Enter Through Prayer

 

Compassion is a mighty demonstration of love which shows its involvement and interest in other matters not according to their own self interest or profit, such as how much will this hospital make or what fame will be reckoned to me in such a university. Genuine compassion is the outpouring of love of someone in need. The passion involved is not dependent on what he can see himself doing, but what God wants to do through him. And this is where we need to pay special attention to in the book of Nehemiah. Godly compassion will demand that we regularly come to God for beseeching help that He alone is able to do. This type of intercessory prayer is powerful. For it gets God involved in places where He longs to pour out His wonderful grace and mercy.

Our view of intercessory prayer

Remember when Jesus was praying and making sure that God was being glorified through His life and that He was being glorified because of His obedience to God?  Right after that, Jesus continues to pray as He looks to the time when He would be taken from the disciples and they would be left in the world.  They would find themselves in a new situation and He saw that only as they became one with Him and each other could the experience the fullness of the revelation of the glory of Himself. 

Jesus knew that the world and the evil one would like to thwart those plans, so Jesus now turns to pray for His disciples in the situation they are about to face.  Jesus prays first for God to protect the disciples by His name, which He has given to Jesus.  In that pray Jesus addresses God as, Holy Father. God is commonly known as the Holy One, the expression Holy Father is not found anywhere else in the Bible. Holiness refers to divine otherness, the realm of the divine in contrast to the mundane. Thus, this phrase captures beautifully God's "purity and tenderness, the "transcendence and intimacy characteristic of Jesus' personal attitude to God and of his teaching about God."

There's this amazing prayer by a Jesuit father that says 'Fall in love with God, stay in love with God, and it will change everything.'

You pray, then, in this manner: Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be your name...

This is followed by the very essence of intercessory prayer.  When we pray, "Thy kingdom come,' are we praying for heaven to come to earth? In a sense we are praying for this; but heaven is an object of desire only because the reign of God is to be more perfectly realized then it is now. Apart from the reign of God, heaven is meaningless. Therefore, what we pray for is, "Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This prayer is a petition for God to reign, to manifest His kingly sovereignty and power, to put to fight every enemy of righteousness and of His divine rule, that God alone may be King over all the world.

The prayer Celine Dion& A Bocelli 
Our Father Prayer in a Catholic Church setting

Cleveland Baptist Church Choir- Hear Our Prayer

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The first followers of Jesus

Disciple means pupil or student, and the disciples were people who chose to follow Jesus and to listen to his teaching. They called him rabbi, or teacher. The twelve disciples were followers of Jesus whom he had chosen to become his core group, the people he talked things over with and depended on.
Many aspects of an envisioned future can be influenced or changed by decisions and actions you make today. For the church, this is not simply projection-based planning but the realization that through prayer and obedience you can be a catalyst to help bring about a future that is in alignment with God’s will. Through prayer, the framework for plan is established. Implementing strategy requires continued daily prayer for direction accompanied by obedient action in response to what God reveals.

There are two conversions in Acts 10, the conversion of a gentile named Cornelius and an apostle named Peter. Both were necessary for the mission of God to go forward. The inclusion of gentiles into the Christian family would become a thorn in the flesh for many, and eventually it lead to a complete rejection of Christianity by Jews. But it started here, and it was brought about by God. As far as Luke was concerned, this was Peter’s climactic sermon, and he would always be known as one who, though sometimes reluctant, was determined to do what God wanted.

What a change! The Law can enslave us; the Gospel sets us free to live for Christ. The message puts a new joy in our hearts and new smiles on our faces. The Gospel ushers in a new day.

If we follow Peter’s logic, we will see that Jewish believers do not have to keep the laws of Moses, either. They are saved by grace through faith, just as the Gentiles are. The old covenant is obsolete, so its laws are no longer required for anyone, and that is why Peter could live like a Gentile (Gal. 2:14).

Having accomplished salvation for the elect, God now applies it to us by faith. Justification is the primary and foundational act of God in applying our salvation because it is the bestowal upon us of the right to all the blessings Christ has won on our behalf and will thus progressively apply to us—such as sanctification and glorification. Justification means and seeks to demonstrate that it is received by faith alone.

There is certainly to-day amongst many of our missionaries a tendency to encourage their converts to teach others from the moment of their conversion. That may seem a very strange thing to say, and it would be a very strange thing to say unless it were still somewhat rare, and was not even now checked and hindered, often by those who desire it most sincerely.

The term “passion” is used to describe everything from romance to hunger pangs. I don’t know what it means to you, but for me passion means whatever a person is willing to suffer for. In fact, that’s the
root meaning of the word. It comes from the Latin paserre, to suffer. It is what you hunger for so intensely that you will sacrifice anything to have it.

http://youtu.be/AX_mA93jtgo

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