Devotions:Prayer Attitudes

Regarding healing; think especially of the part of the body that most needs to be well.
See it well and perfect and shining with God’s light.
Now give thanks that this is being accomplished.

To receive God’s life in the body, we must be able to forget the body so that we can quiet the mind and concentrate on the spiritual energies of God.

We receive God by forgetting ourselves and thinking about Him.
We begin our prayer not by clamoring for this or that, but by thinking about him in a way that makes Him real to us.

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Devotions: Prayer Attitudes

Attitudes for a faith prayer:
1. Choose the same time and the
same place each day, make your
self comfortable and relax.

2. Remind yourself of the reality of
God’s life outside yourself.

3. Ask that life to come in and
increase life in your body.

4. Make a picture in your mind of
the answer to your prayer.

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Devotions: Personal Spirit

The Spirit in the Gospels
The Greek word for spirit (pneuma) in the
New Testament means both a powerful wind
and a personal spirit.
John said that Jesus would ‘baptize with the
Holy Spirit and with fire’
recorded in Matthew 3: 1-12; Mark 1:1-8 and Luke 3:1-18

John says that this baptism of the Holy Spirit is Jesus’ single most important task
Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world..
….is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.
(John 1:29-34)
In the O.T. fire was understood to have
purifying qualities
(Isaiah 1:25; Zech. 13:9 and Malachi 3:2-3)
or to make holy (Isaiah 4:3-6)

The baptism of Jesus’ Holy Spirit
to his followers is to provide both
hurricane power and holy purity.

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Sunday School: Attitude

We don’t see things clearly.
We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist.

But it won’t be long
before the weather clears and the sun shines bright!

We’ll see it all then,
see it all as clearly as
God sees us,
knowing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness,
we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation:
Trust steadily in God,
hope unswervingly,
love extravagantly.
And the best of the three is love.
1 Corinthians 13:12-13
From The Message –
New Testament in Contemporary Language

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Devotions: Important Truths

The Christian is to partner with the Holy Spirit to be ready to receive new power and vitality; to submit to the Holy Spirit.

Without God’s direction no amount of effort from us will work.1

He directs and enables. We cannot control or manipulate God. He uses us. Yet He does not mechanically over-ride our free will.

The degree to which we submit is the degree to which the Spirit can be effective in us.

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Bible Study: Light

“You are the light of the world,” said Jesus whose light still shines down the centuries.
We are the electric light bulbs through
which the light of God reaches the world.
Thus we are “part God”. This does not belittle God anymore than it belittles the sun to know that a square of sunlight on the floor is part of its
infinite and eternal shining.
Knowing then that we are part of God,
that His life within us is an active energy and
that He works through the laws of our bodies,
let us study to adjust to those laws
and speed His work.
adapted from Healing Light by A Sanford

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Sunday School: Prayer for the Baby

Once I was called to pray for a baby girl ill with pneumonia. I knelt beside the cot in silence, laid one hand upon the small congested chest and slipped the other one beneath her back, and asked God to come into her. Soon the baby was filled with a visible inrushing of new life. Even the hands and feet vibrated, as if an electric current were entering her. A look of tension on the tiny face was smoothed away and she passed from a semi-conscious condition into a natural sleep.

He stopped at the threshold, eyes staring, jaw dropped in surprise. The small patient was bright eyed and cheerful, sitting up in bed.
“My God!” exclaimed the doctor, startled out of his bedside manner. “What’s happened to her?”
He was right.
It was his God who had intervened – that’s what happened to her.
The spiritual force that flows through us is the “breath of God” breathed into the “dust of the earth” of which our frames are made.

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Devotions:Energy

Turn on the light of God’s creative energy
Paul advised the Christians in Ephesus to “walk as children of light”
God is described as light and He created first of all light.
Scientists know that light is a form of energy.

All created things are made of energy. God is primal energy and light, so it is not strange that when we establish a closer connection with God in prayer we receive more abundant life – an increased flow of energy.

The creative force that sustains us is
increased within our bodies.
Some adults and many children feel heat when receiving prayer or healing.

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Sunday School: Specific Prayer

Be specific in prayer
Agnes Sanford’s experience
There was a small boy who had a leaky heart.
I had prayed for his healing with slight success. The heart was better but not well. So I questioned him concerning his knowledge of God.
“I know all about God,” he replied serenely. “God is in this room, only you can’t see Him ‘cause He’s ‘visible. And Jesus is in this room, only you can’t see Him ‘cause He’s ‘visible.
“Yes. Isn’t that funny?”
“Not to me, it isn’t.”

So I was reproved. Billy, I decided, knew about God with more profound simplicity than I did. His theology was quite sufficient for his seven years. It remained only for me to teach him how to make his knowledge of God work for the healing of the heart.

“How about playing a little pretend game with me?” I said. “Pretend you’re a big guy going to high school and you’re on the football squad. Shut your eyes and see yourself holding the ball and running ahead of the others. ‘Look at that guy!’ the other kids will say. ‘Just look at him run!
Boy, he’s strong! I bet he’s got a strong heart!” Then you say ‘Thank you God, because that’s the way it’s going to be.’ Will you play that game every night, right after you say your going to bed prayer?”
I left Billy grinning but noncommittal.

A month later I returned. The mother had taken Billy to the doctor.
The doctor knew of the patient’s experiment with faith and was
delighted to pronounce the heart perfect.

“Have you been playing my pretend-game, Billy?” I asked the small seeker after truth.
The little boy’s face lit up with a delighted grin. “Sure have!” he cried.
He had played the game and found a profound reality. He had wrestled with God as his partner against the powers of destruction and had prevailed.
The will of God for him was not a
leaky heart, but health.

