Week Twelve: 01/01-01/05

Week Twelve: 01/01-01/05

Genesis 2:7 “And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”
          
  A few of us have decided this year to do the ESV Bible in a year plan. I’ve attempted to read the Bible in a year more times than I can recall and have miserably failed every time. I was discouraged not only in fear of failing, but because I’ve read Genesis so many times that there’s no way I thought I’d get anything new from it.  On New Years Eve, our team rang in the New Year with worship. The lyrics of one song were, “its your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only.” The next morning I read the first three chapters of Genesis and to my surprise, it was as though I was reading it for the first time. The Lord has been urging me to go deeper in my prayer and devotional life and reading this verse set me on a reasonable trajectory for this year. Every part of our being is a response to the breath that has given us life. We can either choose to allow that response to be for God or against God. I’ve been reading a book about prayer by Timothy Keller and it made me realize that we have to continue to allow the Lord to pour into us in order for us to communicate and have a relationship with Him. Basically what Keller was making a point about was the importance of reading the word because we respond in prayer to/with what we’ve heard from God. It’s almost like the language we’ve acquired as children. We don’t know how to speak unless we’ve been spoken to. If God hasn’t spoken to us through His word, how are we to respond in prayer? It seems like a basic concept that should have been conquered earlier on in my walk, but I’m willing to stoop down low and allow the Lord create in me a genuine relationship with Him. I’m learning to simply be quiet in His presence, desiring to simply walk with God in the cool of the day, and have my life be a living sacrifice unto Him.



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