Sometimes, I wish I were Mother Theresa

Praying with my mother
We can’t all pray all the time all by ourselves. Sometimes, it’s difficult to pray. What do we ask of God? It seems that we’ve been asking for the same thing, over and over again. And yet there are more important concerns which God impresses upon us. My mother and I were praying and God reminds us of every other person other than us. We pray for them by name and it seems that God is pouring out his love for these people and they become the burden of our hearts, too.

Church Worship
Tozer said that we’ve lost the art of worship. We sing about love but we don’t love. We raise our fist against injustice but we aren’t praying for the people of this land. Worship, according to Tozer, does not consist mainly of singing in church. One pastor asked me once: “Why does your church (the church I attended then) calls its service the ‘praise and worship service’ as if praise is one thing, and worship is another? You will say it’s a singular subject and not two subjects that this terms refer to. In fact they go together, praise is worship and worship is praise. To acknowledge God as Lord and to submit to Him in a lifestyle of faith is worship. But who can boast of a perfectly lived lifestyle of worship? I was not asleep in church this morning, but I wasn’t worshiping either. I was listening, though, intently, to the words in 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, “faith, hope, love, and the greatest of these, is love.”

Praying for missionaries
They look straight at me as I turn my head to my right, to the filing cabinet where their pictures are posted. How come I am not a missionary? Do missionaries have more love for lost souls than non-missionaries do? Are they stronger? More filled with the Holy Spirit? Or less sinful? I stare at them and remember their prayer requests. Sometimes, even with the pictures posted, and with all the staring, I still forget to pray.

Reaching out to the “lost”
If “the greatest of these is love” the most difficult is also this: love and compassion. Almost key words to a fault, these are what we often lack as we preach, or teach, or merely quote the Word of God. Paul said, "What if i could speak all languages of humans and of angels? If I did not love others, I would be nothing more than a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. What if I could prophesy and understand all secrets and all knowledge? And what if I had faith that moved mountains? I would be nothing, unless I loved others. What if I gave away all that I owned and let myself be burned alive? I would gain nothing, unless I loved others...."

Generosity
I know somebody. She says she found the secret to success – tithing. But why is success the end goal? Maybe it depends on our definition of success. Love for God is the utmost reason why we tithe. We ought to thank Him from the depths of our being even for creating us at all. We sometimes fail to tithe, because we are still growing in love. We maybe pursuing a different "growth map" though. In which case, let's not use tithing as one of our "ladders to success."

Praying for the Sick
A pastor visits a woman and asks for her prayer request. She says she wants to be healed. The pastor is not convinced that this should be the prayer, so he angles the prayer in a way that definitely did not pray the only prayer requested.

Jesus asked a blind man, “What do you want?” The blind man says, “Lord I want to see.” Jesus gets mud, touches the man’s eye and the man begins to see the trees. Four men lowered their friend through the roof of a house because they couldn’t pass through the door. Jesus sees their faith. He says to the man they lowered on the roof, “Get up…walk.” A woman bleeding for twelve years touches Jesus' clothes. She said to herself, "If I can just touch His clothes i will get well. As soon as she touched them, her bleeding stopped, and she knew she was well." Then Jesus asked, “Who touched my clothes?” His apostles said, “Look at all these people crowding around you. How can you ask who touched you?” But Jesus turned to see who touched Him. He says to her, "You are healed and you will no longer be in pain."


Nothing is impossible with God. So why do we often pray only for the possible?