July 1, 2014
“Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven...” Matthew 6:9-13)
The message of the Bible frequently sifts down to just two words: God first. From Genesis to Revelation, the bottom line interpretation and application of the commandments, character studies, allegories, parables, psalms, sermons, Gospels, Epistles and teachings of Jesus is simply “God first.” The prayer Jesus taught us begins with that God-first emphasis when He instructs us to begin by asking God that His name, the essence of Who and what He is, might be honored and reverenced…
Prayer is not a matter of us persuading God to do our will. The very essence of prayer is an alignment between our wills and the will of God. Prayer is not a matter of us making God our partner and taking God into our plans. Prayer is a matter of God making us His partners and taking us into His plans…
We are not to come into our prayer closets, or corporate worship, with a ‘shopping list’ and send God on errands for us. When we pray, we should come into the presence of God with a blank sheet of paper and ask God to send us on errands for Him. We should be like soldiers reporting for duty to their Commander in Chief.
Dick Woodward, A Prescription for Prayer
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Posted by Dick Woodward
January 28, 2014
“But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’” (Matthew 14:30)
The Apostle Peter is the only man besides Jesus Christ who ever walked on water. Yet millions only remember that he took his eyes off the Lord and would have drowned if the Lord had not saved him.
We read that Peter’s magnificent faith was flawed. He saw the wind. Since we cannot see wind this actually means when he saw what the wind was doing, he lost sight of what Jesus was doing and he became afraid. The remarkable thing here is that when he kept his eyes on Jesus, he walked on water!
It was not until he was beginning to sink that Peter cried out this prayer. Two thousand years later, this remains a go-to prayer for us all through the many storms of life. Jesus taught that our prayers should not be long and we should never think we will generate grace with God by our many words. If Peter had prayed a longer prayer, the words beyond the third would have been glub, glub glub! When Jesus caught Peter by the hand He gave him the nickname, “Little Faith.” (I believe our Lord was smiling when He did.) He literally asked Peter: “Why did you think twice?”
While very ill the past two weeks many people have been recruited to pray for me. Yesterday it occurred to me that I had not prayed for myself. I then fervently pleaded this prayer that the Lord always answers: Lord, save me!
In your spiritual walk, don’t think twice and don’t be a “Little Faith.” Instead, learn to plead this prayer…and soon you will find your way through the stormy waves of life walking on water.
(Editor’s Note: As he recovers from a severe bronchial infection, Dick Woodward had a wee bit of extra assistance from his Blog Posting Elf getting his words online. Prayers appreciated!)
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Posted by Dick Woodward
September 7, 2013
“My voice You shall hear in the morning, O Lord; In the morning I will direct it to You, and I will look up.” (Psalm 5:3)
In one sentence in this beautiful psalm David twice emphasizes the reality that he will pray to his God in the morning. There are three directions of life we must master. We must learn to look up. We must learn to look in until our Lord shows us things we need to know about ourselves. Only then are we prepared to look around in all our relationships.
Anytime we are having difficulty in our relationships with spouses, children, parents or those who are outside the home we should always ask ourselves if we have looked up and looked in sincerely. Knowing ourselves as God wants us to know ourselves is crucial preparation for relating to others.
Smart people are very often right and so they sometimes think they are always right. It is very difficult to live with those who think they are always right. In the same way it is difficult to relate to those who think they never sin. When God helps us look in and see ourselves as He sees us it gives us a humility that is a tool we need to face our relationships.
What would you think of a concert violinist who plays a beautiful concerto solo and then instead of an encore comes out and tunes her violin? In the same way we should not play the concert of our day and then tune the instrument of our lives.
We should begin ‘in the morning’ tuning our lives through our prayers to God as the Psalmist directs us, so that we can look up, look in and then look around.
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Posted by Dick Woodward
June 28, 2013
Oh, that we might know the LORD! Let us press on to know him! Then he will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring.” (Hosea 6:3 NLT)
When I first came to faith and for the first few years as a pastor I struggled with the concept of knowing God personally. I struggled until several spiritual heavyweights mentored me in this dimension of my faith journey. They helped me by shaking everything down to three simple propositions that were basic, yet absolute.
