Sunday, April 14, 2013 - 5:55 pm

This week was the second in Pastor Kip's series on prayer, and today he focused on the way that God views us. When we only see prayer as a discipline, it can often be as difficult and dry to keep up with it as any discipline. When we make it a delight, however, it stops being a chore, and the discipline springs out of our love for God. Without that delight, we often have difficulty believing or understanding that God delights in us, or even that He likes us. We think He's just putting up with us, knowing what we will become in time, but the truth is that He delights in us now, the person that we are today. We look at our broken promises, the way we've fallen short of His expectations, and in our shame we avoid Him. We love the idea of Jesus, the idea of grace, worship, and intimacy with Him, but we don't actually enjoy any of them, because it's too risky. Our shame makes it difficult to imagine that He could actually enjoy us. Pastor Kip spoke from Luke 18:1-8, Jesus' story of the unjust judge, the point being to pray without giving up or losing heart - reminds me how God has been speaking to me recently about the combination of patience and persistence. God is not annoyed when we're persistent. He loves it when we come to Him, it doesn't annoy or pester Him the way the widow's requests did the unjust judge. Patience comes into play because we don't have enough information to understand the complete will of God as it expands far beyond the borders of our imagination. We need to trust that He knows what He's doing, even when we don't. We have to get used to the fact that there's always going to be a mystery to prayer. Thank God that we have the opportunity to talk with Him, communicate with Him, and build up our relationship with the God who loves us more than we know.