Believe it or not, the title is an important question because what we believe about how God responds or doesn’t respond to our actions, especially with regards to our prayers, makes all the difference in the world. Prayer is the most vital link we have with God because scripture reveals, in general, the mind and will of God for the believer but it is prayer that creates and develops the relational side of our relationship.

I wonder how the people we know think or view us? Do they think we are reliable people or would they think we are just “TALKERS” and not doers? As Christians we should be the most reliable people around, but I fear more than not that believers are getting sloppy in the area of reliability.

If you read the scriptures long enough you start to realize a few things that seem to run contrary to how you think and process life. One thing in particular is the challenge to “BELIEVE” what you can’t seem to see. 

Have you ever wondered how you would change your past if you had the ability to go back in time? I think most of us would make different choices if we are honest about the past.  It might be about taking one kind of job over another or moving to a new city or even the friends we chose. Regardless of the individual details, our choices about the future have significant effects our life, both in terms of our fulfillment and our fruitfulness.

Reading the account of the birth of Jesus I think we look at the story through our own life perspective and miss the truly humbling circumstances in which Mary and Joseph fulfilled the will of God. Then they had to deal with the circumstances of both poverty and the hatred of the government through king Herod.

Receiving Jesus into our lives is meant to be a transformative experience, not a transitory experience, nor a one-time experience. It was meant to be from now through eternity, but sadly it is often a short-lived experience, just like the many broken marriages of today.  

When I look at the landscape of how people think and act these days, for both non Christians as well as Christians, there seems to be a disconnect between what a person believes or feels and what are the plain facts before them. People don’t seem to be bothered by the inconsistencies in their lives, let alone in the lives of those around them. It seems people just get entrenched in certain lines of thinking without asking themselves if the things they believe are true or false. Maybe we just hate the idea of finding out that we are wrong about something and thus don’t want to know our error.

Everyone has a perspective on just about everything. The question to ask is if our perspective relates to the facts at hand or if our perspective is out of sync with reality. Today, many people process their perspective on life by how they “FEEL” far more than by the facts before them. Reality has a cruel way of hitting us right between the eyes when we least expect it because facts don’t lie but feeling do.

I know this question for some people seems foreign, but the idea of spiritual children is not a new concept for the body of Christ. It is an old concept but many in the church have never heard what it means to have people look to them as a spiritual parent. Although God is the one that enables a person to be “Born Again,” others in the body of Christ should take on the responsibility and care to raise individuals in their walk with God.