And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints. (Ephesians 6:17–18, ESV)

There is a cosmic battle that is raging. There are evil forces at work that stand opposed to the kingdom of God. The Apostle Paul describes it as nothing less than spiritual warfare in Ephesians 6:10-20.

We are called to take up the full armor of God and to stand firm against the devil and his schemes. We are to take the belt of truth, the gospel of peace as shoes for our feet, the shield of faith, and the helmet of salvation (see Ephesians 6:14-17). These are given to us for defense. This armor helps us to guard our hearts and minds against worldly and demonic influences.

But Paul does not stop there. He says to take the sword of the Spirit and to pray at all times in the Spirit. There is a subtle shift that takes place. Paul transitions away from describing our protective covering. He moves to describe weapons given for offense. He portrays the Word of God as the sword of the Spirit. And then he says to pray at all times.

What I want you to notice is that prayer is something more than asking God for protection. Many people go to God in prayer when bad things happen. They ask God to heal their illness or provide for them in a financial crisis. They seek help with anxiety or aid in fighting addiction. What I am trying to point out is that we often reserve prayer for defense against crises. But the sense I get from Ephesians 6 is that while prayer can be used for defense, it is also a powerful weapon for offense.

Often, the best defense is a great offense. It is easier to push back someone who is standing still than someone who is moving forward. It is all about momentum. And there are few things that God gives us that create forward momentum better than prayer.

Indeed, there will be times when we are knocked back on our heels and will need to use prayer as a defense. But what if we were more intentional about using prayer as a weapon to advance God’s kingdom in this world. Consider some subtle shifts in how you pray:

• Instead of praying for healing, pray for more excellent health that enables you to serve God in a more significant way.
• Instead of praying for God to help you make ends meet, pray that God would give you the wisdom to prosper while living generously to help meet the needs of others.
• Instead of praying for God to take away anxiety or fear, pray that there would be such an abundance of the fruit of the Spirit (see Galatians 5:25) produced in your life that there would be more than enough to share with others.
• Instead of praying for God to remove an addiction, pray for an earnest longing to seek first the kingdom and that your ultimate desire would be to serve the highest good.

In summary, instead of praying against the bad, let’s pray even bolder for the great things God wants to accomplish in us and through us. Instead of praying against falling back, let’s pray to move forward courageously. Instead of praying to survive, let’s pray to thrive!

I was a 4th-year seminary student. I was about to graduate, be ordained, and receive my first Call into ministry. I had spent four years of college and four years of seminary in preparation to serve as a pastor in the church. I had studied the Bible, church doctrine, and church history. I had done fieldwork and completed a one-year internship, working in a church. I considered myself mature and knowledgable. I was confident in my education and learning. I was ready to take on the world. I believed I had everything I needed.

I was so confident in myself that I had signed up for a doctoral-level class on the Gospel of Mark. I knew this class would be a challenge, but I was brimming with confidence.

The class began, and we were going through the Greek text verse-by-verse. We read Mark 1:14-15:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:14–15, ESV)

These verses describe the beginning of Jesus preaching and teaching ministry. These are the first things he says before anything else. He says to repent and believe in the gospel.

Dr. Voelz, our instructor, then he asked the question, “what is our first calling?”

As one who prided himself on having the right answer, my mind began to process the many different things that God has called us to as believers. I am missionally-minded, so the Great Commission to “Go and make disciples” (Matthew 28:19-20) came to mind. That is the foundational verse for so many church mission statements. I was confident that it had to be the answer.

But I was wrong and humbled. In so many ways, I was putting the cart before the horse. We are indeed called to make disciples, but before we get there, there is a more foundational calling on our lives. It is a calling to faith!

Before Jesus preached anything else, he preached repentance and faith. As we progress through the gospels, Jesus keeps coming back to the topic of faith. Jesus chastises the disciples for their lack of faith (see Mark 4:40) while commending others for having faith (see Mark 5:34, 10:52). Without faith, all our learning and working and doing for God is in vain. If we miss the calling to faith, we will be ineffective in all our other callings.

I was eager to do much for God. But before I moved on to all that I wanted to do for him, I was reminded of all that he wanted to do in me. If I missed out on my first calling to faith, I would never succeed in anything else God would call me to do. At that moment, I realized I had falsely placed confidence in my ability ahead of faith in God. I was led to repentance, and to have my faith be renewed in him.

