Thank God for something new. We all need to get fresh things from the Lord, to hear from Him “new every morning”. Otherwise it can end up that we feel like we’re following afar off and we can begin to wonder if He still is near to us in our lives, as we know He should be.

This morning I was out for my morning prayer walk on what’s been a rather bleak, gray and cold early winter day. And while I was pouring out my heart to the Lord about the day before me, I ended up praying a prayer I’d never prayed before. It kind of surprised me but then I checked my heart and did feel that it was something bubbling up from the Holy Spirit within me, rather than some vain thought.

It surprised me when I was praying and I prayed to the Lord, “Cast your bread upon the waters for you shall find it after many days.” (Ecclesiastes 11:1). I never in my life thought of that verse as a prayer. I’ve always thought of it as an injunction to us, an admonition from God to His people to give and share liberally and that one day that liberality will come back to us.

But this morning the Holy Spirit turned it into a prayer from me to God, “Cast your bread upon the waters…”. And I guess that can fit too. We can ask the Lord to cast His bread upon the waters. The waters are us, the peoples of this world who all desperately need the bread of God in all the many forms, fashions and ways that God in heaven sends it. Jesus said “He sends the rain on the just and the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45) He feeds the birds, Jesus said, and of course the point was that He will feed us as well.

But then also He said, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” .(Matthew 4:4) For those of us who know the Lord, we really should be hearing from Him, even every day. We need to be those who “hunger and thirst after righteousness” because, Jesus said, “they shall be filled.” (Matthew 5:45) Yes, first of all that should be in our times spent in His written Word, the Bible. That’s our first and foremost place to connect with the Lord, through what He’s already said and which has been written down for us.

But to keep our contact and relationship alive with the Lord, to have a fresh experience with Him, we really do need to have times where He’s expressing Himself to us through the Spirit, moving in our lives, doing miracles, even little ones, and in whatever way manifesting Himself to us.

He wants that. He wants that kind of close, thrilling, life-changing relationship with each of us every day. It doesn’t have to be in church, it certainly doesn’t have to be in some ritual or ceremony, and it most likely will not be in some political activity. But God wants us to, right now and every day, have a vibrant and alive relationship with Him. No, it won’t be some constant near ecstatic sensation where you’re just on the edge of your seat throughout every day. But there should be times where there’s that something that can only be explained by the fact that the Lord sprinkled a little heaven on you right then.

In fact, we’re already in heaven, the Bible says, as strange as that may seem. Ephesians 2:7 says “We are set down in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” We already have a foretaste of heaven to come; He’s already feeding us with the spiritual manna from heaven if we keep coming to Him for it.

So that ended up looking like a new prayer the Lord gave me today, that He would cast His bread upon the waters. It reminds me of another little thing I got from the Lord some months back on another morning prayer walk when the Lord brought to my attention a bright red cardinal in our back yard and I wrote, “Cardinals in the Winter” about that.

Well, praise God. Thank God for prayer. Sometimes we don’t know what to pray and then, the Bible says, “We know not what we should pray for as we should but the Holy Spirit makes intercession through us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” (Romans 8:26) It’s just good for us to really pour out our hearts before the Lord. And then it’s maybe even better when the Lord punches through our often dull spirits to speak to us and give us something fresh from Him. We all need this. I sure needed to hear fresh from Him this morning. God bless you and God help us all to have and keep a living daily relationship in prayer with the Lord.