… I give myself to prayer.

— Psalm 109:4

All Christians need to learn how to abide in prayer. I am sure most of you have your stated times of prayer in the morning and at night, before your meals and after. The Bible says that we are to pray always. In all times, in all things, we are to pray. We should constantly be in touch with God. We are to walk with Him and talk with Him. Our last thoughts at night and our first thoughts in the morning will be of Him, as we learn to be always in prayer and thus to be dwelling in the secret place of the most High.

In the next few days, we will go through five prayers that can change our lives. Here they are:

Slay me (i.e., my old nature).
Cleanse me.
Fill me (with Your Holy Spirit).
Lead me.
Use me.

Try to pray these every day, and you will begin to notice changes.

Question to ponder:
Have you given yourself over to prayer?

Now all these things happened to them for examples. They are written as an admonition to us, upon whom the end of the ages has come.

— 1 Corinthians 10:11

Samson’s life was a great tragedy, but we learn much from a life such as his that had great potential, but went awry. In a certain way, he was a picture of Christ—a very, very imperfect picture. Christ also had His birth announced by angels. He also was consecrated unto God. He also had a great calling. His calling was also to deliver the people of God, not from the tyranny of the Philistines, but from the tyranny of all evil.

Yet Christ never violated His vows. He never compromised His consecration. He lived a spotless sinless life all of His days. Then one day in the temple of the devil—upon a Cross with outstretched arms—Christ, the greater one than Samson, pressed upon the columns that upheld the very kingdom of evil, and with a mighty push, they went down. Christ did what He came to do. He destroyed the works of Satan.

Question to ponder:
Is there more you can do to live up to your Christ-given potential?

… not of works, so that no one should boast.

— Ephesians 2:9

Many people mistakenly think they can work their way to heaven by being good. Centuries ago, a simple farmer from England indirectly laid this myth to rest. He was an old and very godly plowman and was acquainted with a young English curate who had recently started a ministry in England. Though the plowman had no education, he had been educated by the Spirit of God and the Word of God. One day, in one of their many conversations, while they were talking about the greatest hindrance to spiritual attainment and growth, the curate said that he believed the greatest hindrance to spiritual attainment was the unwillingness to surrender one’s sinful self.

Sounds reasonable, but the plowman said, “No, I think not. I think the greatest hindrance to the advancement in the spiritual faith is the unwillingness to surrender one’s righteous self.”

It is a long way from, “I am proud to stand before God and tell how I have lived my life for the betterment of mankind,” to “God have mercy upon me, a sinner.”

Question to ponder:
Have you surrendered all your self-righteousness to the Lord?

… being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

— Romans 3:24

Today there are so many people who do not even begin to understand the rudiments of Christianity and who suppose that salvation is something they earn by their own good works. They are utterly far afield. They do not know that salvation is an unearned gift—unmerited, undeserved, and unworked for. It is a gift given purely by the grace and goodness of God.

I have asked many people, “What do you think we contribute to our own salvation?” Do you know? If you don’t know, you should. Do we contribute some good works? We have none to offer for every one of our works is stained by sin. Do we contribute some faith that we work up ourselves? We have none.

What do we contribute? Only one thing. Our contribution to our salvation is just one thing. We contribute the sins that Jesus took upon Himself and for which He died.

Question to ponder:
Although Jesus paid it all, there is still one thing we can yet do—thank Him continuously. What is your response to such a great salvation?

Then, when lust has conceived, it brings forth sin; and when sin is finished, it brings forth death.

— James 1:15

Did you ever think about the high cost of unbelief in our society? Just think about what sin has done to our young people today.

Drugs, alcohol, and hard rock music—with its prevalent themes of sex, suicide, drugs, and devil worship—are all having a catastrophic affect upon the thinking, morals, and behavior of young people today. Our schools, with their secular, humanistic bent toward removing references to God and absolute morals from curriculum, contribute mightily to the powerful influences that send young people on the road to the “far country.”

My friends, weigh the difference that faith makes. I hope that when you consider the cost of secularism and humanism and unbelief, you will say, “Enough. We have had enough of this. This is an alien, godless view and we want no more of it foisted on our children. We don’t want them or us to have to pay the consequences now and in the years to come.” If we think it is bad now, what will happen when the millions of young people who are indoctrinated with these views in our schools reach maturity and get to the graduate school of unbelief?

Question to ponder:
Has unbelief ever cost you something precious in your life?

Then Joshua said, “Why have you brought trouble on us? The LORD will trouble you today.”

