Prayer thoughts and testing the spirits to see if they're of God

      This is from a prayer devotional I e-mailed some people. It's about overcoming through prayer and how we sometimes get in our own way. Or, others do it for us. :-)

     I haven't had any readers for a few wees and only 5 since Feb. 1; I will probably suspend this blog if I don't get more. If you like it, share with others.

     What are prayer thoughts? It's what I call things that come to your mind as you pray, or which others might tell you which connect to your prayers. There's an interesting baseball story I'll connect to this.

     Of course, we've seen that everything that comes to our mind must be tested against scripture first. The thought that it might be possible to work one's way to Heaven is, of course, not Biblical. Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.(Eph. 2:8-9, Acts 4:12, John 14:6, etc.)That's an extreme example, but other things are, of course, untrue. Job's friends thought to blame him for all of his problems, which was very false. One wonders what they were doing that first week with Job. They weren't listening to God telling them what to do, it seems.

     I had a few recently I thought I'd share. One, about a girl in our ministry at one point, Hamione, comes from someone at church to whom I told her stor. I commented that I even told her "it's okay to cry" onc e, and she said she hardly ever cried. This woman said that she never cried till she met her husband of 20_ years, who helped her see it was okay to express her feelings and that people would listen.

     So, I added to my prayer list for her - even if it's not at the ver to since she may not want a relationship with a boy till she's through the age where there'd be a lot of drama - that Hamione meets a boy just like this woman, Lisa (now Maxwell) met her husband Mark, one who is compassionate like him and able to draw out of her that willingness to be more expressive.

     It made sense, when I thought about it. Hamione isn't to the point where she has attachment disorder, but she did seem to need a lot of control of things and struggle a lot when in certain situations.

     While I think she has improved a lot in that area since we met her in early 2017, obviously she can keep growing in Christ, and that's here biggest prayer need.

     Don't you love how God does that? When you're praying or just when you're sharing and bouncing ideas off someone, something comes to you that just makes so much sense. And, you also see how some people have gone through the same thing, which encourages us to see that God can bring us - or the people we are praying for - through, too.

     How do you test a prayer thought like that? In tis case, I jjust prayed and asked the Lord to help me - it seemed pretty logical. You know you can trust the Holy Spirit. But you also should check to make sure you don't have any hidden biases.

     Take Job's friends (take them, please!, as he would say.) The thoughts came to them that he was responsible because of some sin he had committed. They had hidden biases - maybe they suffered the same sorts of thigns in their lives and thought that was true of everyone. Or, maybe their view of God was wrong. Maybe they only thought of God the righteous judge and forgot that He is also the suffering servant, and that He is also sovereign; God was allowing thigns to happen to Job becasue the devil was attacking Job and God was testing him. Job aced that test - he got a book of the Bible all about those struggles!

     At times, we all suffer from that inability to see our own biases at times. I do, too. I presume something might be because of a handicap when it doesn't have to be that; although it does give me a way to excuse or forgive someone much more easily.

     We tend to use this to our advantage, too, for our own motives. Tommy Lasorda, before he was a Hall of Fame manager, was a scout in the '60s. He and another team's scout (maybe more than one) were watching a pitcher whose dad was a team doctor. The dad went out to talk to the pitcher on the mound. Another scout asked who that was, and Lasorda said: "You know what? His dad's a doctor. I wonder if he's going out there to give him a shot. I'll bet there's somethign wrong with his arm!" Lasorda, in his biography, reports that the other team was scared off of this iptcher and the Dodgers got him in the 2nd round, whereas he might have gone in the first. (In those days, there wasn't much difference in the money. I don't know the name so I don't know if he made the majors, but it wasn't a big name.)

     See how the mind can play tricks on us? We make these logical leaps over what was actually just  a simpe case of the dad going out to calm down the pitcher, or maybe to talk about some mechanical thing he was doing that the dad and he had worked on that *could* have hurt his arm if he wasn't careful.

     Now, God calms us down when we trust Him. If that scout had prayed he might have said, "Wait a minute, I need to look into this and find out if this guy has arm problems." Or, mabye God will let us fail a little becasue we need to learn something else. Or, maybe God will use that becasue the scout is supposed to look at an even better player who would be a star. Remember how Joseph said in Gen. 50:20, "Thou meant to do evil, but God meant it unto good." God will allow things to happen sometimes that seem bad, becasue He needs to turn us in a direction we wouldn't have gone otherwise. We never would have been on Hamione's block in the first place if we hadn't been recruiting new kids because of some problems elsewhere.