Daily Devotional

February 19

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Posted from the OPC Website

The Practice of the Presence of God

...We must realize that we are in the presence of God. What does that mean? It means realization of something of who God is and what God is. Before we begin to utter words, we always ought to do this. We should say to ourselves: "I am now entering into the audience chamber of that God, the almighty, the absolute, the eternal and great God with all His power and His might and majesty, that God who is a consuming fire, that God who is 'light and in whom is no darkness at all,' that utter, absolute Holy God. That is what I am doing."

...But above all, our Lord insists that we should realize that, in addition to that, He is our Father....
O that we realized this! If only we realized that this almighty God is our Father through the Lord Jesus Christ. If only we realized that ... whenever we pray it is like a child going to its father! He knows all about us; He knows our every need before we tell Him…. He desires to bless us very much more than we desire to be blessed. He has a view of us, He has a plan and a program for us, He has an ambition for us; I say it with reverence, which transcends our highest thought and imagination... He cares for us. He has counted the very hairs of our head. He has said that nothing can happen to us apart from Him.

Then we must remember what Paul puts so gloriously in Ephesians 3. He "is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think." That is the true notion of prayer, says Christ. You do not go and just turn a wheel. You do not just count the beads. You do not say: "I must spend hours in prayer, I have decided to do it, and I must do it." ... We must get rid of this mathematical notion of prayer. What we have to do first of all is to realize who God is, what He is, and our relationship to Him.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 30-1

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”