A DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT
by Wyley Wilkins
Throughout my life, I have been blessed with supportive and loving family and friends. Every now and then, I’m overcome with the realization that their prayer, intervention, and encouragement have been the avenue that God has used to express His love for me. I don’t know how Lyndsay and I would have made it through the dark season of her Leukemia treatments without the support and prayers of family and friends, or how we could have managed to adopt two children at once—an undertaking not for the faint of heart—without the involvement of our community. These relationships have been the foot and hand holds in the Rock that I’ve clung to.
Being on the receiving end has not been the only benefit of these relationships. I’ve grown and have been refined by supporting, praying for, and encouraging my friends and family as well. It is the endless cycle of the love of Christ at work in our hearts.
And the fuel that nourishes it all is prayer.
As brothers and sisters in Christ, the church should always be included in the incense of prayer we offer up to God (Revelation 5:8). We cannot hope to further His cause, follow His will or maintain faithfulness to Him without striving for unity among the believers through love and prayer. We are to “bear with one another in love…until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4).
Peace is the bond that unites believers in Christ (Ephesians 4:3). But when that peace is weathered by the trials and discontents of life, it is prayer that can restore the unity necessary to be His body. We are motivated by the love of Christ to pray for the power of the Holy Spirit to unite us as his family of believers. We can’t make it on our own. God did not design us to. He meant for us to link arms in prayer with His family as we face the storms of life together.
And just like me, many times in your lives you will find yourselves on the receiving end of those powerful prayers as well as be the one offering them for others. In some seasons of life, we are the ones looking out for our brothers and sisters in Christ, casting out the line in prayer to those who are drowning in the waves. In other seasons, we are the one struggling to stay afloat and in desperate need of “powerful and effective” prayers (James 5:16).
My great grandmother, who couldn’t walk or see well in her last years on this earth, would spend hours each day praying for my family and I. Now my grandma, her daughter, has taken up that mantle and I believe that it continues to be the fuel that feeds the legacy of a Christ-centric life in my family.
May we, as God’s ambassadors at PGCC, continually take up that mantle of prayer, lifting each other up in love as we navigate life together, so that we “may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Colossians 1:9-12).
