Hurry Up and Wait!

Why NOW? 

Why a day of prayer for Grace?

In the Hebrew Calendar, the new year begins with the feast of trumpets which actually takes place on  September 17^th which leads into the day of atonement 9 days later.

Rejoicing in The Torah -   October 9^th

The Feast of Dedication - Hanukkah  - December 9^th

The #9 interestingly has biblical significance especially this year!

·         9 fruit of the Spirit

·         9 gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12

·         There are 9 words used for judgement from the root word of righteous judgement. 

A day of prayer is a calling to a place of scrutiny before our God. 

1 Peter 4:17  judgement begins with the family of God

Psalm 39:6   We are merely moving shadows, and all our busy rushing ends in nothing. We heap up wealth for someone else to spend.

Can our time-crammed lives handle one more thing?  What were you thinking Jack to call people to pray at the beginning of September!

Time is one thing that we cannot buy and yet we hear the sayings, “time is money, but as one author rightly put it, “time is life”  My heart’s desire for us is to literally ‘seize the day’ and make the most of every opportunity as we are told in Ephesians 5:15,16.  The busyness of life can leave us wanting more and I want to call us back to the source of life, the invitation from the Giver of life to

·         Settle into His purposes for you, your family, for Grace.

This week has been a blur for many of us as we raced against the clock for the books, the binders and the scientific calculators and the back to school pics!  So, who has time for God in a world addicted to speed?

I remember towards the end of one summer my brother sharing with me, “just think Jack, in a few more days, this will just be memories…”

The answer is not more time, but enough time…enough time to breathe deep, to sing for joy, to rest and reflect without feeling guilty, without feeling so hard pressed by everything that stares you in the face from yesterday’s demands.

God is I AM, He is eternally present and He is in the moment and He is calling us to worship HIM, calling us to give thanks, to break bread and create memories of a thankful heart.

Mark Buchanan shares in the rest of God

 Being in a hurry.  Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me.  I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry.  But a thousand broken and missed things, ten of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing… Through all the haste I thought I was making up time.  It turns out I was throwing it away.

I have said it before and I will say it again, ‘we don’t work in order to rest’  We are called to work from a place of rest.  The first thing Adam had to do after being created was rest!

I want to call out of you what God has created you to be.    Our longing for Grace is to minister from a place of deep seated rest. 

 We rest in the confidence of God, we rest in the Word of God, we rest in the promises of God and that is the place from where we must begin.  Our service for Christ must be an outflow of our relationship with Him!

A prayer of rest by Richard Foster

Blessed Savior, I am not good at resting in the hollow of your hand.  Nothing in my experience has taught me this resting.  I have been taught how to take charge.  I have been taught how to be in control.  But how to rest?  No, I have no models, no paradigms for resting.
    That is not exactly right.  Jesus, when you walked among the Jerusalem crowds and in the Judean hills, you pioneered this way of living.  You were always alert and alive.  You lived utterly responsive to the will of the Father.  Manifold demands were placed upon you, and still you worked in unhurried peace and power.  
    Help me to walk in your steps.  Teach me to see only what you see, to say only what you say, to do only what you do.  Help me, Lord, to work resting and to pray resting.
    I ask this in your good and strong name. Amen.