I had a vision of a living prayer chain. First the background: dear friends were telling me about a situation very much like one going on in our own lives. Someone they love has a grown child who is entangled in a desperately painful situation that child shouldn’t be in in the first place. Perhaps you have close ties to someone who is “in a relationship with” an alcoholic, or a crack addict, or someone who is abusing them—the list is…
How does the flesh get such a strong grip on us? Strongholds of the flesh can show up in an instant and pin us to the mat, but they don’t jump on us “out of the blue.” We almost always have had a long history of giving way to them, or of traumatic past issues that spawned them. This means that what came in can also go out! Knowledge is power. Whenever it is placed under the Lord’s leadership, it leads to liberation (as in “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free”).
Isaac had to have his men dig a lot of wells. The Philistine neighbors became threatened by his prosperity so they kept tying to sabotage his operation by filling in his wells, the life-giving sources of water so vitally needed for the thirst of his household and the thirst of his herds. What does this tell us? We (and our household) have a built-in thirst for God, but we also have an enemy who is nefariously at work to fill in our wells!…
“What’s my purpose?” The man sitting across from me at the addiction recovery mission where I work, wanted to know. He’d been beaten nearly to death once, losing a vital body part; he’d been stabbed next to the heart (literally within an inch of his life); and he had been shot several times. A close family member had told him, “God is saving your life for a reason.” He already knew the Lord, but he had no clue what that reason was. What…
