Tag Archives: christian living

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The Fifth Secret You Need to Know About God’s Will

If We Trust God with Eternity, Why Do We Worry about Today?

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Ask just about any Christian if he or she trusts God to take them to heaven to live with Him forever, and you’ll get an immediate and resounding yes. So why do those same Christians – myself included – struggle to trust Him with all the stuff in between here and now and there and then?

Paying bills, making life decisions, navigating relationships, avoiding temptation – you name it, we worry about it. We fret about stuff we have no control over. We lose sleep trying to make sure we’ve thought of every contingency. We exhaust ourselves working to get just one more thing done or to make a few dollars more.

And then we say we trust God with the fate of our souls. Hmmm…..

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The Fourth Secret You Need to Know about God’s Will

Are You Using What God Has Given You?

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Panic! It’s what we do when we don’t know what to do. It’s understandable. It’s common. But it doesn’t have to happen when we don’t know what God wants us to do next.

The fourth secret in this series of posts sharing 7 secrets we need to know about God’s will is one I learned — and continue to learn — from coming face to face with uncertainty every day. My first instinctive reaction almost every time, no matter how many times God has provided and led me in the past, is to panic and try to figure it all out on my own.

Maybe I’m the only one to fall into this trap of self-reliance. But I doubt it. When we’re face to face with adversity, our worry clouds our view. Panic sets in. And we tend to miss what is right in front of us — God.

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The Third Secret You Need to Know about God’s Will

Why Being "Not Sure" May Be a Very Good Thing

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I don’t like not knowing what God wants next.  I am wired to perform at my best when I have a plan in place, a structured schedule, and plenty of margin to account for unexpected events. But my quest for certainty often presents a barrier to my relationship with God, because living by faith requires uncertainty.

If you are at all like me, you spend a lot of time and energy trying to get to a place that feels secure. I want to know where the money is coming from, what life direction I should take (or not take), and what I am forgetting to do—before it’s too late.

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You Too Can Experience the Power of Intentional Prayer

Why Multi-tasking Prayer Leaves Us Weak

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The truth is that prayer changes everything, especially you. Yet many FaithWalkers take an accidental approach to prayer rather than carve out time and space for intentional communion with God.

Person in Prayer

They pray as they go through life, sort of like grabbing whatever food is handy throughout the day. That practice may quench the hunger pangs at the moment, but it doesn’t make for a healthy diet. I call it “multitasking prayer,” and it can have disastrous results.

Like texting and driving, it is deceptively dangerous because we appear to get away with it many times before disaster actually strikes. Much research has now demonstrated that texting and driving can slow the reaction time of a driver to the same extent as if he or she were drunk.

I can’t help but think that God must hear our hurried, distracted prayers at times and wonder whether we are more than slightly inebriated.

God must hear our hurried, distracted prayers and wonder whether we are more than slightly inebriated.

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I’m sure you’ve heard the common defense for multitasking prayer: Scripture tells us to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17), keeping an attitude of nonstop prayer, as stuff comes to mind throughout the day. Yet many use this as an excuse to turn from intentional, continual prayer to a set of accidental prayers, which don’t form a full communion with God.

When that happens, we quickly become like the hiker who snacks on energy bars all day instead of pausing by the trail to prepare balanced, nutritious meals. The quick bites of fellowship with the Almighty may satisfy some immediate hunger pang, but if that’s the complete diet, your faith will soon become lean and malnourished, unfit to respond when tested.

The Power of Intentional Prayer

Imagine how your life would be different if you spent three hours every day in focused, intentional prayer.  Most of us believe we wouldn’t get much else done.

And yet here is the counterintuitive way one man described his take on focused, intentional prayer: “I have so much to do today that I will spend the first three hours in prayer.”

The man’s name was Martin Luther. As a key figure of the Reformation, he lived a story of tremendous worth. His thinking leads us to this conclusion: if you think you don’t have time to pray, that’s exactly when you know you should.

if you think you don’t have time to pray, that’s exactly when you know you should.

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Another person who accomplished great things for God, most notably helping to bring an end to the horrific slave trade of his day, was William Wilberforce. Though he seemed to be always in motion, this dynamo for justice recognized that he was too weak to do worthy work when he failed to make time to pray: “The shortening of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and faint. I have been keeping too late hours.”

Most revealing of all, Jesus himself regularly took time to step away from the crowds and hurried pace in order to pray (Mark 1:35; Luke 11:1; Hebrews 5:7). Let the weight of that truth sink in.

When God himself, “who was tempted in every way that we are, except without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), walked the earth as one of us, he considered uninterrupted seasons of prayer to be essential for his earthly journey.

