Abiding is not just meditating on His Word and delighting in Him, and not just focusing on trying to bear fruit. It involves the action of complete obedience. The whole reason why we meditate on His Word is so that we can do everything He wants us to do.
The abiding, obedient Christian embraces the following ideas:
That obedience must include Bible study. If we want to obey God we must know what He wants us to do. Therefore, obedience must include Bible study to find out what His will is. Then the next step of course is to obey that will.
That obedience must be your lifestyle. Real obedience, that is, real abiding obedience is not just a once in a while thing. It must be your lifestyle—a continual obedience.
If you put these two ideas together it will keep you abiding in Him and you will…
The focus of the abiding Christian is to bear fruit—that is, to bring forth in his life all the good things of God. Thus, when he abides, in his spirit (or in his attitude) he is filled with the fruit of the Spirit, which is “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control” (Gal. 5:22). Likewise, when he abides, in his behavior he does what is righteous to the praise of God (Phil. 1:11; Heb. 13:15).
Fruit is also new converts. Therefore, the abiding Christian will naturally share his faith with others, and those whom he leads to faith in God will be the evident fruit (Rom. 1:13).
The reason why the abiding Christian focuses on bearing fruit, and why we all should focus on bearing fruit is because that is what God has appointed us for. He has said to us in John 15:16, “You did…
Abiding I believe is the key to receiving regular and many answers to prayer. For Jesus says to us in John 15:7, “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you shall ask whatever you desire, and it shall be done for you.” Abiding in Christ and in His words means to continue in them, that is, to continue believing them and living by them. Abiding also means to dwell with and to be connected to as a branch is to a vine. I conclude, therefore, that abiding in Jesus means that we are continually dwelling with Him and perpetually letting His life flow into us just as living sap flows from a vine to its branches; hence, it means that we are always sipping and tasting and drinking in His goodness, ever being satisfied with what we need and long for.
Here are some wonderful reason why we should want to receive answers to prayer—and I got a lot of help here from E. M. Bounds, a great author.
1. God’s answers to prayer shows evidence of the existence of God and give us proof of our right relationship with Him. Anyone who comes to God in prayer must believe, at least a little, that He exists (Heb. 11:6). But when He rewards us with an answer, we have unmistakable evidence of His existence. Says E. M. Bounds in his Possibilities of Prayer, “There is no proof so clear and demonstrative that God exists than prayer and its answers.”
Furthermore, when we receive answers from Him, it not only strengthens our own faith, but it plants the seed of faith in others around us who have witnessed His answers. This was Elijah’s expectation for the people of Israel—that when…
The following article is an excerpt from this book.
Generally speaking, to be earnest means to be sincere and serious. When one prays with earnestness, he prays showing deep sincerity or seriousness; thus, he is determined, fervent and intense in his prayers. And we could say that the reason one prays with such seriousness is because he finds that the need is so great and that prayer is so important, that it is the only way to find the answer or to satisfy the need.
Now when you have a longing, a craving, and a yearning to satisfy a need, that is the desire of prayer. It is what God puts in you. But if you want that desire to be fulfilled you must follow up that desire by praying with earnestness. For when you pray with earnestness, what you are doing is you are putting that desire to work…
The following article is an excerpt from Prayer A to Z.
The way I see it, the way God gets a hold of us and brings us to into prayer is by first creating in us a desire for Himself and for what He wants to give us by showing us that we have a need or a lack. Next, He, in His own way, gets a hold of us and shows us that He can fill that lack; He shows us that He is the great provider and lover. As He desires us and draws us to Himself He continues to create in us a greater and greater desire for Him. The more we are united with Him in love the more we desire Him and what He wants to give us; hence, the more we have a desire to pray.
Since the election of the new President (Jan. 20), I’ve been feeling rather sad. And I’m wondering why. I guess I feel that righteousness in the country and in the world is not being done. Good people are being stopped and stepped on, and bad people are being praised. The media, who are supposed to just report the news are really Satan’s instruments of deception. Our new president who has taken every step to prop up sin and to put our country on a path to destruction, is being praised and worshipped as if he is the new Savior of mankind.
Meanwhile, our former President, who has done so many good things for our country—in spite of being harassed and ridiculed every minute of every day for the last four years—is now being impeached. For what? For inciting a riot, which he did not do. He was trying to bring justice to an unjust election.
So, this is why I am feeling sad. But I must break out of this mood, with prayer, and look toward heaven. I can be comforted by the good news (in 1Thess. 4:15-17) that soon …
The Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. 17 Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord.
Such wonderful news to think about!