— Joshua 7:25

The Bible reminds us: Be sure your sins will find you out. Yet how often we seem quite sure that they won’t. I am sure Achan must have felt that in the midst of three million people God would never notice what he was doing. Yet, God ordered that the tribes be brought one by one, and it fell on Judah, and then the lot fell upon his great grandfather and then his grandfather and finally upon him. And so, as described in Joshua 7, Achan not only brought defeat upon the army of God, but he brought death upon himself. He, and his wife, and his children, and his cattle were all brought into the valley of Achor (the valley of sorrow and trouble), and there they were stoned until they were all dead. Then their corpses were burnt with fire and covered over with stones.

Therefore, as this account shows us, our sins always affect others and bring trouble upon people beyond ourselves.

Question to ponder:
Is there any sin in your life that only you and God know about? What do you plan to do about it?

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

— Genesis 1:28

God has given us the Cultural Mandate. “This is my Father’s world…I rest me in the thought,” says a familiar hymn. Yet, I am afraid that we have abandoned this world to the unbelievers, to the ungodly, to the Christ-haters. And when we see how unbelief has affected every phase of this life, we see that they have taken the world and made it into something ghastly,

Some people think that God is Lord only over our spiritual lives—but He is Lord of all. We as His people should spread His grace, His gifts, and His influence into every area of life as best as we can.

We need to fulfill the Cultural Mandate to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. We need to see Christians going into every sphere of life to have an influence upon this world for Christ, to bring His teachings and principles to bear in every phase of life. We should live so that our culture might have the face of Jesus Christ indelibly imprinted upon it. That is what needs to be done. That is our task.

Question to ponder:
What can you do to expand Christ’s influence?

Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children

— Ephesians 5:1

It has been said that we live in a time when there is a dearth of real heroes. A recent survey showed that the heroes for American youth included many sleazy celebrities. Surely, there is a need for some godly heroes in our day, and I think that George Washington fills the bill in a remarkable way. He led our troops to victory in the Revolutionary War; he superintended the writing of the Constitution; he was unanimously elected first President of the United States.

But what made him so great? It was his Christian character.

George Washington said to the Delaware Indian chiefs, “You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ.”

In 1783 Washington sent out a letter to the governors of the states saying that we can never hope to be a happy nation unless we imitate Jesus Christ: “I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection … that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do Justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.”

Question to ponder:
How would we be a happier nation if we were to imitate Jesus, the “Divine Author of our blessed Religion”?

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

— Job 38:4

A well-known Florida state legislator once introduced a bill stating that creation should be taught in our public schools as one of the possible theories concerning the origin of man along with evolution. I was very interested in the outcries that appeared in the letters to the editor sections after that happened. One writer fulminated, “Why don’t we just teach fairy tales, if we are going to teach creation?” Indeed, are they not just the same? Does not every rational person know that the Bible and the Genesis account are just fairy tales? Aren’t irrational and uneducated people the only ones who could possibly believe such obscurantist explanations?

I am absolutely confident that were I to have the privilege of confronting any of these people with the request to name a number of the scientific evidences that are set forth by creationists and then to state why they disbelieve them, that none of them would be able to name even one. My friends, this is total obscurantism. “I have made up my mind … don’t confuse me with the facts … I am in the dark and I want to stay there.”

The Bible says that men love darkness rather than the light because their deeds are evil. They hate the light and will not come to it, lest their deeds should be exposed (John 3:19-20).

As Christians, we need never fear the truth, and any honest scientific truth that is discovered is God’s truth.

Question to ponder:
What does it matter that God is the Creator of all things seen and unseen?

Then He said to them, “Take heed and beware of covetousness. For a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

— Luke 12:15

What is covetousness? It is the inordinate desire for the things of the world. The Bible tells us that we must, indeed, try to provide the things needed by our family. In fact, the Scripture says that if any man does not provide for his own household, he is worse than an infidel and has denied the faith. The Scripture also tells us to go to the ant that gathers in the summer to provide for the winter. But covetousness goes beyond providing for the needs of our family. It is the attitude of being provident run amuck, gone loose. It is seeking to gather more unto oneself.

Covetousness has been called the sin that no one commits. One confessor declared that in fifty years of hearing the confessions of people, no one had ever confessed to committing this sin. A minister declared that in decades of leading prayer meetings where many sins were confessed, this sin was never heard on anyone’s lips.

The lust for more and more is ever present, and we must constantly guard against it. When you find yourself lusting after things that God has not given you, confess it as a sin, and at the same time, bring your earnest needs and supplications before Him.

Question to ponder:
How can you guard your heart today against covetousness?