“Have you noticed how much praying for revival has been going on of late — and how little revival has resulted? I believe the problem is that we have been trying to substitute praying for obeying, and it simply will not work.” ~ A.W. Tozer
We have all sorts of sayings to reflect full committal or acceptance of something or some task such as “All in”. The reality of the situation, though, is that our human nature generally does not like to be all in. Our human nature wants to know the least that we have to do in order for something to get done. We are hardly ever all in. We would be lucky, many times, merely to be half in.
That is not what God has in mind for us, though. God wants us to be all in. He shows us how much He means business through His Son, Jesus Christ.
God is totally committed to us. So much so that He gave us His Only-Begotten Son. His Son, Jesus, was so totally committed to us that He was willing to set aside His glory and take upon Himself our human nature. He then went the extra mile by dying on the cross for us in order to redeem us from our sins.
Now, it is our turn. God has shown us how committed He is to us. Jesus gave us His all. We are to give our all back to God.
There are many ways to do that. We give ourselves to God when we pray. Our prayer is the initiation and strengthening of a personal relationship with God. God greatly desires us spending our time with Him.
We cannot stop there, though. We should not only give God our time in prayerful communication with Him. We should also give ourselves to God by serving one another. We can pray for others, we can visit the sick and shut-in, we can help those who are needy, we can be mentors to those who need our help. There are a myriad of ways to give of ourselves.
In doing so, we show ourselves to be obedient sons and daughters of God.
FAITH ACTION: Pray for the strength and courage to obey the Lord at all costs.