The Power of Prayer, Part 3

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Some thoughts about prayer 

in considerations surrounding this incident described in Part 1 and 2.

Reading Part 1 and Part 2 of the Power of Prayer will make these comments more meaningful.  If you have not read “The Power of Prayer” click these links:

Click here for>> The Power of Prayer Part 1

The Power of Prayer Part 2

1.    In the writing “The Power of Prayer” there was an event of seeing soldiers with their rifles on their shoulders marching to the firing range.  This was a most fortuitous event leading to an answer to my problem and some might say a coincidence.  However, with God, there are no coincidences.  He is creative and just as a parent, wants to help His children.  God is not in the business of making things easy for His children and this is a failing of parents in their desire to make life better for their children than they had.  God will provide, supply, and see to our needs but sometimes you have to give up, look up, and open up your mind for His solution, or you just might not recognize it. 
For the longest time after that Friday morning of May 1972, I thought the idea of a gun sight to solve my navigation problem was my idea.  When in January of 2009 I began to earnestly pray often everyday, it was then I began to think otherwise about everything about accomplishments in my life.  At the very least, God gave me life, God gave me eyes to see, God gave me this brain to think, and God puts ideas in my head to follow through on.  God gives us ideas to follow through on and do His work.  The difficult part is our work, our following through on what He gives us to do.
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2.    Heavy emotional events in our lives requiring solutions often come in profoundly low spiritual moments.  It is then we are equally more open to listening and confessing we are helpless, useless, and without hope.   I am thankful for perhaps the first moment in my life I truly felt hopeless and I submitted to asking for His help.

It is when:

we in that helplessness we submit ourselves to His grace,

in our acknowledgement of helplessness and in His grace we

     become our greatest in the Kingdom,

when we acknowledge that we are helpless to solve our 

     problems that we are more ready to 

    clearly open our hearts to Him,

and we are humbly in acceptance of His will, then

     it is in these spiritually low and “poor in spirit’ conditions

     we are most ready to receive the abundant Grace 

     of His solutions in His kingdom; and

he will provide abundant solutions, 

often just barely on time. 

God wants for us to have hope, faith, and patience; He will take care of consequences.  He did with Abraham, He did it with Moses and King David, He did it with the Jews of Jesus, Martin Luther, and others; and, He will do it with you.  

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3.    Parental guidance and living their faith all their life led me to remaining in church.  Even when I did not seem to be spiritually fed, I continued my practice of going to church.
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4.    In and through your faith, in your prayers focus your concern on others and pray more for them rather than yourself.  You will find your concerns diminish and your sinful worry far less intrusive in your life.  Just as it did for me, humble prayer will open your mind to solutions.  Just remember, your solutions to important projects are often inspirations within you but not of or from you.
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5.    In my prayers in those days of war, I found my humble prayers the most powerful when I prayed to be in God's will.  I learned to end my prayers just like Jesus did, "Not my will, but your will be done."  Pray everyday for God to show you His Plan, His Will, and His Way for your life.  Pray for the Holy Spirit to provide you the guidance to recognize what God has for you.
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6.    Asking God to show me the solution was a humble moment and as like most people, we humans like to do things for ourselves.  I firmly believed and submitted to God that the only way this airdrop problem would be solved was for God to show me.   The “show me” came in the form of a question concerning the rifle carrying soldiers.  I firmly believe my knowledge and experience initiated the details of the solution, but it was the inspiration of the question that caused me to realize that solution.  Man can do things, God inspires great things.
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7.    Inspired solutions can come in the form of a question as it was with me.  The sad part, I did not fully realize until many years later that the question was truly an inspirational event.  I prayed for God to show me a solution and His answer was by putting a question in my mind the next day.  It was a question I thought came from within me.  When the Holy Spirit inspires, it is up to us to respond and recognize the inspirations come not from within ourselves but from the Holy Spirit.  This is hard to accept, deal with, and incorporate into our thinking as society teaches us to depend on ourselves.  Self-dependence and self-confidence is a myth perpetrated by society through selling books, videos, and other assortment of self-help instructions.   True confidence comes in our dependence on the Lord and through the Guidance of the Holy Spirit.
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8.    A result of prayer beyond the outcome of the request is the peace of mind that comes through humble submissive prayer.  On this and other occasions of great stress, my experience, my witness, my Godly realization is that my stress level is reduced and clarity in thinking is enhanced through prayer.  I have learned too, that there is scientific evidence in the studies of the activity of the brain during prayer that bears this to be true.

Thanks be to God

lonnie (c)

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lonnie

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