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Breath Prayer on Palm Sunday
Palm Sunday, a perfect day to revisit Christian breath prayer. The prayer is simple: choose a verse from the Bible. Silently repeat it in two phrases while breathing deeply. Breathe in, the first phrase. Breathe out, the second. The classic breath prayer dates from the ancient church. Today we call it the Jesus Prayer: “Jesus Son of God / have mercy on me, a sinner.” You can turn anything God shows you into a breath prayer. This is NOT an affirmation or a deep breathing exercise. This is praying God’s Word back to Him. This morning, I was re-reading a passage He showed me the other day. At the time…
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When You Listen to God
I am definitely NOT the Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane! But His words struck me hard yesterday morning as I face continuing procrastination masquerading as confusion: “’Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.’” (Luke 22:46b) Resisting temptation isn’t just deciding not to rob a bank or gamble the deed to your home in Vegas. It’s also the entrepreneur’s daily temptation to feel and pressure of DOING everything: yourself, family, house, church, friends, community member, oh, and your business–and sometimes, last, your alone time with God. Yet the KEY to resisting our everyday temptations of choosing the good (or the not-so-good) over God’s best is…
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Our Redeemer Lives–and Acts
[Christian Spiritual Director post] I often pray for others. Well, I pray for some people every day of my life. I pray for others too as I know their needs. Often our prayer requests are for DELIVERANCE from disease, from financial need, from disrupted relationships, from so many things everyone experiences in a hard world. As a Christian, I have seen God answer again and again: sometimes quietly, sometimes miraculously. I have personally witnessed deliverance in my life and others’ lives. But this morning I remembered something that I knew and had forgotten. We live in a fallen world, a world under a curse. Obviously, God does not deliver His…