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Tuesday, May 4, 2010
8 'A's of Prayer - part 3
5)Admit-ADMIT YOUR WRONGDOING TO GOD- You give your twelve-year-old son permission to go bowling with some friends. While he’s gone, however, a neighbor stops by and mentions she saw him going into that PG13 movie that you had forbidden him to see. Later you are preparing dinner when your son comes bounding through the back door and opens the refrigerator in a search for a pre-dinner snack. You decide not to tip your hand. “So, how was bowling?” you ask casually. “Urn . . . well, good. It was fine. We had to wait a while to get a lane. But we had a good time.” “Did you beat Jimmy this time?” “Uh . . . I beat him one game out of three. He’s pretty good, you know.” Now, what’s the Number 1 thing you want from your son at this point? You just want him to admit that he went to the movie! You want him to confess that he has deceived you. You just want him to come clean. The longer he denies the truth, the deeper the hole he is digging for himself. And that is how God feels toward us. He already knows what we have done wrong! It is no secret to him. When we obfuscate and spin, when we duck and dodge, when we rationalize and split hairs, when we pretend everything’s fine when it isn’t, he’s just waiting and waiting and waiting for us to ‘fess up. Until then, we are simply lying to him once more by feigning that all’s well. Just as there’s going to be a problem between you and your son until he confesses his wrongdoing, there are going to be difficulties in your relationship with God as long as you cover up the truth by claiming everything’s fine when he already knows it isn’t."While unconfessed sin will not break our union with God, it will break our communion with God,” said Hank Hanegraaff, author of The Prayer of Jesus. In other words, failing to admit our wrongdoing won’t sever our connection to God but it definitely will introduce static into our line. Said Hanegraaff:
The concept of confession carries the acknowledgement that we stand guilty before God's bar of justice. There’s no place for self-righteousness before God. We can only develop intimacy with the Lord through prayer when we confess our need for forgiveness and contritely seek His pardon. The apostle John sums it up beautifully when he writes, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9 NIV) Confessing our sins doesn’t mean vague generalities like, “Well, God, you know I haven’t been exactly perfect.” Instead, it’s the time for painful specificity. It’s when we spell out in agonizing detail how we’ve fallen short of God’s standards. When you began confessing, the Holy Spirit would bring into your mind other sins that you had swept under the carpet and wasn’t even aware that you had committed. It felt so liberating to get those out into the open, to admit them, and to realize that God has wiped you slate clean. You hadn’t even been aware of how those sins had been weighing you down.6)Ask-ASK FOR WHAT YOU NEED FROM GOD- Once we have recalibrated our spirit by worshiping God, paid him tribute for his goodness toward us, and cleared the air by confessing our sins, then it’s finally the appropriate time to bring our requests to God. “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us,” says 1 John 5:14—15(NIV). “And if we know that he hears us---whatever we ask---we know that we have what we asked of him.” We should not shrink back in bringing our requests to our heavenly Father. Jesus told us to ask for our “daily bread,”which theologian Martin Chemnitz said “encompasses all things belonging to and necessary for the sustenance of this body and life.” It can be emotionally difficult to ask God to move in someone’s heart and yet not see immediate or dramatic results. But God’s timing is not our own, and salvation issues are complicated because of the individual’s free will. Yet no time spent in prayer is wasted. Inevitably, there is a difference inside the one who prays. Also, it will your salvation at the forefront of your mind. That made you more alert to opportunities for getting into a spiritual conversation. Praying will bring you comfort. It will remind you that weren’t alone. Our heavenly Father is listening, He cares, and He will soothe your anxieties and fears. It’s true that prayer changes us. It’s the mechanism by which we deepen our relationship with God. We may ask God to give us something because we think we need it, when in God’s wisdom he knows that the very act of praying gives us what we really need. We emerge more dependent on him, more in love with him, more in tune with his Spirit, more committed to his ways, and more tender to his leadings.
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We are a happy family in Christ who are also faithful followers of Christ!
Our zone supervisor: Pastor Edmund Tay
Our Cell Group Leader: Sister SuTing
Members:
Alexis
Belle Sng
Donnie
Eugene
Jeremy/JianYun, Jerome, Justin Quek, Justin Tan
Kimberly
Maria, Michelle
Nadine
Samuel Ng, Samuel Tng
Vivian
YuTing
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