Chapian Quiet Prayer

31 Days of Meditation for Women
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4245-6421-7
Verlag: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Gods peace is waiting for you. Many women long for God's presence in their lives. Although they try to find time for God, they still find themselves distracted by a busy world and even busier minds. Based on an ancient and biblical Christian practice, Quiet Prayer meditation reveals how the power of Jesus-centered silence suppresses distractions, igniting your prayer time and revitalizing your relationship with God. Quiet Prayer will help you - learn the history and importance of Christian meditation, - develop the daily practice of Quiet Prayer through thirty-one guided meditations, - increase your awareness of God and yourself, and - see God's living love and power move in your life. Begin your journey of embracing God's transformative peace through Quiet Prayer.

Marie Chapian, New York Times best-selling author, has published more than 30 books translated into 17 languages. Recipient of many awards including the coveted Gold Medallion Book Award, she is a certified Christian life coach, pastor, spiritual director, and award-winning poet and artist. Marie holds a doctorate in counseling, an MFA in writing, and is founder and president of JC Wings of Wellness-a ministry dedicated to spirit, soul, and body wholeness. She is passionate for the loving heart of God to illuminate the human heart with His compassion, joy, and peace. Her ministry stretches across several continents bringing the transforming majesty of His words to all who will listen.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chapian, Marie

Leseproben

THE PRACTICE OF QUIET PRAYER

Meditation 1

YOUR TRUE AND FALSE SELF6

EPHESIANS 5:17 NKJV

Have you noticed how some days you’re content with your life, feeling good, and then what seems like just the next day, you’re dissatisfied and feeling sorry for yourself? You’re still the same woman, and yet there are two sides of you in combat for your attention. This is called your higher self, or your true self, and your lower self, or false self. Let’s look at the spiritual impact of these two competing forces in us.

Let’s begin by getting to know your lower self, the part of you with the strong tendency to disregard anything but your own wants and desires. Your lower self functions outside the golden walls of wisdom, love, and the will of God. It’s ego driven and controlled by self-driven thoughts, ideas, actions, and behavior. Your lower self hurts others as well as yourself and essentially aims at trying to manage your life on your own without God.

Your higher self, or your true self, is that part of you that reflects the bright luminosity of God as in a mirror. When you were a newborn baby, you didn’t know about sin. You were innocent. The Latin definition of is “without wounds.”7 Other interpretations of are “unpolluted, harmless, unoffending, pure, and guiltless.” As a newborn you had no emotional or mental wounds yet. You didn’t know right from wrong, good from bad. You were innocent and unwounded. When you cried and made a commotion due to hunger or pain, you were expressing life the only way a newborn can.

If you have children, you know the pleasure of their sweet, innocent baby faces. In Psalm 139:13, David exclaims to God, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” which explains that God knew us before we were born, and we’re beautifully put together. Your heavenly Father has been with you since before you were born, is living in you now, and will be with you forever.

You grew up to be the woman you are now, the one who is carrying your life’s experiences with you. When you earnestly pray for deliverance, God will dilute and remove the suffering of your past and erase the shame and guilt from you. When it comes to the traumatic and tragic events in our lives, Quiet Prayer meditation is a great means of healing and restoration.

As the years pass, we develop our personalities, our values, our ideals, interests, likes and dislikes, notions of fairness and justice, and understanding of right and wrong, and we think these are who we are. They don’t, however, define us spiritually. Through the years, in addition to experiences, your beliefs and values were built in you through familial, social, educational, and observational conditioning. As an adult, you have a choice about how you’re going to live your life today, and this is where you must become aware of the power of choice that you possess between your higher self and your lower self.

Imagine having no wounds like a newborn baby. Then see how, through time, you gathered wounds and more wounds all while your ego and personality were forming.

Let’s fast forward to the second-best day of your life, the first being the day you were born. Let’s say that on this second-best special day you relinquished your lifetime of wounds and egoic behaviors and habits and surrendered to spiritually transcend yourself and your old life to become alive in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. You gave him the right to be master of your life. On that day, the Spirit of God fused with your human spirit, and you gave up running things on your own steam. When you did that, your human spirit was supernaturally ignited by God’s Holy Spirit, and you were born all over again. This time your newborn self was filled with the immortal power of God’s spirit within you as pure as God is pure. The one who heals all wounds has taken you back to himself, back to the day he formed you perfect and unwounded.

As you grew up, most of the choices you made were influenced by your ego, your center of self. Your true self is not led by your ego. Your true self is led by the Spirit of God within you. As a woman of God, your true self has risen in you, and your eyes are open to the wonders of life in Christ. Still, your false self will surface as selfish as ever. You can choose how you’re going to respond. Your false self will draw you toward the old wounded, unhealed, and self-centered side of you. Your true self pauses and makes choices that are, for example, upbuilding, helpful, and without malice or selfish motives.

The apostle Paul explained this dilemma of the true self and the false self in Romans 7:24: “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (NKJV). Call it the sin nature or the flesh, but know there is a false self in every human being. It’s up to us to grasp the power and reality of a true and pure self within us. When we are operating in our true self, we can then recognize when the false self pokes its calloused head in our business.

As an adult woman, you have the power of choice to live dominated by the reality of who you truly are, empowered in Christ. Your true self is the one healed of your old wounds, and “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

MEDITATION

Meditation 2

GETTING TO KNOW YOUR TRUE SELF

ROMANS 8:5–6

Understanding who you really are takes awareness and paying attention to your behavior and beliefs—What do you believe about yourself? What do you believe about the world around you? Understanding yourself is knowing and accepting on a daily basis that, at last, you are the human being God created you to be. Recent statistics show that women have less confidence than men.8 Your higher self is that part of you that rises up to change these statistics. Your true self doesn’t push or hurt others to get ahead. Your true self is assertive but not aggressive.

Your false self shrinks back when your true self is in full operation. Your true self doesn’t judge others, find fault, discriminate, gossip, or tell little white lies. Your higher self is the you who shows compassion toward yourself and to those whom you may not think deserve it.

Your higher self flourishes above the flesh and is not prone to despair over the troubles of life. Your true self is not ego driven or rebellious against God’s will. You can recognize your false self when you’re rude, fault finding, angry, worried, vindictive, discriminatory, opinionated, fearful, jealous, and solely motivated by your self-centered cravings. Your true self is dominated by none of these.

In opposition to your true self, your false self doubts God. The false self resorts to old patterns of opening old wounds. The false self rushes into the wrong places at the wrong times and with the wrong motives, but the true self lives in the now with God. The false self is an easy target for flattery and false promises. The false self thinks nothing of selfishly ordering God around, telling him what to do, and calling it prayer. But not your true self.

Your higher self, or your true self, is content to walk a path of humility and isn’t afraid to be wrong or make mistakes.

Take time to get to know your true self, honor her, respect her, love her. She is the true you and the you whose wounds will fall gently into the open heart of love and stay there. Your true self always shows mercy and compassion because that’s who you are.

MEDITATION

Meditation 3

THE CORE OF WORDLESSNESS

JOB 13:5

During Quiet Prayer...