Morning Sharing: To Pray God’s Word with Longing

I’ve reached a point of saturation in the whole supplementing my faith with self-control focus (II Peter 1:3-15) and have way too much to share on Sunday! So, I went instead to my focus on Jeremiah 1 from my prayer time yesterday morning.

My prayer-chapel:

At my prayer-chapel yesterday, praying through Jeremiah 1 was such a heart wrenching mixture of grief and comfort. The grief was because of wounds and heartaches from people, and the comfort was in the invitation to know God as so different from humans! I was so aware of the longing to hear God say to me the same things he said to Jeremiah, and so I spent some time focusing on that this morning.

Here’s just the first thing that stood out: 

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

(Jeremiah 1:5)

The first line (“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you”) I can affirm as true for me as much as for Jeremiah. When Paul spoke of “those God foreknew”, it means those God personally knew and loved before creation. Every believer in Jesus Christ can affirm that before we were even conceived, God already knew us for real.

The second line (“and before you were born I consecrated you”) also seems applicable to all believers in the sense that our place in the body of Christ would have been determined by God before we were born. It emphasizes that each of us is given the place in the body of Christ God has chosen for us, therefore we must live it out as people set apart to do what we are gifted to do.

And, the third line (“I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”) is more of a fill-in-the-blanks statement where we can replace “prophet” with whatever we know of our gifting and our place in the body of Christ and let ourselves feel the significance that our Father in heaven appointed us to this place for the good of people around us. This carries with it the weight of responsibility that, to fully be ourselves, we must be what we have been appointed to be.

When I prayed this through out at my prayer spot yesterday, there was a lot more emotion pouring out than this morning. Part of that was the way just praying through God’s word surprises us with whatever God says next.

At the same time, I am glad to meditate on this again today and see how it will encourage you as well. It is a wonderful encouragement to live out who and what we are in the body of Christ today as faithfully as Jeremiah and the other prophets fulfilled their assignments in the kingdom of God in their day. And God will speak to us through his word about what he is doing with us as surely as he did for them.

 

© 2023 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)