The bottom line is this: the FaithWalker who longs to live a story worth telling knows it simply can’t be done without intentionally investing time for faith to find its voice in prayer.

Question: How what place does prayer have in your faith journey? What prayer tips do you have to share with other FaithWalkers? Share your thoughts by clicking here.

This post first appeared in my book A Story Worth Telling: Your Field Guide to Living an Authentic Life. Thanks to all who gave input on my recent survey. My new series begins on Monday — 7 Secrets You Need To Know about God’s Will. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Photo credit: Dingzeyu Li

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5 Questions to Gauge the Health of Your Faith

Is Your Faith a Source of Life to Others?

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How do you know if your faith is healthy or not? It’s not as if you can stick a thermometer in your soul. But Jesus gave us a way to measure the faith within us — by evaluating what flows out of us.

In John 7:37-40, we find this account of Jesus’ teaching:

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive,for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

In the days of Christ, even more so than in Western civilization today, water was the stuff of life. If you didn’t have it, life came to a halt.

Being thirsty was a far more common experience then. And yet each of us knows what it feels like to thirst for fulfillment and true soul satisfaction.

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The One Thing Every FaithWalker Must Do

And Why Each of Us Easily Qualifies to Do It

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Every Christian wants to one day hear the words, “Well, Done!”  Each FaithWalker wants to do great things for God. But most of us think we just don’t have what it takes to qualify for the Faith Hall of Fame.

We’ve all got stories we tell ourselves about why we don’t belong on the field with those “Major League Christians” we meet in the pages of Scripture. [See my post The Myth of the Minor League Christian.] It’s as if we think we must be perfect in order to qualify for walking by faith.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Thank God!

In fact, do you know the one thing every FaithWalker in Scripture seems to have had in common? Failure.

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The Myth of the Minor League Christian

Are You in the Game or Tailgating in the Parking Lot?

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When I first stepped out by faith to pursue God’s call to write, I heard many people say, “That calling is not for everyone,” as if the call to follow Christ on a faith adventure were reserved only for the Christian elite—not the rest of us who should “bloom where we’re planted” in the Christian minor leagues.

You can discover more of my story and the resistance I encountered in my book A Story Worth Telling. But the idea that there are two classes of Christ followers—the Major and Minor Leagues of Christianity—is not new.

The Apostle Paul addressed this urge to create an upper class of Christians when he said, “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” (1 Corinthians 3:5-6) The Church unintentionally reinforced this thinking with the idea of sainthood, setting up icons to commemorate ordinary Christians doing what God had called them to do. And for many centuries, everyone knew the best Christians, those most serious about following Christ, secluded themselves in monasteries. The major league faith took place behind those walls, while the rest of the rabble settled for being minor league disciples.

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5 Common Responses to a Faith Challenge

Which Way Do You Choose When the Going Gets Tough?

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It’s been said that when the going gets tough the tough get going. But let’s face it: it’s easy to say we believe until we face a faith challenge.

Only when we face a challenge do we discover what our faith is made of. Only then do we realize that growing our faith will take some work.

It might help to think of our faith challenge as a growth curve. When we first begin to step out by faith and test both ourselves and God, we’ll meet resistance.

Resistance doesn’t mean right or wrong, it just means we’re moving in a new direction. Easy doesn’t mean we have God’s green light. In fact, if we’re trying to grow our faith in response to a faith challenge, we should expect it to be difficult at first, especially early in the curve.

When I first started on the path to becoming a professional writer, nothing was easy. I mean nothing.

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8 Tips to Keep Your Faith Fit

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Do you work out? I do. Well, at least since the first of the year, I do. We all know regular physical workouts keep us physically fit and give us the sustainable energy we need to succeed.

But what about exercising our faith in God?

On my last visit to Guam, I chatted with my friend Pastor Albert Alquero of Abundant Life Church. He and his wife Judy are fellow FaithWalkers who followed God all the way to Guam many years ago. As we chatted, I shared how I didn’t want my faith to settle. I wanted to keep walking by faith after seeing God move so mightily in our lives over the last few years. I had reached a comfortable place and that had me worried. I was concerned my faith would become fat and lazy once again.

Albert nodded, understanding my concern and agreeing on the need to keep our faith fit. But after a brief pause, he asked what both of us were thinking, “So how do we do that?”

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5 Reasons We Are Quick to Imitate Others

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We cannot be authentic if we’re trying to imitate someone else. Sounds simple enough, right?

And yet our default position in life seems set to following others in order to live a story worth telling.

There’s a place for leadership – and a place for following – to a point. But if we are ever going to discover how God has wired us to succeed, we’ll need to step away from following in order to become the person God wired us to be.