Joni And Friends Daily Devotional 5 July 2022 | Monday Message
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TOPIC: Taking Time to be With God
God meets us in places.
Have you ever thought about that? He has made us a people who live in time and space. And if he is going to meet with us at all, this eternal, everywhere-present God must condescend to meet with us at a certain location, at a certain time. The mighty Creator of all must bind himself to a penciled line in my date book.
And the wonder of it is, he does! Down through the centuries, he always has. He strolled with Adam through the Garden in the cool of the day…. He wrestled with Jacob through a long night by a stream called Jabbok…. He comforted the fugitive David in a dank limestone cave called Adullum…. He stood with a grief-torn mom and dad in an upstairs room, by the bed of their dead (but soon to be alive!) daughter…. He crossed paths with his disciples in the middle of the night, in the middle of the sea, in the middle of a storm.
- Joni And Friends Daily Devotional 5 July 2022
There is never a place where he is not. He waits in every room we’re about to enter. He stands quietly in the back of every elevator (up or down) before we step through the doors. He lingers around every bend of the path we will ever walk.
He’s in the dark kitchen when we get up at night for a glass of milk. He’s in the recovery room when we come out from under anesthetic. On a long, dirt road, he’s under the tree in the field where we pause to rest. There is no place too remote, no night too black, no cave too deep, no mountain peak too high for the immediate, awesome, pervasive, loving presence of the Lord our God.
Yes, He meets with us ANYPLACE. But he also meets with us SOMEPLACE. Someone once said, “I can pray everywhere all the time, because I can pray somewhere some of the time.” There is a special, specific place of meeting with God, which is as the bedroom to the bride and bridegroom.
A chamber of hallowedness and holiness. A familiar place where we’ve met him again and again. Whether it’s kneeling at our bedside, in the driver’s seat on our commute, or the railing of our sleeping child’s crib…there is a habitual “someplace” of meeting God that is more sacred and special to us than a myriad “anyplaces.”
- Joni And Friends Daily Devotional 5 July 2022
For me, that place is my bedroom.
That’s the one little spot on this spinning planet where I always meet God. As soon as I wheel into my bedroom and see the side lamp lit, the bed covers pulled back just so, and my turn-at-night pillows on the chair, it all signals a Pavlovian response in my mind. It’s time to pray. This isn’t just the place where I get eight hours of sleep; this is where God meets me. This is where we find intimacy.
We all need such places. We need hallowed chambers in the rambling structures of our lives. In developing that discipline of meeting God some place, some of the time, we begin to see how he opens up meeting places where we encounter him everywhere, all of the time. “Pray without ceasing” becomes a way of looking at every place as a point of encountering the Lord. A holy intersection, if you will.
When I was a little girl, I visited my Uncle Vincent’s house on the eastern shore, near Easton, Maryland. One afternoon Uncle Vince took me upstairs to show me his “prayer room.” I remember thinking, This is strange. This is a little rigid. God ought to be meeting Uncle Vince on the golf course, like he meets me when I go horseback riding, or when I go hiking with Daddy. How odd that Uncle Vince needs this little room.
Uncle Vince’s cubicle was not to my taste. He had found some stained glass from an old church in Easton, and had made tall, vertical windows. He had hung a couple of old, musty tapestries on the fake paneling. There was a little prayer kneeler, and an open Bible on a stand.
- Joni And Friends Daily Devotional 5 July 2022
It seemed so odd to me. Stuffy. Tacky. I wasn’t drawn to it at all. But in later years, looking back, I found myself thinking, How wise of Uncle Vince to have had a place all those years where he met Jesus. That’s probably the reason why he could pray on the golf course and when he went hiking with us. Uncle Vince encountered his Lord every place…because he had one place.
And that’s where intimacy with God begins.
Thank you for reading Joni And Friends Daily Devotional 5 July 2022, Tuesday