Give It to God

I have been reading the book The Power of Simple Prayer ~ How to Talk with God about Everything by Joyce Meyer. A friend of mine sent me the book last year and I have slowly been reading through it.

I want to share a small portion today. I needed this as a reminder and challenge and I pray it may also bless you!

Give It to God...

Most people respond to problems in a similar way: they immediately begin to try to solve the problem themselves. If that does not work, they pick up the phone to call a friend or someone else they think can fix the situation. But I like to say that we need to run to the throne before we run to the phone! As I wrote earlier in this book, prayer needs to be our first response to every situation.

When does God really begin to intervene in our lives? When we stop trying to live them for ourselves and according to our own good idea. When does God begin to straighten out our problems? When we give up our attempts to solve them. When does God get involved in our situations? When we quit worrying about them. When does God give us answers? When we finally cease trying to figure everything our for ourselves. Psalm 37:5 says, "Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass," and Proverbs 16:3 says, "Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts will be established" (NKJV)

Many times, our "works" are the things we "work" in our minds - our reasoning, our analyzing, and our attempts to figure out what is going on or what we should do. But God says that id we will commit our works to Him, our thoughts will be established. In other words, if we can get our minds to calm down, we will be clearheaded and God can give us ideas and strategies and directions. When we get the wrong thoughts out of our minds, God can give us the right thoughts. When we clear out the bad ideas, God can give us great ideas.

The first step in the prayer of commitment is to stop worrying and reasoning and to commit our works (our thoughts) to the Lord. The prayer of commitment says to the Lord: "God, I give this to You. I give You this problem. I give You this situation. I give You this relationship. I completely release it and let it go. It is too much for me. I cannot handle it. I am going to stop worrying and stop trying to figure everything out - and I am going to let You take care of it. God, I also give myself to You because I can't do anything about myself, either. I give it all to you. I give you my weaknesses and problems. I want to change but You have to change me." It was a great day for me when I finally learned that it was God's job to change me, and my job is to believe!