Saturday 24 Jul 2021

July 24: Psalm 27:13-14
 
Key Verse: Psalm 27:14
Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.
 
Devotion:
No matter how much someone tells you, the way you will expand your faith is through answered prayers. This may sound like a chicken and egg situation where we have to have faith to pray and we pray so we can see our faith come to fruition! But, like most things in life, you have to have a starting point somewhere!
 
I can remember learning to swim as a small child. I started off in the paddling pool and slowly graduated to the big pool – but where I could stand. My friends had learned before me and they would run and jump into the deep end... it looked like they were having more fun than me jumping into the shallow end! So I had to take the final step and be brave enough to do my first jump into the deep end... The rest is history!
 
The same can be said about our prayer life... when we start off with our prayers, we probably don’t ask for too much and we don’t expect much of an answer. Our level of faith at this stage is quite shallow. When we see our prayers get answered, it is like realising we can swim – even though the water is shallow enough to stand up in. We pray for things we know we can probably do ourselves, or we can rely on someone else to do. But, as we see those prayers answered, we go a bit deeper until we start asking for things we know are not possible through our own doing.
 
This is when our faith grows – when we see God answering those difficult, improbable or impossible things! Our faith is exercised by us asking in the first place. The more we get used to asking God, the more we realise He answers and the greater our reliance on our faith is... until we get to that stage when we expect God to answer all our prayers. That is when others see great faith in us and are encouraged to do the same!
 
Points to Ponder:
How often do you pray?
 
How often do you expect God to answer?