Do not be rash with your mouth and let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven, and you on earth; therefore, let your words be few.
- Ecclesiastes 5:2 (NKJV)
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take”
Did you pray that prayer or some variation of it when you were young?
Did you teach someone younger than you to pray it?
Are there other prayers out there that you were taught as a child that you remember and can rattle off at any point?
Here is the hard question: do you rattle these prayers off and not consider the words?
I’ll be honest, when my kids were little, I did not teach them to pray.
It was not until my youngest was born that I developed a relationship with the Father and started teaching my kids about prayer.
My husband made up a nighttime prayer for our youngest son that he committed to memory (so did we!) but looking back, I wonder if the words had meaning to him.
This verse tells us that when we pray or make any vow, that we need to speak carefully – essentially think before we speak.
Why?
Because we are addressing God.
We should not be hasty or impulsive with our words (God if you get me home safe in this rainstorm, I will never drive in the rain again).
We should consider the words we are about to say (if you make [spouse or child] do the dishes tonight, I will never ask for anything ever again).
Remember He is God, not our next-door neighbor (if they stop parking on my grass, I’ll be nicer to them).
We shouldn’t say a bunch of empty prayers, but we should speak with intention.
Sometimes, the fewer words that come out of our mouths, the better off we are.
Daily Inspiration from the Bible
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to share your thoughts, but please also be respectful.