In2Freedom

Monday, May 15, 2017

The Peacefulness of God's Triune Peace

“Now may the God of peace…”[1]

As soon as I read this I knew that Father wanted me to know him like this. His summary of what he has written in this letter about his new covenant is that we are to think of him as the God of peace.

I immediately connected this to knowing Jesus as the “Prince of peace”,[2] and then to the ministry of the Holy Spirit that is “life and peace”.[3]

The wonder-filled thought is that the whole Triunity of God is peace, a wonderful peace of identity and relationship that is too mind-boggling to package up into a neat little box. It can only be understood in the picture of a wonderfully overflowing river of peace that God has done everything required to pour into our lives so that our cup overflows.[4]

Which, of course, begs the question of why any believer in Jesus Christ would not have peace. However, instead of wasting time bemoaning the problem, I believe the invitation of God is to the solution, that our experience of peace with God is in the God of peace, and the more we know him by the Holy Spirit, the more we will know his peace.

After pasting a whole list of Scriptures into my prayer-journaling for this week, all focused on the Triunity of God in peace, and what that means for us as his children, one that stood out is this familiar passage:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.[5]

In the first paragraph, as we pour our hearts out to God, “the peace of God” guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. In the second passage, as we both think and act according to what the God of peace has revealed in his Book, “the God of peace will be with you.” The God of peace blesses us with the peace of God. Wonderful!

I love that fellowship between the God of peace and the peace of God. God acts the way he does because of who he is. We can count on his peace because it is who he is, and it is expressed in all three persons of the Godhead. They seek our peace, and provide for our peace, because it is who they are by very nature.

What do we do with this (and there are MANY more verses that express the Triunity of God in his peace, and their ministry to their children to bring us to peace with him)?

6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. (Romans 8)

If nothing else, the more we practice setting our minds on the Spirit, the more we will enjoy the ramifications of the life and peace that is ours in Jesus Christ, God’s gift from the Father.

I have often been comforted that, even though churches regularly ignore the “two or three witnesses” rule of Scripture in both the old and new testaments, it is still the way God operates. So, we not only have the witness of two or three Scriptures that tell us that God is the God of peace, and Jesus brings us to peace with God, and the Spirit administers this peace in our lives by drawing us into fellowship with him, but we have the three witnesses of the Triune God testifying to their pleasure in leading us to have peace with them. They are unanimous in their peace, and their desire for us to fellowship with them in peace. Jesus has secured our peace through his redemptive work on the cross, so we are invited to enjoy and experience that peace with minds set on the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

We just have to keep in mind that this is through the wonders of grace in the new covenant, not the laborious burden of trying to keep the old covenant. This is why, in the same sentence in Hebrews I am praying through, the writer reminds us that our experience of peace is “by the blood of the eternal covenant,” not by the duties of the temporary covenant given to Moses. By Jesus’ blood we have peace with God. Our calling is to relate to him in peace no matter how much growing up in Jesus is still required for us to be like him.

[1] Hebrews 13:20

[2] Isaiah 9:6

[3] Romans 8:6

[4] Isaiah 66:12; John 4:14; I Timothy 1:14; Revelation 7:17

[5] Philippians 4:4-9

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

When God’s Word Changes Our Minds About Church

One of the difficult adjustments of home church life has been the discovery that, “Hold it a minute, that’s not what God’s word teaches!”

I have regularly had to adjust long-standing beliefs I had learned in denominational churches of the institutional mindset and reconsider what the New Testament writers were teaching the church of the first century, and what that required of me if I was determined to let the breathed-out words of God teach me, reprove me, correct me, and train me in righteousness.[1]

I want to clarify that this journey in Jesus Christ has not moved me to the contemporary trend of accommodating sin in the church that the apostles would never have dreamed would happen so far ahead in the future. This has not led me to a man-centered interpretation of Scriptures that allow for us to believe whatever we want to believe as it suits our fancy, tickles or ears, or makes us comfortable in something God clearly rebukes. Neither have I come up with any fancy schemes of prophecy, or end times-events-timetables, or new packages of systematic theology. I have not merged aspects of the old covenant with the new, or isolated any particular Scriptures into a doctrinal mindset that requires the denial of other teachings of God’s word. I do not claim perfection in anything I believe or do, but still must identify that growing up in Christ with a heart to live by “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God”,[2] has confronted me with things I already believed and did that were often not at all required by Scripture, and, at times, were in direct contradiction of God’s breathed-out words.

