David's Prayer Life

Today I was reading Psalms and felt God speaking to me.  I have always loved the prayers of David.  His honesty and heart-wrenching cries move me.  Because let’s get real; I’m a guy and I do not like admitting when I’m having a hard time.  Whether it be I’m having a hard time being joyful, a hard time physically making it through the day, or even having a hard time living like God is important to me.  When I struggle, I want to bottle it up and fake it.  I want to press on in my stubbornness and lock down my feelings.  Sure, I might be miserable, but nobody else needs to know just how miserable…right?

I have always wondered why God considered David “a man after His own heart”.  And I still do.  But I think I am beginning to understand why.  We all know it’s not because David was perfect.  David did some really stupid stuff!  And at the end of his life, he was reaping the consequences of his poor choices.  So what made David so set apart?  I believe it was his realness.  David had no reservations about being honest with God.  David praised the Lord in times of prosperity as well as times of doubt and fear.  And when David felt fearful, he cried out to God to deliver him and guard him against his enemies!  He was not afraid to plead for God to move on his behalf.  And he was willing to praise Him for who He is and what He was doing in David’s life.

When I examine my own prayer life, I recognize a plastic, even empty and routine, methodology behind my words.  When I ask God to do something, am I really asking Him to move on my behalf?  Am I really expecting a response?  Or am I going through motions?  David was convinced that God heard his prayers and that God was going to do something!  David was close to the Lord’s heart, not because he was more special than the rest of us, but because He believed God is who He says He is. 

God is teaching me something about my heart.  He is teaching me that I have a lot of knowledge, but not as much trust.  He is teaching me that I am familiar with the kind of words to say, but I lack the bold faith to declare them sincerely.  I know the church game very well.  I can fake it with the best of them and I can pray prayers that sound righteous…but where is my heart?  Where is my belief?

The Psalms of David are revolutionary for me.  I want to pray like David prayed.  I want to seek the face of God and see His hand in my life.  I want to chase down His heart and declare His victories in my life without shame.  David had something I lack and I am beginning a journey in discovering the kind of audacious prayer life that David had.

I am starting to focus in on the different kinds of prayers that David had throughout the book of Psalms.  I will be studying them and sharing my thoughts on them in future posts.  I encourage you to read through the Psalms along with me!

PoW: Prisoner of War

The past few months, I’ve been making my way through a book by John Eldredge called Waking the Dead.  Honestly, this book tore me up.  It was hard to read at times.  But I learned so much through it.  He puts Scripture into perspective in a way that awakened a part of me.  But this book also opened my eyes to some terribly painful truths about my life and the lives of all of us.  Things that now weigh heavily on my heart, and I want…no, I need to share.

PoW.  In a world where conflict and violence is never-ending, most of us probably know what a PoW is.  A prisoner of war.  Today, I want to share with you the story of my heart and how it has been a PoW for the past couple years.  NOTICE:  I do not know how long this story will take to tell.  I will write as the words come and will stop when there is nothing else to tell.  This may be a very long post, I do not know.  You have been warned.  :)

I grew up in a Christian home.  My parents were Christians and we started to regularly attend church when I was in the 3^rd grade.  We had just moved to Virginia Beach, where we would stay for 10 years; a rare thing for a Navy family.  From that day until we moved to Pensacola when I was 18 years old, I went to that same church.  I grew up in that church. 

When I was 10 years old, I became convicted of my sin.  After sharing my convictions with my parents, I was led to the Lord and was baptized shortly after.  Now fast forward about 6 years.

I was an instructor at Karate For Christ (now known as Savior Martial Arts).  I still went to the same church, but in a lot of ways, my peers at karate were more of a youth group to me than my actual church family.  That summer, we were having an event called Teen Praise Night, a gathering where the teens from my karate school gathered for worship and fellowship.  That particular night, I was struck by the message a fellow instructor and dear friend was sharing.  I remember feeling…undone.  I remember the shock and the blood draining from my face as I listened to my friend describe an experience he had about “black belt healers”.  I remember thinking to myself “how can I be a black belt healer, when I do not feel healed myself?”  I felt empty.  I believed I was saved; but something in me wasn’t filled.  After a long conversation with my friend, I recommitted my life to Christ, realizing that though my soul was secure, my heart had been lost.

