Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
It's a cold morning and you feel like snuggling up in your warm bed. It feels so nice when you don't have to meet a deadline and go to work or to school, to just laze there. Do you want to get up out of your warm bed and kneel on your knees to pray? Takes effort. Maybe you can drift off to sleep again.
There is another way of looking at this problem (probably all of us have it!), besides the familiar one that if we stay in bed and don't get up and pray that WE will lose a blessing. That other viewpoint is the way God feels about it. By not making the effort to meet Him at this appointment to pray, are you depriving Him of something HE longs for? Can you dare to think that He Himself enjoys a visit with you, that HE gets a blessing when you pray? Can a child imagine Santa Claus gets a blessing bringing him toys rather than vice versa? (Difficult? No more than grown-ups understanding God!)
There's a verse tucked away in the Old Testament that pictures a lonely God on safari every morning all over the world trying to find someone somewhere who cares enough that He can talk to and to visit with: "The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew Himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him" (2 Chron. 16:9). He has something in His heart that He longs to communicate!
A good teacher can't wait until class time, for He wants to share something precious with his students and watch them grow. David prays in Psalm 25, "Teach me!" Can we imagine God pleading with us, "Please wake up, get up, and let Me teach you something! I'm bursting with some Good News I want to share! I'm like a power plant that needs somebody to turn the switch on to complete the circuit!" (Electricity is flowing through your house night and day, but you have to choose to turn on the switch.)
If Jesus is Emmanuel, "God with us," if He came down here to share oneness with us, then He must have known what it is to lie snug and warm in bed and to feel like going back to sleep. But the Father on safari was calling Him, "He wakeneth morning by morning, He wakeneth Mine ear to hear as the learned, ... and I was not rebellious, neither turned away back" (Isa. 50:4, 5). Let's do what David says, "Bless the Lord, O my soul," and make HIM happy! Supply HIS need! Keep the appointment with Him.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: April 29, 2001.
Copyright © 2012 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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