The Plumbline

Be patient in trouble, and keep on praying. (Romans 12:12) Luther said, "To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing." So many believers have such a hard time with prayer, though. It is as though you begin to pray and your mind is making your shopping list, calculating the budget, or thinking about the outcome of the baseball game last night. We get distracted in prayer - we all try to focus, but then our mind does its own thing. Perhaps that is why we are told to take every thought captive (2 Corinthians 10:5). God knows our tendency to get 'mind-napped' when we pray! It is said that prayer doesn't change God's mind, but it sure can change ours, can it not? We go to God with one thing on our mind, almost as though we know what we expect him to do or say in response to our prayer. We soon find ourselves thinking about things in a different way and wonder what happened. It is because God was at work THROUGH OUR PRAYE...

So, my dear brothers and sisters, this is the point: You died to the power of the law when you died with Christ. And now you are united with the one who was raised from the dead. As a result, we can produce a harvest of good deeds for God. When we were controlled by our old nature, sinful desires were at work within us, and the law aroused these evil desires that produced a harvest of sinful deeds, resulting in death. But now we have been released from the law, for we died to it and are no longer captive to its power. Now we can serve God, not in the old way of obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way of living in the Spirit. (Romans 7:4-6 NLT) This is the point - when God puts things so plainly, it helps, doesn't it? You and I died to the influence of sin in our lives - it no longer drives us, but it is still there. The control has been broken, but the temptations still abound, don't they? Since we are united with Christ, we can lean into him when those temptations c...