prayer delight

But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.
Matthew 6:6 NKJV

Prayer can be showy. You've probably been in prayer gatherings where someone prays a long prayer using flowery language. Prayer is not entertainment; it's a time of fellowship with God.

I know you can pray anywhere but there is something about having a place where we pray regularly. As I grew in my new-found zeal for prayer I began to find myself really looking forward to my prayer times sensing I was really meeting with the Father. The room in which I prayed became synonymous with those times and I would go to the room expectant that I was going to meet with God. The result was that I approached my personal prayer times with faith.

Praying for a long time, using many words or repetition doesn’t mean we are more likely to get God’s attention. I really don’t know why we feel that God will hear us more clearly like that. This Scripture makes it clear that it’s not about words, length or repetition, because God knows anyway. It’s about quality—the right heart attitude, concentrating on what we’re doing, trying to live a life that doesn’t contradict our prayer life—not quantity. 

Let me explain 3D praying to you. The three Ds stand for Desire, Discipline and Delight. First, and you cannot bypass this starting point, there needs to be Desire. Desire to be a person of prayer. Without that desire, nothing will ever change. You can’t force the desire, but you can ask God to plant that in you by his Spirit. 

Second, it requires Discipline. Actually, you could double the D and make it daily discipline. This is the hard part, as you’ve probably already discovered. But I want to assure you that as you face the discipline it gets a lot easier; you’ll find the third D eases it considerably. 

The third D is Delight. Yes, truly prayer has become a delight for me: spending time with the Father, opening up my life with its ups and downs, hearing what he has to say to me. What’s not to like! That means that I can look forward to praying; making my way towards the place where I usually pray I’m actually expectant that I’ll meet God during that time. What a change! It’s delightful.

So He said to them, “When you pray, say: Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done On earth as it is in heaven. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, For we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And do not lead us into temptation, But deliver us from the evil one.”
Luke 11:2‭-‬4 NKJV

Some could be thinking, ‘Hey, that’s good, it’s a short prayer so I can do that easily.’ Not so fast! Do we really think that Jesus taught us to pray with something that can be rattled through in a few seconds? The problem is that this prayer is well known to most of us, and is said or sung in many places with no further thought. It is often used like a kind of mantra. So it becomes fairly meaningless. 

Here’s what Jesus was doing. The rabbis in Jesus’ day taught people ‘index praying’. You know what an index is—it appears, usually at the beginning of a book, giving chapter numbers and titles. Imagine using a large book for any study or work you’re doing and finding there’s no index. How would you find your way around? On the other hand, what if there were just an index and no substance to the book? The point of the index is to act as a pointer to the substance. 

That’s exactly what index praying was all about. The rabbis would provide the points for prayer, like an index, and the people would fill in the substance—their own prayers. This is the method Jesus was teaching in this prayer. Can you now see the Lords Prayer is like that? And what an index of titles! 

1. Worshiping the Father 

2. God’s kingdom 

3. God’s will/guidance 

4. Our daily needs 

5. Forgiveness/relationships 

6. Spiritual warfare 

I challenge you to find one subject, broadly speaking, that’s not covered in this prayer. No wonder Jesus taught it! Hopefully you can begin to see why it’s such a great prayer to pray and how it can help you in your prayer life. 

Why is praying in this way so helpful?  Because we’re obviously praying according to God’s will— and that’s something with which I often struggled as I read the verse that says, ‘This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.’ (1 John 5: 14–15). How could I be sure that what I was praying was according to his will? Surely I must have been praying according to his will if I was praying the prayer he gave. 

Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.
I John 5:14‭-‬15 NKJV

love without limit

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.
Ephesians 5:25‭-‬27 NKJV

By Wycliffe Bible Translators USA

Translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left his mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. 

Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for “love.” Lee and his wife, Tammi, had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels — i, a and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u?

Lee asked the translation committee, “Could you ‘dvi’ your wife?”

“Yes,” they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone.

“Could you ‘dva’ your wife?” Lee asked.

“Yes,” they said. That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.

“Could you ‘dvu’ your wife?” Lee asked. Everyone laughed.

“Of course not!” they said. “If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu.’ It just doesn’t exist.”

Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?”

There was complete silence; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. 

“Do you know what this would mean?” they asked. “This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected his great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”

One simple vowel, and the meaning was changed from “I love you based on what you do and who you are,” to “I love you based on who I am. I love you because of me and not because of you.”

God had encoded the story of his unconditional love right into their language. 

The New Testament in Hdi has been printed, and now 29,000 speakers have the ability to be impacted by passages like Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, ‘dvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘dvu’-d the church. …” 

Read more stories like this in our e-book, “In Your Own Words.”  

why do we need bible translation ?

The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever.”
Isaiah 40:8 NKJV
So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in  the  thing for which I sent it.
Isaiah 55:11 NKJV

By Wycliffe Bible Translators USA

The Bible: It’s one of the oldest and most popular books of all time. But is it just a book or is it much more than that?

At Wycliffe Bible Translators, we believe that the Bible is literally God’s Word to us and that everyone should have it in a language they can clearly understand. But here’s the problem: not everyone has access to God’s Word. In fact, about one-quarter of the world’s language groups are still waiting for their Bible translation to begin. That’s approximately 160 million people who don’t have a single word of the Bible in a language they can clearly understand. 

To put that number in perspective, that’s roughly the populations of Greece, Cuba, Mali, Chile, Iceland, Laos, Saudi Arabia, Poland and Australia combined. 

When people finally do get the Bible in their own language, many meet Jesus Christ for the very first time in their life. And he begins to change them from the inside out, exchanging fear, guilt and pain for the forgiveness, peace and future hope that only he can offer.

It’s because of this hope that Wycliffe is working with language communities all around the world right now to help them get the Bible. And no matter what it takes, we won’t stop until all people have it in a language they can clearly understand.

Watch our video “Why Bible Translation”  and share it with your social networks to help spread the importance of people having the Bible in their own language. 

Have you ever thought about what your life might look like if you never had access to the Bible in your own language?

Think about that for a minute. What if you weren’t able to pick up your Bible whenever you want and read directly from its pages (or from your mobile screen, as is often the case today) words of hope, encouragement and life? 

The Bible is the way we draw close to God. It’s the way we are transformed by the truth of the gospel. And it’s why Bible translation is so crucial — because it connects people to a God who speaks their language.

Around the world, millions of people speak thousands of languages. Many of them are speakers of major languages — like English — but millions of others have one thing in common: they’ve never heard God’s Word in a way that speaks directly to their hearts. 

At Wycliffe, we refer to this as someone’s “heart language.” It’s the language that your mom and dad speak to you at home as you grow up, or the language that you think, dream and pray in. Unless you’re able to hear God speak to you in this language, the words of the Bible won’t be able to penetrate your heart fully. You might hear them, but you won’t be able to understand them intimately. 

Today there are approximately 1,600 languages (out of an approximate 7,000 spoken around the world) that still likely need Bible translation to begin. That represents up to 160 million people still waiting to hear God speak their language. 

We believe that this needs to change. Through the work of Bible translation, people around the world can draw close to a God who speaks their language — a God who is near, personal and touches their hearts with his Word. 

Over the next few days, we’re going to share stories of lives — and entire communities! — that have been changed once they heard God speak their own language. We hope that you’ll be encouraged and reinvigorated in your own walk with God as you read the Bible in your heart language.