2.26.18 Prayer Prompt: Keep It Simple

PRAYER PROMPT ••• Last year, a friend of mine sent me a link to a weight loss program she heard about.
We are friends for many reasons, but one of our common traits is that we regularly talk about our respective need to lose weight.
So I wasn’t offended.
But I told her, “At a glance, it looks interesting, but it also looks complicated. I’ll look at it later.”
Almost a year later, it’s somewhere, flagged in my computer’s bookmark list, and the likelihood that I’ll ever get to it is pretty slim (pun intended).
The thing is, I don’t need a complicated weight loss program to follow.
It’s simple.
Eat right.
Move more.
For anyone who wants to lose weight, that’s what it boils down to.
But we don’t always want simple, do we?
We think simple is too easy.
There’s got to be a catch, right?
We embrace the words of Tom Hanks from “A League of Their Own,” when he said, “If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”
We think if it’s hard, and we succeed, then we’re strong.
We’re better because we persevered through the difficulty and didn’t give up.
The same can be applied to so many situations.
We just like people to make things hard, including God.
But He’s not complicated.
He’s actually made things really simple: Believe in His Son Jesus, who died for our sins and rose from the grave three days later, and we will be saved, and given eternal life.
That’s the Christian faith in a nutshell.
But 1 Corinthians 14:33a says, “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.”
God didn’t design things to be difficult.
Our tendency to overthink and apply manmade rules to Biblical situations makes it hard.
I wrote about that the other day, so I won’t go over it all again.
But what if we, as Christians, made it a goal to keep things simple.
Take the “eat right; move more” approach and apply it to our Christian faith — believe in Jesus; pray more.
Commit to live out our Christian faith, with simple, childlike faith that simply trusts.
Today, as you pray, thank God that He didn’t make it hard.
Ask Him to help you keep it simple as you walk daily, trusting Him and having faith in His great goodness.