Luke 6:12 Now it came to pass in those days that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.
Have you ever noticed that most of our phone conversations go something like this? You call, say a word or two, they'll say a short thing or two in reply and then something like "Ok, in the middle of something, gotta run, talk to you later"! That's a good example of most of our telephone conversations with people when we were living in the United States.
Now that we're living in Israel however, it's a slightly different story. When we call America now, people are always making time to talk to us. In fact, usually, they excuse themselves and go into a separate room so they can hear us loud and clear! And vice versa when they call us! But that got us thinking.
If we make some time and excuse ourselves from a room to talk to someone important on the telephone, how much more should we do these things for the Lord of Glory?!
William Wilberforce, a Christian statesman of Great Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, once said, "I must secure more time for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The shortening of private devotions starves the soul. It grows lean and faint."
We don't starve our bodies, do we? Then why do we starve our souls? We would never dream of not eating for a month or two, but how long has it been since we've gotten to a quiet room to nourish our souls with the Lord? Seems ironic, doesn't it? Our bodies are only temporary -- they will be buried six feet under someday, along with our belongings eventually. Our soul, though, is what we should be nourishing daily, what we should be guarding as our most prized possession because it will always be around!
Let's make sure our priorities are straight. Let's be sure to excuse ourselves from the hustle and bustle -- so we can hear from the Lord -- loud and clear!
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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.