Stepping out from the manmade restrictions of denominational thinking and institutional organizing has allowed me to listen for what the Spirit is saying to the churches with a heart ready to walk in what the apostle Paul called, “the obedience of faith”.[3] I often discovered that I was not only dealing with the need to adjust my thinking and beliefs, but also that I was far more immature in my Christlikeness than I had ever imagined, and the need to grow up in my Savior was glaring in its expectations.

There has been no doubt that, in a quest to submit to the teachings of God’s word in faith, both beliefs and practices have been reproved, or shown to be wrong. This acceptance that I have been wrong prepared the way for whatever correction the Holy Spirit was working into my life through the living and active word of God.[4] These adjustments to belief and practice contributed to my training in the righteousness of faith,[5] that ongoing work of God to transform me into the same image as Jesus Christ “from one degree of glory to another”.[6]

I’m writing this today for the simple reason that I was once again confronted with something that was a challenge to the remnants of denominational/institutional belief and practice, and I had to open my heart to prayerfully meditate on what I was reading with as much openness to hear what the Spirit was saying to the churches at that time, and a willingness to adjust to what this means for the churches at this time.

It began with the next phrase I was praying through in the book of Hebrews, “Obey your leaders and submit to them...”[7] No matter how foreign obedience and submission may seem in the contemporary church,[8] it is not difficult to understand the definitions of the words “obey” and “submit”. They are parallel thoughts that indicate the way churches are to let the leaders lead by letting the followers follow.[9] In the same ways as shepherds lead and guide a flock and the sheep follow wherever they are led, so the care of the flock of God requires some to be leaders, and the rest to follow as they are led. This, of course, is with the understanding that Jesus Christ is head of his church, and we are all seeking to live as his people, his church, his body, his holy temple, growing up in him as the new covenant teaches.[10]

As I considered what it meant to obey and submit to our leaders in the church I was reminded of the apostle Paul’s detailed teaching on this in Ephesians.[11] While the whole passage deserves our humble attention, I can only focus on his description of leadership in the church in order to get some sense of who these leaders are we are to obey and follow. In other words, what did the apostles picture when they instructed the church to follow its leaders?

Paul explained, “And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ”.[12] The “saints” refers to all the believers in the church, all those who have been set apart unto God as holy and righteous by grace through faith. This is synonymous with “the body of Christ”. The saints, all members of the body of Christ, are to obey and submit to their leaders.

The leaders are listed as, “the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers”. Again, for at least the semblance of brevity, I will not define each term, for I think they are understood sufficiently to allow us to consider what this group of men looked like to the earliest gatherings of the body of Christ.[13] My focus is on the simple fact that, when the writer of Hebrews told the church to obey and submit to its leaders, he meant exactly what had already been taught, this plurality of apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers.

I hope we will all agree that at this time in history the apostles who taught these things had no sense of either denominations nor church buildings. Perhaps we would be surprised by how much such practices condition what we believe when the apostles had never even heard of such things. In other words, they were NOT saying, obey and submit to the leaders of your denomination in general, and the leaders of the local church that meets in your specific building in particular. There were no denominations or buildings for that to apply! If we interpret Scripture by these boxes we are not free to go back in time and sit at the feet of the apostles to first know what they were talking about, and then honestly and sincerely see what that requires in our application (weird and difficult as that may be).

When we consider the layers of leadership in Paul’s list I think it is fair to begin with the idea that apostles and prophets were the foundation of the church,[14] so they are just as much the foundation of the church today for us who have only their writings as for those in the early church who also had their personal contributions. Our obedience and submission to the leaders involves a readiness to obey and submit to whatever is given us in the New Testament writings no matter whether there is any evangelist, pastor, or teacher, around to tell us what to do. And, all the present day leaders of the church must work to teach and apply all that has been given through the apostles and prophets so that every generation of the church is led to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.[15]

Evangelists in the early church were men gifted to proclaim the gospel wherever they went, drawing new believers together into the churches that could begin growing in each particular location. They were at the frontlines of Jesus’ mandate to go into the world and make disciples, baptizing those who confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and then beginning the teaching of all things Jesus commanded so that these disciples would follow their Savior as he continued building his church.[16] The ongoing teaching of obedient faith would then fall on the pastors and teachers appointed in the church to continue this ministry.

Shepherds, or pastors, were those men appointed by the apostles,[17] or by their representatives like Timothy and Titus,[18] to shepherd the flock of God after the heart and mind of the great shepherd of the sheep, Jesus Christ.[19] As alluded to earlier, we cannot picture shepherds as individual denominational men over an institutional local church that meets in one building exclusive of the rest of the believers in a given community. That’s not what the church was like in the first century, so we cannot impose such a limitation on God’s word. In the early church, all the believers in a whole city were referred to as the church of that city,[20] and the shepherds were those men in that city who had the qualifications to shepherd the flock of God in what they were taught from the apostles and prophets who had laid the church’s foundation, and the evangelists who had preached it into its early stages of growth.

