JULY 2019 MBUMC Focus Prayer

Honor the Lord your God, worship only him, and make your promises in his name alone. Deuteronomy 6:13 GNT

Holy God, let your love shape my life with salvation, exactly as you promised. Don’t
ever deprive me of truth, not ever – your commandments are what I depend on. I’ll guard with
my life what you’ve revealed to me, guard it now, guard it ever; and I’ll stride freely through
wide open spaces as I look for your truth and your wisdom. Then I’ll tell the world what I find,
speak out boldly in public, unembarrassed. (Psalm 119:41a, 42-46 MSG)

Let’s not put our lives in the hands of experts who know nothing of life, of salvation life.
Mere humans don’t have what it takes; when they die, the projects die with them. Instead, let us
get help from the God of Jacob. Let us put our hope in God and know real blessing! God made
sky and soil, sea and all the fish in it. He always does what he says – he defends the wronged, he
feeds the hungry. God frees prisoners – he gives sight to the blind, he lifts up the fallen. God
loves good people, protects strangers, takes the side of orphans and widows, but makes short
work of the wicked. (Psalm 146:3-9 MSG)

So, my dear friends, let us not get thrown off course. Every desirable and beneficial gift
comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light.
There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle. He brought us to life using
the true Word, showing us off as the crown of all his creatures. (James 1:16-18 MSG)

Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your
tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from human
anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our
gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life. (James 1:19-21 MSG)

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting
the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act
are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away and two minutes later have no idea who they
are, what they look like. (James 1:22-24 MSG)

But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God – the free life! – even out
of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of
action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action. Real religion, the kind that
passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their
plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world. (James 1:25, 27 MSG)

May it be so, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Spirit of God, descend upon my heart; wean it from earth, through all its pulses move;

Stoop to my weakness, mighty as thou art,
And make me love thee as I ought to love.

Hast thou not bid me love thee, God and King?
All, all thine own, soul, heart and strength and mind.

I see thy cross, there teach my heart to cling, O let me seek thee, and O let me find!

H500 verses 1,3, words George Croly 1867, music Frederick C. Atkinson, 1870