What?
This blog is a chance for me to share my Bible-reading meditations and my prayers. I’ll post once a week on Mondays, alternating between sharing a reflection on Scripture a prayer/psalm/pondering.
Why?
“I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not, how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man may be nourished.…I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it.”
-George Mueller
I agree with Mueller. It’s through time with God, time spent prayerfully in the Scriptures, that my soul is made happy. To be happy in the Lord, completely and totally happy in Him apart from anything else, well, if I were that, I think I’d be a lot like Jesus. And that’s just what I want.
I believe that prayer and Bible reading through the power of the Holy Spirit are the foundation of Christian growth. Not that people can’t read the Bible and pray without growing. Like I said, we need the Holy Spirit. And James tells us that all our listening to the Word if not followed by application of its truths is no more than fooling ourselves (James 1:22). But when people spend time talking with God and reading His Scriptures with a longing in their hearts to know Him better, to understand Who He is and what He wants of them, well, change happens. He begins to mold us into what He wants us to be.
But a lot of us struggle with time in the Scriptures and with prayer. Throughout my Christian walk, I’ve had great difficulty in these areas.
With prayer, I mostly struggle with taking the time to do it and with vulnerably sharing my whole heart . I was blessed with a roommate in college who prayed gut-wrenchingly honest prayers with me before we went to sleep at night. I’d read the Psalms, but they felt far-off and unrelated to me and my prayers. But when I heard my friend pray about her problems, many of them very similar to my own, something clicked. She was talking to God, opening her heart to Him more vulnerably than she did with anyone else. She gave me the privilege to listen in, and I learned so much.
She taught me to pray openly and honestly. I’ve prayed with a lot of people since then, and I don’t think I’m the only person who has struggled to understand what that looks like. I only learned through example. Here, I’ll show you my example. I pray someone else will be helped through it as I was.
I also struggle, to read, meditate on, apply, and, in short, love God’s Word. When we engage with the Word of God, we’re engaging with God Himself through His Spirit. This is a huge opportunity and privilege. But I forget. I take it for granted, get bored with it, wonder why on earth I need to read the same passages again. And I know a ton of people have the same problems.
I’ve found that, for me, a lot of this boredom with Scripture evaporates when I take time to journal about it and write about the application. So here I’m sharing my journaling and articles about applications. My prayer is that, once again through an example, someone else might find help in engaging more deeply with God through the Scriptures.
So here we go, reader. I pray that, through this blog, you and I together will gaze on God in His beauty and glory and be transformed. I pray that you’ll be inspired to go meet with God in His Word and through prayer yourself. I pray that, as we meet with God, He’ll change us into the likeness of His Son, Jesus Christ. He’ll change us by making our souls happy in Him, just like Jesus’s.
Soul Happy in the Lord 