Teachers, whether a sub-group of the pastors, or men who could teach but without necessarily having the gifting to shepherd,[21] were given the place of teaching the things that were given to them from the apostles. We see this when Paul told Timothy, “You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.”[22] Paul as an apostle was instructing his disciple-son Timothy in how the church would continue teaching the whole counsel of God from beginning to end. Timothy would take what he heard from Paul (representative of what all the apostles taught the churches), entrust all this teaching to men Timothy deemed faithful, but also with the qualification that those men could teach others as well. In this way the apostolic teaching, now contained in the written words of Scripture, would remain the foundation of the church throughout all of time. Every generation would see faithful men receiving what they have been given, passing it on to the next generations of the church, with the church obeying and submitting to this brotherhood of leaders who were watching over their souls.[23]

I cannot develop this further at the moment, but I leave this with you for your own exploration of how much or little your church’s view of leaders follows that given in the New Testament, and how much or little your church obeys and submits to its leaders in the comprehensive way taught by the apostles. I obviously do not have an answer to how to live this out to the fullest when the majority of Christians in our communities prefer the autonomy of their denominational group that meets in a specific building week after week. However, I know that God’s word still applies today as it did when it was breathed-out by Father, so there are shepherds and teachers who are over the flock of God as broadly as Jesus means it, and we know what he wants us to do when any of these leaders seek to shepherd our souls into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ and his church.

[1] II Timothy 3:16-17

[2] Matthew 4:4

[3] Romans 1:5; 16:26. In each of the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3 Jesus concludes with the statement, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29, 3:6, 13, 22).

[4] Hebrews 4:12

[5] Romans 1:16-17

[6] II Corinthians 3:18

[7] Hebrews 13:17

[8] We likely know how Satan loves to stir up bad and hurtful experiences with church leadership in order to manage our hurts and fears into unbelief and disobedience. Both pastors and churches have been hurt by each other, and hurt feelings have a way of demanding authority over our beliefs and actions, so it is not difficult for the evil one to lead people who are already tending towards self-protective systems into one more expression of justifying why we simple aren’t ready or able to walk in the obedience of faith.

[9] In such a short presentation I cannot deal with all the “exceptions” of when people should not be leaders, or how they might be leading in their own ways instead of those of the word of God. I am not thinking of a specific leader who has come to mind for you since I cannot judge whether that leader is or is not walking in God’s will. My aim is to begin with what God’s word teaches, agree that we want to hide God’s word in our hearts so we will not sin against him, and then apply the words of Scripture to our situations so that, no matter what anyone else is doing, we are obeying what is written in faith, trusting the Holy Spirit to lead us in how to follow the leaders within Jesus’ church.

[10] Everything I am sharing here is with the understanding that we are talking about the leaders of the church who know that the church belongs to Jesus (his church), and that we are seeking to become all he is working into us for his glory. Even when the apostles called the church to follow its leaders, they also identified the kind of men who were wolves and false teachers, making clear that we are to stay away from such men. However, no matter how often or how deeply we have been burned by bad leadership, Jesus is still head of his church, and he is still presenting men to lead his people, and the people are to obey and submit to these men who are working together to lead the church.

[11] I am thinking specifically of the paragraph of Ephesians 4:11-16, with the larger context of Ephesians 4:1-16. All that is taught in Ephesians balances on the doctrine taught in the first three chapters, and the application of how to live this faith as described in the last three chapters. God has given us all we need to grow up in Jesus Christ, and that includes the brotherhood of shepherds who lead the flock that follows its leaders.

[12] Ephesians 4:11-12

[13] Yes, the words “group” and “men” are intentional. It may seem foreign to our traditions to think of leaders as a group of men rather than all the individual pastors of all the denominational expressions of local churches. I have more often heard people refer to “my pastor” than “our pastors”. And, of course, the rejection of God’s design of man in the image of God as male and female (Genesis 1:26-27) has led to many unnecessary disagreements over how to live as men and women in Jesus Christ both in the church and in the family. While limiting what I share to what the Bible teaches might reduce my circle of fellowship, I hope that those who disagree will at least enter into the same diligence to understand the mind of the Spirit as revealed in the God-breathed words of Scripture with a willingness to change our minds on anything we carry contrary to God’s revelation.

[14] Ephesians 2:20 (context: Ephesians 2:11-22).

