"God Working In Us" -2

"O Lord, open Thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth Thy praise." (Psalms 51:15) There is another side of this changed life, besides God performing the change in us, there is us wanting to be changed. Keep in mind that this is a prayer, prayer being a petition unto the Lord for Him to do something for us, something that we could never do for ourselves. I think that might be the most important thing for us to remember, is how much we are lost without God's help, and how unable we are to fix ourselves; it is God, and God alone that must create the change in us; we can never make ourselves have a new heart, or muster up the will to obey the will of God; to somehow think that we can, goes against all that the gospel message speaks about. Even praise, as much as we would like to think that it is completely from within our own hearts, is ordained by God; you can see that example show in the story of Cain and Abel. The vision that I had this morning was about those transparent sheets of story pages, the ones where each page has another section of the story, and as you place them over each other, they complete the picture; if the wrong sheet is in the mix, then the picture presented does not display the right story. That is what I mean by God ordained praise, because the praise offered up to God must have the right story behind it; in other words, we must understand why it is that we are praising Him, and how it is that we are meant to praise Him; all of which are given to us by Him, as He presents to us the picture, layer upon layer, each connecting layer pointing to the message of the cross... "My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And hereby we do know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth His word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in Him." (1 John 2:1-5)