For the years that followed, I served as a karate instructor and I loved it.  I become very good at what I did.  I was very passionate about where I was in life and I saw God move in the lives of my students and friends.  My heart was free.  Now fast forward again to when I was 18 years old, just 2 years ago.

We moved.  That may seem like a simple statement, but to me it was earth shattering.  All the friendships I had formed and nurtured over the course of 10 years were being uprooted.  All the progress I had made in the martial arts was being forced to a halt (I have multiple black belts in several different styles and was working my way through Tai Chi and Aikido as a beginner).  I had also been speaking at my church, literally having grown up there.  I had seen the church change drastically through the years and was being given positions of leadership and influence.  I spent my 18^th birthday delivering a sermon in front of my church congregation and the many karate friends who came out to support me.  Frankly, I was heading somewhere with my life.  I had spent years working towards where I was and I was proud of where God had brought me.  Then we moved.

The move to Pensacola did something to me that I cannot truly describe.  Uprooting my life and moving down South didn’t just rattle my social life.  It shook me down in my soul.  I literally became a different person.  My heart, once free and passionate about the work of God, was becoming uneasy and confused.  Then the final shove that imprisoned my heart: my dad left.

I was broken-hearted.  And I mean that in every sense of the word.  My heart was broken and buried in a sea of pain, doubt, and anger.  My heart was no longer free.  It was being held prisoner by the enemy. 

There is a war going on, my friends.  And I do not mean the war overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I am talking about the war for our souls.  A great conflict between us and Satan.  I will be honest, I knew about this war.  In fact, being a martial artist, spiritual warfare fascinated me.  I loved making connections to Christianity through my karate training.  But an academic understanding of this war did not prepare me for the assault on my heart.

Satan, according to Scripture, was once a stunning creature.  The most beautiful and cunning out of all that God had made.  But Satan grew arrogant.  He came to envying God’s sovereignty and he coveted God’s throne.  For his rebellion, Satan and his angel followers were banished from Heaven.  Satan’s hatred of God fuels this war that you and I find ourselves in.  And we have a problem; we bear the image of God.  For that, Satan despises us. 

Since our creation, Satan has made destroying us his mission.  Did he not initiate the fall of humankind by deceiving Eve and tempting her into disobedience of what God said?  His game plan has been disruption and destruction ever since the beginning.  And thousands of years later, nothing has changed.  Back to my story…

Satan moved against my heart in a mighty way.  Already spiritually off balance and confused by the move, I was relying on one thing to help keep me stable while I sorted my new life out: my family.  And so it was there that Satan struck.  My father, swayed by whatever lies Satan offered, left us to follow his dreams and fulfill his own happiness.  In short, Satan had just pushed my heart into a prison cell and locked the door.  I could not trust God.  After all, He was the One who allowed the move in the first place, knowing what awaited my family.  I can safely say that I doubted my faith.  There were even seasons when I rejected my faith in my heart, for I could see no light in the darkness of my prison cell. 

Now I am 20 years old.  My dad is still gone.  I have yet to continue in my martial arts training and the leadership and passion for the Kingdom of God has not been what it was.  I used to think that all those years in Virginia was me being fake.  That I did not truly love God because I caved so quickly after troubles hit.  I felt like I had to build my faith up from scratch here in Pensacola because it did not truly exist in Virginia. But I was lied to.  And here I shall share the truth.

What happened to me and my family was not my fault.  Pretty simple, isn’t it?  But you see, for years I have been trying to own what happened as a failure of faith on my part.  That somewhere in the midst of this, I did not do what I should have and now I had to start over in the faith area of my life.  But I was being deceived.  My heart was hostage to an enemy whose sole focus in life is to see my heart destroyed. 

Proverbs 4:23 says “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life”.  In the midst of my difficult situation, I had not guarded my heart.  I was left defenseless and before I knew what happened, I was a prisoner of war.   God secured my soul when I was 10 years old, yes!  But Satan had trapped my heart, burying it under my guilt, my hurt, and my anger.  My heart needed to be rescued.

Now for the joyous part!  Jesus said that “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”.  Yes, Satan had stolen my heart, killed my joy, and was destroying my faith.  But Jesus is not some passive God who stands on the sidelines and watches the hearts of His people being assaulted.  My King stepped in to free me.  Over the past few months, I have been seeing the truth.  To understand Christianity, you must have more than just an understanding of God.  You must have an understanding of the war you were born into.  There is a dialogue from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers that speaks to this.

