A Season of Lent
40 Days of Prayer
Day 2
Last night as I was reading my Lent Devotional ---- again, I don't participate
in Lent as part of any religion -- I do it because Lent, in Old English and
Latin --- means "Spring" and "fortieth". It's a time to
reflect on where Jesus walked in the Garden of Gethsemane, fasting and praying for forty days in his journey to Resurrection Sunday!
I never knew that about the "Spring" and "fortieth" until
reading in this current devotional. It made me smile because I love Spring
gardening season, and for me it typically does start on Ash Wednesday and lasts
until Easter! That's my "40 Days in the Wilderness" as I whip my
"Garden of Gethsemane" into shape.
How are you spending this Spring Season of Lent?
You'll find me in my wilderness, aka my "Where HOPEISM Blooms"
gardens.
Anyway - a definition of prayer I thought of as I read my Lent Devotional by
A.W. Tozer -- one of my favorite authors in the Christian realm --- is how
prayer is a way we clear the wilderness of our mind of weeds so that our faith, our garden, can grow.
What imagery there!
When I don't tend to my garden, it becomes overgrown with invasive weeds that I don't want or need, if left unchecked - those weeds, that satan, will choke out the flowers and vegetables I do want and need!
If our prayer life isn't cultivated daily, if left to itself and neglected of being weeded of bad thoughts, actions, desires, complacency, --- it becomes overgrown with satan's snares that choke out all the good, the thankfulness, gratitude, joy. It becomes dead and brittle. A barren wilderness!
Again, what imagery as a definition of prayer!
It makes me all the more fervent in pulling those weeds, those negative thoughts and actions, out of my garden -- er, mind.
I want to clear the garden of the bad, cultivate that soil to make room for the good.
And as any farmer or gardener knows -- that is a DAILY PROCESS.
It will not be "once and done".
It is a daily habit - pulling weeds, cultivating that soil so the good can grow, and thrive.
A.W. Tozer puts it this way:
The bias of nature is toward the wilderness, never toward the fruitful field. To the alert Christian this fact will be more than an observation of interest to farmers; it will be a parable, an object lesson setting forth a law that runs through all the regions of our fallen world... We cannot escape the law that would persuade all things to remain wild or to return to a wild state after a period of cultivation. What is true of the field is true also of the soul, if we are but wise enough to see it."
That is what this journey through Lent is to me for these 40 days. That weeding, that cultivating, that taking the time to tend to things that make my garden grow!
My Faith, my pursuit of Christ, my HOPEISM.
The truth is that no spiritual experience, however revolutionary, can exempt us from temptation; and what is temptation but the effort of the wilderness to encroach upon our new-cleared fields? - A.W. Tozer
How often am I tempted to stay in bed and not get up and pursue prayer? Simply being a born-again-believer with my fresh copy of that 'fire insurance' does not mean my fields will never need to be cultivated - weeded from satan's snares!
The purified heart is obnoxious to the devil and to all the forces of the lost world. They will not rest until they have won back what they have lost. The jungle will creep in and seek to swallow up the tiny areas that have been made free by the power of the Holy Ghost. Only watchfulness and constant prayer can preserve those moral gains won for us through the operations of God's grace. The neglected heart will soon be a heart overrun with worldly thoughts. The neglected life will soon become a moral chaos. The creeping wilderness will soon take over that church that trusts in its own strength and forgets to watch and pray. - A.W. Tozer
I sit here stunned at that.
Humbled by it.
Inspired to weed more fervently.
Determined to pray more faithfully.