[15] Matthew 4:4

[16] Jesus promised to build his church (Matthew 16:18), and instructed his apostles in what is commonly known as the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).

[17] Acts 14:23 (context: Acts 14:19-23)

[18] Titus 1:5; I Timothy 3:1-7 puts the qualifications for elders on Timothy (an outsider), not on a board within the local congregations that had formed through the preaching of the gospel.

[19] I Peter 5:2 (context: I Peter 5:1-4). I cannot develop this into my Pondering at the moment, but it is significant that elders, those we understand to be, or include, the pastors and teachers of the church, were not chosen by the congregations, but by the apostles and their representatives. Every denominational/institutional church I have been in has demanded the autonomy for the congregation to choose an “outsider” to come in and lead them, when the early church had “outsiders” come in and appoint elders from the men who were already in the church! And yet, to suggest such a thing is often considered almost blasphemous, even though the denominational, institutional, autonomous local churches that meet in individual specific buildings is completely foreign to Scripture.

[20] Again, that is the way Jesus spoke of things in his letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3, that each city he addressed had only the one church in that city, no matter how many home churches were required to care for that one church. Each of the letters to the churches in the rest of the new testament also affirm that when the apostles wrote the church of a city they only had the one church in mind, that local expression of the body of Christ.

[21] There is reason to believe that some shepherds were gifted to shepherd the flock, but not necessarily at teaching.

[22] II Timothy 2:1-2

[23] A key component of the exhortation in Hebrews 13:17 is that the church obeys and submits to leaders who are watching over their souls for their growth and maturity in Jesus Christ. While it may seem foreign to think of leaders as all the men in a community who ought to be working together in this care of the church, and it might seem strange that Jesus would expect his church to obey and submit to this brotherhood of leaders even in a day when culture decries any suggestion of submission to authority whatsoever, it is often the case that it is strangely foreign to the local gatherings of the body of Christ that leaders are interested in the care of people’s souls rather than the operation of a denominational institution. However, our love for Jesus as head of the church he is building still opens our hearts to seek the reality of what he teaches in his word, and to live all it means to be members of his church, his body, whether we quietly lead in unknown gatherings of his brothers, or accept that God has given men to lead us even from a distance. We simply accept that this notion of the church obeying and submitting to a brotherhood of men who are caring for the souls of God’s people is a pure and wonderful expression of the greatest possible fellowship in the world (hence why it is so incessantly attacked by the world, the flesh, and the devil), and so we open our hearts to God to pray for this to happen wherever we are, and to increase the maturity of every aspect of this relationship between God and man no matter what difficulties we may be facing. Even the most impossible situations call us to pray for what is written in God’s word, and to submit to every expression of God’s answer to our prayers.

Monday, May 8, 2017

When the Hindrance to Prayer is the Help to Prayer

I often have people tell me that the reason they didn’t pray at prayer meeting was that they didn’t have anything to pray about. Or, they will tell me that they aren’t praying in private because they can never think of what to pray.

My response is that the very thing they say is their reason not to pray is actually their reason to pray. When we hit a place where we don’t know what to pray, we NEED to pray and let God give us what to pray. Even in fellowship-prayer with another believer, or our prayer group, or our church prayer meeting, as scary as it might be, when there is that quiet moment that we could begin praying, and our minds seem empty of any possible thing to pray for, we should learn to begin praying anyway so that God can give us something to pray about.

I know our sarky self-protection cannot imagine this, that we would dare to enter into such an unsafe scenario as opening our mouths when we have nothing to pray, but consider what the faith-based heart of a beloved child sees when the opportunity to pray comes before him or her and no immediate thought of something to pray or praise is evident.

When a beloved child knows there is something between him or her and Father, and it grieves their heart that they are not as close to Father as they wish, and there is some nebulous fog of contrariness within them that keeps telling them they have nothing to pray about, and yet not praying is preventing the fellowship with the Spirit they long for, then the reasons not to pray become the things to pray for with reckless abandon.

We know how children can pester us with something they want, asking repeatedly the exact same question because we still haven’t given them the answer they are looking for. Even when we answer, if the answer is contrary to their desire, they will continue asking in the belief that there has to be a match between their request and our reply.

Now, what about when the child of God believes that the reason he or she is not praying to Father is because they cannot think of what to pray, and yet they know that not praying is hindering their growth in fellowship with Father? Does the awareness of the problem lead the child to conclude that they will not approach Father because they cannot think of what to pray? Is this the way we relate to others, that we will avoid them because we haven’t thought through what we would say to them if we were together? Do we not meet with many people in many different scenarios where we haven’t given any thought to what to say but just start talking because we are happy to see them?

