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TheDiscipleMD

“It made me shiver , and I about made up my mind to pray and see if I couldn’t try to quit bein’ the kind of boy I was and be better.  So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come.  Why wouldn’t they? It weren’t no use to try to hide from Him…I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because I was playin’ double. I was lettin’ on to give up sin, but way inside of me I was holdin’ on to the biggest one of all. I was tryin’ to make my mouth say I would do  the right thing and the clean thing, but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie. I found that out.” (Mark Twain, words of Huckleberry Finn)

And as Abraham Lincoln said:

“You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.”

And I might add: “You can’t fool God any of the time.”

Mark Twain, using a fictional character, expressed what all of us really know in our hearts. It is impossible to pray a lie. For, as Proverbs state: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is…” (Proverbs 23:7) And the Lord knoweth our heart.

In many ways it should be comforting to understand that the Lord knows our true identity. Because in knowing that we cannot fool Him, He is able to motivate us to become a better person, because he shares the secret with us of who we really are,  and in what ways we can improve ourselves.  All of us have probably learned, at one time or another in our lives,  what Huckleberry Finn found out when he thought about trying to fool the Lord by praying with an insincere heart.  We are just fooling ourselves! May we pray with full purpose of heart, and  be honest with the Lord,  which will allow Him to help us rise to the full potential of our true identities as sons and daughters of God!