Devotionals

There In A Crisis, by Sarah Tummey.

Thanks to Sarah for these beautiful thoughts.

The other week, I was having lunch with friends. We were talking about Brexit, which is pretty big on the news these days. Will Boris Johnson get us out of the EU on October 31st, or will his opponents thwart him so they can keep extending the deadline? Whichever outcome you favour, you’d have to say there’s a lot of uncertainty here at the moment. To some it feels like a bit of a crisis.
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The Comfort And Power Of Asking For Prayer, By Kay Warner.

Thanks To Kay for sharing her thoughts and experiences with us. What an encouragement!
What a few weeks I’ve had. I finally got given a date for the final operation. My surgeon got his secretary to call me and I was booked in for 22 August. Just a week to get organised.
I felt so stressed. I had appointments to rearrange, work to inform, kids to sort out, and it was GCSE result day the day of my surgery. So what did I do? How did I cope? I messaged my church.
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Setting Aside Time To Pray, By Lou Beard.

Thanks to Lou for these beautiful thoughts on prayer.
Prayer, very simply put, is a conversation with God. It can be broken down into different categories. There are prayers of praise, where we can express how wonderful and awesome God is. There are prayers of thanks, where we can thank The Lord for all he has done for us, or for specific ways in which he has helped us. Then there are prayers of request, either for ourselves or for others.
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A Divine Pattern For Prayer.

I have heard it said that prayer should be as natural for the Christian as taking our next breath, so why is it that so many of us struggle to maintain a consistent prayer life? Is it because we struggle to converse with someone who rarely responds in an audible manner? Do we even sometimes feel embarrassed, especially when praying out loud, lest we be overheard, and accused of talking to ourselves?
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Prayer

The English dictionary defines the word prayer as: ‘The action of praying to God; earnest entreaty.’ It certainly is true that when we pray we are speaking to our heavenly father, and we often find ourselves bringing our varied requests to him. Yet I can’t help thinking there’s a lot more to prayer than simply making Ernest entreaties to God. I decided to go to the Bible dictionary – hoping this would give me a more definite understanding of the word. It said that prayer is: ‘Personal communion with God who is a person.’ It also said that the classic contents of prayer are adoration (Telling the Lord how much we love him and worshiping him), thanksgiving (Remembering to say thank you for all the things he’s done for us), confession (Acknowledging our sin and asking for forgiveness) and partition (Bringing our requests before him). This is a much more helpful definition. It’s telling us that prayer is a personal thing, and reminding us that when we pray we’re not just speaking to an idol or something we conjure up in our imaginations but to our Lord himself.
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A Great Example, By Sarah Tummey.

During the next couple of weeks, we will be enjoying some inspiring thoughts from my good friend Sarah

Reading 2 Samuel 5, I’m impressed by how humble David is as opposed to his enemies. He becomes king over Israel. Samuel said he would be years before, pouring oil on his head to prepare him, but while Saul was alive, David couldn’t succeed him. Finally, the moment comes. David goes to Jerusalem and in their arrogance, the people living there taunt him: “You can’t get inside our city. Even the blind and the crippled can stop you” (2 Samuel 5:6). They think David so weak, they don’t need an army of healthy soldiers; even someone without full use of their faculties could triumph against him, but how wrong they are.
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A Man After God’s Own Heart.

Today, I’d like us to consider 2 men. I won’t tell you their names yet, but I’ll present the facts of their lives and characters as they are presented to us in God’s word. One thing they both have in common is that they were chosen by God to be kings. Another is that they start out humble and totally relying upon the Lord, but sadly, there the similarities end.
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