The most important issue in LIVING the Christian life is praying and waiting. If we just act without prayer, we haven’t invited God into our situation. If we pray and don’t wait for His response to our prayer, we haven’t put our trust in Him. We leave our prayer moment without feeling the need for His answer. If we pray and then act on what we think we should do, our faith is in our own strength, abilities, and knowledge. We were basically asking God to bless our plans, our efforts, and our way of running our life. When we pray and then wait for God’s answers, empowerment, faith, and directions, He puts His power, wisdom, knowledge, understanding, and miracles into our situations. He then gives us what we need to be able to move forward while flowing in the blessings from our heavenly Father. We have a relationship of inviting Him into every move we make.

The second most important issue in LIVING the Christian life is acting in faith. This will take time and a lot of patience with yourself. It will be like learning how to swim, ride a bicycle, or drive a car. There will be mistakes and failures.

You will misunderstand, try and fail, succeed and then get prideful, forget to pray before you act, forget to wait after you pray, and a whole lot of other mistakes in this process. But, like all the things you are FINALLY doing well at, if you have patience with yourself and believe that God will do a good job in you, you will learn how to act in faith, succeed, and then give the glory to God. The more frequently you expose yourself to assignments from God, the more practice you will get. If you are willing to be corrected, trained, challenged, retrained, helped with your mistakes, and be told what to do, then you will ultimately learn to live the victorious Christian life. It will all be well worth the time you spend with Jesus. He will stick with you and produce in you all the qualities needed to BE the person the Bible describes.

Ask Jesus to accept you as one of His students. Ask Him to help you give your Christian life over to His leadership and training. Tell Him you want to stay faithful to His training for the rest of your life. Give Him the control of your education. Let Him be the instructor of all you need to know and live. Pray that He will help you stick with it and not become discouraged.