Guest Post – Drink the Water!

The following is a guest post from my uncle, Randy Curry, who lives in Stroud, Oklahoma.  Randy has always had a profound spiritual influence on my life, and he daily sends encouragements and exhortations from the Bible to his friends and family via email.  I wanted to share the following email that he sent Friday because of how desperately we Christians (as well as non-Christians!) need to hear this message.

Randy, thanks for your insight, your personal example, and most of all for your love for and devotion to Christ!

John 4:10
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

1 Thes 5:16-18
Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Yesterday afternoon as I worked on a project outside, the weather was GREAT. When I am busy, I just keep after it, usually not stopping for much, as I worked along I thought I should get a drink of water, just a twinge of thirst. Many times I ignore that call of thirst and just keep on going, I have found it always gets me into trouble. I have found that I need to drink water even before my body starts calling for water. Your body continually does low grade perspiration, which is a constant pull of the fluid in your body. If you ignore the calls for water your body starts to get weak, going from very mild to serious.

The same is true for our spiritual life, if we are not continually drinking the living water, continually praying, continually giving thanks, and continually ignore the thirst, our spiritual walk becomes weak with all kinds of complications setting in. The things of the world place a constant drain on the body… we have to continually keep drinking.

Continually drink the water, continually pray, continually gives thanks!

Amos 8:11
“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land- not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.

Prayer & Meditation Resources from Dr. Whitney

I recently experienced some awesome, awesome talks by Dr. Don Whitney (SBTS) about prayer and meditation and practical ideas for fueling our quiet times alone with God. I encourage you to check out some of the following resources and consider adopting a few new habits that will help you dig into God’s Word and allow the Spirit to change you as you live and commune with Him!

I listened to the following three sessions during a recent road trip of a conference that Dr. Whitney does all over the US about prayer and meditation. These talks get very practical, and I wish that I would have learned this information the first day that I was a Christian and had reviewed it every year since then.

Session 1 – Meditating on Scripture
Session 2 – Praying Through Scripture
Session 3 – Praying Through Scripture

Here are some of the resources that he uses in his classes and conferences (I encourage you to read and print these out even if you are not able to listen to the messages):

Methods of Meditation
Phillippians 4:8 Questions
The Joseph Hall Questions

More information on this subject from Dr. Whitney’s classes that he teaches can be found here, and more audio from Dr. Whitney can be found here and here.

Here is the homepage for Dr. Whitney’s website.

I pray that these resources might help to jumpstart your prayer and meditation as it has mine. These methods help to open up two-way communication between us and God, as it is not through fulfilling “quiet-time requirements” but through a life lived with God that we fully glorify Him and are deeply satisfied in Him!

Please feel free to leave comments about what you find through these resources or even some of your own experiences in these areas.

In Christ!

Mickey

A Summer Challenge

In the midst of a summer filled with may books – books about people, books about church, books about the Bible – and audio sermons galore, a statement like the following by Spurgeon can cut to the quick, quick:

It is well to meditate upon the things of God, because we thus get the real nutriment out of them. A man who hears many sermons, is not necessarily well-instructed in the faith. We may read so many religious books, that we overload our brains, and they may be unable to work under the weight of the great mass of paper and of printer’s ink. The man who reads but one book, and that book his Bible, and then meditates much upon it, will be a better scholar in Christ’s school than he who merely reads hundreds of books, and meditates not at all.

I know not nor care not about being a scholar, however I do desire to redeem the time that God has given and make sure that I put my time to the best use possible. In that spirit, I have recently revisited an article from a few years back and pray that God will use it in my life (and hopefully in yours) to bring about many blessings and much growth.

The article, written by Andrew Davis, can be found here, and it describes a simple system for scripture memory. For those who are not actively involved in scripture memory, please consider employing this spiritual discipline and see how the richness of the Bible will fuel you, inspire you, and comfort you as you go through your day!

As we memorize, we meditate, and as we meditate, we pray, and as we pray, we invite God into every aspect of our lives and experience His power, as described towards the end of the same sermon by Spurgeon:

We can meditate better after we have addicted ourselves to a meditative frame. When we have mused a little, then the fire begins to burn; and you will perceive, that as the fire burns, meditation gets easier, and then the heart gets warm; and oh! what holy affections, what blessed excitements those have who are much alone with Christ! (you can read the rest of Spurgeon’s sermon here)

I pray that we would not wast these summer days – that we would spend many of our leisure hours reading and contemplating and learning and meditating on God’s word – so that our heart might glow like a white-hot coal for the glory and work of God!

