Embrace solitude.

Prayer that becomes a lifestyle.

In our modern world, it’s almost impossible to slow down from the hurried pace of everyday life if we are not truly intentional about doing it. We find it hard if not almost unbearable to just sit still, and if we ever have to wait somewhere- we find something to do immediately. The world we live in has conditioned us to always be on the go. Our culture is constantly luring us into accumulating more and more things in our frantic search for meaning. Instead of simplifying our life; we complicate it, all the while hoping that the extra things will fill the deep void within us. I say “we” and not “the world” because it seems to me that Christians are increasingly following the pattern of this world. Solitude is almost unheard of amidst Christians, and prayer is almost extinct from our lives as a result. Silence makes us uncomfortable because it’s in the quiet and the stillness that we hear the desperate voice of our soul crying out to us in anguish. We are afraid of facing the true condition of our heart, so we try to silence the voice that screams out to us by drowning it in the noise of life. Some of us have even become deaf to our truest self. As Christians, we simply cannot live without prayer. A life without prayer starves your spirit and cripples your faith. Jesus knew just how important prayer is and if you read the gospels carefully, you’ll notice that He treasured prayer and was intentional about seeking the refreshment that solitude alone can bring. Mark 1:35 (ESV) says, “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.” Notice the importance of the word “desolate.” Jesus didn’t go anywhere to pray, he sought a place that was isolated, free of distractions and away from the noise of life. He embraced the beauty of solitude because he understood that God speaks to us when we are quiet enough to hear Him. If Jesus needed prayer, how much more do we? Jesus rose “very early in the morning” in order to pray, and we must start our day with prayer if we want to follow His example. In Ephesians 6, after Paul describes the whole armor of God, he ends by urging us to be “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication” (Ephesians 6:18a). I believe Paul placed prayer at the end on purpose because he wanted to draw our attention to the fact that the armor of God is ineffective without prayer. If we want to be victorious in the spiritual battles of our lives, we must be people of prayer. We are not to pray once or twice and give up if nothing happens, but we are to pray “at all times.” Perseverance is the key to leading a life of prayer. One important aspect of perseverant prayer is praying “in the Spirit.” Many times, we pray for something that is not in the will of God and we get frustrated when God doesn’t answer despite our stubborn attempts of convincing Him that He needs to answer our prayer. When our prayers flow out of our flesh instead of God’s Spirit, it’s not that God doesn’t hear our prayers; He does, but He chooses not to answer them for our own good. However, God wants us to pray because prayer is effective: “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him” (1 John 5:14-15). Ultimately, prayer should not be about asking but about knowing the heart of a God who longs to hear us because He cares about every detail of our lives. As we allow God to teach us how to treasure solitude, we will find that the voice of our desperate soul is not the only voice we will hear. Authentic prayer causes us to hear the voice of God, as He gently and lovingly encourages, corrects, and quiets us. His voice brings life! Is prayer a part of your life? Do you set aside time every day for prayer? You might not always be able to go to a solitary place in nature to pray, but you can find a small, quiet space in your home or anywhere else- where you can talk to God daily. The more you will devote yourself to prayer, the more you will discover that prayer alone can give depth, vitality, and meaning to your relationship with God. A life without prayer is a life without God.

Love letter.

 God’s heart burns with passion for you.

Beloved, you let so many things distract you from seeking Me. I watch you from the time that you open your eyes in the morning to the time when you close them in exhaustion. I watch you even through the night and think about the glorious plans that I have for your life. I desire to give you dreams as you sleep, but your thoughts and worries take over your mind and you either dream of things that are not from Me, or you don’t dream at all. I wish I could show you something, even the smallest glimpse of what I have for you might make you trust Me, desire me. I wait for you as you awake and I long for you to speak to Me. I can give you the wisdom you need as you search frantically for truth in a world that is empty. I have everything you need, yet you rush through your morning like a mad man. Oh, beloved. If only you knew that if you rose up early to spend time with Me, I would multiply your time and you would have a different outcome to your day. But no, you choose to do things on your own. Beloved, it hurts so much to see you live life so blindly! You need to understand that you can’t see the reality of your spirit without My help. Everything springs up from the Spirit, and if your inner life is not overflowing and it lacks- your outward life will reflect that. My child, you wonder why life is so hard and confusing and you become angry with Me for your difficulties, yet you fail to understand the most important thing. I don’t like bringing hardship into your life because I suffer along with you, but I know that this is the only way for Me to get your attention. Sadly, you turn away from Me even more instead of seeking Me and running towards Me. You listen to the voice of the enemy and the voice of your deceitful heart, but I speak to you also and I do it often. It hurts Me so much to feel your rejection. You are not paying attention to Me at all! I want to bless you and give you abundance of life, but I cannot do so unless you are fully Mine. Please, seek me! THERE IS SO MUCH AT STAKE. Can’t you see how much you need Me? When did you forget that I am your first love? When did you forget that you promised to serve Me and to love Me all your days? You’ve forgotten everything I’ve done for you so quickly! Your heart is so absent during the limited amount of time you spend with Me! I watch you open My Word out of obligation and routine. You don’t even speak to Me enough in prayer! You don’t realize that there are things I desire for you to understand, and you can only do so by spending time with Me. I want you to read My Word with excitement and live it out that you may find life and peace. If only you believed how powerful My Word really is and that it is alive- you would hold it in your hands for the treasure that it is and you would never want to put it down! Beloved, if only you made time for Me! Did it ever occur to you that I long to hear your voice? I long for us to speak as someone longs to hear the voice of their lover. Will you make time for me and not just let days pass you by without seeking Me? Yes, the world you live in is fast and restless, but I made your heart for rest and fulfillment. YOU NEED ME. Draw near to Me! Before you’ll make the first step in getting close, I’ll be closer to you than ever before! There are things I need you to change that I may replace them with My Truth and righteousness, but you need me in order to know what you need to do. Beloved, life is meant to be challenging, yet breath-taking at the same time and I want you to experience the thrill of hope as I help you overcome this world. Even as I help you overcome yourself. Only through Me you can overcome! My mercy has no end and My love for you is bigger than the sky you see above and all around you. I’ll be waiting. Every single day of your life, but don’t make the tragic mistake of not coming to Me now! You’re robbing yourself of so much. I DON’T WANT YOU TO MISS OUT ON LIFE. There is a love story waiting for you! Come..I LOVE YOU.