Perhaps we do not know Father’s heart for us that he reveals himself as the beloved Father who takes his children in his arms and carries them close to his heart.[1] Perhaps we do not know that it is okay to approach Father with nothing to say because he has plenty to say to us and its okay to rest in him and listen to him speak through his word, and through his Spirit, so that we feel our souls feeding on every word that comes from the mouth of God.[2]

Some of us may be surprised to discover that, if we would meet with God on a daily basis where we first tell him where we’re at, how we’re doing, what we’re thinking and feeling, like a little child admitting his or her neediness to Father, and then open the word to hear what the Spirit has to teach us and remind us about that day,[3] that we would then discover that Father speaks so profoundly personally to whatever we are going through that we would have more to talk to him about than we had imagined.

Because the Scriptures we have in God’s Book are the breathed-out words of God, and they are able to teach us, reprove us, correct us, and train us in righteousness,[4] presenting our hearts to God in the prayerful meditation of his word will ALWAYS give us things to pray about.

Using the scenario at hand, that we come to God struggling to know what to pray to him, and we begin by telling him all about that in humble contrition, and then we read in his word and see that the Spirit is seeking to speak something into our hearts, we will have something to pray back to Father in relation to whatever his words are teaching us. Simply because we put our heart before Father, and then listened to what he had to say, and discovered that his Spirit was now teaching us whatever we need to hear, gives us something to pray about, that we would experience whatever the words of Christ are instructing us to have in our lives.

At times, the ministry of the words of Christ will work to reprove us, or to address things in our lives that are wrong with us. At times this will feel like a loving Father showing his beloved child that there is sin hindering our relationship with him, perhaps the underlying reason we can’t pray. After all, when we’re in love with some sin, isn’t Father the last person we would want to talk to since we know he will do something to help us stop sinning? So, when we give in to the Spirit’s invitation to pour out our hearts in the divine presence, we must not be surprised when the words of Christ reprove us for the sin that is not only a hindrance to prayer, but a hindrance to everything to do with our fellowship with God and his people.

Other times the reproof of God in his words may address wrong beliefs and thinking in relation to other people’s sins against us. The words of Christ may confront how wrong we are to harbor a self-protective stance against God because we don’t trust him with our hurts and heartaches and so we just avoid him. If we get as far as telling Father where we are starting from, and then listening to his word for anything he has to say to us that day, we can be sure that he will address our mistaken choice to rely on ourselves for the care of our wounds rather than come to him in that small mustard seed of faith that believes there has to be some truth to the revelation that God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.[5] While fear nags at our souls that this couldn’t be true because it has never happened before, faith urges us to accept the reproof of the words of Christ and come boldly into the divine presence to receive the help we so desperately need.

Whenever God’s words reprove us of things that are wrong in our lives, even if it just feels like a doctor making a diagnosis of our soul-condition as he or she would of our bodies, the reproof is never the expression of divine judgment against sinners. When God adopts us as his children, something he does for every person who receives the Lord Jesus Christ as our Lord, and God, and Savior, he always follows up a reproof with the correction of his loving discipline.[6]

In other words, if Father shows us there is something wrong within us, it is always so he can address it for our ongoing transformation into the likeness of Jesus Christ from one degree of glory to another.[7] He must follow a rebuke of what is wrong with a correction into what is right. This might include him reproving us for doubting him about whatever we have hidden beneath our layers of self-protection, and correcting us into the kind of humble faith that would express trust in him of the, “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you”, variety.[8] Whatever the case, we must expect that our times in the word of God will sometimes have to correct a wrong notion, or a wrong action, and, when Father shows us the correct way of thinking about our problem, even our struggle to pray, we will discover that he had a way to help us after all!

The over-riding ministry of God’s word is that Father uses his word to train us in righteousness. Even the righteousness of prayer can be trained into us. In fact, people join sports’ teams all the time without having the skills to play, but with a desire to be trained to play. Kids start sports at young ages where they can barely skate, or kick a ball, and yet they get out there on the ice, or on the field, and accept the training that will help them grow up to do well.

In an even greater way, when we consider that the words of Christ will train us in righteousness, we are right back to the starting place of believing that whatever is a hindrance is actually a help. That unrighteousness in our hearts is not a hindrance to approaching God, but a help to know how to pray. And, we pray about the unrighteousness in our lives, and things Father shows us in his word of what righteousness looks like, because we know the very words of God in the hands of the Holy Spirit will train us in righteousness without fail.[9]

All of this gives us plenty of reason to pray when we don’t know what to pray. If we will pray to Father that we don’t know what to pray, tell him how we feel about that, and whatever else pours out of our hearts once we open the prayer-faucet, and then open his word knowing that faith comes from hearing, and hearing comes from the words of Christ,[10] we can be sure that Father will give us something in his word that will build up our faith so we know what to pray. We just have to start praying!

