This past week was Prayer Week at Safe Harbor. For the last few years we have distributed a "Prayer Guide" to help with prayer as the week progresses. Following is Mondays prayer help. It unfolds the truth that God uses prayer to move His truth from our heads to our hearts . . .
As we begin
this week of prayer, it is good to remember two truths: first, God’s Word feeds our faith in Christ
(“Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ” Rom. 10:17). Without regular, personal time in God’s Word
our faith in Christ—in His person, in His work, in His promises—begins to wane. As followers of Christ we need His Word if we
are to truly live for Christ and His kingdom. (“Man shall not live by bread
alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” Matt. 4:4).
God’s Word
nourishes our faith, but it is prayer—as John Calvin once said—that is the
“chief exercise of faith by which we daily receive God’s benefits.”
Calvin uses
the illustration of a field in which God has buried a precious treasure. God
points out the treasure in His Word, faith believes what God says, and prayer is the spade with which we dig the
treasure up and make it our own. “We
dig up by prayer the treasures that were pointed out by the Lord’s Gospel, and
which our faith has gazed upon” (Institutes,
Book 3, Chapter 20).
How vital
this is! How do the truths and promises
of the Gospel become our truths? How do
we move from knowing that we are loved in Jesus to truly experiencing that
love? How do we move from knowing that
we need to forgive to forgiving the one who has hurt us? The answer is. . . prayer.
