Dave’s Monday Blast – June 23, 2025
Well…summer has “officially” arrived. It is hot and sweaty in Tennessee. It is the kind of hot and sweaty that makes your glasses fog up when you go outside. It is the kind of hot and sweaty that requires you to take a shower after you have just taken a shower. It is the kind of hot and sweaty that encourages every bug (there are countless bugs) to visit, and they are all very hungry.
Before we moved, many of you told me about the realities of southern hot and sweaty; I felt u’all were exaggerating, you weren’t ! Of course, July and August are the really humid months according the locals.
Our beautiful baby girl is getting married this Saturday and it is supposed to be hot and sweaty with scattered showers and thunderstorms; it is outdoors on the Tennessee River. I want to believe though that it will be dry and cool and of course we are all praying to that end.
Prayer and faith. What does the Bible say? (Mark 11:22 -24) “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Men of INTENTION are familiar with E.M. Bounds (1835 – 1913). Many of you have read the following: Power through Prayer; The Essentials of Prayer; The Necessity of Prayer, and The Weapon of Prayer.
Do any of these quotes by Bounds sound familiar?
“God shapes the world by prayer”
“Prayers outlive the lives of those who uttered them; outlive a generation, outlive and age, outlive a world”
“The prayers of God’s saints are the capital stock in heaven by which Christ carries on His great work upon earth”
“The secret to success in Christ’s Kingdom is the ability to pray”
Bounds also said: “Prayer is our most powerful gift when done in faith. We can do nothing without prayer. It surmounts or removes all obstacles, overcomes every resisting force and gains its ends in the face of the invincible hindrances.
The Denison Forum comments: “God loves to move when we pray. He is not a God who forces his will on his people, but in love waits for us to capture his heart and ask him to move and work in our lives and the lives of others. There is no more important task before us today than to learn what it is to pray in faith.” The passage we read earlier from Mark 11 finds Jesus illustrating an important link between prayer and faith. We pray because He told us to. He moves in response to our faith. Conversely, but in support of this marriage between faith and the act of prayer read James 1:5 – 8. Where faith positions us to receive from God, doubt has the opposite effect. Scripture is clear that the prayers God responds to are prayers of faith.
Denison further comments: “You and I have been given the incredible gift of conversation with a God who longs to move in response to our prayer. What obstacles stand in your way today? Where do you need a miracle? (We need about a million of them right now in our world). Who needs prayer around you?
Now…we are praying for a beautiful day this coming Saturday when our precious gal gets married. We are praying in faith that all those hundreds of details associated with a wedding come together in the most memorable ways. It is certainly the will of God that two young people covenant to become husband and wife. But our faith tells us that it will transpire as He chooses and we will remind ourselves during and after this blessed event that it transpired just as He planned it and nothing will stand in His way.
