Day 6 - 40 Days of Prayer: Following In His Steps

Nov. 19 Matthew 19:16-30 (What, if Jesus asked you to get rid of, would be difficult for you to do? Why is that so? )

Day 5 - 40 Days of Prayer: Following In His Steps

Nov. 18 Matthew 10:32-39 (Ask God to strengthen your love for Him.)

Day 4 - 40 Days of Prayer: Following In His Steps

Nov. 17 Luke 14:25-33 (Have you counted the cost of being a follower of Jesus? What has it cost you so far? What do you think it might cost you in the future? Ask God for the willingness & strength to pay the price.)

From the world’s standpoint, true Christianity continues to be eccentric…
Even the language of the New Testament to describe the Christian life sounds exaggerated to everyone except those who have experienced a new life.
-Prentice A. Meador, Jr.

Day 3 - 40 Days of Prayer: Following In His Steps

Nov. 16 2 John 1:6 - And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.

Day 2 - 40 Days of Prayer: Following In His Steps

Nov. 15 Colossians 3:1-17 (Do you remember the life you lived before you began to follow Jesus? Have you abandoned that life? Fully?)

40 Days of Prayer: Following in His Steps

If we walk in the light, as he is in the light
we have fellowship with one another,
and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.
1 John 1:7

In the next 40 days I want to challenge you to set aside some time each day where you can be alone and undisturbed with God for a time of prayer, scripture reading and reflection. The focus for these next 40 days will be to strengthen our commitment to Christ. Following Christ requires a total reorientation of our will to His. Through these readings, meditations, and prayer, I hope that each of us will examine ourselves to see any areas where we may not have been fully devoted to Christ. The first and most important command Jesus gave to each of us is His simple invitation: "Come follow me" (Matthew 4:19). Accept His invitation to follow Him, fully trusting in his love and power to enable you to give yourself completely to Him.

Be sure to read each daily scripture first; listening to what God is saying to you in that passage. Then ask yourself the hard questions about how you are or are not living the truth revealed in these verses. Lastly spend time in prayer and meditation about your relationship as a follower of Christ, asking God's help to become a more fully devoted follower.

Day 1 - Nov. 14 1 Peter 2:21-23 To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.

Simple Isn't Necessarily Easy

And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. Mark 9:43

The movie title is simply, “127 Hours”, and premiered at the Telluride Film Festival several weeks ago. It is the story of Aron Ralston’s accident while hiking alone in 2003. His right arm was pinned beneath an 800-pound boulder. His water bottle was empty. A rescue crew was unlikely to spot him in the narrow slit of Utah’s Bluejohn Canyon. So after 5 days of being trapped, Aron Ralston took out his pocketknife and amputated his arm below the elbow. He then rigged anchors into the cliff, fixed a rope and rappelled 60 feet to the canyon floor. Bleeding heavily through a tourniquet, Ralston began to hike. He had walked about five miles when a helicopter search team found him.

When that story first broke, the question that everyone had to ask was, “how could someone do that?” There’s no doubt that Aron Ralston had ‘true grit.” But then we all reformed the question, “Would I have been able to do that?”

When we stand back and analyze the situation objectively, it is not difficult to reach the conclusion that the only way to save his life was to do what he did. That’s the simple part. But the actual execution of that conclusion – well that’s the difficult part.

That’s often the way life is. There are some conclusions in life that are simple to reach: I need to loose weight, I need to repent, I need to forgive, I need to pray more, read my Bible every day, I need to treat my family better, and on the list goes. We know what we need to do. That’s simple. Doing them is another story. It’s not easy to loose weight. It’s not easy to repent and stop doing sinful things. It’s not easy to forgive others when they hurt you. It’s not easy to reprioritize our schedule to make time for prayer and Bible reading. It’s not easy to become the husband, father, wife, mother, etc. that I know I need to be.

There may be many reasons why we find it difficult to change our life. Maybe it’s because we’re just not desperate enough yet. Maybe it’s because we aren’t yet faced with the terrible consequences of our situation that we’re not willing to do the hard work that needs to be done. Think about your life – in all aspects, in your relationship to self, to others, to creation, and to God, where are you stuck? What do you need to do to get free and begin living again? Knowing what to do may be the easy part. Doing it will be hard - but it is only in the doing of the hard work that we can overcome being trapped between a rock and a hard place.

Aron Ralston finally reached a state of desperation that moved him to do something to save his life. He found the strength to do the hard thing. Are you willing to do the hard thing to save your spiritual life? Simple-yes; Easy-no, but worth it.

Father of creation, so often I go off on my own, like Aron Ralston did and find myself in trouble. I know you have the power to rescue me from my own weakness and stupidity, but I also believe you want me to take a step of faith and sever the ties that keep me from fully following you. Give me the strength to make those hard choices and to live for you.