Matthew 14:23 And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone.
There were times that Yeshua (Jesus) separated himself from the multitudes -- and there are times when we need to separate ourselves from our lives and ministry, and spend some time with our Lord.
I love how Yeshua climbed a mountain. It made me think of an interesting analogy. Picture the shape of a mountain. It starts out wide at the bottom -- the higher we climb, the narrower it becomes -- and the more we must stay close to the center. As we go even higher yet, there's less room to move to the left or the right -- and there's less and less ground that can be compromised -- the more focused we need to be and the less we can afford to be distracted. The higher we go, the less room we have to fool around!
Whatever you may be dealing with, you may just need to separate yourself and climb up to spend time with the Lord -- get centered on Him and focused on what He's calling you to.
God wants us to learn to climb to the top and focus all of our lives on His will! Let's take out some time this weekend to try it!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]The Hebrew word for a dried up river bed is "Nachal". Israel has many of these. Here, in Israel it rains in winter, but not in summer. In the summer, these places stand as a testament of the rains that once fell and of the rains yet to come. Then, when they do come, the Nechalim (nachal plural) almost instantly fill with water. This is what the Scripture means when it says, "I will give you rivers in the desert." There is a promise in that for us.
In 1917, the Ottoman Empire controlled the city of Aqaba which seemed impregnable to any attack. Behind the city in every direction was a vast desert, and overlooking the city’s harbor were huge naval guns protecting it against any enemy attack from the sea.
During the Battle of Britain, the German Luftwaffe rained down about thirty-five thousand bombs upon London during nightly air raids, causing terrifying fear and tremendous destruction and mayhem in large parts of London.
A well known speaker started off his seminar by holding up a $20 bill. In the room of two hundred, he asked, "Who would like this $20 bill?" Hands immediately started going up.
The revivalist D.L. Moody was on vacation in England from his ministry in Chicago. At one point during his sabbatical there, a local pastor prevailed upon Moody to speak at his parish church. So D.L. went to preach the next Sunday morning. That afternoon he recorded in his journal that it was the deadest crowd he had ever seen and the only thing worse than preaching to those people was that he had promised to speak again the same night.
Yesterday, my family and I had the privilege of being among the nearly 300,000 individuals at the March for Israel event in Washington, D.C. As many in the crowd stood in solidarity with Israel, I reflected on our role as believers. In these last days, we are simply called to be watchmen on the walls.
Over the years I’ve often gotten emails asking “Do you think revival will ever come to the United States?, When do you think it will come?” While re-reading Charles Finney’s lectures on revival recently, I was reminded that a key aspect of world revival is revival within ourselves.