Josh1Eight

"I will show you what it’s like when someone comes to me, listens to my teaching, and then follows it. It is like a person building a house who digs deep and lays the foundation on solid rock. When the floodwaters rise and break against that house, it stands firm because it is well built." (Luke 6:47, 48 NLT) This is probably one of the most key paragraphs in all of Scripture pertaining to living out the Christian life. This entire "sermon" by Jesus is the last in a string of revolutionary statements about true spirituality from the most spiritual Man who ever lived. Keep in mind also that Jesus wasn't addressing the spiritual elite of His day. These were an assortment of regular, everyday men and women, many of whom did not even have a grasp on who God really was (vs. 17). In the most basic terms Jesus spelled out in several ways the simple truth that God desires people to love Him and love others as we would want to be shown love (27-42). But He doesn...

"One day soon afterward Jesus went up on a mountain to pray, and he prayed to God all night. At daybreak he called together all of his disciples and chose twelve of them to be apostles..." (Luke 6:12, 13 NLT) Jesus prayed. Often. Occasionally He got up before sun up to commune with God the Father. I always wish I could have been a fly on the wall to just listen in on to those prayer meetings to see what "perfect prayer" actually looked like. But then I wonder, "Why did Jesus even need to pray?" Didn't He have the authority to do the works of God kinda on demand? Of course. And yet He prayed more than any man in history. Was He just being a good example? Hardly. Apparently Jesus understood something about prayer that you and I don't. Maybe His "praying" was less about requesting something and more about communing with the very presence of the One who is the source of all things. On this specific occasion Jesus already had a follo...