The Family Disciple Me Podcast // Discipleship Starts With a Conversation
In a world filled with a lot of talk, we want to have meaningful, biblical conversations with those God has entrusted to us. Join Tosha Williams and the Family Disciple Me ministry for Devotion Driven Discipleship conversation starters that will encourage you to "Seek Him Speak Him" in your own life.
Family Disciple Me is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) Christian ministry dedicated to catalyzing Devotion Driven Discipleship in our own lives and homes as well as around the world.
For more information, visit familydiscipleme.org
The Family Disciple Me Podcast // Discipleship Starts With a Conversation
May You Pray and Start with Praise! // Conversation #1 from our Annual May You Pray Series
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Before we start with prayer, God wants us to begin with praise! Before we ask for blessings, He wants us to bless Him!
What does this look like? How does this affect our lives and hearts? Join me in this podcast episode as I launch this year's "May You Pray" campaign! We're going to talk about an amazing prayer from Ephesians chapter one, as well as the praises of Psalm 145 and 100.
The coordinating Devotion Driven Discipleship guide can be found at: May You Pray and Start with Praise!
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The Family Disciple Me ministry exists to catalyze devotion driven discipleship in our homes and around the world. We believe that discipleship starts with a conversation, and FDM provides free, easily-accessible, biblical resources to encourage these meaningful conversations along life's way. Sign up through our website to be "the first to know" about upcoming releases and resources (including the FDM App - coming soon!!!) You can also follow Family Disciple Me on social media.
Family Disciple Me is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit ministry, and all donations are tax deductible. More information, blogs, statement of faith and contact info can be found at familydiscipleme.org
Start With Praise
Speaker 1Are you satisfied with your prayer life? If you're anything like me, I imagine that you pray all the time and yet there's something in the depths of your heart that tell you that there is more that God has for you in prayer. There's something that tells you that there's more to explore, there's more to experience with God in prayer. Recently, I've had multiple people talk to me about this very thing, and I completely understand, because, well, I've prayed for decades now and yet I still feel like I'm at the very beginnings of understanding how vast and profound and impactful prayer is. It's because of this that I am so excited that we are once again at our annual May you Pray conversation series with Family Disciple Me. We've been doing this for seven years now, where we specifically spend a month focusing on the topic of prayer. It's not that we don't focus on prayer the rest of the year, but for one month we set our gaze specifically on this topic to learn more about what God wants to teach us about prayer. This year, in our conversation series, we're going to be looking at a really special prayer from the book of Ephesians, chapter one, as I have studied this passage anew and spent time with the Lord talking to the Holy Spirit about what he wants to say to us. Through this specific chapter. I have been so challenged, I've been so encouraged, I have felt so blessed, and I can't wait for you to be a part of that as well. So, as we come into this year's May you Pray, could I encourage you to set your sights on what God has to say to you through his word. Prepare to lean into these conversations and, while you're at it, bring someone else with you. I'm going to cue the intro here and we're going to be right back in just a moment to talk about our very first conversation from this series. May you Pray and start with praise.
Speaker 1Welcome to the Family Disciple Me podcast. Our goal is to catalyze devotion-driven discipleship in our own lives and relationships and then around the world. We do this through easily accessible biblical resources that help us meet with God and make Him known. We call this Seek Him, speak Him. You can find out more about this, our ministry and our resources at familydisciplemeorg. Hi, my name is Tasha Williams. I'm delighted to be on this journey with you, so let's spend this moment together, seeking God in His Word about what he first has to say to us.
Speaker 1When I come to God in prayer, I often get straight to the point. I talk to God about what I need. I pray about this situation or that problem. I talk to him about this relationship or that issue that I'm facing. I explain to him how I would appreciate his help and his intervention in certain situations in my life. God isn't opposed with us coming to him and getting straight to the point.
Speaker 1And yet I have learned that there's something that God wants from us. Before we start telling him what we want from him, god wants us to enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. What does that look like for us? How does that impact our prayers? Do you pray this way? I know I've got a lot to learn about praying this way, that's for sure.
Speaker 1Maybe that's why God had to wake me up in the middle of the night one night, as I was writing this conversation series, and he said to me start with praise. After he said that I couldn't go back to sleep. All I could do was lay there and think about the fact that, as I was contemplating all these amazing things about prayer and considering all these different aspects of prayer, I had missed the most important, the most important, preeminent thing, and that is that God wants our prayers to be preceded by our praises. He wants us to praise Him, he wants us to bless His name, he wants us to thank Him. You know, in our amazing passage of scripture that we're going to focus on in this May you Pray conversation series, we have so much that we're going to learn from verses 16 through 20 from chapter one. And yet, before we get there to all these different aspects of prayer, we're going to back up and see what the Apostle Paul exemplifies to us in prayer in the very beginning verses of this passage of Scripture In Ephesians 1, verses 2 and 3, it says this Grace and peace to you from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
Speaker 1It's easy to focus on the blessings. God has done so many good things for us and we, as His children, have the right and the privilege to ask Him for more blessings, to tell him what we need, to talk to him about the cries of our heart. And yet, before we get to all the blessings and asking him for more. He wants us to stop and praise him. Our God has been so good to us, he's been so kind to us. That doesn't mean that life is easy and doesn't mean that we don't have hard situations and problems and issues that we're working through. Those still remain in our lives and yet, through it all, I don't know about you, but I see God's goodness, I see his faithfulness, I see his blessings. God wants me to turn around and state my gratitude, my thankfulness, back to him for all the things that he's done, but also for who he is. He wants me to turn to him and acknowledge his character, his steadfast, loyal, faithful, kind, good character in our lives. He wants all of us to praise him this way.
