Treasured Truth

What happens when our priorities are not God’s priorities? Among other things, we break fellowship with God and we focus on satisfying our own selfish desires. But God always gives us the opportunity to repent when we realize that our ways are not His ways.

In the book of Haggai, the prophet relays a message from the Lord of Hosts to the people of Israel. He says, “Consider your ways!” because their ways were not the Lord’s ways. Today, we can glean from this passage that the key to getting what we need in our lives is to focus on what God wants for our lives. God’s priorities must become our priorities.

The key to winning spiritual warfare is prayer. And what is the prescriptive truth that we have about prayer? Based on the example of the Lord’s prayer, we are to direct our prayers to the Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

As we begin a new study from Joshua chapter 1, Pastor Ford explains that God has called us as believer to be takers. And some of the things that He wants us to take are His promises.

Have you ever prayed, “Lord, bless me”? If you have, then what did you mean? Have you considered that you got up this morning? That’s being blessed. If you can clothe yourself and feed yourself, then you’re already blessed. God wants to hear from us specific requests about what we want and need Him to do. We don’t need to ask Him to bless us, because He’s already blessed us beyond measure.

Too many of us as believers don’t understand the power of prayer and we feel we have to pray rather than we get to pray. We don’t understand that God has given us a mighty, supernatural weapon, that we can use in the natural world and that weapon is called prayer.

Scripture says that the effectual, fervent prayers of a righteous person avail much. In other words, they are very valuable or profitable. So we need to be in the habit of praying fervently on a regular basis, bringing our requests to the true and the living God, because without His help we can do nothing.

The Christian life is a battlefield, not a playground. And when we rely on the power of prayer, we stand in the battle, knowing that we have withstood the onslaught of the enemy. We may lose family, friends, money, materials, and even our reputations. But in the end we have hope, because we know that with God’s help, we’ve stood through the warfare.

When trying to get out of debt, will we do as the widow in the book of 2 Kings did? As Blind Bartimaeus and as Abraham did? What did they do? They believed God to bring life to a dead situation. They didn’t try to figure out how God was going to do it. They just acted on what God said and held on in spite of their life circumstances.

John is referred to in scripture as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” And God gave Abraham the greatest compliment when He said, “I know him,” and called Abraham His friend. Pastor Ford asks us to consider, when God says something about us, what is He going to compliment us about?