talk, we have to take a breath to utter words. When we read scripture, we pray to imbibe His word."

Someone just asked me about "imbibe."  Imbibe means to drink, take in, absorb. And thus to receive nourishment....  In a social  sense, when we're talking with a friend it feeds our soul to have our soul connect or touch his.  Giving and taking information, feelings, and dreams we learn more of the other and receive something back for our lives when we connect with that friend.  It helps us to move forward another day when we can make sense of what we're feeling and why that failed relationship so many years ago still hurts so much or why my relationship with my wife is so amazingly fresh after 13 years.  It is in those patterns of relationship that we learn more about ourselves and develop hopes and dreams for the future.

Prayer is one of those lost arts which we need to help us make sense of our spiritual lives.  And really not only of our spiritual lives but of the rest of our lives as well.  It is in prayer that breathe out and in of God's Spirit and come to know him better.  Ultimately, however, we learn about God through reading his word.  When we read God's word we must read it with a prayer on our lips so that our soul touches His.  In this connection we reframe our lives in terms of his and learn about ourselves in the process.  Yes, we learn we're failures and fall short.  Yes, we learn we're not all that we once were.  But we also learn of God's grace and his power to bring us from a position of stagnation to a place of movement toward eternity.  I wonder if one component of our sin is a human attempt to bring movement to a stagnated soul?  If we would but wait on God, we would learn that this is not stagnation.  God will provide for us a release that will propel us toward the ultimate focus of our souls: life in God.

So we drink deeply of God through breathing his word in and out of our soul: imbibe and live.

The Miracle of Prayer

This is in reference to Matthew 6:5-15. Click on this link to read the passage: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=47&chapter=6&version=31&context=chapter

A couple of days ago I was asked to lead prayer in our meeting at church and when I began to pray I felt a unique sense of God's presence that morning. I was concerned about a couple of individuals in our group and prayed for them accordingly. The thought hit me that when I prayed that morning I was not simply making an appeal to God for something to happen. God placed upon me the desire to pray for the person who was present. The prayer was for them and their encouragement as much as it was for God to act and work. Too many times I have the perspective that God is distant and uninvolved. Therefore, I must get on my knees, fast, cry, pray, plead, pull, and beg to get God's attention so that maybe he would stop what he is doing and pay attention to me or my needs (or those of someone else). Fasting, crying, and begging are part of our spiritual lives and need to be done. But they are done with the view that I am limiting myself in recognition of God's greatness, not as a way to gain divine attention.

God is our Father in heaven. He is working to bring into effect his will on this earth. And he will accomplish it. God is not the detached, ex-officio member of the human race. In his immanence - his presence – he became a part of the human condition and breathes with us as we breathe. So that when I pray as I did that morning I was not praying out of my own superior understanding of my friends. I was praying out of the concern and intervention of God who prompted me to pray as I did and love as I did. This indeed was not me but God.

This is not to elevate myself to some sort of superior spiritual condition. God made the decision to intervene in a way that morning on the behalf of another. If someone else stood in that place I think they too would have been moved to pray for those individuals and pray for them with passion. Make no mistake about it: Prayer is not my seeing a need and bringing God along to the meeting of that need. Prayer is God intervening in our lives to complete his glory and our good. That is the miracle of prayer.