Thoughts for Reflection

1. Where have you placed confidence in your ability ahead of your faith in God?
2. Pray and ask God for forgiveness. Then ask him to increase your faith in him!
   

Prayer

Lord, you have called me to believe in you. But I put so many other things before that first calling. Too often, I put more confidence in my abilities. Lord, I believe, but help me in my unbelief (Mark 9:24). Forgive my lack of faith. Increase my trust. Correct me where I have misplaced my hope. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Eternal Father of my soul, let my first thought today be of you, let my first impulse be to worship you, let my first word be your Name, let my first action be to kneel before you in prayer. – John Baillie

Put God first in your life! It is something I have said. It is something I try to do. I want God to be first and foremost in my life.

But I will be honest and admit that this is a struggle. I do not often put God first. I tend to put my worry and anxiety first. Prayer becomes more of my last resort than my first option. If I am honest, I will recognize that I give more lip-service to God being important than making him important.

A place where I struggle with this is having God be my first thoughts of the day. This morning when I woke up, the first thing I did was not to ponder God’s presence. The first thing I did was to turn on my phone to check on the news about the hurricane. How bad was the devastation in the Bahamas? Will it hit the US Coast?

My thoughts then went to my task list and calendar. Today was the first day for our church preschool. I wanted to make sure and be there to greet the parents and students. My daughter also had her first cross country meet, and it was uniform distribution night for our son’s soccer team.

I was off and running. I would have my devotion time, but it became more of a task to check off the list than quality time spent with God. This morning, I was more concerned that I was a day behind in my readings. My biggest motivation was to catch up on my reading, making it more about my reading than about meeting God.

I find that the starting point of my day is important. When my first impulse is to check all that is wrong with the world, to focus on my crazy schedule, and to fret about the burdens I place upon myself – I begin to question God’s presence and ability. I lose perspective, and my problems grow more prominent in my mind than God.

But when my thoughts start with God, I approach the troubles of the world, the affairs of my life, and my calling in a new light. I discover peace in the storm and hope for the day. I know that God is greater than anything the world can throw at me.

Putting God first in our thoughts is not about doing so out of obligation. Instead, it is something we need. We need God at the forefront of our minds to face the day.

So how about you? What is first in your mind – your problems or your God? How do you make your first thoughts in the morning be of God? How do your first thoughts of the day influence the remainder of your day?

I remember when I was a teenager and stayed up late at night watching television. There were times when I stayed up so late that the television station would start playing the National Anthem before going off-air.

On the screen would be a picture like this:

There was nothing else to watch. That was it. I had reached the end of the available viewing content for the day. With not much else to do, I would find my way to bed.

The world is different today. There is never a time when there is nothing to watch. There is an endless feed of content to consume in the age of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and others. You can drink long and deep from the content offered. As much as you consume, you will never get to the bottom of the barrel. When you get to end of one show, a button will pop up to take you to the next show.

These are infinity pools of content. Infinity pools are apps and services where there is a constant supply of fresh content to consume. Just hit refresh and more will appear.

Think about the Facebook app on your phone. You can scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, and scroll more, but you never come to the bottom end of the content. If you were somehow able to make it to the bottom, you could always go back to the top of the feed and you pull down. It will refresh your feed with new content to consume.

Shopping on Amazon can be another infinity pool. What can you not buy on Amazon? I go on to purchase furnace filters, but I also see a colorful phone case and a cool new hat. I click on these things only to discover other intriguing items for purchase.

Still, another example is YouTube. I recently opened YouTube to help me fix our dryer. But on the right side of the screen, there was an endless list of recommended videos for me to watch.

So what is the point of sharing all this?

Awareness

The first thing is to be aware of the infinity pools. The goal of these services is to suck you in and to keep your eyes glued to the screen. The CEO of Netflix is quoted as saying that the greatest competition to Netflix is sleep. The sentiment is that if they could keep your eyes glued to Netflix 25 hours a day, they would do it. But as we know, there are only 24 hours in a day. Awareness of what these services are attempting to accomplish will hopefully make us more cautious as we approach the use of these services.

Create Boundaries

Realizing these services are not going to take themselves off-air, it is up to us to turn them off for ourselves. Build boundaries in your use of these services. Technology now enables us to set limits. Start by turning off the notifications on your phone. You don’t need to know the very second someone “Likes” the picture of your dog.

You can also create time limits. The settings on my iPhone allow me to set time limits for individual apps. It also allows me to set downtime where my phone will only function as a phone. Imagine that!

