Prayer and Purpose

Jesus endured the greatest testing any human will ever endure when He spent 40 days in the wilderness without food or drink, and He was tried and tempted (Mt 4:1-11; Mk 1:12-13; Lk 4:1-13. While Jesus walked on this earth He was fully God, yet also fully man. By allowing Himself to become man He was able to truly be tempted by Satan's lies. He was alone during this time, alone in the sense that there was no other human with Him. However, this does not require that we should do spiritual battle alone. Indeed, Jesus shortly before being arrested asks His disciples to pray for Him in Gethsemane, a time when He knew His time to die was drawing near and the temptation to not die must have been brutal (Mt 26:36-45; Mk 14:32-41; Lk 22:39-46).  Paul instructs us to keep watch over ourselves to avoid temptation and to "[b]ear one another's burdens" (Gal 6:2). Bearing one another up helps us, as Paul says, to not begin to think to highly of ourselves, and just like a yoke,...

As a Christian, there are some hard things to deal with because you feel like you shouldn’t be having issues with them at all if you truly love and trust God. Some of these things include anxiety, stress, fear, and depression. Although I can’t speak personally to long-term struggles with issues outside of fear, I have still dealt with many of them for brief periods throughout my life, and just like forgiveness, it is much easier said than done to just trust God. Today’s topic is stress. I hold most of my stress in my muscles. I clench my jaw and get tight shoulders. It also often turns to anger if I don’t do something to vent that stress that builds up like a shuddering tea kettle of water about to whistle. While I know that many say, “Just pray about it,” when it comes to basically everything (and that is true) it is sometimes hard to do. We are finite beings that understand the tangible things of the world much more than the intangible. You certainly should go to God as your co...