Single Thread

As I mentioned in another post, I remember missing out on my daily devotion once in the past four months.  I think that’s a pretty good streak.  I have been “blessed” with a good amount of time on my hands.  I’ve been out of work for most of the year—”in between projects”.  That means I’ve had a lot to think about in my free time (too much free time, in my opinion).

My prayers have been mostly about myself: struggles, lack of focus, financial trouble, etc.  It’s been about me.  I’m asking God to help me out anyway possible to get myself out of this rut.  I’ve been looking for affirmation for what decisions (which I believe are mostly mine) I should take that will determine my future.

Yup, my prayers have been pretty selfish.

I’m not a big fan of taking entire versus out of context, but if you’re familiar with the story of Job, check the last chapter in his book.  The Lord accepted Job’s prayer for his friends (Job 42:10).  Praying for one’s behalf is intercession.  I’ve never even realized this word is directly associated to praying to God in one’s behalf.

“Worship and intercession must go together; one is impossible without the other.  Intercession means raising ourselves up to the point of getting the mind of Christ regarding the person whom we are praying (see Philippians 2:5)” -Oswald Chambers

So I’m trying something different (for the better) in my daily devotions.  No longer will I pray to God only for myself.  As a matter of fact, I’m going to try to pray to God for others only.  He knows in my heart what I truly desire, but I feel I should refocus my prayers for those around me.

I must not forget that ten-plus years ago someone did pray for me to come to Jesus.  Who knows how completely lost I would have been if that one Christian who knew me did not intercede.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.  Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you.  Away from me, you evildoers!’” (Matthew 7:21-23, NIV)

Anyone can believe and acknowledge the existence of God, His Son, the crucifixion and the resurrection.  But believing is not enough.  Even the demons believe (James 2:19).  What do I need to do to separate myself from just a believer to an actual follower of Christ?

I, personally, needed to ask myself, “If Jesus were to walk in my shoes, would He really do what I do?”  I cannot live life in a way where I do what I want and pray that God will always forgive my sinful decisions.  That is not the way to live as a Christian. Do not live by grace alone.  Just because we will be forgiven, it doesn’t mean we should keep sinning (Romans 6:1-2).

I can no longer be just a believer.  I need to fully devote my life to His teachings.  I need to be committed 100% to God.  But I know I cannot do this alone.  I need God to work through me.  The actions I take should be directly from Him—inspired and worked through by the Holy Spirit.  This requires me to give myself up for Him that way I can find the life worth living for (Matthew 16:25).

From this day forward, I will commit my life to Jesus Christ.  Let His will be done through me.

So… exactly where do I begin?

A buddy of mine and I started doing daily devotions a couple of months ago.  We have a pretty good system to hold each other accountable: if you fail to do your daily devotion, you buy the other guy dinner for that day.  I believe we probably failed a total of 3 to 4 times in the past two and a half months or so.  For myself, I believe that’s a pretty good devotion streak since I have never attempted anything like this as a Christian for 10 years.

There’s really only two things I try to get done first thing in the morning:

1. Get in the Word (The Bible)
2. Listen and speak in solitude (Prayer)

As a Christian, getting into the Word should be easy.  The Bible is supposed to be our go-to documentation on life.  It is divine Scripture passed to man from God.  It is the living Word of God. It not only teaches lessons from the past, but I strongly believe its teachings have complete validity in the present and future.  But as I mentioned above, I’ve considered myself a Christian for over 10 years and I haven’t really read the Bible.  Sure, I’ll jump around between books and chapters to get some kind of insightful verse to shoehorn why things are happening to me now, but I haven’t been using the Scripture to aid what I’m really struggling with: prayer.

Up until a few months ago, I mostly treated prayer as a one way communication to God.  Sure, I tried to listen… I really tried.  I believed after a few years of being content on Christianity, I forgot what God’s voice sounded like.  And now, I struggle to recognize His voice.  That’s a problem.  I chose to follow Jesus Christ, and now I fail to recognize Him.  Has He abandoned me?  Never!  But I feel there are times it feels like I’ve given up on Him—my lack of devotion.

This is how my motivation for my daily devotions come from.  I’m living in stagnation.  I know there’s more to life than this.   Instead of living daily through drudgery, it’s time to discover how I will remove this life of discontentment.  And I will do it through these two things: absorbing the Word and prayer.

Well, here I am again restarting Single Thread for the 3rd time in ten years.  The site itself was never really activate from the get go.  I wrote a bit more of Single Thread’s background in the About page.  The last scribing blogging experiment I conducted was with j2.  There isn’t much to read there.  The entire site has always been locked down with a login whom myself and a couple of others only had access to.  j2 was a failed experiment in approaching the whole “blogging” and social networking thing that Facebook, et al are already doing so well at.

This time around I’m no longer spending all of my time developing a proper social networking/blogging site, but instead I get to use it.  Yeah, for those who do know me, it is odd that I’m actually “creating” a website without actually doing any development on it.  As I get older, I’m slowly realizing it’s way easier to just use the tool to get the job done versus creating the tool to do said job.  Novel idea, right?  Yes, I’m a bit slow to the party.

With all that said, this site is going to be about my daily walk with my Lord Jesus Christ.  I’ve been a Christian for over ten years, and only now I’m slowly “getting it”.  I’m a stubborn kind of guy.  Whether or not this site would find any value outside of reflecting my own thoughts, it’s something I feel I need to do… even it’s only entertaining all one of you out there.