The three propositions are: God is there, God is real, and God is personal.
I have not struggled with the proposition that God is there. My mentors challenged me to think about all the ways God responds to our many prayers to Him. As proclaimed by Hosea I found that when I related myself to God He responded by relating Himself to me. That inspired me to believe that He is not only there but He is very real when I relate to Him and make contact with Him there.
Over time as I shared the intimate dimensions of my personal, private and even secret life with Him I affirmed the glorious reality that God is personal and I should believe Him when He tells me He knows the number of hairs on my head at any given moment. I should also believe Him when He tells me He has a plan for my life that when followed will make me an original person distinct from every other living person.
Are you pressing on to know the Lord? If you are, I offer you these three propositions that can help us all know the Lord when we believe them.
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Posted by Dick Woodward
June 8, 2013
“A person’s steps are confirmed by the Lord.” (Psalm 37:23 Berkeley)
THE NINTH STEP: Look for confirmation as you seek God’s will.
At times on our journeys of faith when we come to a fork in the road there is no verse of Scripture that tells us to go to the right or to the left and we have no prompting or leading of the Spirit. We do our best to make the proper choice, while acknowledging the hard reality that we simply do not know which direction is the will of the Lord. Having done everything we can to discern the will of God, we journey down one side or the other of that road.
The verse quoted above means we should sometimes move forward into what we perceive to be the will of God, praying and looking for a confirmation. That confirmation may be positive or negative. If everything works out and the direction we have chosen obviously has God’s stamp of approval on it, we can say God has given us a confirmation of His will. We have the conviction of God saying to us, “This is the way, walk in it.” (Isaiah 30:21) We see evidence of the reality Jesus described, that when He calls His sheep to follow Him, He goes before them. (John 10:1-4) After we commit to a direction, we see evidence that the Living Christ has gone before us and prepared the way for us.
Sometimes, the confirmation is negative and the results are the opposite of those just described. When that happens, we should be humble enough to go back to that fork in the road and choose the other direction. We see an example of this in Acts chapter 16 when Paul wanted to go into Asia and was directed instead by illness into Philippi.
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Posted by Dick Woodward
May 25, 2013
STEP NUMBER FOUR: Spend much time in God’s Word.
Let me tell you why. In chapter 55 of his prophecy, Isaiah tells us there is as much difference between the thoughts and ways of God and the way we think and do things as the heavens are high above the earth (vv. 8-9). He then goes on to describe one of the many supernatural functions of the Word of God.
The Word of God establishes an alignment between our thoughts, ways and wills, and the thoughts, ways and will of God.
I once heard Billy Graham tell of boarding a plane before he was famous. He spoke to an old pastor friend who was sitting in an aisle seat reading his Bible. The old pastor completely ignored Billy. When they had been in flight for about an hour, the pastor came back to where Billy was seated and greeted him enthusiastically. He apologized for ignoring Billy earlier. He said, “When I pray, I am talking to God, but when I open God’s Word, He talks to me. He was talking to me when you spoke to me and I could not interrupt God just to talk to Billy Graham.”
Thomas à Kempis opened his Bible every morning with this prayer: “Let all the voices be stopped. Speak to me Lord, Thou alone.” If we sincerely want to know the will of God, we must be in relationship and in conversation with God. We should speak to our loving heavenly Father in prayer and expect God to speak to us as we open the Word of God. That is why two of the bases we must touch when we seek to know the will of God are prayer and the Word of God.
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Posted by Dick Woodward
May 23, 2013
“One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” (Luke 11:1)
When the disciple’s asked Jesus this request they were not just asking Him the ‘how to’ of prayer. They were amazed at the large amounts of time Jesus prioritized for prayer. They were asking something like ‘teach us what you know about prayer that we obviously do not know that causes You to spend so very much time in prayer.’
STEP NUMBER THREE: Spend much time in prayer.
