Memorial Day

We had another beautiful Memorial Day with lots of friends, good fellowship, food, Duplos, and even a hockey game. And sunshine! God answered our prayers and it was sunny and warm.

Sorry the pictures are so bright, but they will give a little glimpse of the fun we had.

Go

Pray

I desire therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting.
1 Timothy 2:8


Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.
1 Peter 5:18


Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit.
1 Thess. 5:16-17


No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying.
-Leonard Ravenhill


Let me burn out for God. After all, whatever God may appoint, prayer is the great thing. Oh, that I may be a man of prayer!
-Henry Martyn


Prayer makes the soul tender. Notice, we never pray for folks we gossip about, and we never gossip about the folk for whom we pray! For prayer is a great detergent.
-Leonard Ravenhill


Love is kindled in a flame, and ardency is its life. Flame is the air which true Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire; it can withstand anything, rather than a feeble flame; but when the surrounding atmosphere is frigid or lukewarm, it dies, chilled and starved to its vitals.
True prayer MUST be aflame.
-E.M. Bounds


O brother, pray; in spite of Satan, pray; spend hours in prayer; rather neglect friends than not pray; rather fast, and lose breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper-and sleep too- than not pray. And we must not talk about prayer, we must pray in right earnest. The Lord is near. He comes softly while the virgins slumber.
-Andrew A. Bonar

"'Not called' did you say? 'Not heard the call,' I think you should say.

Put your ear down to the Bible, and year Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin.

Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help.

Go and stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters, and servants and masters not to come there.

And then look Christ in the face, whose mercy you have professed to obey, and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world."

- William Booth

Allow Me To Re-introduce The Christ

This is good. Be sure to listen to the whole thing.

(Don't forget to pause the i-pod music so that you can listen)

A Letter From Brainerd

The following is a portion of a letter from David Brainerd to an anonymous friend of his. Though it was written about 262 years ago, I felt like it was written to me personally. His language is a little bit foreign to us now days, so read carefully. This is a letter to you.

(You may not have heard of David Brainerd. Here is a little bit of information about him that I gathered from the little bit I have read of him:
David Brainerd [1718-47] spent his life for his Lord. He was a man of prayer and devotional life like few who ever walked this earth. He was a young missionary to the Indians during the Great Awakening of our early colonial history. He had hoped to marry Jerusha Edwards, daughter of Jonathan Edwards, that they might spend their lives serving their King; however, he was completely "burned out" in the service of his God, and died at the Edwards' home in Northampton at the age of 29. Before he died, he said to his beloved Jerusha, "If I thought I should not see you, and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part with you. But we shall spend an happy eternity together." She, who attended him during the last year of his life, contracted the same disease of tuberculosis and died a few months later at the age of 18.
David Brainerd counted not his life dear unto death, and in a letter to his brother said, "I declare now I am dying; I would not have spent my life otherwise for all the world.")

Here is the letter; I have emboldened a few places that I especially like:

"How amazing it is, that the living who know they must die, should notwithstanding, 'put far away the evil,' in a season of health and prosperity; and live at such an awful distance from a familiarity with the grave and the great concern beyond it!...How rare are the instances of those who live and act, from day to day; as on the verge of Eternity; striving to fill up all their remaining moments in the service, and to the honour of their great Master! We insensibly trifle away time, while we seem to have enough of it; and are so strangely amused, as in a great measure to lose a sense of the holiness and blessed qualifications necessary to prepare us to be inhabitants of the heavenly paradise. But O, dear Sir, a dying bed, if we enjoy our reason clearly, will give another view of things. I have now, for more than three weeks, lain under the greatest degree of weakness; the greater part of the time, expecting daily and hourly to enter into the eternal world: sometimes have been so far gone, as to be wholly speechless, for some hours together. O of what vast importance has a holy spiritual life been appeared to me at this season!

I have longed to call upon all my friends, to make it their business to live to God; and especially all that are designed for, or engaged in the service of the sanctuary. O dear Sir, do not think it enough, to live at the rate of common Christians. Alas, to how little purpose do they often converse, when they meet together! The visits, even of those who are called Christians indeed, are frequently barren; and conscience cannot but condemn us for the misimprovement of time, while we have been conversant with them. But the way to enjoy the divine presence, and to be fitted for distinguishing service for God, is to live a life of devotion and constant self-dedication to Him; observing the motions and dispositions of our own hearts, whence we may learn the corruptions that lodge there, and our constant need of help from God for the performance of the least duty. And O dear Sir, let me beseech you frequently to attend the great and precious duties of secret fasting and prayer.

I have a secret thought, for some things I have observed, that God may perhaps design you for some singular service in the world... Suffer me therefore, finally, to intreat you earnestly to give yourself to prayer, to reading and meditation on divine truths: strive to penetrate to the bottom of them, and never be content with superficial knowledge. By this means, your thoughts will gradually grow weighty and judicious; and you hereby will be possessed of a valuable treasure, out of which you may produce 'things new and old,' to the glory of God"

"Draw me"

I stand amazed. This quote goes along perfectly with what I have been pondering of late. Read it carefully! The Spirit of God gives wisdom and understanding. Praise God!

