Devotion for February
Conversations
Scripture
…be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ … (Eph 3:16-17)
Conversations can make life very pleasant and lift our spirits. Other conversations can make us nervous. If someone random comes up to us in the street preaching bizarrely to us we simply don’t know what to say and we mostly hold our silence. But a lot of our daily conversations are bland and formal. Like the lady who came into the Four Doors Down Cafe in Marton and took her order of food and said, “thank you so much”. So many conversations are like this, they go no further than, “how are you”, and “well thank you”. Can we really call that a conversation?
Good conversations include two people sharing who they are. If we know the other person we get relaxed and let the other person know what is important to us, and the other person listens and responds in a similar way.
In our Christian life, prayer is our conversation with God. This conversation always begins with God. God’s speaks; for example, he says to us, ‘I will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, I will also provide a way out so that you can endure it’.
Martin Luther spoke of how we might then respond to God – considering the above scripture – what does God want me to do, how does what I’ve heard cause me to give thanks, what do I need to confess, and what do I now pray.
How would you describe your conversation style with God?
Prayer:
Holy Spirit speak to our hearts so we might know begin to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ for us. Amen
Pastor Warren Paltridge
LCNZ Assistant Bishop
January 2025
