Thanks for joining us on this journey of building a consistent habit of reading our Bibles every day. The Bible reading plan we are using this year can be found here: One Year Bible or here on the Bible app. As always, if you miss a day, don’t feel compelled to go back and catch up. Just skip it and start back on today’s date. I am reading the NLT this year, but feel free to use whatever version you prefer. Now here are some thoughts from today’s readings:
“You can pray for anything, and if you have faith, you will receive it.”
– Matthew 21:22
At the end of our New Testament reading today, Jesus leaves us with a challenging statement in verse 22. You may be thinking, that doesn’t sound like a challenge. In fact, it sounds like a promise… and an amazing one at that! This is challenging because, in our reality, it doesn’t seem to be true, does it? I don’t know about you, but I have prayed many times thinking I had faith, and still didn’t receive.
But the word of God is always true. If we aren’t experiencing that truth, the error is always on our end. So, the question is, what is our part and are we doing it? Here we see that our part is asking and having faith. Then we must examine ourselves and ask if our issue is that we aren’t asking or we aren’t having faith. As with most good questions, that will lead us to other questions. For instance, how often should we ask? What’s the right way to ask? How do we know if we have faith?
This verse doesn’t answer these questions. The good thing is, the Bible as tons of verses on prayer, asking, and having faith. So when we have questions, we can search the Bible for certain topics and use what people call “the whole counsel of the word of God” on that subject to make a decision on what we should do. Of course, we will take all that we learn on these subject to God in prayer and allow Him open our understanding of the Bible. Not sure how to do that? Search the Bible for that topic!
What do you think your biggest problem is, lack of asking or lack of faith? What other subjects do you need to search the scriptures about?