Dear Friends,

I continue to learn a thing or two about prayer, namely that I need a constant connection to Christ. There is a need to think about him in every situation – where is he and what does he want?

Things go badly when I forget that connection and to honor it with reverence in my encounters with his children. His grace makes me whole. When I go on without him my brokenness is a hazard to myself and to others.

There’s a tendency to think, “Well, I am a well-educated person with experience, a title, and a job description. Why can’t I take care of business?”

The Lord does not accept conditional surrender. We can never lean on him as a crutch until we get well and then go back to our way. We cannot perfect ourselves in the flesh (Gal 3:3).

The kind of absolute surrender Christ accepts sounds like this­““Tomorrow we will give ourselves up to you, and you may do to us whatever seems good to you” (1 Samuel 11:10).  In positive terms, Jesus says, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

Repentance means letting him take over and living in a faithful relationship with him. Our relationship with him consists of our love for him reciprocating his love for us, our dependence upon him to live the way he made us to live, and our obedience to his Word and Spirit in both our responses and manner of responses to him and to his children.

In that relationship, we ask him to go with us in every circumstance and situation. We approach them with the thought that he is in us and with us. This is what Paul meant when he said, “Pray without ceasing,” (1 Thess 5:17). It means to live in the constant flow of grace.

We don’t trust God to keep that flow coming. Like Moses at Meribah, we are inclined to strike the rock in impatience and frustration rather than to wait for God’s stream of life-giving water to come from hard places in hard situations (Nov 20:8-13).

In fact, this inclination is so ingrained in our sinful human nature that we will smack the rock, rhetorically speaking, before we will ask God. Only when our rock-smacking reaction fails or goes wrong and causes remorse will we remember to ask God for the water of his grace in our desert.

I read the other day of a woman who was frustrated and irritated by another woman in the checkout line ahead of her who was fumbling and bumbling along for what seemed like 15 minutes, but was more likely no more than three minutes.

The irritated woman wanted to vent and was thinking of all kinds of things to say.  Finally, when the fumbler had found what she needed from her purse, she turned and said, “Thank you for your patience with me.”

It was the first time the irritated, frustrated woman had ever been told she was “patient.” She sent up a silent prayer, “Thanks, God, for answering my 20-years of prayer, “Please, don’t let me be mean.”

Why does it take so long? We know the Lord can do what we ask immediately. Why does he delay so long to transform us and respond to our needs and hope?

We all have these questions in our troubled minds and aching hearts at some time or another and they may return again and again. Scripture tells us that Jesus, praying as a human, learned obedience through what he suffered and so must we (Heb 5:7-6).

Our conversations with God over time help us learn how to discern good and bad in our experiences. We mature and deepen in faith and love in the process (Heb 5:11-14).

God wills this growth for us (1 Thess 4:3). He empowers that growth (Phil 2:13). The fact that spiritual maturity doesn’t take hold in us as fast as we would like is due to the fact that he gives us a free will, but we don’t choose wisely especially in the early going.

Eugene Peterson says, “Our wills are given to us to exercise freely. We can assert them noisily and brashly, like Adam, in choosing what is beneath us and thereby being diminished; or we can choose, like Christ, the way of our creator and redeemer and learn a greater freedom in an expanding reality” (Praying the Message of Jesus, entry for March 4).

Eventually, we learn to cast all our cares upon him because we’ve learned that he really cares about us. This is the lesson of true humility in all things big and small. When we’ve arrived there the connection of relationship is made and we live in the flow of grace.

God also does not give us everything at once because we aren’t ready for it. He told the children of Israel in the wilderness that he would drive out their enemies and deliver the land to them, but not all at once.

He said, “I will not drive them out in one year, or the land would become desolate and the wild animals would multiply against you. Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land” (Ex 23:29-30).

God is gracious and helpful in demonstrating his love for us. He never gives us what we can’t handle or a solution that creates a new set of problems. He desires to save us for an eternal relationship with him.

Great relationships develop over time as love deepens and trust grows. Communication is the key. No loving relationship means anything without expression so I continue to learn to pray.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps. 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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