Know Why You Go Back

Consider the reasons we keep going back to these infinity pools. The reason that we keep scrolling through Facebook is to discover a sense of connection, of belonging, and acceptance. We are looking to that “Mention” or that “Like” for affirmation. With such a vast pool of connections, we hope that one of those connections will be of consequence. But studies show that the more we scroll through Facebook, the more lonely and disconnected we will feel.

But we keep scrolling, searching, and bingeing. We hope that the next show, click, or tweet will bring us the meaningful satisfaction we crave. There are endless possibilities. We think we certainly have to find something in all that content to be consumed. Why do we keep going back? For what are we searching?

Our Longing for Jesus

One day Jesus sat beside another deep well as a woman from Samaria came to draw water. He says to her:

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” (John 4:13–15, ESV)

The infinity pools of apps and services will never satisfy us no matter how long or deeply we drink. They will leave us thirsty. Worse, they leave us drained and empty, having poured so much of ourselves into them.

Could it be that all the scrolling and all the bingeing is ultimately a search for Jesus? We all have a God-sized hole in our heart. The only thing that will fill that hole is God himself. But people try to fill that hole with so many different things like sex, money, entertainment, and social media. But nothing ever fits. All those things do is to expose the emptiness inside.

Jesus declares that he is living water. He satisfies in a way the infinity pools of apps and services never could. More than a few of us have regretted the time wasted in those pools. But no one who has drunk from the living water of Jesus has ever regretted it.

So come to the fountain, drink deeply, where Jesus’ love never ends.

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” (Matthew 11:29, ESV)

I hope you have had a great summer. The Fall of the year is quickly approaching. Kids in many parts of the country have returned to school. My kids are counting the days until they return in September.

It has been a busy summer for me. I feel as if I have hardly been home. I have been present with my congregation only two of the last six Sundays. I was away at our denomination’s National Youth Gathering in July.

In August, I took a sabbatical. I call it a sabbatical because it was more than a vacation. Our family spent a week in Upstate New York on Lake George.

We also made some time to get away to the Jersey Shore. In Jersey, you don’t go to the beach; you go to the Shore.

Then I spent a week doing nothing. I don’t have a picture of that, because I was doing nothing. But it was a blessing to have an extra week to rest and be renewed. We sometimes take vacations that we cram with so much activity that we never get time to rest.

I am thankful for the opportunity to create some great memories with my family. But I am also grateful for the opportunity I had to simply “be” and not “do.”

We wear “busy” as a status symbol. We make it part of our identity. We convince ourselves that we need to be doing something. I know that when I experience downtime, my mind often races through the things I feel I need to accomplish. It takes effort to resist the urge not to busy myself.

I know there are times when I have felt guilty for taking a nap or watching a television show. I considered those things to be a waste of my time. I tell myself that I need to be more productive. But being busy is not the same as being productive. In fact, being busy can work against being productive.

Sometimes, the most productive thing we can do is to take a nap. When we are always busy, it takes energy and attention from our most important endeavors. There are certainly times to be busy, but there is a time to rest. Our best work happens when we are rested. When we are tired and worn out, we will produce less than our best.

This is the way God designed us. This is why he created a day called the Sabbath. It is essential to build rest into our years, months, weeks, and days.

As I read the Gospels, I find it hard not to notice how Jesus makes it a point to rest. He often rested at the least appropriate times. When a storm was raging on the Sea of Galilee, and the disciples were doing all they could to keep from being shipwrecked, Jesus was asleep in the stern of the boat (see Mark 4:38). How could he do that at that moment in time?

A reason we don’t get adequate rest because we don’t think we can. We think there is too much that needs to be done. We think the storm is too great to do nothing. We miss the point that our busyness has no power over the storm. And we become worn out in the busyness of trying to control things we cannot control. Our busyness gives us an illusion of control even though we are not the ones in control. And there comes a time when we need to step back from trying to calm the storms we cannot calm and let God do this thing. Rest in him! Abide in him!

Faith is not trying to do more. It is letting God handle the things we cannot manipulate. Being too busy ultimately stems from a lack of faith. We wear ourselves out by trusting in our busyness more than in God’s greatness. God is greater than any storm. Your busyness is not.

So how about you? Do you get adequate rest? Do you suffer from a lack of rest? How do you ensure you get enough rest? How do you see your work suffer when you lack rest? How do you view the connection between faith and rest? Feel free to share in the comments.