RTTBROS

Water From the Rock #RTTBROS #Nightlight

"Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." — Proverbs 3:5-6

I want to tell you about a man who dug a well on a tropical island while his neighbors thought he had lost his mind. And when the water came up, they concluded he must be a god.

His name was John G. Paton, and when he arrived on the island of Aniwa in the South Pacific in the 1860s, the people there were cannibals. Literally. And everybody back home in Scotland knew it. When Paton announced he was going as a missionary to the New Hebrides islands, a well-meaning church elder grabbed him by the arm and said, "The cannibals! You will be eaten by cannibals!" Paton looked at the man calmly and replied that his body would be eaten by worms in the grave soon enough anyway, and it made little difference whether it was worms or cannibals, as long as he was found faithful to Christ.

That is a man who had settled something on the inside.

Now, Aniwa had no fresh water. The islanders depended entirely on rain, and they were skeptical that anything useful could possibly come from the ground beneath their feet. Paton told them he was going to dig a well and find fresh water. They thought he was either deluded or dangerous. He dug down, and down, and down in the tropical heat, day after day. And then one morning, fresh water bubbled up from the coral ground of that island, something that had never happened in living memory.

The people of Aniwa stood there with their mouths open. They called it a miracle. And through that well, a door swung open for the gospel that changed the entire island. Within fifteen years, the whole of Aniwa had come to faith in Jesus Christ. Paton later wrote, with tears, that he had claimed Aniwa for Jesus, and that Aniwa now worshipped at the Savior's feet.

History is just HIS story.

Here is what I have had to learn over these many years. God will sometimes ask you to dig where nobody thinks there is any water. To trust Him in a direction that looks foolish to everyone watching. That is not the absence of wisdom. That is Proverbs 3:5 with a shovel in its hands, "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding."

What is God asking you to dig into today, that looks impossible to everyone around you? Maybe it is time to pick up your shovel.

Let's pray: Father, give us the courage of men and women like John Paton, who trusted You past the point where their own understanding ran out. When You call us to dig, help us dig. In Jesus' name, Amen.

#Faith #Missions #TrustGod #ChristianLiving #DailyDevotion #Perseverance #BiblicalWisdom #RTTBROS #Nightlight

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God Allows #RTTBROS #RTTBROS #Legacy #Problems #Hurt

Covered in Prayer #RTTBROS #Nightlight #parenting #Legacy #blessing

Prison To Pulpit #RTTBROS #Nightlight #prayer #Problems #Hurt

Words That Outlasted Empires #RTTBROS #Nightlight

"The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace."— Numbers 6:24-26

You know, sometimes God does something so remarkable that it just stops you in your tracks and makes you shake your head in wonder.

Back in 1979, an archaeologist named Gabriel Barkay was excavating a series of ancient burial caves just southwest of Jerusalem. His team figured the tombs had been picked clean by looters centuries before, and honestly, they weren't expecting much. But then a thirteen-year-old volunteer started poking around the floor of one of those caves with a stick, and that stick found a crack, and that crack led to a hidden chamber that every looter for a thousand years had walked right past without knowing it was there.

Inside that little hidden room, tucked away like a secret God had been keeping, were two tiny silver scrolls, rolled up so small they looked like cigarette butts. They were so fragile it took the Israel Museum three full years just to figure out how to unroll them without turning them to dust.

And when they finally opened those scrolls, they found words. Words scratched into ancient silver in a script 2,600 years old. Words from the time of the prophet Jeremiah and the First Temple. The oldest known portion of the Bible ever discovered. And do you know what those words were? The Priestly Blessing from Numbers chapter six:

"The LORD bless thee, and keep thee."

Friend, that blessing was being spoken over God's people before the Babylonians came. Before Rome rose and fell. Before the Middle Ages, before the Reformation, before two World Wars. And it is still true this very moment.

Here's what hit me about this. Those scrolls were worn as amulets, meant to carry the blessing of God with them wherever they went, even into death. And isn't that exactly what God's Word does? It goes with us into every dark place, every uncertain cave, every moment when the world feels like it has been picked clean and there's nothing left.

History is just HIS story, and He has been speaking this blessing over His children for a very long time.

"The LORD bless thee, and keep thee." He hasn't stopped saying it. He's saying it over you today.

Let's pray: Father, thank You that Your Word has outlasted every empire and every enemy. Thank You that the same blessing You spoke over Your people 2,600 years ago still covers us today. Help us to rest in the fact that You are keeping us, right now, today. In Jesus' name, Amen.

#Faith #BibleHistory #GodsWord #Archaeology #DailyDevotion #ChristianLiving #RTTBROS #Nightlight

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Problem Of Calluses #Nightlight #RTTBROS #Heart #Hurt #Problems

When God Answers #RTTBROS #Nightlight

"If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you." — John 15:7

You know, I think one of the most honest struggles in the Christian life is prayer that feels like it's just bouncing off the ceiling. We pray, and then we wait, and then we wonder. Did anybody hear that? Is anybody home?

I ran across something from the life of a man named Dr. Burns Thomson, a Scottish physician and missionary who lived in the 1800s. When he was a young student, he and a close friend made an agreement to pray together for specific things, very specific things. And here's what his friend wrote about it later: the answers came so quickly and so clearly that there was simply no room left to doubt that God had heard them. Once the answer came the same day. Another time, the answer came while they were still praying.

