My Victory Prayer – Begin Again Daily

Dear Jesus,

What an awesome moment I’m having with you right now. What an awesome realization of the work you’ve done in my life. How you’ve cleared my mind of bad things, evil things, unclean things. Not just curse words, but unclean thoughts. I was just thinking about this man you’ve brought into my life through email. In the past, I would have filled my head with all kinds of fantasies of what might happen, what could happen, socially, physically, psychologically. And at this moment, I find myself totally rooted in the now, totally rooted in reality. No more fantasizing about what could be or what could have been.

I’ve wasted so much of my life dwelling on the past or dreaming about the future, never really living for today. But today, for the first time ever, I feel like I’m living for today – to fulfill your destiny for what you want me to accomplish today. It’s such an unusual feeling. I’ve never actually felt so…in the moment before. It’s like heavy duty weird – awesome.

I feel like I have a brand new calling. I feel like I need to approach each new day asking God “What do you want me to do for you today?” Forget about me. Forget what my plans for my life are. It’s all about God. It’s all about what God wants me to do. Now, I think I’ve always known that, but I’ve just never really approached life with that point of view before. So, starting right now, before I do anything, first I will ask, “Is this something God wants me to do?”

As you can imagine, I will not be doing some of the things I used to do. Amen.

My devotional reading this morning just happened to be I Thessalonians 4:3 – 12 (NIV)

“³It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; ⁴that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable,⁵ not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God; ⁶and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him. The Lord will punish men for all such sins, as we have already told you and warned you. ⁷For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. ⁸Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit.

⁹Now about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. ¹⁰And in fact, you do love all the brothers throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more.

¹¹Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, ¹²so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.”

And then I read this quote from C.S. Lewis (the bolding is mine):

“I do not think any efforts of my own will can end once and for all this craving for limited liabilities, this fatal reservation. Only God can. I have good faith and hope He will. Of course, I don’t mean I can therefore, as they say, ‘sit back.’ What God does for us, He does in us. The process of doing it will appear to me (and not falsely) to be the daily or hourly repeated exercises of my own will renouncing this attitude, especially each morning, for it grows all over me like a new shell each night. Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal, the permitted, regularised presence of an area in ourselves which we still claim for our own. We may never, this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government. And this, so far as I can yet see, must be begun again every day. Our morning prayer should be that in the Imitation: Da hodie perfecte incipere – grant me to make an unflawed beginning today, for I have done nothing yet.”

– From “A Slip of the Tongue” (The Weight of Glory)