DAILY DEVOTIONAL – November 13th, 2019
“Disturb Us, Lord”
Prayer: Lord Jesus, You taught us that God, our God and Father, is the God of the living and not the dead. You also said, Lord, that You are the resurrection and the life. Lord, we confess that it is hard for us to die so that we might live. In Your grace and mercy, help us to lay our lives down at Your feet, so that Your will would be done on earth, here in our own life, as it is in heaven. Amen.
Scripture: Luke 17:28-33
Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, 29 but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all— 30 so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. 31 On that day, let the one who is on the housetop, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back. 32 Remember Lot’s wife. 33 Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.
Devotional – “Disturb Us, Lord!”
When was the last time you prayed and asked God to grant you poverty? When was the last time you prayed and asked God to bless you with weakness, or meekness? Have you ever prayed and asked God to break your heart? Have you ever asked Him to have mercy on you by giving you the opportunity to suffer or endure hardship?
As audacious and outrageous as this may sound, praying for God to grace us with suffering or to disturb our lives with trials and obstacles is not as crazy as it may sound. Jesus says in Matthew 19, “Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven.” So, why not pray for poverty? Scripture says Romans 5, “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame.” It says in James 1, “ Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” So, then why not pray for suffering and trials of various kinds? After begging three times for a hardship to be removed from his life, the Lord answered the Apostle Paul and said in 2 Corinthians 12, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” So, why not pray to be made more weak instead of praying and asking the Lord for strength?
These kinds of prayers only make sense when we confess and believe the truth of what the Scriptures say about who we are. That we are poor because in our sinful arrogance we believe ourselves to be worthy of riches and so often equate earthly wealth with the favor of God. Scripture says that we are hopeless in our sinfulness because we insist on trying to be gods unto ourselves; determined to supply for ourselves all that we want and need rather than being dependent on our Father and Creator who Scripture says is the giver of all good gifts (James 1:17) and who knows better than we do what will make us truly content. God’s Word says that in our sinfulness we take to much comfort in our own God-given intelligence, strength, and abilities, and therefore trust in ourselves and our own resolve and grit more than we trust in the Lord whose might crushed the head of the Devil and shattered the grave to nothing in His resurrection from the dead.
The blessing of being able to pray for God to disturb and disrupt our life is only possible when we come to be honest with ourselves and confess the truth that it is our wealth, our strength, our comfort, our complacency, our plans, and our satisfaction with ourselves that stands as the biggest barrier to receiving the full life of blessed joy and eternal satisfaction that Jesus has promised to give us, and in fact has given us through His death and resurrection.
It is said that Sir Francis Drake penned this prayer in 1577. It is a prayer entitled, “Disturb Us, Lord.” Whether it was actually written by Drake or not, does not remove the Scriptural truth that this prayer beautifully articulates. Here is what it says:
Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show Your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.
Amen.
Jesus tells us in Luke 17 to, “remember Lot’s wife” who though she was being guided by angels to salvation from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, couldn’t pull her eyes away from her wealth, from what she had built, and the plans she had made for herself. As a result, she was consumed by her own life, and missed the salvation of God. Jesus makes clear the lesson we are to learn from this. He says, “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.”
Pray for the Lord to disrupt your life my friends. Pray for His grace and mercy to give you the strength to be weak. Pray for His provision to lead you into whatever will strip away the dead and dying things of this world that blind us and deprive us of the eternal blessings God is giving to us today…and remember that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
