How God Acts in Your Life ...

Friday, Jan 22, 2016. Do you pray sometimes? Perhaps you pray regularly. What are your experiences with it? Do you experience answers to your prayer? Does God do what you ask him to do? This might strongly depend on who you are, what you ask for, what your problems and your pain and your challenges are at the moment. It might also depend on God's plans, his thoughts about your life … Let us discuss how God acts in our life!

He Wants to Listen …

First of all: we are told many times we should pray. It is good to bring all our life, all our dreams, all our pain, all our fears to the Lord. It is good to ask him to help us, to bless us, to support us. It is good to ask for his guidance and his advice. It is good to trust our life into his hands - he is God, the creator and universal maintainer of this world.

God wants to listen. He is interested in our life, our very ordinary life, day by day, minute by minute. He wants to know what we think - he knows it anyway, but he wants us to share it with him and to live with him. In Jesus, he came into our world. One of his goals here have been to be close to us, to live with us, to experience what we experience, and to believe how we believe. When we take the story of Jesus serious, we cannot say, the eternal God would not be interested in our little life, with all what is in it. He is.

And this is how we need to approach how God acts in our life. First of all, he does not want to make it to something completely different on the level of us living with others, with our family, our work, our neighbors, our friends, our needs, our goals, our joy, our tears. All this is designed to be in this world. But he wants to make it completely different in the sense of us being filled by his spirit. With faith and in faith nothing is impossible. We can experience him in our life, and with him many astonishing and breathtaking moments and experiences. Let us look into what happened to Mary when she became pregnant with Jesus:

Nothing Impossible

And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” 35 And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. 36 And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. 37 For nothing will be impossible with God.” 38 And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant6 of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her. (Luke 1, 34-38)

You might ask yourself: why did God wait so long with Elisabeth to get a child? Did she not pray for it? Could he not have done it earlier? All these questions might be good questions, but we also learn that John the baptist, who was this son of Elisabeth, plays a crucial role in the plans of God with this world. God heard the prayer of Elisabeth, and gave more to her than she could ever expect. She became part of his salvation history in a prominent role!

But God has his own timing. He has his own time-frame. He acts when time is there, not before. Sometimes we need this time of patience. We need to learn that other things are more important than what we pray for. We need to learn that he is the center of the world. We need to find to peace, to love, to truth. We need to acquire freedom, his unlimited freedom which enables us to be fully human. In this freedom and with him as the source and center of our life, we will experience his actions, day by day! (RWEP) ... more texts