Now I don't know about you, but that kind of prayer life sounds like something from another world. Most of us would settle for an answer sometime this decade. So what was their secret?

F.B. Meyer, that wonderful old devotional writer, put his finger on it. He said prevailing prayer, the kind that actually moves things, has some marks on it worth paying attention to.

First, it has to be aimed at God's glory, not just our comfort. We have to ask honestly, "Would this bring honor to God, or am I just trying to get out of a tight spot?" That's a question that'll clean up your prayer list in a hurry.

Second, it has to be prayed in Christ's name, and Meyer makes the point that this isn't just a phrase you tack on at the end like a period. Praying in Jesus' name means praying the way Jesus would pray, with His heart, His priorities, His spirit running through every word.

And third, here's the one that really gets me, we have to be abiding. Jesus said it right there in John 15:7. "If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you." The answered prayer flows out of the abiding relationship. You can't separate the two. A branch that's connected to the vine doesn't have to beg for sap, it just comes. When we stay close to Jesus, when His Word is actually living in us and not just sitting on the shelf, our desires start lining up with His desires, and suddenly we're asking for things He already wants to give.

I'm too soon old and too late smart on this one, but I've lived long enough to know the difference between praying from a distance and praying from a place of closeness with God. The prayers that get answered are almost always the ones that come out of that abiding place.

So maybe the question today isn't "why isn't God answering my prayers?" Maybe the better question is, "How's my abiding?"

Let's pray: Father, draw us close. Let Your words live in us, not just sit near us. We want the kind of prayer life where heaven moves and answers come. We seek Your face, show us Your glory. In Jesus' name, Amen.

#Prayer #Faith #ChristianLiving #DailyDevotion #TrustGod #BiblicalWisdom #RTTBROS #Nightlight

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Season 20 Episode 12

For This We Have Jesus #RTTBROS #Nightlight

For This, We Have Jesus

A Prayer Guide for Parents Who Know They Are Not Enough

Sandy and I have discovered something about parenting that no one warns you about clearly enough: the problems your children face do not stay simple. They compound. They multiply. They become, in time, almost infinitely complex, and you are not infinite. You are very, very finite. You run out of answers. You run out of energy. Sometimes you run out of words entirely.

My Uncle Tommy had a saying for moments like that. Whenever life presented something too large for human hands to handle, he would lean back and say, quietly and with complete conviction: “For this, we have Jesus.” I have never found a better theology than that.

If there was ever an endeavor that required prayer, it is surely parenting. And if you have ever stood in the middle of your own living room, looking at the life of someone you love more than your own, feeling that desperate, hollow not enough feeling, welcome to my club. The membership is large. The dues are humility. And the only way through is on your knees.

“I didn’t have a role model in my home to teach me how to be a husband or a father. So I find myself coming up short in both, again and again. But I have learned that an honest prayer beats a confident mistake every time.”

— Gene Kissinger

I want to be honest with you the way I wish someone had been honest with me. I did not grow up with a man in my home who showed me what a husband looked like, or what a father did when things got hard. I have been learning on the job, and the job is harder than I ever imagined. I come up short. Not sometimes. Regularly. The grace of God is not a decoration in my house; it is load-bearing.

What I have found, slowly and imperfectly, is that prayer changes things, not always the circumstances, but always me. It changes what I see when I look at my children. It changes how long I can hold on. It changes the atmosphere of a home in ways I cannot fully explain but have absolutely witnessed.

Stormie Omartian’s book The Power of a Praying Parent gave me language and structure for something I desperately needed to do but did not know how to do well. Her central teaching is simple and liberating: you are not meant to fix your children. You are meant to bring them to God. Prayer is not your last resort after everything else fails. It is your first and most powerful act as a parent, a spiritual hedge built around a life you love but cannot fully protect.

The Prayer Guide

I built a prayer guide based on Omartian’s framework, one for every stage of a child’s life, from the first year through adulthood. My personal version has prayers written out for each of my own children and runs fifteen pages. That one stays private.

But this version, the one I’m sharing here, is a quick-start guide any parent can use. It gives you specific, scripture-rooted prayers for each stage of childhood and adolescence, drawn from the same principles that shaped my own journal. Use it as a starting point. Adapt it. Make it your own. Build something that fits your family.

One last thing before you go. There is a principle in scripture about the prayer of agreement, that when two or more come together and ask, something shifts. I believe that. So here is my offer, and I mean it with everything I have:

Will you agree with me in prayer for my children? I will agree with you in prayer for yours.

We are not enough. But He is. And for this, we have Jesus.

Here is the Link to "The Praying Parent's Quick Start Guide"

https://rttbros1.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-praying-parents-quick-start-guide.html?fbclid=IwdGRjcAQTE49jbGNrBBMTh2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHk5HzXGxSwFGpReLc6dPlZ67tu5mQqh1w5X8_SEaRymOAHg5yBpG1bMZuu9W_aem_o60h54cSn9WoHc9VzGprJA&m=1

It won't let me hyperlink here copy and paste link to Google search

Better Together #RTTBROS #Nightlight

Prayer For The Distressed #RTTBROS #Nightlight