Is There A Right Position to Pray? (and other devotionals)

Is there is a Right Position to Pray? by Daily Disciples What is the position of our prayer life? The position of prayer can be physical like on our knees or face down but let's consider our spiritual position in prayer. Spiritually speaking, where are we positioned in Christ when we pray? Colossians 3 tells us we are seated in the “heavenlies”. Paul states that Jesus is seated at the right hand of God the Father and we are now seated with Him. Then we are instructed to set our minds on things above, not on earthly things. If we took the mental position of setting our minds with Jesus seated in the heaven-lies and then look down on our lives from His perspective, what would we see? How would it impact our prayer life if we prayed for things from Jesus’s point of view? We would see things differently as a result of pulling ourselves out of ourselves to see: how we are acting? how we are communicating? what buttons are being pushed that keep us troubled? where are we getting stuck? If we really understood our position in Christ, our prayers would change. We would not be so reactive but would be proactive to pray without the emotional pulls. In prayer, we need to learn to see our circumstances from God's perspective. We might then consider to stop praying about all the moving, distracting, emotionally draining things, and start praying for what Jesus wants for us and from us in any given situation. We might just see that the Lord does not want to change the situation but to actually change us. _________________________________ He went out, not knowing where he was going. —Hebrews 11:8  Have you ever “gone out” in this way? If so, there is no logical answer possible when anyone asks you what you are doing. One of the most difficult questions to answer in Christian work is, “What do you expect to do?” You don’t know what you are going to do. The only thing you know is that God knows what He is doing. Continually examine your attitude toward God to see if you are willing to “go out” in every area of your life, trusting in God entirely. It is this attitude that keeps you in constant wonder, because you don’t know what God is going to do next. Each morning as you wake, there is a new opportunity to “go out,” building your confidence in God. “…do not worry about your life…nor about the body…” (Luke 12:22). In other words, don’t worry about the things that concerned you before you did “go out.” Have you been asking God what He is going to do? He will never tell you. God does not tell you what He is going to do— He reveals to you who He is. Do you believe in a miracle-working God, and will you “go out” in complete surrender to Him until you are not surprised one iota by anything He does? Believe God is always the God you know Him to be when you are nearest to Him. Then think how unnecessary and disrespectful worry is! Let the attitude of your life be a continual willingness to “go out” in dependence upon God, and your life will have a sacred and inexpressible charm about it that is very satisfying to Jesus. You must learn to “go out” through your convictions, creeds, or experiences until you come to the point in your faith where there is nothing between yourself and God. ~Oswald Chambers~ ______________________ "The greatest question of our time is not communism versus individualism, not Europe versus America, not even East versus the West; it is whether men can live without God." ~Will Durant~ ____________________ "America has become a cut flower civilization. Our culture is cut off from its Christian roots like a flower cut at the stem. Though the flower will hold its beauty for a time, it is destined to wither and die." ~D. Elton Trueblood~ ______________________ "When God is dead, anything is permissible." ~Fyodor Dostroyevsky~ ______________________ "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' Since then I have spent well-over 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books,collected hundreds of  personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' " ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn~