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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| When my heart feels so corrupt I can't trust myself to pray. |
It happens.
It is the feeling of guilt over our sin. Perhaps it is failure over some particular sin that we are unwilling to surrender, or perhaps it is many such sins -but make no mistake, we all will feel, from time to time, the ache of guilt so deeply that when we bow our heads to pray to God about it, we feel as though there is no way we can express our grief and failure because deep down, what is causing this ache is the fact that we don't want to give up the sin or sins that are causing us such turmoil in our soul.
What we are experiencing is the love of God, even if we are too dull to understand it as such. It is the loving ministry of the Holy Spirit within us that refuses to allow us to make peace with the sin in our life. It is God Himself ministering a godly conviction in us, so that we cannot easily ignore that which is limiting the only joy that matters. You see, God is for us, not against us, but the enemy will try and fool us into believing that God is against us because we are so corrupt and wicked - and this even after all God has done for us.
Here then is where truth sets you free. You see, God is not against you, He was already for you when you were still unsaved, and His unwitting enemy. It was He, and not you, who instigated your faith - He drew you in. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, you were not looking for God, God was looking for you - whatever experience you have had, however you came to want to be a Christian - God was the subtle, but sure Author of it. You were chosen by God to be His child, not because there was anything good found in you, not because you began to pursue God - rather you love God only because His love for you personally, drew you to Him.
This feeling of corruption, and worthlessness is a sharing in God's own affections, and God has no affection for your sin. What you are feeling is a watered down version of God's own revulsion over the sin that you are embracing, and you feel this in order that you may know that the thing is repugnant to Him. He lets you share in His revulsion because there is nothing in your flesh to show you the thing is wicked - in fact, your flesh is the very thing that wants to embrace it. Unless God shared this revulsion with you, all you would have is your knowledge that the thing is wrong, and perhaps your conscience would bother you.
So this revulsion is a good thing, but it is also something the enemy will attempt to use to blind you. The enemy wants to cripple you, and tell you that God hates you, or God won't understand you, or God is against you, and that until you straighten it all out, you have no right coming to God - that God's throne is a throne of judgment, and that if you are going to come to God, you better be clean, lest He judge you. He will try to keep you far away from God, because the longer you are absent from God in your affections, the colder you will become, and the more likely your faith will shrink rather than grow.
Scripture does not call the enemy a toothless lion - He is a roaring lion who is able to devour all the good that you should and could do by separating you from God so that you wither rather than grow.
Listen, when you feel that you cannot come to God because you are so foul, so stuck in your sinful ways, so unwilling to turn, that you regard prayer as something that would surely only affront God - that is when you need to pray the most. God already knows all these things - and if you are His child, He knew this would all happen even before He drew you to Himself - and even knowing your present failure, He still chose you. I don't know that God saw something in you, but God certainly put Himself in you, and you in Him. Don't let the devil win the field today, you are God's child - hand picked to be His adopted son or daughter. He knew this day would come, even when you were convinced that God loved you because you were so willing or so earnest. Now is the day that you need to trust in Him - trust that He has chosen you, and that His love is not conditioned on the perfection of your walk, or your obedience, or your faith - but is in fact unconditional.
The throne where you will meet Him is called the throne of grace, not because it sounds nice, but because that is the essence of it - we who approach it do so assured that God is going to be gracious, not because we deserve it, for grace cannot be earned. Go then to your knees if you have been long away, and trust that God is there, for you.
Don't let another day go by where the enemy dances over you, but stand up out of the mire, remember who your Father in heaven is, and Who has won you the right to stand in His presence - it has never been because you were worthy, but because you are in Christ. Go then to the throne in boldness.Labels: prayer |
posted by Daniel @
6:14 AM
7 comment(s)
 
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| 1010: Justified By Faith (Part II) |
Have you ever felt like your prayers are not getting through to God?
You know, where you feel like even though God is aware of all things at all times, that is, even though you know that God must hear your prayer, yet because you know that you are not as holy and pure in your prayer today as you were on your best day, that because of your current spiritual deficit, or rather your currently acute awareness of the same spiritual deficit you had even on your "best" day, you are certain that your prayer is utterly useless. You tell yourself that even though God "hears" your prayer, yet He will not respect it because you haven't been perfect in your obedience, and you see yourself for a hypocrite, and imagine that anything you say is worthless because you're such a phony.
Well if you're a genuine Christian, I am pretty sure you have been there, and probably more often than you would comfortably admit.
What is it that draws a believer out of a funk like that?
A woman I knew once remarked at a bible study that she used "praise and worship" music to get her in the mood for church. As a personal rule, I am something of a bulldog when people say stuff like that around me. "In the mood for church?", I asked, "what does that mean?" I don't recall the exact wording of her answer, but the gist of it was that she felt she could not receive God's word unless or until she was hyped up emotionally. In a nutshell, unless or until she felt spiritual, she believed she wasn't being spiritual.
Don't get me wrong, I have experienced a very real, spiritual elecation through sining in a congregation of people who are actually worshipping God in song. I have tasted the exaltation of God in my soul when singing worship songs. I do not suggest for a moment that a Christian cannot be drawn closer to God through worship in music. But this did not seem to be the nature of what she was describing. Her response was not about coming to a place of worship, but rather coming to a place of heightened emotional response. In her mind, she equated high emotions with spirituality, and low emotions with a lack thereof.
I am not sure if this was my first exposure to this sort of quackery, but it was certainly one of the first, and if my soul could form facial expressions in the wake of this response, it would have been one of wide-eyed, gaping mouthed, horror. Let me qualify my reaction a bit further though; I do not mean to present myself as so far above this sort of thing that I am looking down upon it from some great spiritual height. In the infancy of my own faith I was by no means immune to the influence of various superstitions, empty traditions, and well intentioned appeals to the mystical. If I was appalled, it was only in the knowledge that this person had been a Christian from her youth, and in all that time had never learned any better. I was not appalled by the quality of her ignorance, as much as I was that it should still exist after so many years.
Every new believer wants tangible assurance that they are genuine - that their faith is the real deal. I myself wanted, in the infancy of my faith, to be able to appeal to some "saved" feeling whenever I needed assurance. Said another way, I wanted to be able to supernaturally sense that I was saved. I think that is a common felt "need" of every person who joins themself to Christ - and it is common to both the genuine and the illegitimate. I was more or less ignorant of the scriptures, so I didn't really know what assurance was supposed to be like. Was it emotional? Tangible? Mystical? I had my own preconceptions, and in my case I was certain that whatever assurance was, it would come with a serious and settled "saved" feeling. This feeling would be supernatural in origin (mystical) - a sensation of sorts that only I was aware of, but something that was always there so that I could, by tapping into it at will, always know that I was really, really a Christian.
In fact, I sort of thought that unless I had some sort of ever-present supernatural experience going on, I might not even be a real Christian! Especially having listened to the sort of superficial Christian conversations that were the mainstay of my early fellowship - Christians talking to one another in language that made it sound like their lives were sprinkled liberally with supernatural impressions. When someone said, "the Lord showed me this morning that..." I took that to mean that they either had some sort of supernatural ability to hear God speak that I lacked, or worse, that I was receiving messages from God all the time but was not spiritual enough to interpret them properly. I began to consider every stray thought as a possible message from God, and every twinge of guilt as condemnation from the same. Being inclined towards compulsive thoughts I would think about the most horrible thing that God might want ask me to do, then convince myself that God was in fact "moving me" to do it, and that my reluctance to obey the voice of God was the most heinous of sins. My walk of "faith" was more of a stumbling, barely controlled free-fall down a careening path, twisting and turning, and driven by the winds of guilt at not answering immediately every stray thought that God was "beaming" in to my head.
My walk was a mess, and my faith was a burden to me, for I longed to be righteous, but was weighed down with the notion that God was micro managing the minutia of my existence, and that I was failing left, right, front, and center, to answer every buffetting wind. As exposed myself to God's word, I began to be set free from these lying doctrines, and man-made, mystical superstitions. The truth set me free, just as it sets all free who genuinely seek and find it. Afterwards, I equated my former ignorance with immaturity, and though I was ashamed and embarrassed that I should have been so foolishly led, I chalked it up to the infancy of my faith, and set it aside. When I was a child, I spoke and acted like a child, but I grew out of that, and put it away from me. My assumption was that everyone else in church must have gone through that long ago, and that I had only come lately to be where they were at, if I had even attained to that height.
So when I heard this woman speak of needing to be emotionally hyped up in order to do anything spiritual, I was shocked and stunned by the news. Shocked that anyone who has spent their life in the company of Christians could, in practice, be so flaky, and stunned I say, by the magnitude of her zeal, given how sorely misplaced it was. How was it that no one had corrected her of this notion? How was it that when I spoke against it, I felt like Paul on Mars Hill - I was speaking strange things that offended and confused people?
My point is not to drone on about this one instance, but rather to show in real life ignorance in the church produces empty religious rituals that go no where, and do no good thing, rather they only contribute to the demise of a church.
Getting back to the first point in this post: the path out of a dead prayer life; the path out of the agony of feeling that God doesn't hear your prayers, is not to find some emotional pick-me-up, but to find again the first truth that you have set aside covered over with empty and even superstitious religious notions.
That truth is that if you are in Christ God will hear your prayers. God will hear your prayers whether you feel you are right and acceptable to Him (because of some merit earned through righteous living), or you whether you feel you are too sinful and unacceptable to Him (...having failed to produce this same personal merit).
Certainty does not (and cannot) come from your emotions. Certainty comes when you trust that God hears you because of Christ's finished work on the cross. Certainty - or assurance, flows from faith, and not the other way around.
Let me give you real life account from my own life. My oldest daughter had a bit of a crisis last night, and in part that is why I use this particular example of prayer to introduce the big picture. She is only ten, and after listening to me read Isaiah 23 last night, and in the course of the discussion that followed about the end of the world, she began, though she had given her life to Christ a couple of years ago, to be sorely concerned for her soul. She realized, perhaps for the first time publicly, that she was afraid that her faith might not be real, and that when she dies she might not go to be with God, but instead would be exposed to His wrath. Through large tears she confessed that she knew she wanted to believe God, but that she found herself not trusting that He really would save her.
I call "judgment day clarity" like that a God send, and rightly so. She saw herself, perhaps for the first time, for who she truly was - someone who wanted to avoid hell, but who didn't really believe God. She came face to face with a burning anguish that would not be pacified by any platitude, grand or small. She saw that [1] she needed to believe, and [2] that she couldn't "make herself" believe.
Would that more believers had such a clear understanding of their truest dilemma! We talked for hours, my daughter and I, and I had to deny myself several times as I so wanted to placate her torment with cries of, "Peace! Peace!" when it was evident that such cries of peace would be more for my benefit than hers.
I explained faith to her ten times in ten different ways, and I underscored the fact that she cannot ride on my faith, but has to deal with God personally and directly. I couldn't give her faith, nor could she generate it herself, but she had to turn to the Author of faith Himself, and deal directly with Him, for He alone was the only one who could raise her up out of her dilemma.
But here is the crux of this personal example: I myself was praying up a storm as we talked, I was begging God silently for wisdom, for the right words, for His words (i.e. words from scripture), that I might not speak from my own wisdom, but quote His, and though I have been in Christ many years now, - I began to feel a little impotent when all my prayers seemed to be having no immediate effect.
My daughter was still tormented having her eyes of understanding glossed over in doubt. Why wasn't God opening her understanding?? I wasn't exactly panicked, but I was definitely off my game, as it were. At one point she went to the bathroom, trail of tears in her wake, and I was able to turn my soul full faced to the Lord and pray not alongside what I was doing, but as it were, I was able to be alone with the Lord long enough to realize that I was no longer exercising faith, but had begun to simply pleah with God to do my will, and wondering where the lions were.
You see, I had taken my eyes off of Christ. I had started to worry, to fret, to try and call down from heaven the sort of resolution I thought the situation needed.
When the solution I thought was necessary failed to materialize, I began to question whether God was listening, or whether my own prayers were fruitless, ...useless. I wasn't praying in faith, I was praying as a form or diligent religion. I knew that prayer was called for, I knew that unless God built this house, the labourer (me) would labor in vain. But for all that, I hadn't actually been coming to God in faith while talking to my daughter, but coming to God in pretense. I was coming to God in my desperation and trying to force God (through prayer) to do my will (calm my daughter, and open her understanding... now!), and this primarily for my own benefit. I was trying to do the right thing and wanted God's power to make it happen - rather than resting in God, and trusting that the situation was in His hands and not my own.
When I saw that I was floundering in prayer, in that moment I set my heart on the truth - that God hears me in Christ, and that having committed my path to the Lord, I was willing to rest in whatever God would do. These matters were in His capable hands, hadn't I appealed to my God? Hadn't He heard my prayer? The bible teaches that He heard my appeal, for it is surely His will that I instruct my children in the way they are to go, that I share the good news of Christ, and that sinners repent, and the gospel be proclaimed. In the blink of an eye I went from a desperate father full of concern, to a man so certain of God's goodness and provision, that I was at once filled with all patience and joy. I was in the Spirit, not some mystical place of emotion, but resting in the certainty of God's presence, God's power, and God's provision. Jehovah Jireh, amen.
My daughter came back from the washroom calm and at ease. I told her about my own lack of faith in our discussion, and how in the moment it was restored to me, I was at peace, trusting in God to do what I could not. She was so excited to hear this because she said in the two minutes she had left to go to the washroom, she suddenly found herself comforted and calmed - she was excited to hear how God had answered my prayer in her. It is one thing for a little girl to hear about God answering prayer, and another to be the knowing recipient of it.
Now, she didn't come back and tell me about some transcendent peace and calm that overcame her mystically with some sort of tangible tingle; rather I told her about my prayer, and then she told me about how it was answered, and knowing that I couldn't have known about her calmness she realized that God must have heard my prayer and answered it, and that her sudden calmness and renewed certainty were proof that God had answered my prayer. If she was calm when she came back, she was strengthened spiritually by the news that God had heard and answered my prayer in providing her with the calmness that comes from resting in the Lord.
I could go on and on about the grace and majesty of God, especially as it pertains to my daughter whom I so dearly love, but I mention this only to introduce faith as a component of the Christian life.
When scripture says that the just shall live by faith, it isn't describing the process of the new birth, it is describing the life that follows the new birth.
It isn't that the just shall inherit life by faith, it is that the just shall live by faith. Faith is not merely the foundation of our justification, it is also, and perhaps more significant given how this point is practically unheard of in many congregations - the foundation of our sanctification. I hope to show in the next post, that many immature believers today are not living their Christian lives by faith as they should, both to God's glory, and to their own joy. I hope also to articulate, as best I can, exactly what it means to live by faith.Labels: faith, Faith and prayer., prayer |
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posted by Daniel @
7:46 AM
0 comment(s)
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| Forgetting God's Glory |
There is a difference between being grateful and expressing gratitude. One is a feeling, the other something you do. In the same way, there is a difference between regarding God to be glorious, and actually glorifying God. The one is a settled opinion, the other something you do.
I think every genuine Christian (and probably a good measure of the nominal i.e. "in name only" Christians) would agree that God ought to be regarded as holy; but how many of us make supplications to God in every prayer that His name be established as Holy on the earth? How many of us beg God to do His will on earth? How many cry out for God's kingdom to be more firmly established on earth?
Clearly I am referring back to what the church has come to call "the Lord's prayer", though it was in truth, the Lord's instruction on how we ought to pray. A template, if you will, supplied by God Himself in the person of Christ, upon being asked that He teach us how to pray.
We may reason within ourselves that God's kingdom is going to be established anyway, so why should we ask for something that is absolutely and inevitably going to happen? Why should we ask that God's will be done on earth, since it is impossible for God's will to be thwarted? Why should we ask that God's name be regarded as holy here on the earth?
Before I answer that (as best I can), let's get one thing straight in our thinking. Christ did not teach us to pray this way for His sake, or for God's sake. God gains nothing by our worship, and lacks nothing in our negligence. Jesus did not give this instruction in order to pad God's confidence, or say meritorious things. God, while the object of our worship is not the beneficiary of it: we are. Jesus taught us to adore God, to exalt Him, and to express that adoration and exaltation, in our daily lives, and again, and perhaps especially, in prayer.
I think a great many people, while understanding perfectly the concept of "worthiness", simultaneously fail to apply it.
The first thing we should note here is that God is worthy of our adoration. Jesus isn't calling us to go "above and beyond", He is calling us to perform the bare minimum of righteousness. I want to imprint this firmly in your thinking, so let me drill down a bit: God is so worthy of our adoration, that we are obligated by His worth to adore Him. Try and get your head around that. It is right and proper for a created being to adore God the Creator, just as it is right and proper to express that adoration, and again, just as it is a real moral deficiency to ignore that duty.
People don't think of adoring God as a righteous duty, because they simply do not, or perhaps cannot imagine, someone or something being so worthy of it that it imposes an obligation on us. Nevertheless, this obligation is a reality, and attending to this obligation, does not build God up, it builds us up. If we fail to answer this obligation eitehr in our heart or in our expression, we are standing aloof from genuine righteousness.
Can I spell this out more clearly? Perhaps I can in this way. No one who fails to adore God in their heart and/or in their actions can rightly say or imagine that they are drawing near to God. You cannot draw near to God and stand aloof at the same time. Either you answer the obligation to adore God in your heart and in your actions, or you do not. If you are not adoring God, you are not drawing near to God, and you are not, no matter how convinced you may be of the contrary, fellowshipping with God.
When Jesus teaches us to adore God with our hearts, our mouths, and our hands, He is teaching us a necessary component of humility, a necessary ingredient of drawing near to God, and He is teaching it, not for God's benefit, but for our own. He is giving us a necessary ingredient of drawing near to, or seeking the face of God, in order that -we- might be blessed. God calls us to adore Him, because we cannot draw near to Him without adoring Him.
I could go on and show that the same is true of asking God to see that His will is done on earth, or asking God to cause His kingdom to flourish, grow, and come to full fruition on earth - but we end up in the same place. We end up showing that these things are taught us because that is what real righteousness looks like - it recognizes God's worth, and accepts the obligation that worth places upon us, to see that God's will be done, and God's kingdom established, and this, not for God's benefit, for He gains nothing by it, but for the benefit of those who live on the earth.
One of the most uncomfortable silences I know of happens in the standard prayer meeting. The person running the meeting calls for the congregation to enter into a time of praise and adoration, which is often interpreted to be a time of thanking God a variety of things that happened this past week or month. Those present often sit in silence as each person tries to think of something interesting or noteworthy that happened recently. In a group of thirty you might find five who are willing to "share" something, and usually they are just thankful for the way something turned out, whether an answered prayer, or a situation, or what have you. It is right to be thankful in all things, don't get me wrong, and there is a place for that, and ought to be a place for that; but seldom do we hear people actually glorifying God.
I chalk that up, not to spiritual inertia, though that is certainly likely, but I chalk it up mostly to the artificiality of most prayer meetings. Let's be honest, dropping our collective guards for just long enough to affirm that public prayers are almost always more guarded, and therefore more superficial, than private prayers. It isn't a question of fervancy, for we can pray just as fervantly in the throng as we can alone. It is rather that prayers are intimate things. We are not talking to the congregation, we are talking to God, and though the best of us may be able to have our private converstaion in the open, most are intimidated by the thought. Most people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of dying. So it should come as no surprise therefore that few will be willing to break the silence in a large group, and fewer still, having done so, will be able to pray intimately with the entire congregation eavesdropping.
I know, I know, a great many congregations have co-opted the instructions concerning church discipline found in Matthew 18:19 ("Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven." [NASB]), by painting that as one person praying about something, and one or more following that prayer praying alongside them by "agreeing" with them (you know, "yes God, yeah, what he said. yeah, Amen, let that be done," etc.)
That isn't what the text is talking about, and I don't think that kind of agreeing in prayer is what is meant. In fact, if anything, that almost always ends up with well meaning people simply daydreaming while others are praying. They put their heads down, and groan and mumble, but much of it is just habit. They hear the flow of the prayer and have learned (without trying to do so) to groan and mumble at all the right times, given the standard flow of a prayer. Then they raise their head afterwards and feel guilty for having daydreamed through the whole thing. The problem isn't that they need to be more attentive, it is that this is about as artificial a way to "pray" as saying a rosary. The only difference being that when you say the rosary, you are repeating a known prayer, and when you "agree in prayer" you are just humming and hawing your amens instead of repeating someone else's prayer.
The text of Matthew 18 instructs the local church to exercise the power of the keys, on behalf of Jesus: to purge from the church those whose conduct denies their profession of faith. Verse 19 is part of a six verse teaching by Christ, and must be understood in the context of that whole teaching, which begins in verse 15 and runs to verse 20. When sin is found in a believer, he is called to repent by the one who so finds the sin. If the believer refuses to repent, the one who first identified the sin calls for repentance again with one or two more believers, and if the sinning believer refuses to repent, the matter is put before the church. The church must prayerfully agrees together that this person really is an unrepentant sinner before they can hold that person's profession of faith as no longer credible, and loose on earth, what (from all the evidence) is already loosed in heaven. That is, because they can no longer affirm that this person is truly a part of the body of Christ, and in the absence of that affirmation, they regard that person thereafter as unsaved, having never been a true member of the body of Christ.
Nowhere in that passage do we see find support for the notion of one person praying and a bunch of people following along with silent (or mumbled) amens; and more importantly, the passage is not about how to pray, but how the church must prayerfully agree (that is, agree together after spending time in prayer on the matter) before they have the authority, on Christ's behalf, to declare someone's profession of faith invalid.
That's a bit of a detour I suppose, as our discussion is not about how to conduct a coherent and productive prayer meeting, or how to weed out those bizarre religious habits we so thoughtlessly ape just because other people have done it before us; but rather to focus on the fact that adoring God, and magnifying His name are not empty obligations, but the very stuff of life itself.
Think of genuine adoration as you would a spiritual thermometer. If you are adoring God in your heart and expressing that adoration openly and often, you are at one degree above the freezing point, anything less is spiritual bankruptcy. Oh, you might think it a small thing, given that you pray every day, and read the bible, and go to church, and have a ministry, and give generously, and have made so many sacrifices... but what have you done if you have done this without adoring God?
Think on these things.Labels: Adoration, prayer |
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posted by Daniel @
7:32 AM
5 comment(s)
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| One of the great things about... |
...praying for others, is that it forces you to be honest with God; assuming your prayers can stray into the "right thing to say, but not said with your heart" category.
I know from reading scripture what my prayers should look like. When I pray, I suppose I subconsciously make sure my prayers are to the best of my ability, proper; that is even if and when my heart isn't exactly contrite the words of my prayers are. Which is pretty sad, since God isn't fooled by lucid and orthodox articulations if the heart that is forming these words isn't tied to them.
So it is that often when I am in prayer, and I say "often" to my own shame, I have had to stop in the middle of saying the right thing, and ask myself whether I actually mean what I am so eloquently saying, or trying to say.
I may learn a thing or two about myself from "Christian living". I may gain insight into the human condition through reading scripture, but I tell you, I learn more about my own sinful condition through prayer than through any other means. Assuming my experience is not a statistical anomaly, but is an experience common to all who spend time each day in prayer, then I can say with some conviction that those who consider intercessory prayer a daily duty and not a "monthly maybe" are probably going to have a far more real assessment of both who they are before God, and who they are in Christ.
You see it is one thing it have the head knowledge that one is accepted by God in the Beloved (Christ), and quite another to come daily before the throne, in the mire of our own imperfect lives, and be forced upon learning some new and horrible truth about the depth of our own depravity, that we are not heard on high because our perfections, but that even in our imperfections we have God's ear "in Christ. The former is the doctrine, the latter is the living it out.
I like to muse about those who spend all their time perfecting a theology they never get around to really living out. Which is not to denigrate the need for study, or the pursuit of a right theology; for without such things one suffers loss; but rather to say that some are inclined to pursue the one for it's own sake, rather than for the sake of living it. You know people like that - they have an opinion on everything theological - and usually it is an extreme opinion, but they lack grace and love and life in expressing it.
Which is not meant as a polemic against such things, rather I mention it because I thought about it while I happened to be typing this out. The link being that the same sort of disconnect is there - an adherence to religion, whether institutionalized, or self-made; that doesn't translate into actual obedient living.
I preached this Sunday on the difference between Saturation and Motivation. I said that scripture teaches us to be saturated with many things - to be in prayer always, to give thanks always, to rejoice always, etc., and that some immature Christians take such commands and after building for themselves a model of what healthy Christianity should look like, they err in imagining such things are intended to motivate them to Christian living.
Let me exposit that for a bit. I mean that they find themselves naturally disobedient towards God, and imagine that this disobedience flows out of some corruption in their faith - a corruption that they have spent, and continue to spend, the lion's share of their energy fruitlessly trying to overcome. The idea is that if they can just over come this deadness in themselves, that new life will spring out - and that obedience will not only become easy, it will be suddenly something they truly and passionately are driven to do.
The problem, I stated in my preaching, is that they imagine that Christians only have to obey God when and if they are properly motivated. They rightly conclude that we are to worship God in spirit and in truth, that we are to be holy, submitted, etc. etc. but conclude that all this comes -after- God zaps us with "grace" - but by grace here, they think some sort of mind altering, and desire altering mystic changing of our being so that our sinful flesh, which has no desire to do God's will whatsoever, is suddenly and powerfully "gagged" or suppressed, leaving only that good desire which is from God, so that we effortlessly begin to obey God and everything is beautiful in the world.
The fact, I said, is that we are God's slaves.
The reason a slave obeys his master is because he is a slave. That's his motivation. Yes we are to be saturated by God, and that saturation will make the burden light - but we don't wait around for the burden to get light; that is, we don't try and psyche ourselves up with the "right" spiritual™ motivation, rather our motivation is that we are God's slaves, and slaves obey.
I know that sounds a little utilitarian, or perhaps even mercenary for some, but it is never the less true. Jesus came to earth, and lived the life of God's slave, having emptied Himself of everything else, setting His own eartly desires aside, He commended Himself to doing the will of the Father while on earth. Are we more free than our Lord and Savior? Did He come to serve, and not be served, so that we could not serve and be served? Where the Master is, there the servant is also.
The point is that rather than looking to our subjective feelings for the "juice" to obey for today, we should be looking to God and saying, just as in the parable, that even should our obedience as slaves become flawless we will only be unprofitable, having done what was expected of us.
A lot of Christians are struck dumb at the thought that God actually expects us to obey Him. We run around "wanting" to obey, but find that it is difficult, so we think there is something wrong with us, and instead of obeying God "because we are slaves" we try to obey God "because we feel like it" - and so embark on a fruitless quest to capture the magical "obedience feeling" that we tell ourselves we lack.
Listen: the lepers were healed as they obeyed. The pattern in scripture is that when you obey, God is merciful. Contrition moves the heart of God. The heart that says, "I will obey the moment you make it easy to do so" is not a contrite heart, it is a rebellious heart, and likely making excuses that, when examined closely, translate into it being God's fault that one isn't obeying. He didn't give me the power, or the strength, or what have you.
God does give power, and strength, but not to those who demand it and stand aloof until they receive it. Surrender your heart to God, obey Him for no other reason than because He is your Master and you are His slave. I mean, you do love God, so this isn't tyrannical, or mean, it is an expression of love on your part - an act of worship - so don't demand that God primes your pump further. He has chosen you, directed his mercy towards you while you were yet a sinner. Called you to Himself and given you faith to believed to the saving of your soul. Were that not enough, He Himself has put His own Spirit into you, as a guarantee until the day that you are redeemed in full. He is with you, and surrounding you on all sides with every opportunity, and has even opened a way in Christ for you to talk to Him directly - a throne that you can come to by grace; so that you have every reason to obey Him, love, gratitude, joy, peace, etc. But you are not called to obey God out of gratitude or love (you should be saturated by these things, not motivated by them), rather you obey because of who you are in Christ - God's slave.
One of the things I wish I had closed on, in that particular sermon, was the thought that every command that God gives; every act of obedience that God demands, is intended for our own joy. God commands us to live in such a way as to bring about our greatest joy. His commands are not self serving, but serve us and our joy. To disobey them is to turn away from life and joy, peace and grace and mercy. It is to invite suffering and sorrow into our existence; and to obey is to draw near to the Creator upon whom our lives depend, and for whom our lives exist. That yes we are slaves, and yes we should learn to obey God "because" we are slaves, looking to no other truth to motivate us unto obedience - but let us not imagine that we are slaves to some cosmic tyrant, but rather as children let us obey our Father for He loves us, and knows what will bring about our greatest joy - the very thing that His commandments are intended to foster.
Anyway, these are just my thought this morning. My hope is that they are edifying.Labels: joy, prayer, slavery |
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posted by Daniel @
8:29 AM
8 comment(s)
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| Because you have to? |
Prayer.
It is usually the first indicator of backsliding - your prayer life begins to dwindle. You start to pray only when called upon to pray, or again, when expected to by others, you know the routine because you, being a Christian, are not perfect, and you fall into the same pits that every other Christian falls into. You still say grace, but it's almost a formality. You still pray over the kids, but its brief and heartless. You may even pray with your spouse, but all your cumulative daily prayer could fit into the commercial break between shows on television.
The problem with the kind of walk that could be characterized by the words "auto-pilot" is just that - you aren't invested in it, you are just doing it, and likely doing it because you feel you have to. Your prayer dwindles because you don't really want to talk to God - the only reason you talk to God is because you regard doing so as a Christian duty, and once you make peace with sin, that is, once you don't care about duty, even that starts to fade.
Praying because you have to is not what God wants from you.
Rather than give a pragmatic solution, I will just tell you the problem, and you can figure out what you ought to do about it. The problem is that you love yourself and the world more than you love God. You are filling yourself up with things that have no value - things that will be destroyed, you love the earth so much, having forgotten that in the end, when they fill your mouth with a shovel full from your own grave, you will only then see how little it was worth.
I will give you a hint - you can't save yourself from that sort of stuff, but there is Someone who can - if you are willing to talk to Him.Labels: prayer |
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posted by Daniel @
6:50 AM
3 comment(s)
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| Encouragement In Prayer |
When we get together for prayer, it happens that some are laboring in the strength of their sincerity, and in the hope of their piety, to move God to look upon their request with mercy.
Yet others come to prayer filled with joy in this act of worship and fellowship - not trusting in their own piety to open God's bowels of compassion as though they could encourage God to answer their prayers by being especially sincere, or especially pious, but these have learned that they are not calling God into their work, but have been called by Him into His work. They regard themselves as His ministers, working in His field, and trust that it is His work they are about, and not their own. They do not fret about whether or when God will do His work, for it is God's work, and they trust that He is a fit Manager.
I encourage you, especially when you come to pray for something that seems impossible or difficult, to consider whether this is God's work, or your own - and if you can say with certainty that this is God's work, and that you are His worker - then take courage brother, sister, for you are not laboring to move God, rather He is laboring to move you. Believe therefore that you are not calling down heaven to do your bidding, but heaven is calling you to do its bidding. Have the heart in you that is a servants heart, and not a beggars.
Do not imagine it a noble thing to beg of God, as though God were some tyrant who is withholding good - rather imagine yourself a soldier, and God your general, and know that your prayer is just your communication to your Commander explaining what you will need, or others will need, in order to see His plan completed.
You are not the Initiator of prayer, God knows already what you will pray, prayer is for -your- benefit, and you should enter into it with praise, because it is worship. Yes, there will be broken hearted prayers, yes, there will be tears, yes, you will feel alone on the battle field at times, and cry out in what seems to you to be intolerable isolation - but you are not alone, and you are not forsaken. No one said that the war was going to be easy, but you are promised victory, and promised to never be left to fend for yourself. You are a soldier in God's army - your battlefield is your own desires, which you are to make war upon daily - and prayer is given you as a means by which you may be edified, and edify others in the struggle. It is not something you do to make things happen, it is something God gives you so that you can be edified in longing for what He longs for, in sharing His deepest longings.
Pray therefore, not timidly wringing your hat in your hands and begging - but as a child of the King of kings, as one of royal blood, who comes into the royal palace seeking what is needed to carry out the will of Him who sits on the throne. You are not a beggar, you are a cherished son, a prince. Have you been asked to pray for something that seems impossible to you? Good gravy!
God doesn't hear you because you are pious, He hears you because you are His child, and if you think a thing is impossible, it is because you forget who God is, or you imagine that prayers are answered according to how well you have brokered your piety. Throw that in the trash heap today, and pray with that Spirit that cries out, "Abba, Father!" - and know that you are entering into His work when you do.Labels: prayer |
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posted by Daniel @
7:02 AM
5 comment(s)
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| Wednesday Prayer Encouragement -I- |
 I thought it might be, as much as I am able, good to make Wednesdays a day for posting on prayer, especially with regards to strengthening those who are weak in prayer.
We begin in what may seem an unlikely place, in 2 Samuel chapter 12 - the scene where King David's child - the one born of that adulterous union between himself and Bathsheba - is dying, and David's prayers do not change the fact the outcome of that fact:
"...15(b)And the LORD afflicted the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and he became sick. 16David therefore sought God on behalf of the child. And David fasted and went in and lay all night on the ground. 17And the elders of his house stood beside him, to raise him from the ground, but he would not, nor did he eat food with them. 18On the seventh day the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, "Behold, while the child was yet alive, we spoke to him, and he did not listen to us. How then can we say to him the child is dead? He may do himself some harm." 19But when David saw that his servants were whispering together, David understood that the child was dead. And David said to his servants, "Is the child dead?" They said, "He is dead." 20Then David arose from the earth and washed and anointed himself and changed his clothes. And he went into the house of the LORD and worshiped. He then went to his own house. And when he asked, they set food before him, and he ate. 21Then his servants said to him, "What is this thing that you have done? You fasted and wept for the child while he was alive; but when the child died, you arose and ate food." 22He said, "While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept, for I said, 'Who knows whether the LORD will be gracious to me, that the child may live?' 23But now he is dead. Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me." - 2 Samuel 12:15-23 [ESV]
David prayed his heart out. I haven't been to a prayer meeting where men prayed like this. I think it would be something, that's for sure. But God didn't give David his request did He? Was David insincere? No. Was David full of sin? He had long since repented of his wickedness and been fully pardoned. Why didn't God do what David asked?
Now, rather than answer that I am just going to leave it hanging because it may help to make the point I am making more clear.
You see the apostle Paul knew all about David's prayer. Paul knew that David was a man of profound faith, and that David had asked God to be merciful to an innocent child, and for reasons we aren't even going to play with God did not give David his request. Paul knew this.
Now remember in the book of Acts, when Paul tells the centurion not to sail out of Fair Havens on the isle of Crete? You see, they were in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, on the south side of Crete, but they wanted to sail to another Cretan port which was on the western tip of the island - but it was already late in the season, meaning the odds of encountering a storm were pretty good. But the centurion was more persuaded, you will recall, by the owner of the vessel and its pilot - so when the wind was blowing from the south (that is, it would push them into the island as opposed to away from it), they figured they could skirt the island of Crete and make for that port on the western tip - which would be far more suited for a ship of that size (276 passengers + cargo) to winter in. But they didn't get too far when a fierce north east wind came up. It is useless to try and row a boat that size into some rather large waves to try and row to shore - and it is crazy to try and sit there in the water and be battered by it - so they did what they could do - they opened the sails, and let the wind have its way with them.
This was no small storm that had hit them - in the course of weeks they were blown hundreds of kilometers to the east. Eventually it became clear to all of them that they were going to die. The storm was not letting up, and they had done all they could to keep the boat afloat. It seemed just a matter of time before the storm either capsized the boat or tore it apart. They hadn't eaten in many days, and when they thought they might be approaching land (at night) it looked to be the end for them. They cast out four anchors and prayed that they boat would hold together till daybreak.
The sailors new that the odds of getting a boat that size to shore were pretty slim. More than likely you would run aground on a reef, and the sea would tear your vessel apart underneath you. They tried to make a run for it in the ship's boat, but Paul had been praying...
21Since they had been without food for a long time, Paul stood up among them and said, "Men, you should have listened to me and not have set sail from Crete and incurred this injury and loss. 22Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. 23For this very night there stood before me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship, 24and he said, 'Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar. And behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you.' 25So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. 26But we must run aground on some island." - Acts 27:21-26 [ESV]
God has granted you all those who sail with you??
Paul was sailing with, if you recall - the sailors, the soldiers, and ... who else was it now - oh yeah, a bunch of prisoners who were (Like Paul) going to Rome to be tried. I don't doubt that some of these were more than petty thieves. Enemies of the state, murderers, dangerous conspirators - desperate men, most of whom were off to be tried by Nero, who wasn't exactly a nice guy I might add. The moral amongst those men must have started off low, and plummeted from there. Paul prayed that God would spare their lives.
I mentioned David at the beginning, because Paul would have known full well that no less than King David himself prayed that God would spare the life of an innocent, and God did not - and here Paul is lifting up the lives of -hundreds- of criminals... yet God granted Paul's request - not one of them would die in the drink - all would make it alive to shore.
Paul could well have looked to David's example and reasoned that there is -no way- that a righteous and good God is -ever- going to spare the lives of a bunch of criminals. Most of these men deserved to be punished, and many were not fit to live by the standards of the law - a standard I might add that Paul himself explains elsewhere is for our good. But Paul didn't look to the merit of these men as anything, he looked to Christ, praying in Christ that God would do what he was asking God to do - and he prayed, we expect, fervently and continually so.
So the next time you come to intercessory prayer, remember that your prayer is not going to be answered according to your own sense of justice - but rather according to God's mercy. Have faith in your merciful God - don't turn and look at what you are praying to see if it worth praying about - man, if it falls to you, pray boldly - don't wait until you feel like you are asking something reasonable - or try and paint it in such a way in prayer that it is okay if God let's this one slide, since it is probably his will to let it slide anyway - man, that is poison. Pray with faith in the mercy of God, understanding that when you place your faith in the character of God rather than in your "ability to ask a thing with great fervor" - you are actually worshiping God in prayer...
Pray believing - not clenching your teeth, but believing that God is whom He presents Himself to be.Labels: encouragement, prayer, Wednesday prayer |
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posted by Daniel @
8:47 AM
20 comment(s)
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"Please Grant Me Patience!"
and other toothless prayers... |
 This morning I decided to lay in bed when I ought to have gotten up.
You see, my morning begins early - I try to read the bible for at least an hour, spend at least a half an hour in prayer, but prefer to spend an hour or so, try to get in 45 minutes on the treadmill, all before 6:30 a.m. when I wake up my two older children to teach them biblical Greek for an hour. If I forgotten to prepare the day's Greek lesson the night before (or if I was just too busy), I try and squeeze in a half hour to write the lesson and print it out somewhere before 6:30 a.m.. Then I give the kids some instructions about what to do when after I leave, and butta-bing butta boom, I hop in the shower, get dressed and ride my bike the ten miles to my work and start my work day around 8:45.
There is not a lot of room for sleeping in with my schedule, so that whenever I do it is indicative of the flesh.
So as I lay there in bed, willing myself to stay there, I was suddenly struck with the most absurd intrusion into my thoughts. Being wide awake, and attempting to give both my exhaustion and my wandering mind the time they needed to lull me back into the arms of my former slumber, I suddenly daydreamed for no apparent reason, an image of one of the office plants falling over. It is a big palm tree plant that is up on a window ledge. So utterly foreign was this daydream to my thoughts, that I said to myself - where did that come from?? I mean, I could care less about the flora in our office, and imagining them toppling over for no reason just didn't make any sense. My mind doesn't wander in that way. So, I began to ask myself what that could possibly represent, if it was in fact representative of anything. How did King Solomon say it? - and if a tree falls to the south or the north, In the place where the tree falls, there it shall lie. In the light of that kind of thinking, I began to see myself as that toppled office plant - laying there and staying there. There is no path to spiritual inertness, the moment you stop walking in the Spirit - that is, submitting yourself to God - in that very moment you are in the flesh and it begins to produce death in you just as surely as a fallen tree rots.
