However, I have not yet seen elsewhere the idea of applying the "prayer calendar" idea to Paul's exhortation in the Bible in his second letter to Timothy to raise up prayer "for kings and all those in authority." The key idea being how to implement that word, "all." We in America have an extremely complex governmental system. The more that I hear about how dissatisfied Americans are with the workings of Federal, state, county, and municipal executive and judicial and bureaucratic personnel, the more I believe we need to be praying about and for these people if we wish their decisions and actions to be influenced in more godly directions. I have heard many times how prayer needs to be specific to be effective. This is my contribution towards an effective application, but it needs to be used to do that.
The idea of a "prayer calendar" is itself not new. I don't claim for a minute I invented it. It is a concept used by Catholics, evangelicals, even by Islam, There are too many search results to view all of them.
However, I have not yet seen elsewhere the idea of applying the "prayer calendar" idea to Paul's exhortation in the Bible in his second letter to Timothy to raise up prayer "for kings and all those in authority." The key idea being how to implement that word, "all." We in America have an extremely complex governmental system. The more that I hear about how dissatisfied Americans are with the workings of Federal, state, county, and municipal executive and judicial and bureaucratic personnel, the more I believe we need to be praying about and for these people if we wish their decisions and actions to be influenced in more godly directions. I have heard many times how prayer needs to be specific to be effective. This is my contribution towards an effective application, but it needs to be used to do that.
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When I became a Christian, soon after graduating from college (the first time), I really wondered about the whole concept of having an active relationship with God through Jesus Christ. I believed what the Bible said about the Holy Spirit coming to be within me. (I still do.) That just raised new questions, most of which could be summed up as: how will it work?
I was very concerned about knowing how I was supposed to communicate with God's Spirit. Just how was this interface going to operate? I wasn't worried about whether God would know about things. Thanks to the 139th Psalm, I knew He would know things before I could tell him. I was more concerned about how I would coexist with the Spirit. How would it happen? Would I receive thoughts from Him? Feel the compulsion to do certain things? How would I know if He were working through me, compared to my actions just being my own? Other questions existed as well. Learning how this relationship works, even with information from Scripture, has still involved trial and error. As is true of most people, my trials most often came from my errors. But I believe the most important thing that I've learned is this: not to try too hard to detect what the Holy Spirit is doing. I've found that He does His best work when I'm paying attention to what I'm doing and not watching Him. This is subject (of course) to the usual guidelines: He will never act or move me to act in a way that would contradict Scripture. What He does, or does through me, will usually end up producing the "fruit of the Spirit": love, joy, peace, longsuffering, and self-control. In the last analysis, the Holy Spirit is God, just as much as the Father is and the Son is. He is not giving up control. Sometimes He will wait until we're not looking before He acts. |
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