Now, I suspect that if any of us have never tried this before that giving it our first shot in a public prayer meeting might seem so insurmountable that we would not even imagine trying. Well, guess what! That’s what our private and secret prayer-life is for!

Before your church’s next prayer meeting, or your next prayer group, or your next visit with any believer who might consider praying with you, get alone with God and begin praying out your struggles with willingness for the Spirit of Jesus Christ to lead you into prayer. Begin with an expression of your dependence on your heavenly Father to teach you to pray, confessing whatever inabilities and inadequacies are staring you in the face, and settle your heart into the Holy Spirit’s work of helping you cry out, “Abba! Father!”[11]

And don’t stop because you still believe you have nothing to pray. Once we settle that every thought or belief that causes us to conclude we ought not to pray is really the very thing we should pray about, our struggle becomes a help to prayer rather than a hindrance to prayer.

And, once that hindrance to prayer is removed, the one where we keep concluding we should stop praying just because we have nothing in our minds to pray, we will discover that it is rather easy to pray without ceasing when we just keep starting with every thought in our heads that tells us we have nothing to pray. Get those things poured out before the throne of grace and we will discover that God has plenty of grace and mercy to help us in our time of need, and will lead us into more things to pray about than we can possibly fit in.[12]

[1] Isaiah 40:11

[2] Matthew 4:4

[3] John 14:26

[4] II Timothy 3:16-17

[5] Psalm 147:3

[6] Hebrews 12:6

[7] II Corinthians 3:18

[8] Psalm 56:3

[9] A beautiful expression of this is in Titus 2:11-14

[10] Romans 10:17

[11] Romans 8:15

[12] Hebrews 4:14-16

Friday, May 5, 2017

Help to Put That Into Prayer

Often, when I hear people describing some difficulty in their lives, I find myself organizing thoughts together into specific things they could pray for. There are times when someone has expressed something very painful and hopeless, and my mind is triggered with truths from God’s Book that seem like a very comforting and hopeful way of presenting their situation to Father in prayer, never denying where they are starting from, but directing them into the blessings of prayer.

For a while now I have found myself focusing on praying as big as possible. We often limit our prayers to things we can imagine, confining our requests to people-sized descriptions. We end up praying fairly small requests, asking God to do nothing more than give someone a minor nudge here, or a teeny bit of encouragement there, or a bit of help to carry on with whatever mundane and wearisome situation they are going through.

However, when we pray big, seeking to remain true to God and his Book, there are so many things we could ask Father to do in the God-sized variety. These would be prayers and requests described in impossibly hopeful ways, but based on what God is capable of doing, in accord with all he has spoken, trusting him to perform whatever is good and pleasing in his sight.

My primary aim is to encourage all of us to fellowship with other disciples of Jesus Christ in order to help each other formulate our prayers into God-sized expectations. I would love to encourage us all to think in God-sized ways, letting the words of Christ dwell in us so richly that we are consistently asking for the very things he has promised in his Book. But I would also love to see us developing relationships with one another where we could ask other believers for help in thinking our prayers into fellowship with the mind of Christ, and then uniting to pray for those things that would most magnify the glory of God’s grace in his ongoing work of building his church.

One of the areas of greatest difficulty in our praying is asking God to do things in our lives that are profoundly contradictory to the way people have treated us. We easily become so satisfied with just making do that we don’t realize Father has told us things about his work that ought to stir up our hearts to pray for huge and wonderful things to happen for us and our congregations.

I do not for one minute mean this in the unbiblical notions people fabricate by cutting-and-pasting bits of Scripture together into mangled statements that are no longer something God has spoken. I do not believe we can pick-and-choose what Scriptures we add together to make it appear God’s Book endorses something we want to do, or a relationship we want to have, or a purchase we want to make, or a dream we want to fulfill.

In all of what I share I mean to pray what God has taught us is his will for his church and his people, and the quality of life he can and will give to a congregation that seeks his will above their own. We are given so many promises from God, descriptions of his plans and purposes, and every day we spend fellowship with God in his word opens our hearts to something he has written that could be turned into a hope-filled expression of faith to submit our hearts to things far greater than any collection of human beings could accomplish.

