Have you heard or read something and immediately thought of someone else? Maybe a shared memory or a memorable conversation from the past played out in your mind like it was yesterday. Singer and songwriter Dante Bowe, in a conversation recorded for YouTube https://youtu.be/Rg0ye1kWGPI with well known Christian artist, David Crowder, recalls sitting at his piano thinking about one of his close friends when the words “God really loves us,” came to him in a refrain. David Crowder agrees that this was a holy moment, saying there are definitely times “when I’m singing this (lyric), I’m believing something for somebody.”
I believe this is a form of prayer, when the Holy Spirit draws Scripture or a spiritual truth to the forefront and causes your thoughts to center on a person or people group. The Bible teaches that the Spirit of God understands what we cannot and comes alongside us in our thoughts and actions, interpreting and empowering Godlike responses in us. In the period surrounding the last presidential election, I remember reading through the Psalms and making David’s prayers my own for the United States and its highest leaders. Paul’s letter to the Romans encourages me in these turbulent times in world history to see events for what they are from a Christian worldview.
Paul writes, “That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times.
The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next.
Everything in creation is being more or less held back.
God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead.
Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.
All around us we observe a pregnant creation.
The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs.
But it’s not only around us; it’s within us.
The Spirit of God is arousing us within.
We’re also feeling the birth pangs.
These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance.
That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother.
We are enlarged in the waiting.
We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us.
But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.
Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along.
If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter.
He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.
He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God.
That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.”
Romans 8:18-28 MSG
https://bible.com/bible/97/rom.8.26.MSG
“By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life.
We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence.
And because of his glory and excellence, he has given us great and precious promises.
These are the promises that enable you to share his divine nature and escape the world’s corruption caused by human desires.
In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises.
Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone.
The more you grow like this, the more productive and useful you will be in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
2 Peter 1:3-8 NLT
https://bible.com/bible/116/2pe.1.5-8.NLT
The Spirit keeps us present before God. I cannot imagine a more beautiful reality. One day I will lay aside this tent, this temporary shelter that has been my home for fifty-two years and counting. The angst I feel is translated as expectancy, like my thirty-seven weeks pregnant daughter-in-love, enlarging me, making my presence on this earth more impactful, not less. This tension between temporal and eternal makes me more deliberate with my words and thoughts and actions.
So when I am awakened in the night with a dream about that person I haven’t seen in months or years, when I hear that song that I sang with my child who is far from home, or when the verse on the page jumps out at me, I, with the Holy Spirit, am transported into God’s presence, where Christ sits enthroned interceding for me. Don’t waste those sacred moments wishing for what might have been. Surrender them to the Master of what will be before He returns to judge the earth.
““The God who made the world and everything in it, this Master of sky and land, doesn’t live in custom-made shrines or need the human race to run errands for him, as if he couldn’t take care of himself.
He makes the creatures; the creatures don’t make him.
Starting from scratch, he made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him.
He doesn’t play hide-and-seek with us.
He’s not remote; he’s near.
We live and move in him, can’t get away from him!
One of your poets said it well: ‘We’re the God-created.’
Well, if we are the God-created, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to think we could hire a sculptor to chisel a god out of stone for us, does it?
“God overlooks it as long as you don’t know any better—but that time is past.
The unknown is now known, and he’s calling for a radical life-change.
He has set a day when the entire human race will be judged and everything set right.
And he has already appointed the judge, confirming him before everyone by raising him from the dead.””
Acts 17:24-31 MSG
https://bible.com/bible/97/act.17.30.MSG
“So, dear brothers and sisters, work hard to prove that you really are among those God has called and chosen.
Do these things, and you will never fall away.”
2 Peter 1:10 NLT
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