Radiate: 90 Devotions to Reflect the Heart of Jesus

Sample Devotional Reading

Lay It All Out There

"Then you will call on Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you." Jeremiah 29:12 NIV

How do we learn to pray? Many of us feel like we don’t know how or question if what we are currently doing is the “right way.”

Surely it is silly to talk to such a mighty and powerful God about the trivial details of our lives. However, this is precisely what He wants to hear. To believe that certain contents of our hearts are not substantial enough to include in our prayers reveals that we not only don’t understand prayer but also have misinterpreted the One we pray to.

C. S. Lewis tells us to “lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.” If our prayers, the most intimate time we have with the Father, feel like striving, then what avenue will be a safe haven for our authentic selves? Prayer allows us to bring every morsel before Him—the places of our unbelief, the sources of our anxiety, the friendship we are worried about, or the snooty remark from our neighbor we can’t seem to let go. When we speak frankly with our Father, we allow our souls to feel known and seen, even if He was already aware of it all.

The only reason we would withhold the honest thoughts of our hearts is if we thought they didn’t matter to Him or that He is not capable of changing them. However, if we don’t believe He will intervene in the mundane and the ordinary, why would we invite Him into the big and the extraordinary?

How does a child learn to have a conversation? They talk. How do we learn to have a conversation with God? We talk to Him. And we listen. Prayer is like an incubator for spiritual growth, and the effect of spiritual growth is displaying the radiance of God. We learn more about the heart of the One who made us, and in our communication with Him, we point to heaven.

Let us not be discouraged by the very vehicle that takes us straight to His feet. If we struggle to desire to pray, that in itself is a prayer! Do you see? All is welcome. Nothing is trivial. Transformation is absolute. We do not need a fancy way to pray, a higher degree to discern, or a “better” past to be eligible to be heard by Jesus. The proper way to pray to God is merely that: to pray.

May we find ourselves so hidden in Him that we hide nothing from Him. That is a life of peace.

Prayer:

Hey Jesus, thank You for bending down to hear my prayers and desiring to hear my voice. Nothing is too big or too small, Lord. Help me not to concentrate on the logistics of prayer but rather just fix my eyes on You so that I can learn Your heart. In Jesus’ name, AMEN. - C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (Eugene; Harvest Books, 1973), p. 22.