what Are You Reading? – Generational Prayer

well hey good morning and happy monday morning um this week we're actually going to jump into psalm 145 and i'm going to go there and i'm going to read verses four and five for you and um i just want you to focus on um the power of prayer and um i'm deep into looking at a lot of things from the perspective of prayer and the power of prayer and what it does in and through our lives, especially as we are doing this Armor of God Bible study, which will be starting very soon. And so if you haven't signed up, we still have room for that. All right. So Psalm 145 verses four and five says, one generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts on the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wondrous works, I will meditate. And I love that phrase of meditate and just thinking about and praying through and taking time to think about the things God has done. And so my challenge, we're going to get into a little bit of a deeper, just neat thing I learned this week. But the challenge this week is once we're done with this, I want you to take a piece of paper and I want you to write down the wondrous things that God has done in your life. And if you're somebody who says, well, he hasn't done anything wondrous in my life. Well, maybe you need to take time and really ask God to reveal the things that he has done. You know, just where did Jesus show up and show out in your life? Because I guarantee that there are so many times that, and there are so many times in my life that I can give God credit. And there's so many, I probably don't even realize it was God's hand and provision and just his wondrous works. And I've yet to see that that was his hand divinely guiding me. So I want you to take a look back at that. But something interesting that I learned, and this is in Genesis, and it's a phrase that has made me change the way I'm thinking. Maybe not fully changed, but it's made me think a little bit more deeply about prayer and just the aspect of passing on the goodness of God from one generation to the next. And so this is the passage of scripture where God is confronting Cain after Abel, Cain has killed his brother Abel. And it says, the Lord said, what have you done? Listen, your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. And so this is in that Christine McLellan study that's on the book of Acts. And she said that the word blood, and this is sourced by another writer, the word blood used here in this scripture is plural. And the reason that it is plural is that the Jewish people in their culture were very communal. And so the word blood didn't just mean it was the loss of one life, but the loss of all the generations that could have come from that one life. And that's a powerful thought, especially when we turn it to prayer. But I do want to point to this one thing that she, she's really, really interesting. Christy McLelland is in this study and we'll be doing this in the fall. She really digs deep into the historical aspect. And so this is from the Mishnah Sanhedrin, which is a part of the Talmud. Yes, I had to look that up. And the Talmud is just about the proceedings and the beliefs and the kind of like doctrine of the Jewish people. And so this Mishnah Sanhedrin is a chapter out of the Talmud. And it says, if any man, this was just a, this is describing the communal point of view of the Jewish people at the time this was written. said, if any man has caused a single life to perish from Israel, he is deemed by scripture as if he caused a whole world to perish. And anyone who saves a single soul from Israel, he is deemed by scripture as if he had saved a whole world. And so what a powerful thing. So when we take that and we apply it with the gospel and we look at a life being saved, Sweet Beth Mobley, and she's probably watching this morning, is possibly watching this, but when she has an aspect of when she prays and prays for families, she prays not just for the families that are here now, but the families to come. And that is such a beautiful way of praying. And so what I want to challenge us today is to think about the generational. So meditate on the goodness of God and think about the generational pouring of his spirit through different generations. And so, because I know Beth always will say, Lord, if you can capture the hearts of these women, you can do women, men, individuals, children. She said, if you capture it, you're going to capture, you'll capture the husbands and you're going to capture the children. And when you capture the children, you capture the children's children. And when you capture the children's children, you capture them, the children's children's children. And you can keep going on and on. And that is so beautiful. That is such a picture of what this is, this meditation on the glory of God, on the goodness of God. And so again, I'm going to read that Psalm 145 verses four through five. It says, one generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts on the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wondrous works. I will meditate. So think about not just in your life but in the lives that have come before yours and your grandparents your great-grandparents and maybe you're the maybe you're the first christian in your family talk about generational change all the way down changing your family tree pray for that today pray for change and maybe you have children that have strayed maybe you have family members who don't know the lord pray for that earnestly and even if you have this is just my word of encouragement to you to keep praying, to keep seeking God in these areas. And so that right there, um, it's just my encouragement. So take out that piece of paper and write down the things that God has done and pray for the things that you want him to do all unto his will and for his glory. Thank you so much. And I hope you guys have a great rest of your week. Bye.

Originally published at warren.church.