Are you unhappy?

Complete surrender is the key to finding the life you’ve been looking for.

I can vividly remember the day when I experienced salvation. The day when I died to myself and was resurrected to life in Christ Jesus. The day when I lost my life in order to find it. It was the day when the old was made new, completely new! On that day, I realized how filthy I was and how much I needed His salvation. I needed to be forgiven, to feel the freedom that comes from it surging through my veins! Oh, how beautiful that day was! To have the weight of the sin I was carrying taken off my shoulders!!! To surrender all that I was to the One who carried the cross in my place and who was made sin so that I might become His righteousness! I could have never done on my own what Christ did for me on that cross! I will never be able to fully understand the beauty and mystery of it and I want to keep the memory close to my heart forever! This life is like an ocean, with waves hitting against the shore of our heart in magnificent force. Sometimes it’s really easy to get caught up in the midst of it all; to overlook what Christ has done on our behalf and the life that we found in Him. It was through complete surrender that we found life in the first place, yet we don’t live lives completely surrendered to Christ anymore. The world around us has a way of making us “numb” to the effect of the cross. It’s not that the cross is of no effect anymore, because the power of it is stronger than anything else in this world! It’s just that we often become part of the world instead of letting God change the world through us. I’ve noticed that we can become a little too “comfortable” in our salvation and instead of living in it every day of our lives, we can so easily let sin creep in. This can take the form of a worldly mindset that shouts to us and begs us to focus all our attention and time on us instead of on Christ and what He wants to do in our lives. Instead of conforming ourselves to the image of Christ, we tend to conform ourselves to the image of this world. I’ve seen this happen in my own life and it happens in a very subtle way. If we don’t immerse ourselves in the Word of God and spend time in His presence through prayer, how can we constantly renew our hearts and minds in order to allow the Spirit of God to lead us on the path that we should follow? We wonder why we don’t feel as close to God as we used to feel in the beginning. Our focus has shifted. It used to be God, but now it’s become so many other things. We try to fit God in our lives, instead of giving Him full control and building our lives around Him. He is not our first love anymore. He just isn’t! Look at the way we spend our time and what consumes us. Are we devoted to God or ourselves? Are we starving our flesh or are we feeding it? If we feed our sinful nature, we starve the spirit; it’s just the way it works. When we sin, do we confess our sins and repent of them while turning away or do we let sin over sin accumulate in our lives until our sensitivity to the truth fades more and more? Do we allow Christ to be Lord over our hearts or are we serving our own desires and ambitions? We need to let Him renew our hearts and minds. Like a book that’s been long-forgotten on an old library shelf, so have we forgotten about our hearts and what the finger of God wrote on the pages of our life. We have forgotten that the hands of the One who wrote the story of the universe picked up the old and dusty book of our lives and with a gentle blow He dusted us off of our sinfulness and filled us with life. He erased everything and rewrote the story of our life. The pages of our heart became white and new. God wants to keep it that way. Let’s allow God to make our hearts new and pure again! There is nothing in this life that is as strong and powerful as the power of Christ to forgive sin and make everything new! God longs to be close to you and He’s been waiting for you to surrender your heart completely to Him in the same way that you surrendered when you first accepted Christ as Lord over your life. You found your life by losing it and the true Christian life is lived in a constant and complete abandon to God. We are focused on so many different things, when our sole focus should be our God! We try to make life work on our own and become so frustrated when we find out that we can’t make it work, yet we still don’t realize that everything we need will be given to us if we seek Him FIRST- with our whole heart. Give God everything! Your time, energy, dreams, all that you are! Life, freedom, fullness, blessing, joy, peace, stability, balance, wholeness, and true fulfillment will be yours.

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

Matthew 6:33 (NLT)