Speaker 1Well, the night that he said, start with praise. I don't think I went back to sleep very fast, and well, when I did finally go back to sleep, it was only for maybe a couple hours, and then morning was here and it was time to get up and start the day. And so, along with everything else, I began to start working on this conversation series again and I began swapping out concepts and paragraphs and scriptures and ideas and comments that well, you'll see the final product. When you look at the conversation guide that goes along with this podcast episode, when you look at the conversation guide that goes along with this podcast episode. As I was doing that, I felt like God highlighted Psalm 145 to me, and so I started incorporating that Psalm into the written conversation guide.
Speaker 1Psalm 145 is a Psalm of King David. It's a Psalmsalm of praise, and he praises God about so many things. It is an amazing, amazing psalm of thanks and gratitude. Psalm 145, verse 1 and 2, says I will exalt you, my God, the King. I will praise your name forever and ever. The King, I will praise your name forever and ever. Every day, I will praise you and extol your name forever and ever. God wants us to praise him like this. What's more, he wants us to praise him like this in front of other people, in front of the next generation. I spent a morning just contemplating all of this, writing about this, preparing this conversation guide for this first May you Pray conversation that we're encouraging you to have as you spend time with Jesus in devotion, and then go disciple another person that he's entrusted to you, other person that he's entrusted to you.
Speaker 1I had to eventually close up shop and head to church where I was a part of a meeting with my husband and other teachers at Vanguard Church. Kelly was leading the meeting and he started it by saying I want everybody to open your Bibles to Psalm 145. And then he proceeded to read the entire Psalm. And he proceeded to challenge every single one of us to not just pray but to praise. My jaw was on the floor because Kelly had no idea what God had been talking to me about in the prior 12 hours. I hadn't had a chance to tell him that God woke me up and said to me the night before start with praise. I hadn't had the opportunity to tell Kelly how God had highlighted Ephesians 1, 2, and 3 to me and had me meditate on the word praise in the Greek there and what it meant to honor and to bless God because he is worthy. Kelly had no idea that God had already led my heart to Psalm 145, so that I had already been meditating on it that very morning.
Speaker 1And yet there we were, sitting in the meeting, having the Spirit of God say the same thing to both of us and then, by extension, to all of us God wants us to practice praise with our prayers, and so, as we discuss that in our meeting and as I continue to contemplate what that means for our lives, I wonder what would it be like if, during this year's May you Praise, that we do this? What if we praise God in advance for all the things he's about to do? For all the things he's about to do? What if, in every circumstance where we set out to pray in this coming month, when we lean into the challenge to pray more, what if we begin every prayer with praise, praising God for who he is, praising him for his character, praising him like King David did in Psalm 145? What if we deliberately entered God's gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise?
Speaker 1Let's make this our first challenge in this year's May you Pray series. Before we ask for blessings, let's bless God. A praise-filled heart is a thankful heart. We can praise God for who he is and then, after we've praised Him, after we've blessed Him, after we've thanked Him, then, in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, we can present our request to God. Let's be people who start praying with praise. Let's be people who praise God in advance for who he is and for what he's about to do. We have so much more in store for us in this series. I'm so excited about it and I hope that you'll be encouraged and challenged so much that you're going to be excited and refreshed and renewed in a new way, in prayer as well.
Speaker 1As we close, I want to pray a prayer of blessing over you, over us, but also a prayer of blessing to our Lord, god, father, son and Spirit. Thank you for all that you've given us. Thank you for the grace and the peace that you've poured out on us. Thank you that you've given us every spiritual blessing. Thank you for the lavish goodness that you have richly given to us when we believe God.
Speaker 1As we go through this May you Pray series, would you encourage us in prayer, in purpose and in passion, crying out to you like never before.
Speaker 1God, we want to praise you. We want to be people who are a blessing to you as much as you are a blessing to us. We want you to be glorified and honored by our lives as well as our words. So, jesus, father, son, spirit, we bless you and praise you as we look to you and begin to journey with you ever closer, ever deeper, into the mysteries and the abundance of prayer, into the mysteries and the abundance of prayer. We ask you these things, jesus, in your name, for your glory and for our good and the good of all those people that you've so graciously, abundantly blessed us with. In Jesus' name, amen.
Speaker 1Now, friend, I encourage you look up the conversation guide that goes along with this episode and spend some time with Jesus and see what he wants to say to you by the power of His Spirit, about the scriptures, the verses, the applications, all the things that we've talked about in this podcast episode. Ultimately, it's what he has to say to you that matters. God bless you, friend. Lean into Him. I am praying for you. So now may you pray and start with praise. Be encouraged.