Prayer | His Glory My Joy, a blog of Author Luana Ehrlich

Feeling Abnormal With Normal

October 3, 2011 3 comments

Every Sunday, for all of my life (yes, even as an infant), I have gone to church. It’s the normal thing for me to do. I would feel abnormal not doing so. But yesterday, as my husband and I went to church, I felt abnormal.

It wasn’t a different kind of church. It wasn’t a different time to go to church. There weren’t different songs being sung. There wasn’t a different gospel being preached.

The difference was the church we attended wasn’t the one we had been attending for 17 years. It wasn’t the church where my husband had been the senior pastor. Our normal Sunday worship experience felt abnormal because God had spoken, we had obeyed (a little reluctantly I admit), and we had retired from this church.

Making His children uncomfortable in the ordinary is one of the ways God works to make Himself known to us. Moses experienced feeling abnormal with normal when he took his sheep up the mountain to graze as he normally did and encountered an ordinary bush not being consumed by the fire that enveloped it. From that bush, Moses heard the voice of God, obeyed His commands (though not always willingly and perfectly) and came to know Him in a relationship that Scripture identified as “friends.”

For church members used to having the same pastor for 17 years, I suspect their normal seemed abnormal yesterday also. Like me, they may have found the abnormal uncomfortable, strange and, yes, fearful. What do we do with these feelings?

Moses told God his misgivings about these changes from his normal. I believe that’s the pattern God intends for us. As we lay before Him our insecurities, we can be certain of His plans for us. “’For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’” (Jeremiah 29:11).

The abnormal can be very good indeed. Moses probably thought so. What could be more abnormal than being friends with God?

Categories: Devotionals, Personal, Prayer Tags: Abnormal with God, Different church, Finding a church, Leaving a church, Moses friend of God

What Do I Pray?

August 18, 2011 2 comments

Prayer is often defined as “just talking to God.” While that is true as a simple definition, prayer is much more than talking. To be effective, as in James 5:16, “the effective prayer of a righteous man has great power,” our talking to our Heavenly Father must also be in communion with Him, must be tuned in to His way of thinking. And what better way to communicate in this way with God than to use His own words?

One day during an extremely difficult time in our lives, with multiple crisis swirling all around us, my husband, knowing I prayed for him each morning, asked me, “What are you praying for me these days?” I shared with him I was only praying one prayer over and over for both of us. It was what I called one of my Personalized Scripture Prayers, that is, the very words of God repeated back to Him. By praying in this way, I could be assured that what I was expressing to the Lord was in keeping with His own heart, was expressing His own desires when we were so uncertain of our own motives and what we needed to do.

Here’s what I was praying for my husband from Colossians 1:9-11, “Father, I pray that he may be filled with the knowledge of your will, with all wisdom and understanding so that he will walk in a manner worthy of you, to please you in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work, increasing in the knowledge of you, strengthened with all power, according to your glorious might for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience with thanksgiving.”

There are numerous passages like the one above that can be personalized and prayed back to God and can be used to “talk to God” in His own words. Let me know if you have some favorite Scriptures which you pray often to our Lord.