Crisis Management
Surely I know that it will be well with those who (reverently) fear God, who revere and worship Him, realizing His continual presence. (Ecclesiastes 8:12)
God has taught me some valuable lessons about crisis management. Jesus said, "Come to Me" (Matthew 11:28); He didn't say run to the phone and call three friends when we face an emergency. I am not against asking people to pray for us, but if we run to people, we won't find a cure; we will only find a bandage.
We face many challenges and crises in life. Sometimes the crises are major; sometimes they are minor. To avoid living in a constant state of emergency, the Lord impressed on me to seek Him continuously, or diligently. I used to seek time with God once in a while or when my life was in big trouble. Eventually, I learned that if I ever wanted to get out of crisis mode, I needed to seek God as if I were in desperate need of Him all the time - during hard times and during seasons of great blessing.
We often give God low priority when things are going well for us. But I have observed that if the only time we seek God is when we are desperate, He often keeps us in desperate circumstances in order to keep us in fellowship with Him.
God will always rescue and help us when we come to Him. But if we want to stay in a place of constant peace and victory, we must diligently seek Him at all times, as the verse for today urges us to do.
Pray at All Times
Pray at all times (on every occasion, in every season) in the Spirit, with all (manner of) prayer and entreaty. (Ephesians 6:18)
In the verse for today, Paul is basically saying that we are to pray in every circumstance, following the Holy Spirit's direction, using different types of prayer in different situations. But how do we "pray at all times", as the Bible instructs? We do it by keeping an attitude of thanksgiving and total dependence upon God as we go about our everyday lives, turning our thoughts toward Him in the midst of doing all the things we have to do and listening for His voice in every situation. I believe God really wants us to live a lifestyle of prayer and that He wants to help us stop thinking about prayer as an event and begin to see it as a way of life, as an internal activity that undergirds everything else we do. He want us to talk to Him and listen to Him continually - to pray our way through every day with our hearts connected to His and our ears attuned to His voice.
We often hear about a prayer need or think about a situation and say to ourselves, I need to pray about that later when I pray. That thought is a stall tactic of the enemy. Why not pray right that minute? We do not pray right away because of the wrong mind-set we have about prayer. It would be easy if we just followed our hearts, but Satan wants to complicate prayer. He wants us to procrastinate in the hope that we will forget the matter entirely. Praying as we sense the desire or need to pray is simple, and it is the way we can pray continually and stay connected to God in every situation throughout the day.
How right she is, about all of this.
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