Category: Prayers

“Day and night, without pause, they sing: ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.’ ” –Revelation 4:8 We pray each day that God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10). In heaven, it’s God’s will that we praise Him “without pause” (Rv 4:8). When we pray the Our Father, we therefore pray that we would praise God on earth as He is praised in heaven. Each day of our lives then becomes a day of training in praise, a preparation for our destiny of giving eternal praise to the Lord (Eph 1:3, 12). Daily...

“Because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of My mouth!” —Revelation 3:16 Jesus said that the lukewarm Christians of Laodicea made Him feel like vomiting. Then He knocked at their door and wanted to have supper with them (Rv 3:20). Isn’t it contradictory to want to have supper with people who make you sick? Yet Jesus loves us so much that He is willing to be sick, to suffer, and to die so as to share His life with us. Zacchaeus, the little tax collector, was another sickening person. Tax collectors, because of their...

“At that very moment he was given his sight and began to follow Him.” —Luke 18:43 Jesus’ healing of the blind beggar of Jericho is preceded by the young rich man’s rejection of Jesus and followed by Zacchaeus’ acceptance of Him. Jesus healed not only the physically blind but also those spiritually blinded by the god of the present age, the god of greed and a pleasure-seeking lifestyle (2 Cor 4:4). The love of money is the root of all evil, including spiritual blindness (1 Tm 6:10). For example, the Pharisees were “blind guides” and “blind fools” (Mt 23:16-17) because...

“Perhaps he was separated from you for a while for this reason: that you might possess him forever, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother, especially dear to me; and how much more to you, since now you will know him both as a man and in the Lord.” –Philemon 15-16 St. Paul tried to undermine the institution of slavery not by politics or legislation but by winning over individual Christians to the brotherhood and sisterhood of community life. By converting the slave Onesimus, Paul thereby made the slave a brother to the...