This morning I woke up (as I occasionally do) with a praise song repeating in my head. The lyrics that I kept repeating were “So what can I say, What can I do, But offer this heart O God, Completely to You”. I had to look it up to find out that it is Hillsong’s “The Stand”. Hillsong, thank you for writing such a great song and so many others like it.
So after I got up and started thinking, I wondered how do we really offer our hearts completely to God? What does that look like? Is it something permanent or something that we must do every day?
Having no answers but only more questions I sat down to eat breakfast and read my bible passage of the day. Un-ironically, the passage was Galatians 5:16 - 6:18. What a godsend! That was exactly what I needed to read and God knew what it. God knew what I would be reading and he placed the song in my head to get my mind going first thing in the morning! I am not surprised that he does this, but excited. I love it when I really feel the Lord speaking to me.
Galatians 5:16 in the N.I.V. tells us “So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” So I started wondering, how does one live by the spirit? Well, we know that the Holy Spirit lives in all who believe in Jesus Christ and are called to Him. Ok, so I have the Holy spirit, but how do I live by it? I am convinced that the way we live by the Spirit is through constant prayer.
By constant prayer, I don’t mean that we pray and do nothing else but that, in our daily lives, we pray when we have time. We should pray when we are driving, when someone makes us angry, when we don’t know whether we should go left or right… We should pray for the leading of the Holy Spirit in all circumstances. Prayers don’t have to be long, drawn out, well thought-out with lots of long words. We would do well to remember Peter’s prayer in Matthew 14:30, “Lord, save me!” There are only 3 words to this prayer but it was said in honest desperation and the Lord answered him and saved him. When we are angry or don’t know what to say, a simple “Lord, give me the words to say” will do wonders for us.
As I write this and pray about what to write, I am becoming more and more convinced that to live in the Spirit simply means that we allow the Holy Spirit to guide our lives and we submit to God’s will for us. And we submit by praying, listening and obeying. This is a lesson that I truly need to learn. I need to obey. And obedience to Jesus Christ is the only way to live righteously.
To whoever is reading this, I thank you for reading. I thank you for being interested in what I have to say and I hope that this helps you as much as it does me. Much of this isn’t written for others as much as it is written for me, that I may come to understand more about my own faith and I may grow in that faith. If you are encouraged by what you read here, please send me a comment. I’d love to know that you are being encouraged by my ramblings.
God bless you,
Tim Biden
