Youth

Our devotion this week, Pray Effectively, comes from the YouVersion Bible App. It was provided by Answers with Bayless Conley. For more information, please visit: http://www.answersbc.org

PRAISE: The First Step in Effective Prayer

Praying consistently will change your life. In fact, many of the blessings God wants you to enjoy will never be realized unless you pray.

I think all Christians know they are supposed to pray, and all Christians want to pray. But many of God’s people, if they are completely frank and transparent about the issue, would have to admit their prayer life is somewhere between mediocre and non-existent.

Over the next few devotionals, I want to share with you four simple points which I have put into an acronym: P-R-A-Y. If you can spell the word pray, hopefully you will be able to remember how to make your prayer life more effective, and you will be inspired to pray more consistently.

Psalm 100 helps us understand the first letter, “P”, in the word P-R-A-Y, which stands for praise.

Psalm 100:1-4 states it well,

¹Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.
²Worship the Lord with gladness;
    come before him with joyful songs.
³ Know that the Lord is God.
    It is he who made us, and we are his;
    we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
⁴ Enter his gates with thanksgiving
    and his courts with praise;
    give thanks to him and praise his name.

Verse 2 tells us, Come before His presence with singing. And in verse 4 notice the words “enter into.” In other words, praise is how you are to enter God’s presence. It is the best way to begin your prayer.

When you want to come to God, you start with thanksgiving. You start with singing. You start with praise. Or, as The Message says, Enter with the password: “Thank you!”

Today, and every day, make praise the starting point of every conversation with God.

Our devotion this week comes from the YouVersion Bible App. It was written and provided by Elevation Church. We’ll spend some time this week in a few songs written by Elevation, and looking at the Scripture background of these songs.

Yours

Take a moment and look up Yours by Elevation Worship on iTunes, Spotify, or YouTube. Listen the whole way through, and then continue reading below.

“Glory and praise
Power and strength
Worthy is the Lamb of God
Hallelujah.”

One of the greatest purposes of our worship is re-orientation. As we go about our day and fulfill our earthly duties, it’s easy to overlook our heavenly ones. Since the moment sin entered creation, our natural bend hasn’t been upward; it’s been inward. And as a natural result, we tend to fix our eyes not on where our help comes from, but on where our problems come from.

Worship has the power to change that. It can take your eyes off the petty and, within a matter of minutes, change your perspective and provide a window through which to see God’s ability, God’s power, and God’s provision.

That’s why when we use our voices in worship to declare God’s promises and ascribe to Him His glory — we’re not performing, we’re practicing. It’s an intentional effort to make our lives about more than ourselves.

Jesus, the Holy Lamb of God, was slain not so we could live a life based on our preferences, but so we could live a life built upon His promises.

Read Revelation 5:12.

¹² In a loud voice they were saying:
“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
    to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
    and honor and glory and praise!”

Whatever you might be going through right now, remember the power of your worship. Allow it to shift your perspective and remind you that there is only one who belongs on the throne — and it isn’t us.

Our devotion this week comes from the YouVersion Bible App. It was written and provided by Elevation Church. We’ll spend some time this week in a few songs written by Elevation, and looking at the Scripture background of these songs.

Do It Again – Part 2

Take a moment and look up Do It Again by Elevation Worship on iTunes, Spotify, or YouTube. Listen the whole way through, and then continue reading below.

“I’ve seen you move
You move the mountains
And I believe
I’ll see you do it again.”

As Joshua rounded the walls for the seventh time on the seventh day, it’s hard to imagine the nervousness he felt — and perhaps even the confusion. He had spent seven days following instructions that involved walking around a city wall leading an entire nation of people. And if that wasn’t enough, the final instructions for obtaining victory was for his people to blow trumpets and give a loud shout.

Why did they have to walk around a city wall? Why seven laps? Why seven days? And how was shouting supposed to cause a structurally sound wall to collapse?

A lot of it didn’t make sense, but when it comes to faith — that isn’t that unusual. In fact, rarely do the instructions of faith make sense.

Faith will tell you to have patience when everything else is telling you to panic.

Faith will tell you to hold on when everything else is telling you to let go.

Faith will tell you to push forward when everything else is telling you to pull back.

Read Joshua 6:15-20.

¹⁵ On the seventh day, they got up at daybreak and marched around the city seven times in the same manner, except that on that day they circled the city seven times. ¹⁶ The seventh time around, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the army, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city! ¹⁷ The city and all that is in it are to be devoted to the Lord. Only Rahab the prostituteand all who are with her in her house shall be spared, because she hid the spies we sent. ¹⁸ But keep away from the devoted things, so that you will not bring about your own destruction by taking any of them. Otherwise you will make the camp of Israel liable to destruction and bring trouble on it. ¹⁹ All the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron are sacred to the Lord and must go into his treasury.”
²⁰ When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.

You may not be facing a monstrous wall like Joshua was, but you are facing something. And even if the way forward doesn’t make sense, the good news is it doesn’t have to.

Having faith isn’t about making sense; it’s about making your heart open and available to the voice of God.