40 Days of Prayer, Day 23
A special prayer request for today for the church…We need workers for AWANA. Please pray that the God of the harvest will send workers into the harvest. We need another five or six individuals who can give us even just 1 hour on Wednesday evenings to help kids memorize the Scripture. We had 130 kids for the first night of AWANA. What an incredible responsibility to be entrusted with so many young hearts and minds. Pray for them as we encourage them on their spiritual journey to know God through faith in Christ and to follow Him. God bless you on this Monday morning. In Christ, Daniel
Day 23, Monday, September 12
(NLT) “9 How can a young person stay pure? By obeying your word. 10I have tried hard to find you—don’t let me wander from your commands. 11I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. 12I praise you, O Lord; teach me your decrees. 13I have recited aloud all the regulations you have given us. 14I have rejoiced in your laws as much as in riches. 15I will study your commandments and reflect on your ways. 16I will delight in your decrees and not forget your word.”
Delighting in the Word of God
Often times children weary of the boundaries provided by parents and teachers. As a young person, rules are often treated as a necessary evil, at best. This is not just a youthful problem. A call to obedience causes many of us to recoil. It seems that the loss of freedom, the loss of the freedom to choice whatever I wish to do and whenever I wish to do it, can create a rebellious heart. Instead of loving our parents, teachers, police and other authorities in our lives, we treat them and their rules with distain. The same is true at times of our attitude toward God. There is no greater authority in our lives than God Himself. He communicates His authority through the scripture. For many people, they instinctively reject His authority and hate both the law and Law Giver. Not so for this psalmist. He says, “I delight in your decrees.” Elsewhere in Psalm 119 he says, “O how I love Your law. It is my meditation all the day.” (Psalm 119:97)
A half-hearted submission to the Bible will never get us the purity of life promised in this Psalm. Reading, studying and even memorizing are good, but not enough to bring corrective changes to our behavior. We must love God by loving His law. When we love God and His law our attitudes change and we seek to read, study, memorize and follow what He says in His law. A love for the Law of God is an expression of our love for God as the Law Giver. We cannot separate the person of God from His law. We cannot separate the character of God from His standards communicated in the Bible. John says it this way in I John 5:2-3, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.” John provides us a New Testament version of this psalm. “I delight in your decrees.” “Oh how I love Your law.” From Psalm 119. “His commandments are not a burden.” From I John. An external observance of the law without the heart engaged is not full obedience. Obedience transcends the external down to the attitude of the follower of the law.
Prayer Focus
O How we love Your Word! You have so graciously granted it to reveal Yourself to us. You have also granted Your Word to us to protect us from temptations. Please give me a pure heart. Help me to submit my heart to You and Your law. Amen.
From Bunyan’s The Acceptable Sacrifice
The broken-hearted smell what others cannot scent. Alas! sin never smelled so to any man alive as it smells to the broken-hearted. You know wounds will stink: but [there is] no stink like that of sin to the broken-hearted man. His own sins stink, and so does the sins of all the world to him. Sin has the worst of smells; however, some men like it (Psa 38:5). But none are offended with the scent thereof but God and the broken-hearted sinner. 'My wounds stink, and are corrupt, ' he says, both in God's nostrils and mine own. But, alas! who smells the stink of sin? None of the carnal world; they, like carrion-crows, seek it, love it, and eat it as the child eats bread. 'They eat up the sin of my people, ' God says, 'and they set their heart on their iniquity' (Hosea 4:8). This, I say, they do, because they do not smell the nauseous scent of sin. You know, that what is nauseous to the smell cannot be palatable to the taste. The broken-hearted man doth find that sin is nauseous, and therefore cries out it stinks. They also think at times the smell of fire, of fire and brimstone, is upon them, they are so sensible of the wages due to sin.