Awake and alive

Sandy* writes her prayers on paper and puts them in a jar. Then she places the jar at the highest point she can find in her house. She didn’t fully explain her reasoning to me, yet what she did say made it obvious that she is hoping a lofty physical position for those prayers will somehow put them closer to God and more likely to be answered. (*not her real name)

I don’t know how to respond to Sandy. She is naively religious, knowing very little about what the Bible says, either about prayer or salvation. She thinks she is okay with God because she was taught by a mainline, liberal denomination that everyone is okay with God. She is a gentle person in some ways, but not innocent.

This morning I am reading from Ephesians and amazed at Paul’s long sentences. I’m also amazed that God gives me insight from verses 18-20 about how to pray for Sandy. They say,

I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms. . . .

Sandy has no idea that God has called her, at least not yet, but I can pray that He will open the eyes of her heart so that she knows about eternal life and about the inheritance secured for her by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I can also pray that He gives her new life and the recognition of how wonderful it is that Jesus came here in human flesh and is now exalted to rule at the Father’s right hand.

My devotional reading expresses these thoughts about the wonder of Jesus’ rule, not so much that He is Lord and God, but that He is fully human even now as He reigns from heaven. With slight editing, this is what the reading says:

It is no great mystery that the Son of God should be exalted to the throne of power for it is only a step from the bosom of the Father to His right hand. However, that anyone with our (human) nature should be exalted to that seat of preeminence and power; that the Mediator between God and man should be the man Christ Jesus; that the hands which once were nailed to the cross should now hold the scepter, and that the feet which once walked on Lake Gennesaret and were weary and dust-soiled at Jacob’s well, and were washed with a sinful woman’s tears and kissed in penitential grief and love with polluted lips—that these very feet should now have all things put under them both in heaven and earth, there is the mystery. What food for faith!
The living family of God wants a living Savior, one who can hear and answer prayer, deliver out of soul-trouble, speak a word with power to the heart when bowed down with grief and sorrow, sympathize with us under powerful temptations, support us under the trials and afflictions of life, and maintain under a thousand discouragements His own life in our soul. We want One who can sustain under bereavements the mourning widow, and be a father to her fatherless children, appear again and again in providence as a friend that loves us at all times, be our brother ‘born for adversity’, smile upon us in death, and comforts us with His rod and staff as we walk through the valley of its dark shadow, and land us at last safely in a happy eternity.

Paul wrote about how God has put all things under the feet of Jesus, and made Him head over all things, yet some are still “dead in trespasses and sins” and need the power of His deliverance. They have no idea about a happy eternity nor how to get there. Sandy things she is okay, but instead of life and power, her prayers and words about her faith reveal empty ritual and superstition.

I’m told that a sleepwalker who thinks they are awake needs to be awakened very carefully. God is showing me how to pray for Sandy, and I’m certain that if He wants me to do more than that, He will also show me. I’m hoping to see her wake up and realize the wonder of Jesus and the life that He alone can offer her.