“O LORD my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me.” Psalm 30:2
Have you ever “missed the mark”? I have. It often happens when I think I’ve understood something, and I really haven’t got a clue as to what was the intent. When it comes to spiritual things, I often think I’ve “got it,” but later I realize, I didn’t get it at all. Leaning on my own understanding is not always reliable, and just recently I found out that it has led me down the wrong path for many years in a very critical area of my spiritual life.
The Bible says to “pray without ceasing” (I Thessalonians 5:17), so I have always incorporated prayer into my Christian life. 1 Peter says we should be “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you,” so I pray. I have prayed for many things, sometimes physical, sometimes spiritual. Sometimes for me personally and sometime for others, but many times the answers didn’t seem to come. I knew in my heart that God could answer my prayers, but I didn’t have the faith that God would answer them.
This made it increasingly hard for me to pray in faith, but I still went through the motions. It was easy to say the words, but I was a prayer warrior whose arsenal was empty and ineffective. My prayers were like spitting into the wind; they just came back to hit me in the face. Needless to say, I was like “a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed” (James1:6), and I didn’t even know it! Oddly enough, I wasn’t angry about the seemingly lack of answers to my prayers; I just assumed that was how prayer was supposed to be. Sometimes my prayers were answered, and sometimes they weren’t. I became that double-minded man that James wrote about, unstable in all my ways (James 1:8), but I was still oblivious to my sad state.
Recently, when I was out of the country, I was able to watch a Sunday school class on my church’s livestream broadcast. The lesson was about stress, and Pastor Jackson spoke from the book of James. He referenced the first part of chapter one, and as he elaborated on it, I realized that I was that double-minded person tossed about by the wind! After this sank in, I listened more intently, and when the broadcast ended, I knew that I needed to change, but how? Read more