Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem;
    they will never be silent day or night.
You who call on the Lord,
    give yourselves no rest,
and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem
    and makes her the praise of the earth.

• Isaiah 62:6-7

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

• John 13:34-35

“Do I know anything experimentally about this aspect of things? Have I ever spent one minute before God in intercessory importunity over the sins of other people? If we take this statement of the prophet and turn the searchlight on ourselves, we will be covered with shame and confusion because of our miserably selfish, self-centred Christianity. …
“One of the first lessons we learn in the Ministry of the Interior is to talk things out before God in soliloquy-tell God what you know He knows in order that you may get to know it as He does. All the harshness will go and the suffering sadness of God’s Spirit will take its place, and gradually you will be brought into sympathy with His point of view.
“When God puts a weight on you for intercession for souls don’t shirk it by talking to them·. It is much easier to talk to them than to talk to God about them-much easier to talk to them than to take it before God and let the weight crush the life out of you until gradually and patiently God lifts the life out of the mire. That is where very few of us go.”

• Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts for Disciples (March 7, from God’s Workmanship)

Oswald Chambers paints a poor picture of the Christians of his day, and I feel they were much more on fire for Christ than the average Christian today.  Do we have people who tirelessly intercede for others, forgetting their own wants and desires?  Maybe not many, but they exist, a lot more when you forget that part about forgetting self.

But then again, there are a lot of self-centered Christians out there.  We should be Christ-centered, but somehow that part gets lost in translation, which may explain why transformation (sanctification) is so slow or non-existent in many people who confess their faith in Christ.

There are those prayer warriors that are tireless in their prayers for others.  Many of those others may not even be known to them.  A member of the church may send in a prayer request about a friend of a loved one who lives far away.  But that does not change the attitude nor the posture of the prayer warrior.

And as we pray for other sacrificially, not thinking of ourselves, we grow in our faith and in our relationship with Jesus.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.