What Me Worry?
Good Morning Friends,
Most Saturday mornings I do gardening work around the yard and shop for food that I prepare for my family, but instead today I will be on a vacation/mission with my family and Presbyterian friends going to Vancouver BC to play handbells with people from around the world. As I pray and I pack and as I think about the trip I rejoice in this amazing life I have been given and what a joy it is. So really I am not concerned. We have planned the best we can. We have practiced. So now it is time to go. The only current problem is that our particular flights do not feed us a meal. I am wondering what will be on my menu. What Me Worry?
Scripture: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
Matthew 6:25-34 (NIV)
To [the One] who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine . . . to him be glory.
Ephesians 3:20 (NIV)
“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Luke 11:9-13 (NRSV)
Message: God’s abilities to answer prayers goes beyond what we have on our menu of activities. In fact, I believe that God is best at answering prayers we have not fully formed into specific recipes for serving up at prayer time. There are some things God is able to cook up in response to our hearts desires that are not on the menu and never make it to our prayer list. Sometimes it comes out of the prayers of others and then sometimes it comes as an echo of the eternal expansion welling up as a creative force and as if out of nothingness. Thankfully God can and will answer the unspoken prayers of our hearts in ways we never thought about. God is able to do amazing things and is not confined to our imagination and certainly not to what is on the menu. God will not be defined or limited by what we see as limits and boundaries. God is bigger than our prayer box. God’s menu is endless and everlasting. Maybe I will taste something new in Vancouver.
Pray we never close our eyes to what God might do in our lives and with our lives. Pray we believe in God’s omnipotence. Pray we leverage the power given to us through the Holy Spirit. Pray we learn the power of persistent prayer. Pray we practice. Pray we realize that our prayers affect God as well as our circumstances. Pray we realize that God wants to do things in and among us that we cannot possibly do ourselves. Pray we still ask and receive so that others might believe. Pray we expand our expectations about the church and what God can do though each of us as a witness to what Grace is all about. Pray we are members of a fellowship of people who pray together. Pray that we feel the power of prayer. Pray that it open our eyes. Pray that it fills us to overflowing. Pray God gets glory in answered and unspoken prayers that were never on the menu. Pray we realize that prayer is not about us at all…about our initiatives, actions, performance and words…no pray is about God. Pray that our faith be deepened, our prayers empowered and our lives transformed in the reality that God is the giver of good gifts. Pray we drink and eat in the promise of the Kingdom to come. Pray that each of us be blessed even though these devotionals will, for the next couple of weeks, not be on the menu.
Blessings,
John Lawson
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