At the moment, as I pray my way through the last chapter of the book of Hebrews, I am feeding my soul on this verse, “Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.”[1] Now, imagine that someone is struggling with depression, or discouragement, or hopelessness, or worthlessness, and their struggle seems well-nigh impossible for them to overcome, and the best they can pray is that Father would just help them get through the day, and we know that just isn’t a big enough prayer and we would like to help them pray something bigger than they can imagine at the time. And what if we have learned to read God’s word as Father’s daily ministry to our souls, and so we know there is something in what he is teaching us that must surely apply to what we are to expect for this brother or sister in Christ? How would we help them pray according to God’s will for his children?

Before I went downstairs to pray about these things I had typed out a suggested way of praying through this Scripture. However, during my prayer time I had such a wonderful and uplifting time simply holding the Scripture before me and praying about what I was reading that I suddenly concluded that writing out a prayer was too restrictive on what might happen if we let the Scripture speak for itself.

With that in mind, consider how you would pray if you prayed “through him then”, rather than through any of your God-limited thoughts and feelings. What do you know about Jesus as your Lord, and Savior, and Redeemer, and Intercessor, and Great High Priest, that would affect how you prayed to the Father as his beloved child coming to him through Firstborn Brother? Just start talking to Father about how you are coming to him through Jesus, and through all Jesus has done, and all the promises of what Jesus will still do for us in this lifetime, and what he will complete when we see him as he is, and watch your heart take hold of the glorious truths of God simply because the word of God is leading you to do so.

Then talk to God about what it would be like if you were free to “continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God”, without any hindrance or restriction from a wounded soul or a self-protective sark.[2] Don’t imagine God-limiting things about how this could not happen because of things that have happened to you (that is your sark talking anyway), but ask God to make this so real that you would not only feel yourself filled with praise to God, particularly because you are coming to him through Jesus, not through yourself, but that this praise would be continuous and constant in your life.

Consider in prayer, just talking to Father about whatever is going on within you as you humble yourself before the words he has given, how you would love to acknowledge his name to all your negative circumstances, all your wrong beliefs, all your fear-based limitations, and, instead of endlessly rehearsing all your bad experiences and failures, you would love to constantly acknowledge the name of the Living God over all you are, all you have, all you are going through, and all you could do and be in Jesus’ name.

One of my favorite ways of helping myself and others put Scripture into prayer has been to consider things the apostles prayed for the churches, and follow their example in asking for things that we know are according to the will of God. Here is one that regularly helps me turn anything I am facing into a prayer of faith:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.[3]

There is so much in here that will help us put words to our own prayers, but one part of this prayer that has often helped me pray for much more than my sarky thoughts would imagine is the expression, “according to the riches of his glory”. So often, when I have felt tempted to limit my prayers to my complaints of hopelessness, or the ignorance of my sark, the simple consideration that I am to pray according to the riches of Father’s glory has lifted my prayers into things I wouldn’t otherwise have considered.

If we could help each other with this, sitting down with this prayer before us, and start asking for the same things as brother Paul, asking to the measure of the riches of God’s glory, we would find ourselves asking for things that uplift us in the asking even before we see an answer to our prayers. Except, of course, wouldn’t that already be Father answering our prayers even as we pray?

I could go on with the way Jesus’ announcement of his ministry in Luke 4 gives so many high and lofty prayer requests we can and should pray for, and all the more the more impossible things appear to us. And, although I believe all of us could experience this ourselves in our own private prayer times with God (as happened for me again this morning), I urge us to consider what we could share with other believers if we would ask for help when we need it, and offer help when others can’t see anything better than some painful and discouraging situation staring them in the face.

And, if we can’t even imagine helping someone put lofty and uplifting expressions to their prayers… ASK! Ask God to help you come to him even when you are feeling quite unsure of what to do, and that he will bless you as you begin praying anyway (that is part of praying in faith), and help you to consider things to pray that even at the moment you begin praying you still can’t imagine. If we ask God to teach us to pray, and then pray whatever Scriptures he has set before us that day, he will absolutely most certainly answer according to his good, pleasing, and acceptable will.[4]

[1] Hebrews 13:15

[2] Remember that “sark” is simply my preferred way of referring to the flesh since “sarx” is the Greek word that is translated “flesh” in our English Bibles. I also clarify that I’m not saying that we should avoid God when our souls are wounded, or our sarks are feeling especially self-protective. I simply mean that we are asking God to give us this experience of continually offering up our sacrifice of praise to him.

[3] Ephesians 3:14-19

[4] Romans 12:2

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

From Signposts to Destination

I began this as something I wanted to share with my church family this morning. However, it seemed to take on a mind of its own, and so developed into some thoughts that others might find helpful as well. It will give you an idea of how we encourage our people to share with one another so that our mutual journey of growing up in Jesus Christ builds up each other. It also addresses a specific characteristic of hindrances to our experience of God and his work, and the gracious counterpoint that constantly fills us with hope of knowing God better every day than we have ever known him before.

