Someone has asked, "Where do you come up with the ideas for your blog posts?"
It's a very good question.
I only wish I had a better answer. You see, my blog, "Random Thoughts From a Cluttered Mind" is named thus for a reason. My posts are random; there's no clear agenda, clear pattern (with perhaps the exception being Fridays, which is reserved for things I find fascinating visually or humorously), rhyme or reason. My mind is cluttered. I don't discipline it well in order to have it working like a finely tuned autmotive engine. As "they" say, "It is what it is."
I do think much of what I write about comes from things I hear or things I read.
Last evening, during our time of prayer at Cornerstone, one of the men was praying and said gave thanks to God for the vehicle of prayer, which allows us to carry our needs, our requests, our thanks to God. I liked that phrasing––the vehicle of prayer––and here's why.
When God created Adam and placed him in the garden, He spoke with him, as well as the woman. There was communication taking place. In Genesis 3, after Adam & Eve have sinned, we read that they heard the sound of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day and they hid themselves. It appears, from this, that they hid because God had come and they were ashamed at their sin. It was not hiding due to God's coming to the garden for the first time. It seems as if God did this frequently.
I want to be careful not to presume upon the text here, but I find this fascinating. Here we have God showing His loving desire to be with His creatures, primarily the two He'd created in His image. He wanted to be with them, to spend time with them, to talk with them. And, I assume, prior to their sin, they wanted the same thing…not only wanted it, but desired it.
Now all that's been ruined; ruined in the sense that prayer is now work. Don't get me wrong; it can be sweet work, with all the joy of having met with God in blessed communion through prayer. But it can still be work, because it isn't "natural." Our flesh does not want to talk with God. God will tell it all kinds of things that it doesn't want to hear (why do you think Adam & Eve hid?). Prayer is work because the world is always full of far more "desirable" things to do, places to go, people to talk with. The devil will keep on seeking to convince us that prayer is toilsome labor that we really ought not bother with; after all, it's so fruitless and did God really say He wanted to talk with you?
So, the next time you find yourself laboring to pray, fight through it. God intended to commune with you. It was part of His good creation. It was part of His design. It was one of the reasons Christ died.