My heart is always full and overflowing with thanks to God for you as
I constantly remember you in my prayers. Ephesians 1:16
As parents it is easy for us to relate to our sons (indeed all of our children!) with hearts full and overflowing with thanks to God and love for them. If you’re like me (Ruth), and you find yourself moved by these overflowing feelings of love and thankfulness, you may find yourself praying for your child(ren).
This fall we would like to take a prayer journey with you for our sons and the Taylor football team as a whole, indeed for ourselves and our families as well. Prayer is an area we can all grow in…all the time! We were inspired to take family devotions this direction because prayer is a big part of our existence as TUFF. We have a prayer forum on our TUFF Connect page devoted to specific prayer requests. But more than that, we want to be known as people of prayer, people who are constantly before God’s throne, in communion with Him, speaking with and listening to our heavenly Father. And I would bet you want to see your children, your sons, grow in grace and in relationship with their heavenly Father. We need prayer as part of our daily existence!
Our fall devotionals will take a look at prayers that are written in the Bible. They are good examples of how and what to pray. And they offer us much insight into the God who gave our children to us. The plan right now is for these to be weekly meditations for our hearts, something to think on and pray through all week.
We start today with the prelude to Paul’s first prayer for the church at Ephesus. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians isn’t in response to some great need they were experiencing. In fact, he tells them he’s heard of their strong faith and their devotion to loving others! Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is for encouragement to remember who they are in Christ and what God desires to accomplish in them. Isn’t that exactly where we’d like to see our sons?
As football camp gets under way let’s allow God’s Spirit to lead our hearts in overflowing thankfulness for our young men. Let’s pray that they would remember that they have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 1:3), chosen to be holy and blameless (1:4), adopted into the family of God (1:5), lavished with God’s grace (1:8) and sealed with the Holy Spirit (1:13). You may choose to take a different blessing each day to meditate on. Take that one aspect of what God has given them and pray that over them. Then take a couple days praying that God would use them to “bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ,” (Ephesians 1:10 NIV) especially with their teammates since that’s the community in which they’re living at the moment. Pray that their individual relationships with God would be utmost in their hearts and minds.
The plan is to publish these family devotions once a week (most likely on Sunday). Player devotions will be published daily and will be focused around these hashtags: #Ao1 (Audience of One), #EMAT (Biblical Manhood) and #TEAM (Together Each Achieves More). Feel free to follow the player devotions so that your prayers can be more focused each day on what they are thinking on from God's word.