God is gracious in the process
God has been doing a lot in my heart this week, I haven’t understood it all and have been finding it difficult at times. I have often felt completley lethargic and unable to even form words to pray. He is making me realise my complete dependence on Him and my utter inability to do anything in my own strength and every time I slip into doing things by myself, I am suddenly alone and tend to fall into confusion and despondency. In comparison to this,
when I admit that I can’t do it and ask God to help me, the confusion and despondency lifts and I am strengthened and have hope. Suddenly things become clear and I can see that there is a way forward and I wonder why on earth I was so upset in the first place! However, because my natural inclination is to attempt things in my own strength, the cycle is continuing until I finally stop! Praise God for His enduring patience though 
Today Pastor Tim talked about the Elements of Prayer and our assignment is to go through the six elements and pray them into our lives, to ask the Holy Spirit to solidify them and my personal request was that He would reveal more to me as I have been realising since I started Fire School that I don’t know anything really about God and his nature and also that I don’t have much faith in Him which is obviously something that needs to be rectified but that only God can do.
I have just been reading John ch. 15 as our first verse was John 15:7, and I started off with the idea that I would just try reading a bit of the Bible in the hope that God would speak to me but without and faith that anything would really happen as I couldn’t think of anything fancy to pray. God is gracious and as soon as I started to read, the Holy Spirit started to speak to me and the scriptures became so clear.
God showed me that I am going through a pruning process, He is cutting off the dead wood from my life which can be painful but is necessary for more fruit to be produced and then as I read through the verses, the Holy Spirit started to speak to me about the true nature of God, Jesus says that “apart from me you can do nothing….I have loved you even as the Father has loved me. Remain in my love. When you obey me, you remain in my love, just as I obey my Father and remain in His love. I have told you this so that you will be filled with my joy…”
The Holy Spirit showed me that to truly abide in God is to obey, to obey is to love and to love is to receive love, you can’t obey God without being made completely aware of His love and to have a knowledge of being loved is to have joy. To pray in a spirit of obedience and received love is to cause God to hear your request and he cannot help but to act. We have six other scriptures to read and meditate on but just wanted to log this as it was a truly amazing revelation for me!