Tag: Daniel Westfall
Ep.020: A Plague on Your House
Hi, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray With Me”.
Today we consider the story of Moses leading the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. Moses started by asking Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, to let the people go. But Pharaoh wasn’t about to release his slave labor force. That’s like asking Walmart to dismiss its clerks and shelf stockers, and run the store with just the management. Not going to happen.
So Moses had a wee contest with Pharaoh, in which Moses called down plagues on Egypt to convince Pharaoh to free the Israelite slaves. Pharaoh wasn’t impressed with the first two plagues because his magicians could so something similar. But Pharaoh found the plagues annoying, so he asked Moses to pray to the Lord to get rid of them.
After plague #2, Pharaoh said, “Pray to the Lord to take away the frogs, and I will let your people go.”
After the plague of flies, he said, “I will let you go to offer sacrifices to the Lord your God in the wilderness, but you must not go very far. Now pray for me.”
After the plague of thunderstorms with lightning and hail, Pharaoh said, “Pray to the Lord, for we have had enough.”
And after plague #8, the locusts, he said, “Forgive my sin once more and pray for me.”
I like his prayer after the locusts. “Forgive my sin once more and pray for me.” Amen to that! That’s a prayer for you and for me. After each plague, Pharaoh promised to let the Israelites go, but as soon as God lifted the plague, Pharaoh changed his mind. What would it take to get Pharaoh to keep his promises and to set the people free? What finally worked was when Moses created a path through the Red Sea on which the Israelites escaped to safety. And when Pharaoh’s army followed, the path disappeared, the sea came in, and the army drowned.
Let’s take a look at Pharaoh’s philosophy of prayer and see if it has some lessons for us. Here’s how the Pharaoh philosophy of prayer operates: God tells you to do something, you decide you don’t really want to do it. God makes your life difficult, you ask someone to pray for you. And amazingly, the prayer works. Your life becomes easier, your troubles go away, and you forget about God. . . until God sends more troubles to get your attention and you say, “Oh, yeah! That’s what I was supposed to do. Maybe I’ll do it this time.” So you pray for relief from your new troubles, your prayer gets answered, things get better, and you settle back into your comfort zone of ignoring God.
So here are two lessons from Pharaoh’s philosophy of prayer:
1. Be sure to pray when your life is falling apart. That’s what prayer is for.
2. But remember to keep your promises when times are good. That’s what prayer is about too!
Dear God, teach us to pray and obey when times are good and when times are bad. May our paths lead us through the Red Sea to the wilderness where you meet us. And save us from our enemies who pursue us to bring us back into slavery.
Thank you for listening.
I’m Daniel on the channel “Pray with me”.
Appendix: The 10 plagues and Pharaoh’s responses.
- Nile to blood
- Frogs Pray to the Lord
- Gnats or lice
- Flies Pray for me
- Livestock
- Boils
- Thunderstorm – Hail Pray to the Lord for we have had enough
- Locusts Forgive my sin once more and pray for me
- Darkness for 3 days
- Firstborn Go, and bless me.
- The Finale: Path through the Red Sea
Ep.020: A Plague on Your House. Podcast
Ep.019: Psalm 1: Tree People and Chaff People
Hi, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray with Me.”
Today we start a new prayer project: praying through the Psalms. We start with Psalm 1, which asks the question, “Do you want to be a chaff person or a tree person?”
Psalm 1 describes wicked people as chaff blown around by the wind. So what is chaff?
When the wheat is growing, the kernels are protected by an outer layer of fibre. But after harvest, you garbage the dry and useless husks, and save the edible kernels to be ground into flour.
1. Imagine a grain farmer in ancient times, using a shovel to toss his pile of grain into the air. The wind blows away the dry husks and dirt, and the good seeds fall back into the pile.
2. A modern combine takes the crop into the front and spews dirt and straw and husks out the back.
3. In World War 2, planes dropped foil-backed strips of paper into the air to confuse the enemy radar. They called it chaff. It was a cloud of paper fluttering down through the air, ending up as useless litter on the ground.
Maybe your life is like chaff: short-term, temporary, little to show for your efforts, changing direction with the weather, a cloud of dust and husks in the blowing wind. Always looking for the next hit of entertainment or drugs or religion that will mask your pain and give you relief from gnawing emptiness and angst.
Psalm 1 says there is another way to do life. Instead of being a chaff person, you could be a tree person. A tree, planted by streams of water, always green and leafy, giving a harvest of fruit. A tree person has deep roots, a tree person doesn’t dry up and blow away. A tree person becomes like Treebeard the Ent in “Lord of the Rings” — not hasty, but thoughtful, wise, and good.
Let’s pray.
Our Father, so much of our life is chaff. Our books, our movies, our video games, days on Facebook and nights surfing the net. Our lives are blowing away a cloud of dust and chaff.
Help us become tree people. To grow our roots deep into your word. To listen to our heart when it tells us to pray. To obey the spirit when it encourages us to love a neighbour. Psalm 1 says, “The Tree Person delights in the law of the Lord.” Help us to discover the delight that comes from letting go our ways of chaff, and growing roots and leaves and fruit, fed by the Spirit in streams of water and growing up into the warming sunshine of your presence.
Amen.
I’m Daniel on the channel “Pray with Me”.
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