Theoden: I will not risk open war…

Aragorn: Open war is upon you whether you would risk it or not.

You must understand, there is a war out there regardless of how you feel about it.  And Satan is going after your heart.  Denying it does not spare you.  Choosing not to think about it does not rescue you from the schemes of Hell.  You are in a fight for your life just like I am.  But we do not fight alone.

Jesus Christ did not stand by idly when our souls were condemned to eternal fire.  No, he shed His robes of royalty and descended to the realm of Satan where he snatched the keys to Hell from the clenched hands of Satan himself and then rose to life again, conquering death.  But He did not stop at our eternal salvation.  That was what I grew up believing.  That Jesus died and rose again so that I would change destinations when I died.  But that is not the completion of what Christ did for us!  Jesus Himself tells us what He came to do.  Teaching in the synagogue, Jesus reveals to us His mission statement in the words of Isaiah.  Jesus quotes “The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed” (Luke 4:18).

What I have been learning the past few months and am continuing to learn is that God never intended to stop with my salvation.  He came to “proclaim freedom for the prisoners…to release the oppressed”.  This means that Jesus Christ did not just die and raise again to save my soul.  He came to bring abundant life; He came to restore my heart and set it free. 

Christianity is more than salvation.  Frankly, I was never taught that growing up in my little Southern Baptist church.  If it was taught to me, it certainly didn’t stick.  Christianity is LIFE!  Jesus did not come to give you fire insurance, a “get out of jail, free” card, or whatever other cute little phrases there are out there.  Christ came to set us free.  Here on earth as well as the life after this. 

And here is some honesty: my faith that my soul was secure was not enough to get me through the day.  My trying to look through my circumstances and look forward to Heaven did not offer me the hope I thought it should. But now here is my hope: that Christ is risen, His Spirit dwells in me at this very moment, and I have a place in His family and a mission on His battlefield.  My life has purpose. 

For 2 years, my heart was held captive and it didn’t matter what kind of “faith stuff” I did, it wasn’t real because my heart wasn’t in it.  Why?  Because Satan had my heart clenched in his fist.  But Christ, in His grace and His love, stepped into the situation and pried open the hand of the enemy and released me!  I now have a very real and experiential understanding of the war we’re in.  I have also experienced the grace of God in how He has recovered my heart.  Without Him acting on my behalf, I would have gone the rest of my life thinking the circumstances that arose in my life were my fault, and my inability to handle them were my failures.  My attempts at faith would have been empty and hollow and eventually I would have given up on God.

My heart used to be a prisoner of war.  But now I am free of the prison that Satan arranged for me.  I never put down the sword of faith; it was snatched from me. My guard was down and my heart was exposed to an invasion that I did not even understand. 

But that is old news, my friends.  I’m back in the fight.  Not because I did anything spectacular.  Not because I wrestled my way out of doubt and come to you as some saint.  No, not at all.  I am back in the fight because Jesus set my heart free.  He opened my eyes to the reality of my situation; blew open the door to my prison cell.  I see light where I used to know only darkness and despair.  Christ is not just my Savior; He is my Father and He is my Friend.   

I had been left fatherless and felt abandoned.  In this, Satan caged my heart.  Jesus broke me out and I am learning what it is like to be fathered by God and to truly be in His presence. 

I do not know about you, but the realization that Jesus wanted more than just my soul, was life-changing for me.  He wants to come and heal our hearts.  He doesn’t just rule over us, He walks beside us on that narrow road.  He teaches us and is a Friend to us.  Jesus Christ is awesome. 

I share this story to give you courage.  And maybe, you were like me.  You are saved, but you don’t feel passion like you used to.  Faith and “God stuff” seems like an obligation; not your heart’s delight.  If this is so, I hope my story has helped to open your eyes.  Too many Christians live thinking that the two big players in their life are them and God.  They are ignorant of an enemy that seeks their doom.   I am no longer one of them.  If you want to talk or hear more about Jesus and what He has already done for you and what He wants to do in your future, let me know.  I have been a Christian for half my life and I have never wanted to know God like this.  I have never understood His passion for me before now.  He moved Heaven and Earth to make a way for you to know Him personally.  That is no longer just doctrine to me; it is my story. 

I will be writing more in the future about our hearts and what God is teaching me about who He is and what He wants to do in our lives.  I hope you will stay with me on the journey.  I am confident it will be a wild one!