How your devotions get leggy

There may be volumes written that I am unaware of on the topic of the mark of the person of true faith. My experience is that a person of true faith is a person who is always asking God for things. And what things! The more faith, the more expansive and varied and outlandish the requests become. To be sure, thanksgiving expands with request-making. But it is the asking that strikes me.

It stands to reason. As faith grows---as we see how big is God's heart, how lavish His inheritance, how powerful His arm, and how willing He is to be involved with us in the moments of our days---we join a long line of believers who suddenly realized the same thing. They turn on a dime from being fearful and self-deprecating to being avaricious in a godly way: "Send me!" said Isaiah, who had just a moment before wanted to die. What did John Piper call it---Christian hedonism?

In True Spirituality, Francis Schaeffer wrote:

"And it has been true for many of us that at a certain point, after we have been Christians for a long time, suddenly through the teaching of the Bible---directly or through someone teaching us---we have seen the meaning of the work of Jesus and the blood of Jesus for our present life, and a new door opens for us. . . ."

When your faith grows, you can hardly get through your morning devotions. You stop at every other verse to ask for whatever that verse is talking about. You read Ezekiel 1:12, which is describing the four living creatures, with their four faces and each one with two wings, and the comment: "And each went straight forward. Wherever the spirit would go, they went, without turning as they went." And you get excited about a new thing to pray for, and you stop and say, "Lord, make me like that. Cause me to be so filled with the Spirit, and so led by the Spirit that wherever the Spirit goes, I will go, without turning as I go, either to the left or the right of your Spirit's precise leading.

Then you go off on a tangent and ask for more: "Lord, in fact, make me so filled with your Spirit that even my dreams are godly. Teach me things through my dreams, as you have taught men in the past. Do keep speaking to me in the daytime, but why waste the night! That's eight hours of downtime from your teaching? I won't have it! I need thee every hour."

Then you move down to the next verse, verse 13, and you read that the appearance of the four creatures was like "burning coals of fire." And you have perhaps seen burning coals of fire in your life, so you can visualize it---the way the glow emanates from the inside. And it clicks with you that the fire inside is the Holy Spirit, and that a Christian can glow like that. And your head drops down again as you start in with your next outrageous prayer request---that you would have the appearance of burning coals of fire, so that your children will see Christ in you, sometimes without a word being spoken.

It's all well and good, but eventually you have to get up and make breakfast for the kids.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.