This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 1:42 pm and is filed under All, Christian Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I wrote a number of posts in the past that I never published. This is one of them. I didn’t want the details like Boot Camp to confuse anyone.
One of my favorite things in life is when people experience the presence of God for the first time in prayer. If you know me very well then you that I am burdened for people who know a lot about God, but don’t know God very well. Matt Chandler preached a great sermon about this. This can run the gammit from crazy legalistic rule followers to serious grace abusers. Either side is really sad. I love when people really connnect with the living God during worship and prayer and all the sudden they feel like their world is completely changed. A lot of the Boot Camp students here are experiencing that right now. They seek after the Lord and the find Him, it almost sounds like a scripture or something.
It is humorous in life how we interpret everything through our culture and experiences. No matter how much we want to be “all about what the Bible says” we are goign to struggle with this. A good example for me was when I would read biographies of great Christians. I would read how they prayed 12 hours a day and God moved mightily in these revivals. Well my experiencse in prayer for the most part had been boring, so I assumed these guys were just bored for like 12 hours. I wish the biographers had written “and they enjoyed it” after some of these stories.
To be honest, a lot of my time spent with the Lord were incredible and amazing, but not always. That was really frustrating. I just assumed the problem was with my sin and/or that Jesus didn’t like me that much. That whole Hebrews “they must believe He is and that He is a rewarder of those that deligently seek Him” thing seemed like an after death sort of thing. One time I was at a prayer meeting that was rather lifeless and the guy leading prayed to end us “God you are worth an hour and a half of hard prayer.” I wanted to yell “ITS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SO HARD!” I didn’t, it wasn’t really his fault. He didn’t know any better.
It wasn’t until my friend Chad started pray meetings at his house every Wednesday night that I learned a lot of the whys and hows of prayer. You can read all the books you like, but you are going to have learn this stuff through experience. You are probably wearing the glasses of “boy howdy prayer can be boring”, but you need to throw those off and remember again that you can encounter the living God.
