Is Seeking God Reserved For Sundays Only

Friday 22 November 2013

There was a time when people attended Sunday School, went to Sunday service, attended Sunday evening and Wednesday evening services along with attending special services. People were use to going to church and a lot of their lives centered around the Word of God and God's people.

This behavior fostered a belief in the importance of a relationship with God. People leaned on their relationship with the Lord to stay on track. They knew God in good times and had an assurance of His help during bad times.

Now things have changed. The average Christian attends church 1 hour on Sunday. According to the Barna Institute, only 29% of Christians spend time reading God's word daily. We have removed prayer from the public school and out of the government. Many have even removed Him from their homes..

Pastors are not helping to promote the power of prayer and seeking God as they should either. A cross denominational survey has brought to light some very revealing statistics about the prayer lives of many pastors today. The study shows 80% of pastors spend less than 15 minutes a day in prayer and 95% of pastors do not pray regularly with their wives. If the pulpit does not focus on prayer as the point of spiritual power is it any wonder that the congregation is floundering in prayer power as well?

When we do not hear from God, it is because we have stopped talking to Him. God will not scream in our ears. He speaks as a gentleman in a soft voice for all who would hear him. When we think of conversing with God we can compare it to talking to a friend. Many times those conversations are spontaneous and vary depending on the day and how we feel. It's the same way with God. He is not looking for some cookie cutter relationship with us. He wants to talk to us each day and to relate to us based on where we are.

The Bible says "seek the Lord while He may be found". This implies that there may come a day when we cannot find the Lord even if we wanted to seek Him. People need to look for the Lord whenever they think about him. Sundays are great to focus but there are 6 other days we have as well. Look for Him everyday and make it a great one!

You Know Life's Burden - Don't Add to Theirs

Friday 15 November 2013

You know the inner burden,
That harrowing burden of life,
You know it very personally,
That feeling of anxious strife.
The next person's not so different,
If you think life's pretty tough,
It's good to extend them grace,
So their life's not so rough.

BURDENS are those struggles that follow us each day, all our lives, only that we have that short reprieve every now and then. If there isn't anything to be anxious about, we find something. Perhaps it's a case that we are free of anxiousness and we may be anxious because it's so strange.

This is not to paint a picture of a life overrun with anxiousness; but there is always a stressor that bears down making reality something of a true performance. Pity we don't always want to perform. We know the common burdens of life, almost as much as we know how much relief means, and how unfair burdens added are, it seems.

Given the knowledge we have about our own burdens, why on earth do we allow ourselves to add to others' burdens? We may see it as 'you get what you give', but that isn't a sound basis for living a good life.

Our aim should be to not add unnecessarily to others' burdens, given that we recognise the additional stress upon them. Sometimes we cannot avoid it, however. It's not as if this is asking us to be people-pleasers - to make it so the people we know don't bear any pain. But we do what we can to relieve the unnecessary burden.

WAYS OF LIGHTENING BURDENS

Rather than adding burdens we could more nobly find ways of lightening the burdens of others. These are the little things. These are those things that encourage people in very small ways; almost the smaller the better. In fact, the smallest of deeds are hardly repayable, and that's the point. Making people feel they should be repaying just adds to their burden. The idea of lightening burdens is about making them feel comfortable at receiving a blessing.