James 5:16 Confess faults to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous one avails much.
We all know that prayer needs to be an essential part of our lives. And if you're like me, we would love for the Lord to answer all our prayers instantaneously -- however, we know from experience this is not always the case!
Oswald Chambers was quoted as saying, “We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.
Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don't want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of 'good time' is seldom in sync with ours.”
While our prayers may not be answered immediately, we know the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man or woman radically changes the world around us!
Charles Spurgeon once said, "We cannot all argue, but we can all pray; we cannot all be leaders, but we can all be pleaders; we cannot all be mighty in rhetoric, but we can all be prevalent in prayer."
So let’s commit to spending more time in prayer today! Make sure you don't allow the enemy to rob your time to pray -- for it's in prayer that we tap into God's unlimited power that makes demons tremble!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]Tonight begins the feast of Purim, which celebrates the deliverance of the Jewish people from one of many of Satan's attempts to purge them from the world. Mordechai gave Esther a great challenge then, "and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"
Life can get so hectic sometimes -- we often try to do too many things at once. But when our schedule gets that hectic, we need to start investing in some quality time with the Lord. The operating word here is "investing".
The first man was called "Ah-dom", we know him as "Adam". The word used for "man", as in "mankind", in Genesis 1, is also the same word – "Ah-dom". "Ah-dom" is rooted in the three Hebrew letters, aleph-dalet-mem, and one of the Hebrew words for earth is "Adamah", which contains the same three letters, however it ends with the Hebrew letter "hay". "Adamah" means "red earth", or "red clay", and this word points to the natural earth elements, the "earth dust" that composed Adam’s body, and the body of every human being since. "Man" is "ah-dom", in a very real sense, "clay".
Yesterday, in our devotional I spoke of the two rains in Israel, the early rain and the latter rain. The prophet Joel speaks prophetically of these two rainy seasons in connection with the outpouring of God's spirit.
For much of the year, Israel receives little to no rain. The early rains ( "Yoreh") begin at the time of the Fall Feasts, September-October, and the "Latter Rain (“Malkosh”) concludes the rainy season around the time of the Spring festival of Passover.
En Gedi is a nature reserve about 40 minutes from our home. Surrounded by dry, barren, rocky ground, except to the east where the Dead Sea lies, it is an oasis, fed year round by springs of fresh water, and home to some of the most unique wild and botanical life in the world.
A father asked his son to carry a letter from their camp to the village. He pointed out a trail over which the lad had never gone before. “All right Dad, but I don’t see how that path will ever reach the town,” said the boy. “Well son, I'll tell you how. Do you see that big tree down the path?” asked the father. “Oh, yes, I see that far.” “Well, when you get there by the tree, you’ll see the trail a little farther ahead -- and farther down you'll see another big tree -- and when you reach that one you'll be closer and so on until you get within sight of the houses of the village.”