So I got out of bed, I didn't finish off the "extra hour of sleep" I had planned for myself, but I also didn't have all the time to do what I normally do in the morning. To make matters worse, I hadn't put together today's Greek lesson for the kids. So I dragged myself to the computer first thing, and opened our text to see what sort of lesson I should prepare - and today is the day they are scheduled to learn about putting all those fancy noun cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative of the second declension) together in a sentence with all those fancy (present, active indicative) verbs they have been learning for the past 14 weeks.
But the text has an error in it: it reads: εὐαγγέλιον κύριου διδάσκει. and says that εὐαγγέλιον. is in the nominative case, but then goes on to translate it as "He teaches the gospel of the Lord" - now first of all, I don't see any definite articles in the original Greek, and if εὐαγγέλιον. is supposed to be the in nominative that makes "a gospel" the subject of the sentence (note the underlined indefinite article?). It seemed to me that the translation should have read: "A gospel of a lord teaches." But if εὐαγγέλιον was in the accusative case, as I would have expected it to be, we would presume a subject pronoun from the verb ("He teaches") and the gospel the be the thing that is being taught, as opposed to the thing that is teaching - rendering the clause: "He teaches a gospel of a Lord.". Either way - the text was off. The only problem was I was thinking that I must be wrong - perhaps there was some little known quirky Greek grammatical rule that I wasn't aware of? So as I began to prepare the lesson, I quickly did a web search to see if there were some rule I was unaware of, but I came up empty. Then I tried my various Greek textbooks - nothing. In fact, everything seemed to be to suggest that the text was simply wrong. So in a final act of desperation, I do an errata search on this textbook and shazam! That was the problem - text book error. By the time I got the lesson prepared, it was a 7:15 a.m., I hadn't had any time in the word, or in prayer, and I was already 45 minutes out on my teaching schedule.
I woke the kids, and explained how dreadfully behind the ball we were, we skipped the Greek verse memorization, and the conjugation exercises, and the declension exercises because I knew they could do that without me, and we dove headlong into translating clauses that involved a nominative, a genitive, a verb and an accusative.
Well, my six year old was having some difficulty, but my nine year old picked it up and understood what had to be done. I kept glancing at the clock, and when my little one continued to show confusion, I began to lose my patience with my six year old. Why do you think we spent so much time memorizing the genitive forms? Why do you think we bothered with the learning the nominatives, and the accusatives? That wasn't just trivial information kids - it was so that when we got here you would be able to put a sentence together! You have no one to blame for your confusion but yourself, and frankly, you need to think long and hard about whether you are willing to put in the effort to continue in Greek with us!
You see, my plan was never to teach my six year old Greek. My eldest son is nine, and I thought he was ready, but when we began my six year old daughter was so upset that she wasn't invited she began to try and study Greek by herself (our lessons were taped to the wall). My wife finally persuaded me to let her try, and so I did, and she absolutely loved it - though it meant an half hour or more extra work for me - yet I was willing to accommodate her because her interest was genuine. She is only just beginning to read in English, so she has struggled along through the whole process - but she has such a never-give-up attitude that I have come to be so very thankful for her joining us in this endeavor.
Nevertheless, this morning, as my frustration at being off my schedule began to show itself in my demeanor and language, I had to stop and remind myself that the only reason I am suffering frustration, the only reason I am lacking patience is because I am presently walking in the flesh. Somewhere along the way I stopped walking in the light, and the moment I did I was in the flesh, and the flesh was producing death in me just as it always does.
I had to sit put myself before the Lord, confess that I was not surrendered in my heart, ask for grace and forgiveness, put my faith in Christ that this thing in me that rose up was in fact on the cross with Christ, and thereby powerless to control me - and then I had to sit down with the kids - late as I was, and explain that they were both excellent students, and that the reason they (well my younger one at least) was having trouble understanding was because I was poorly prepared and had shortchanged their time by my own laziness, and then I tried to put the blame on them for not being good students. I explained that my actions were shameful, and that I was sorry for them - but I also explained that the sin in side of me would continue to make me like that and worse if I didn't trust Christ to deal with it. I asked them to forgive me and to learn from my mistake. I praised them for their patience with me, and then set them back to work.
What is relevant to this post is not so much what I did do, but what I did not do.
I didn't stop and pray, "Dear Lord, please give me patience!"
You see, patience is a fruit that flows naturally out of a surrendered walk in the Holy Spirit - we don't produce it, but it is impossible for a person surrendered to Christ to be impatient. Think about it - if I am honestly surrendered to God - genuinely willing to accept anything from His hand that He deems is appropriate - genuinely willing to receive as much and no more - you cannot at the same time be impatient, if you are, you are not surrendered, that is, you are not "in the Spirit." That is why scripture calls patience a fruit of the Spirit.
Asking God to give you patience in a moment where patience is needed is not simply missing the boat - it is asking amiss that you may spend a thing on your lusts. Asking for patience so that we can use it as a tool to quench the dictates of our flesh and in doing so satisfy our own nagging guilt is not godly, it is selfish. God isn't concerned about making your walk in the flesh comfy - He wants you to appropriate your death in Christ! So praying for patience is like begging God to let you keep going in the flesh - aloof from the very salvation from sin that Christ died to give you. It is my firm conviction that God is not going to enable your neglect in this matter.
So the next time you are tempted to pray for patience, or joy, or peace, or anything else that comes instantly, substantially and perfectly to those, and only those who surrender themselves to God, why not instead try something that has some biblical "teeth" - try humbling yourself under God's mighty hand and see if you don't receive grace - and life more abundantly for that matter.Labels: edification, encouragement, homeschool, prayer |
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posted by Daniel @
10:50 AM
12 comment(s)
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