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Sunday School: Bury the Old Life

When God lives and breathes in you
(and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus),
you are delivered from that dead life.
With his Spirit living in you
you’ll be as alive as Christ’s.

So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old
do- it –yourself life one ..cent.
There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all.
The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life.
God’s Spirit beckons.
There are things to do and places to go.

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Bible Study: New Power

Romans 8:1-17
A new power is in operation.
The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mass of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all.

Those who trust God’s action in them
find that God’s Spirit is in them—
living and breathing God.

It stands to reason that if the alive -and -present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself.

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Bible Study: Images of the Spirit

Old Testament images of the Spirit
show power and purity.
As a company’s chief operates the
policies, programs, decisions
and vision of the company
so the Holy Spirit acts to implement
the Father’s will.

He moulds and animates creation
Genesis 1:1-2 God creates. Holy Spirit hovers over the waters as a hen broods over her eggs bringing them to life. Gen 2:7
H.S. sustains life. Ps 33:6, 104:29-30; Is. 34:16, 40:7 Job 33:4
He reveals Gods truth
Ezekiel 37:1-2 Spirit reveals God’s truth through the
vision of the valley of dry bones. Also Is 61:1-4, 48:16
Joel 2:28 Spirit will bring prophetic speech
He awakens people to God
He convicts of sin and encourages to faith and praise
Psalm 51:10-12; Isaiah 44:3-5; Ezekiel 39:29; 36:25-27; 11:19

He equips some men and women for service
Joseph -Genesis 41:33-42
Moses -Num. 11:16-29
The kings-Saul and David helped to rule
1 Samuel 10:10; 11:6; 16:13;
He is God, the Holy Spirit.
Equal to God-third person of the Trinity.

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Sunday School: Our Potential

The Holy Spirit fulfills our potential
in God but
the Christian is to partner with the Holy Spirit
- ready to receive new power and vitality;

The Christian is to submit to the Holy Spirit as
a conscious act of the will. We decide and
continue to submit every day of our life.

The degree to which we submit is the degree to which the Spirit can be effective through us.

He who comes to God must believe that God is (God) and He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. Hebrews 11:6

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Bible Study: Successful Prayer

What prayers of ours have been successful?
Realize that if our experiment fails it is not
due to a lack in God but a natural lack in
ourselves. What scientist would be
discouraged if his first experiment failed?

We intend with God’s help to heal our
shortcomings, to repair our ‘spiritual’ wiring.
We need not fear to test His power by prayer.
We must be in accordance with God’s will.

So a wise seeker after God
had better study the laws of God
and adapt his prayers to them.
God’s nature is love so we pray in love.
When our electric lights fail, we know that the fault is not a lack of electricity in the universe but in the wiring. Edison tried hundreds of times to get electricity to flow continuously until finally he succeeded – that is faith.

God’s activity can also be blocked; by fear,
no trust…. or operating out of His will.
Your examples?
God’s plans are always good. John 10:10

Praise and thanks keep a continuous flow
of His power. 1 Thessalonians 5:17

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Devotions: Prayer

Extracts from The Healing Light
by A. Sanford
God is both within and without us. He is the source of all life: the creator of the universe.
He is also the indwelling life of our own
little selves. And just as a whole world full of electricity will not light a house unless the house itself is prepared to receive that
electricity, so the infinite and eternal life of God cannot help us unless we are prepared to receive that life within ourselves.
Only the amount of God
that we can get in us will work for us.
“The kingdom of God is within you,” Jesus said.
Luke 17:21

God does things through us (not for us).
God is omnipotent.
He can do as He likes but He has made a world that runs by law, and He does not like to break those laws.
Roses will bloom in winter if we adapt our greenhouses to His laws of heat and light that the rose needs.

He can also produce a full-blown answer
to prayer ….if….
we adapt to His laws of love and faith.

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Sunday School: Baby's Ears

My baby had been ill for six weeks with abscessed ears.

I prayed desperately that God would heal the child.
My mind was filled with thoughts of fear and of bitterness, and these are not of God, God is love, and perfect love casts out fear.

So God could not go through me to heal my baby for there was a break in the pipeline that connected me with Him; Yet He sent one of His own ministers. –a young man, ruddy faced and clear eyed. “I’ll go and have a prayer with him,” he said. “I don’t think that will do any good,” I replied wearily. He’s only a baby. He won’t understand.”
“Oh, that won’t matter,” he replied,
disregarding my feeble protests. He went upstairs. Light shone in his eyes. I saw his joyfulness, and I believed. For joy is the heavenly “O.K.” on the inner life of power.
Joy called forth my faith.

The minister placed his hands upon the baby’s ears and said, “Now you close your eyes and go to sleep I’m going to ask God to come into your ears and make them well, and when you wake up you’ll be all right.”
Within hours, it happened! He was well!

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Devotions: Holy Spirit's Work

Ever since the Holy Spirit came to the
disciples of Jesus in the upper room on the
day of Pentecost, God’s spirit has been
active in the world to bring God’s life to
Jesus followers who welcome Him.
That’s us!

He is not limited by time, power or place
He operates at any time, in any part of the world, to any person.
That’s for us!

The Bible says God does not discriminate
between people (Acts 10:34 )
He responds to our faith in Jesus, God’s son (not our good works)
We can have faith!

He knows all about us but we need to
communicate because he works through our faith and trust in Him.
We can communicate.

God has laws. If we obey them, His laws
work for us. His Holy Spirit is Jesus
representative in the world today.
He works for us!

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