When you must know the will of another human being, what is the first step you take? Our first thought is usually that we must meet with that person and have a conversation with them. When a man is in love and decides he wants to marry a woman, his first thought is that he must meet with her and have a conversation with her.
When we seek to know the will of God, our first thought should be that we must meet with God and have a conversation with Him. Prayer is a conversation with God. If you do not know how to pray, think of prayer as simply meeting with and having a personal conversation with God.
Jesus responded to the apostles with a prayer that was not as much a prayer as it was an instruction about how to pray. When you are alone, use that prayer as an outline for your conversation with God. You will find yourself applying the second and third steps I have shared with you for knowing the will of God when Jesus instructs you to pray:
“Your kingdom come; Your will be done.”
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Posted by Dick Woodward
May 14, 2013
“Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?” (Galatians 4:16)
We can be a philosopher and love truth. We can be a sincere seeker after truth and never find the truth we seek. According to Jesus when we come to know the truth by relationship, He himself will make us free (John 8: 30-36).
Jesus said in a prayer to His Father: “Thy Word is truth.” (John 17: 17) This means we should read the Bible as a lover and seeker of truth. Jesus made the claim that His teaching is the truth of God (John 7: 17). He even told us how we can prove that claim. The doing leads to the knowing. If we will personally do what He teaches we will know that His teaching cannot be the teaching of a man. It has to be the teaching of God.
There are times when we can devastate people with the truth. There are also times when the truth can cut through the denial of people and set them free from problems that are isolating them from reality and destroying them. It is then that we must speak the truth in love and ask if we have become their enemy for doing so.
When we are facing those kinds of challenges we must pray that: “God will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; and that they may recover themselves” (2 Timothy 2: 25). To repent means to think again and have a change of mind will and direction.
May your search for truth not only end but begin with the One who said, “I am the way, the truth and the life and no one can come to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6).
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Posted by Dick Woodward
April 19, 2013
“But woe to him who is alone when he falls.” (Ecclesiastes 4:10)
Have you observed how much Jesus valued community? He taught: “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” (Matthew 18:20 NIV) He also gave a great teaching regarding prayer community: “When two of you get together on anything at all on earth and make a prayer of it, my Father in heaven goes into action.” (Matthew 18:19, The Message)
When He made that observation about being present when two or three gather in His name he was not giving us a consolation for a poor attendance at a meeting. He was being descriptive and prescriptive about the reality that His risen presence is among us in a special way when just two or three of us come together in His name.
The man who was thought to be the wisest man on earth in his day also wrote about the value of community. Before he wrote the words quoted above he told us that two are better than one for when one falls the other will help him up and “a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” This could mean that when two or three are in community the presence of God among them forms that threefold cord that cannot be quickly broken.
Are you in community? If you are not then follow the teaching of our Lord and the wise counsel of Solomon and seek the spiritual community you need. I’m not telling you to go to church. I am writing about that special relationship with two or three people where you have accountability and deep sharing of life and faith. If you cannot find one, start one. It only takes you and one other person.
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Posted by Dick Woodward
April 14, 2013
“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and wonderful results.” (James 5:16 NLT)
When Alcoholics Anonymous started it was called “The Saint James Fellowship” because it was founded on this verse. The founders later changed the name to include people of all faiths and those with no faith. While millions of secular people apply the truths of this Scripture and experience healing, it is a shame that many believers never make these healing applications.
When you meet with another believer do you keep your sins in the closet? Do you give the impression that you don’t have a problem in the world? Do they do the same? That does not burden you to pray for each other. But if you trust them and share some of your sins with them they would be burdened to pray for you. They would also more than likely have what I call “reality contact” with you by sharing their sins and that would burden you to pray for them. The result of these mutual prayers would be mutual healing.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote extensively about spiritual community, put it this way: “Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So they remain alone with their sins, living in lies and hypocrisy… He who is alone with his sins is utterly alone.”
A paraphrase of James 5:16 is that honest prayers explode with power! It is a strategy of the evil one to isolate us into self imposed solitary confinement. Never let him isolate you into being a closet sinner; instead, find healing in confessing your sins and praying for one another.
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Posted by Dick Woodward
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