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The Drawing Of The Father

"No man can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him." John vi. 44.

"When God draws me, the issue of my will comes in at once--- will I react on the revelation which God gives---will I come to Him? Discussion on spiritual matters is an impertinence. Never discuss with anyone when God speaks. Belief is not an intellectual act; belief is a moral act whereby I deliberately commit myself. Will I dump myself down absolutely on God and transact on what He says? If I will, I shall find I am based on Reality that is as sure as God's throne.

In preaching the gospel, always push an issue of will. Belief must be the will to believe. There must be a surrender of the will, not a surrender to persuasive power, a deliberate launching forth on God and on what He says until I am no longer confident in what I have done, I am confident only in God. The hindrance is that I will not trust God, but only my mental understanding. As far as feelings go, I must stake all blindly. I must will to believe, and this can never be done without a violent effort on my part to disassociate myself from my old ways of looking at things, and by putting myself right over to Him.

Every man is made to reach out beyond his grasp. It is God who draws me, and my relationship to Him in the first place is a personal one, not an intellectual one. I am introduced into the relationship by the miracle of God and my own will to believe, then I begin to get an intelligent appreciation and understanding of the wonder of the transaction."

-Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest pg. 357

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This really blew me away. It is God who draws us, and when He calls we must not discuss it; we must go. No time to sit and decide whether or not He has called; He has, and we must obey. Belief is not understanding of the mind, but of the heart. Will we abandon unto Him? We must forsake all; we must pick up our cross. He has left it up to us to decide, but it is He that will do it. And He will so get us out of the way that it is only obvious that it is He that did it, and not anything that we accomplished. We pray to fall in love; He draws us, and then He shows us what He has done by gently revealing to us the Wisdom of His ways and giving us His Spirit of understanding. Then all that we can to is praise Him. Oh, and the Love that comes with understanding! I think that the heavenly pattern for love is that when we love someone, we seek to know everything there is to know about the person. We note the things they love, the things they hate, the things that make their eyes shine, or make them laugh. Our eyes follow theirs to see what they care about. We love to listen to them talk about the things they delight in. We seek to know the things that make them weep so that we might weep with them. And we do not study them just for head knowledge about them! We take it to our heart, and then the end result is meant to be one thing: greater love.

Such is how our relationship with God is meant to be. That our love "may abound still more and more in knowledge and discernment." That we may approve the things that are excellent!!!

A (Girly) Cheer For The Warrior-Poets!

A Letter To:
The men in my life, young and old, who desire the Christ Life above all else:
Greetings.
In a world of mediocre men with a mediocre view of manhood, mediocre expectations, mediocre dreams, mediocre love, mediocre faith, and mediocre Christianity...

It is my earnest desire that you would not stop halfway up the mountain.

That when you begin to grow weary or complacent, you would behold the Man who did not stop halfway, but carried the weight of the world to the top of the mountain and died there amidst scorn and mockery---and find your strength in this truth: "He is risen!"
Oh, that you would know Him in the power of His risen Life---the Life which flows and fills to overflowing, if only you would open up and receive it.

Where are the Chivalrous? Where are the Knights in shining armor? Where are the Mighty Men of old?

Behold the Man who ever stands Victorious! If you would but go to Him and lay yourself at His feet, show Him all the wretchedness of sinful flesh, the heart so black, so cold, so petrified within your chest... Then, only then, will He draw His mighty Sword and knight you, that you may bear His Name, His Sword, His Love, and His Life. And you will be more than a conqueror through Him.

I pray that you would learn to be leaders, not as those in this world, but as the One Great Leader, who did nothing of His own, but only that which His Father sent Him to do.
Depend on Him, Who is your Life, Who knows no end, for everything you may need.
When yieldedness comes, then dreams come true. I know this personally, by His great grace. So bring in the tithes, the tithes of all, no matter how broken and small... and you will look up to find Heaven's windows opened wide. Try Him in this; He is ever faithful.

I know I am but a young girl with still so many young girls' dreams in my heart, but if you would
pause and consider these things it would bring me great joy.
And know this: I am running this race by the same Strength, near you, and am cheering you on more than you know.
As your sister/daughter in the Lord, I pray that my own life would encourage and not harm you in your pursuit of the Prize.

The reason I ended up writing this letter is because... the Bravehearted Gospel website is up!!!
With all my heart do I commend such manhood as this.
Check it out!
There's some really powerful and encouraging stuff on there. It has been a huge blessing to me (and I'm a girl!) More and more I'm beginning to like the manly stuff; I find my mighty King in the midst of it.

So this is just one girl's letter to the guys in her life---
with a girly "huzzah!" for the Warrior-Poets!

May you follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.

Soli Deo Gloria!
Sarochka

www.braveheartedgospel.com