Though we live in the world we must not let the world get us down. For we have been raised up with Christ and we sit with Him in the heavenly places. And He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ. Though we should pray for the country and the world, we must set our mind on things above where Christ is, not on all the things of this world. For our real life is hidden with Christ in God. Soon, when He comes and we see Him, we will be revealed with him in glory (Eph. 1:3; Col. 3:1-4).
On this day, after the forty-sixth Presidential inauguration, when the country, according to the media, finally is at peace and at rest and unified, there are some of us (me) who are not at rest and struggling. Though the world says peace and safety at last, I know differently. Though the newspapers and the TV media are smiling and showing a sigh of relief, I am tense and on guard. All is really not going well, and won’t go well. The left is planning war against us Christians. They are scheming against us. And the devil is taking advantage of our unrest. He is and will come against us to destroy us so that we will not rise again. What can be done?
I have been blogging on the Lord’s Prayer, and so, I think this is a good time to put it all together and really try to better my own prayer habits from that Lord’s-Prayer-outline. I, and we all need more and better prayer at this time. If you have been following my blog posts on this prayer, we have pointed out that there is an invocation, “Our Father in Heaven”; then six petitions. The first three have to do with prayer for the glory of God; and then the next three have to do with our own needs.
The struggle for me is how to use this prayer outline in my own prayers. If I pray according to my own feelings and inclinations, I probably won’t use the outline at all; I will just tell God how I feel. If I do that, His prayer outline becomes useless. But if I force myself to use the outline, then my prayers usually become mechanical and sometimes without much heart. So, what do I do? I have to tell you that I haven’t completely figured it out yet. But I have some ideas that I am now thinking about, that I think will allow my prayer to get better. So here are my ideas.
My goal will be to use the Lord’s Prayer outline as a guide and yet to find a way to pray with my heart in it—so that His prayer outline will also be my outline, and also that I will be praying with my own heart.
The first thing that I think will be very helpful is to write out my prayers using the Lord’s prayer as a guide, and to try to write as much as I can. I will have the goal of writing a seven-page prayer with each page under the heading of one of the Lord’s Prayer points. So, on page one I will write on “Our Father.” Then on page two I will write on “Hallowed be Thy name,” and so on. And to make it less mechanical, I will really work on getting smooth transitions from page to page. Maybe on some days, when I have more time, I will try to write two pages per outline point, making it a fourteen-page prayer. I will continue this prayer writing exercise for many days, maybe for a few months.
Next, when I feel that I have mastered the writing, I will try to pray just in my thoughts without writing it out. And each time I do it, I will try to pray with my heart and all the while asking Him to help me pray.
As I think on these ideas, I am so aware that prayer is a struggle and hard work. It is hard to pray correctly and hard to train my mind to be attentive to Him. This is so much of what prayer is—being attentive to Him. It will also be challenging to get everything to fit where it belongs; that is, where in the prayer outline do I confess sins, and where do I pray for friends, and so many other things. These are things that need to be worked out in the prayer writing; and then hopefully, when I graduate from the writing, I will have it figured out—so that in the end I will know how to pray to the Father appropriately and with praise.
In all that I have written here I am mainly talking about your private prayers. Public prayer may be similar, but not as long. I think public prayers should always be short, as not to appear prideful, and also to allow others to pray.
The following article is an excerpt from this book.
Prayer has been defined or described in many ways.
Here are nine different descriptions of prayer, by various authors:
1. Prayer is asking and receiving. According to E.M. Bounds, “Prayer is the outstretched arms of the child for the Father’s help. Prayer is the child’s cry calling to the Father’s ear…Prayer is the seeking of God’s greatest good, which will not come if we do not pray.”
2. Prayer is approaching God’s throne. According to Spurgeon, “True prayer is an approach of the soul by the Spirit of God to the throne of God.” I would say it this way: it is the approach of the Holy Spirit in our soul that drives us to the throne.
3. Prayer is our service due Him. According to E. M. Bounds, “Prayer is not a duty which must be performed, to ease obligation…
The following article is an excerpt from this book.
Prayer is not only petition, it is also something more basic—it is soul to soul communication with God. And this really must come first, before we ask God for anything. For this is the heart of prayer. Before we can expect Him to listen to our requests we must have made contact with His soul by our soul.
I got this idea from Jim Downing in his book Meditation, where he suggests that various passages in the Psalms (e.g. Ps. 62:5, 130:6, 25:1) “indicate that coming into contact with God involves the soul.” And he stated that “Theologians in general agree as to the soul’s principle powers…the mind, the affections and the will.”
So I am suggesting that “coming into contact with God” with our souls is really what prayer is. True prayer, therefore, will involves the mind, the affections (the…
Stephen Nielsen 