The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…
"Reality Beckons"
Occasionally, we hear people say, "I am not a praying person." Meaning no disrespect, the admission is synonymous to "I do not live in reality."
"In Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).
Failure to pray involves blindness to truth as it actually exists. God forms and informs the great fact of every creature's existence. He made all things, sustains all things, and works in all thing to fulfill "the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord" (John 1:3; Colossians 1:17; Ephesians 1; 11; 3:11). Prayerlessness thus exposes carelessness to reality as it is, and to the God who in every moment grants to all "life and breath and all things" (Acts 17:25).
Even those who pray have only just begun to see and respond to reality. Indeed, find the most genuinely prayerful believer on the planet. Seek to affirm that person for his or her faithfulness to God, and awareness of reality. Then hear the confession, "Oh, I see and know so little! I have barely begun to commune with God in the light of His presence and working!" Indeed, the prayerful well know that a genuine awareness of reality resulting from communion with God reveals blindness as much as sight. As one preacher confessed after more than six decades of faithfully walking with God, "I feel I know less about Him now than when I started." Thus, even if we may be to some degree a "praying person" because we have seen and know the Lord Jesus by faith, reality still beckons us to open our eyes far wider, and our hearts far more humbly and expectantly. "Show me Thy glory… Show me Thy ways, o Lord, teach me Thy paths" (Exodus 33:18; Psalm 25:4).
We are as fish that swim in the ocean that is God. Are we aware of the ocean? All believers are, to some degree. However, reality ever reveals that we have seen nothing as we ought to see, and nothing yet as we will see. We can rightly confess, "I live in reality. That I pray to the God who actually and vitally consist confirms this." However, if we genuinely pray, another confession must accompany our affirmation of faith. "The ocean stretches before me endlessly. I have seen so little of what I could know, and a mere glimmer of the light that forever awaits my heart and mind." Such awareness and admission will elicit another prayer, based on both our grateful knowledge and confessed ignorance of the ocean - reality as existing in God - wherein we live and move and have our being…
"One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in His temple."
(Psalm 27:4)
"He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him."
(Hebrews 11:6).
Weekly Memory Verse
Trust in Him at all times, ye people, pour out your heart before Him. God is a refuge for us.
(Psalm 62:8)
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