Sweet Fragrance

God knows what 2025 brings, and He gave me the focus I need for those challenges.

So, my word for 2025 is Prayer.

We turn to prayer because it is the most personal way to experience God, to encounter Him, and to grow in intimacy and knowledge of Him. As it is written in the book of Ephesians, God’s desire is for us to pray “on all occasions.”

How many purposes for prayer can you think of?

There are prayers of praise, thankfulness, worship, and rejoicing. There are prayers of confession and repentance. There are prayers for personal needs, such as food, health, strength, wisdom, and forgiveness. There are prayers of intercession for the needs of others, for the salvation of unsaved loved ones, and for churches, schools, and missionaries.

Our prayers are a sweet fragrance to God as we admit our own inadequacies and lean on God’s promises of provision and power.

Worry is a conversation we have with ourselves about things we cannot change. Prayer is a conversation we have with God about things He can change!

If you haven’t already done so, make prayer an indispensable part of your daily time with God! Begin every day with prayer!

A lot of people don’t pray because they say they don’t know how. Some think there’s a special vocabulary that God hears. If they don’t use the precise words and inflections, they think God turns a deaf ear. That’s not true!

I once heard of an atheist mother whose daughter was killed in an accident. With grief-stricken rage, she lay face down, beating the bed and yelling, “GOD, I HATE YOU!!!!”

Her rage spent, she lay exhausted. In the still of the moment, she heard God’s voice:
“That is the first time you ever spoke to Me.”

God wants to talk with us no matter what we say to Him. He’d rather we yell hateful remarks at Him than treat Him with apathy and indifference. He can handle it. He is not like us. That is why I love Him so.

I don’t know about you, but I often pray what I think He wants to hear. But I’ve learned that He wants me to be real.

Besides, since He’s my life living in me, through me, for me, and as me, He feels everything I feel. It’s not like I can hide my feelings from Him. Therefore, we share them together.

Then, after we get it off our chests, we can come back to all things working together for good.

A guy named Francois Fenelon has some good thoughts on how to pray. His method has worked well for me. I hope it might do the same for you, especially if you don’t pray enough. Here it is:

HOW TO PRAY — Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one’s heart — its pleasures and its pains — to a dear friend.

Tell Him your troubles, that He may comfort you. Tell Him your joys, that He may sober them. Tell Him your longings, that He may purify them. Tell Him your dislikes, that He may help you conquer them.

Talk to Him of your temptations, that He may shield you from them. Show Him the wounds of your heart, that He may heal them. Lay bare your indifference to good, your depraved tastes for evil, your instability.

Tell Him how self-love makes you unjust to others, how vanity tempts you to be insincere, how pride disguises you to yourself and to others.

If you thus pour out all your weaknesses, needs, troubles, there will be no lack of what to say. You will never exhaust the subject. It is continually being renewed.

As Fenelon implies, people who have no secrets from each other have lots to discuss. They don’t weigh their words, for there’s nothing to be held back; neither do they seek for something to say. They talk out of the abundance of the heart, without consideration — they say just what they think.

Blessed are they who have such familiar intercourse with God.

I pray to thank You, Lord, for the gift of another day. This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it, because I no longer live, but the Lord Jesus lives in me, for me, through me, and as me, and I live in Him.

Therefore, without Him I can do nothing. But with Him, all things are possible, because the Lord is my strength. The Lord, in His power, is my strength every minute of every hour and every day.

I will continue to lean on this promise:
I CAN DO ALL THINGS THROUGH CHRIST WHO STRENGTHENS ME.