ForYou Dear Friends:
I wish many thing for my friends. Some are personal such a peace in the home, continued good relations with their kids, finding a wife and settling for the sexual faithfulness God asks of us, food, rent, an opening for at last doing what God has gifted and called you to (Yes, Chasna, I mean singing for a living) -- different things for each one of you. But when it come to faith, what some of you call religion, I pray everyone of you will experience and be involved in:
1. Building each other up in holy faith
Now what in the world does that mean? It means consciously doing something that will strengthen, inform, encourage, enable the faith of people you know - and, for some of you, people you don't know. I means gracing their lives and our interactions with and responses to them with the grace and mercy, the love and charity, with which we have been grace by God and others.It clearly means refraining from words, actions, attitudes, and judgments which tear down and discourage.
2. Praying in the power of the Holy Spirit
I, like Jude, do not mean praying in tongues here - though, if that is your practice, I pray peace on it ... for most of my friends who have been vocal about private prayer languages have fallen into deep sin and/or lifestyles that deny Christ and have deeply shamed his name in their home communities actually driving both unbelievers and the youth of Christian families from the faith.
Praying in the power of the Holy Spirit means praying under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This means you are praying according to God's desires revealed to you for the situation or person. So, if God the Holy Spirit is asking God the Father and God the Son for that which they already desire, then you are praying with the full force of heaven behind you. Now that's praying in the power of the Holy Spirit himself.
Praying in the power of the Holy Spirit means praying under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This means you are praying according to God's desires revealed to you for the situation or person. So, if God the Holy Spirit is asking God the Father and God the Son for that which they already desire, then you are praying with the full force of heaven behind you. Now that's praying in the power of the Holy Spirit himself.
3. Awaiting the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ
Not presuming on his mercy, but patiently waiting, in faithful living, for his mercy to be extended to you or those for whom your are praying.
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