Prayer For LifeSample

DAY TWO: We Can’t Do It On Our Own

When I married my wife, Teresa, I know it wasn't the courtship she wanted or deserved.

Instead of feeling elated, a wound within my heart remained open, and the misery mingled with a hundred other wounds from my lifetime. I didn’t fully trust that Teresa wasn’t going to have a change of heart and decide that she didn’t love me after all.

I couldn’t possibly have been easy to love. With all that resentment and pain in my heart, I was not pleasant to be around. My drinking got worse. I continued to ride out panic attacks with Valium and whiskey. My temper was as bad as ever.

Teresa cried a lot. She was trapped with an angry man who couldn’t behave himself. I dragged her down. I was her albatross.

But she kept looking to God to help. When I was still into booze and anger, she was trying to invoke the almighty God.

Even after I was saved, my anger was slow to subside. I wish that change would come as fast as salvation. Once saved, you will be changed. That’s God’s promise. But even for those who change, the change can be excruciatingly slow.

My temper took eight years to control following my salvation. I had God’s promise that I would change and that my life would change. But without an understanding of grace, I set about to try and force the change to happen faster than God had planned.

Some Christians are just miserable. They go to church, and they become critical of anything that doesn’t move them. The worship, the music, the preaching…none of it satisfies them. But the reality is that they are not going anywhere in God. They are trying to propel their Christian life in the natural.