The Bible in the prayer and meditation of George Mueller

This is an excerpt from The Autobiography of George Mueller, and in it Mueller (1805-1898 ) gives his personal testimony of how the Bible came to be the foundation of his prayer and meditation. This section has been instrumental in the lives of many Christians, and I hope to reference Mueller’s wisdom soon and demonstrate how others have used Mueller’s approach to develop their own quiet time with God.

Don’t read through this excerpt too quickly; be sure to pick up on the struggle that Mueller experiences and the result of his breakthrough on his life as a whole. I find much comfort in the fact that spiritual giants like Mueller experienced the same frustrations that I do myself, and this blog exists because of the universality of this struggle.

George Mueller:

“While I was staying at Nailsworth, it pleased the Lord to teach me a truth, irrespective of human instrumentality, as far as I know, the benefit of which I have not lost, though now . . . more than forty years have since passed away.

The point is this: I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not, how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers, I might seek to relieve the distressed, I might in other ways seek to behave myself as it becomes a child of God in this world; and yet, not being happy in the Lord, and not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit.

Before this time my practice had been, at least for ten years previously, as an habitual thing, to give myself to prayer, after having dressed in the morning. Now I saw, that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that thus, whilst meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental, communion with the Lord. I began therefore, to meditate on the New Testament, from the beginning, early in the morning.

The first thing I did, after having asked in a few words the Lord’s blessing upon His precious Word, was to begin to meditate on the Word of God; searching, as it were, into every verse, to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word; not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The result I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer.

When thus I have been for awhile making confession, or intercession, or supplication, or have given thanks, I go on to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go on, into prayer for myself or others, as the Word may lead to it; but still continually keeping before me, that food for my own soul is the object of my meditation. The result of this is, that there is always a good deal of confession, thanksgiving, supplication, or intercession mingled with my meditation, and that my inner man almost invariably is even sensibly nourished and strengthened and that by breakfast time, with rare exceptions, I am in a peaceful if not happy state of heart. Thus also the Lord is pleased to communicate unto me that which, very soon after, I have found to become food for other believers, though it was not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word that I gave myself to meditation, but for the profit of my own inner man.

The difference between my former practice and my present one is this. Formerly, when I rose, I began to pray as soon as possible, and generally spent all my time till breakfast in prayer, or a,!most all the time. At a,l events I almost invariably began with prayer…. But what was the result? I often spent a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or even an hour on my knees, before being conscious to myself of having derived comfort, encouragement, humbling of soul, etc.; and often after having suffered much from wandering of mind for the first ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, or even half an hour, I only then began really to pray.

I scarcely ever suffer now in this way. For my heart being nourished by the truth, being brought into experimental fellowship with God, I speak to my Father, and to my Friend (vile though I am, and unworthy of it! ) about the things that He has brought before me in His precious Word.

It often now astonishes me that I did not sooner see this. In no book did I ever read about it. No public ministry ever brought the matter before me. No private intercourse with a brother stirred me up to this matter. And yet now, since God has taught me this point, it is as plain to me as anything, that the first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is to obtain food for his inner man.

As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time, except we take food, and as this is one of the first things we do in the morning, so it should be with the inner man. We should take food for that, as every one must allow. Now what is the food for the inner man: not prayer, but the Word of God: and here again not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts….

I dwell so particularly on this point because of the immense spiritual profit and refreshment I am conscious of having derived from it my self, and I affectionately and solemnly beseech all my fellow-believers to ponder this matter. By the blessing of God I ascribe to this mode the help and strength which I have had from God to pass in peace through deeper trials in various ways than I had ever had before; and after having now above forty years tried this way, I can most fully, in the fear of God, commend it. How different when the soul is refreshed and made happy early in the morning, from what it is when, without spiritual preparation, the service, the trials and the temptations of the day come upon one!”

Autobiography of George Mueller, compiled by Fred. Bergen, (London: J. Nisbet Co., 1906), pp. 152-54. (as referenced at http://www.desiringgod.org/dg/id107_b.htm#6)