One of the themes that began weaving into my time with God this past week or so is the need to differentiate between things God does or teaches that are signposts pointing us in the right direction, and things he speaks about that are the real destination for our souls. This, of course, got me into writing about it, so I have found myself considering all kinds of ways people stop and set up camp at a signpost when the signpost has popped up to direct them to keep going in a certain direction.[1]

I find this to be the case when people take a “position” on some doctrinal issue and end up setting up camp around their label rather than treating the thing that happened, or the thing they learned, as a signpost to get them back to God’s word. Of course, I’m not judging that this is the case every time someone uses a doctrinal label to clarify where they are coming from. I’m only addressing those with a tendency to camp at signposts with the reminder that these directional markers are not there to give them a distinctive experience that becomes their lifetime source of identity or focus.

This can also take the form of things that come up in terms of memories, or painful feelings, or profound experiences of God speaking to us, causing us to set up camp at these things as if this is now our life-focus. Sometimes we become so painfully focused on these things that we don’t realize God brought them to mind as a signpost to direct our hearts to him in some way he was speaking about. Perhaps God told us that he heals the brokenhearted and binds up our wounds,[2] and we set up camp around how brokenhearted and wounded we are instead of letting the signpost direct our hearts into the love of God who heals all that ails us.

Other times we fabricate such an immediate fortress of self-protection against what God is doing that we set up camp at the signpost just as much as the person who has become addicted to the problem-solving life that always looks like it is doing God’s will at the signpost when it is really stubbornly refusing to move on. Our fears of whatever the signpost is pointing to, typically saturated with fear-based imaginings of the most creative variety, cause us to camp at the signpost while feigning such abhorrence of the signpost that people may not immediately recognize that we are just as much camping there as the ones who lavish their love on the signposts for giving them something to live for.

What is my comfort in this? First, that it is impossible to hunger and thirst for anything that describes our true destination in Christ without being ridiculed and rejected by all who set up camp at signposts, no matter how different they are from one another. Because our quest to find God in the destination makes us different from all the signpost-campers, we are rejected by all because our difference from them could only mean that we are wrong.

To know that this is just the way it is, rather than that the rejection is because of me as a person, comforts me that I am on the right track to where the signposts are pointing, and that the satisfaction in arriving where God is leading is greater than the ridicule of the signpost-campers who don’t want to go any further.

Second, that any time I realize I have been deluded into an obsessive relationship with a signpost, there is the Beatitudinal Journey towards the destination just waiting for me (or urging and helping me) to pack up camp and keep going.[3]

Hmmm… just as I was writing this last thought, I discovered another area in which this applies. We can experience people as signposts.

God can use people in our lives who relate to us in such a way that it opens up things that are missing in us. People may relate to us in loving and caring ways we have never experienced before, expressing a disarming sincerity that breaks through our walls of self-protection because we have never had to defend against loving and caring people since we have never met any previously! Their genuineness gets through to us in ways that expose unresolved issues, things still broken within us, and we can focus on the person, addicted to this experience of someone actually caring about us and how we are doing. We then become attached to the people in place of God instead of letting their lives, along with the things they have exposed within us, direct us to attach to God first and foremost.[4] Where God may be using this person to open up our hearts to a real soul-condition that we need to bring to him, our starving hearts may desperately attach to the signpost because no one has ever treated us this way before, and we still can’t believe that God could be like that.

On the other hand, in a defensive posture, because this person caring for us so sincerely, and in such contradiction to the way we believe we have been treated our whole lives, and because feeling vulnerable and real terrifies the heebie-jeebies out of us, we may also become obsessively focused on these people, not out of a longing to have a signpost-level relationship with them, but because we now have a very scary person that we must compulsively try to avoid like the plague. Out of fear of them, we set up camp and refuse to go any further.

As I was sharing these things with my home church, I realized that it exposed things (signposts) directing me to come to God with a willingness to see how much I need him, and a longing to get to know him in the ways I need. Since I’m still meditating on the scary, and nebulous, and wonderful hope of, “Through him then…”[5] I can see how God is using this Scripture as a signpost, directing me to consider how Jesus is more than a signpost to the Father, but is the door itself, the door that is the destination to the destination.

Hmmm… another comforting thought of what is ahead, likely beyond some more signposts that I might like or dislike enough to potentially hold me back, and that will direct me into the love of the Father whether I like the route or not. It makes me wonder what God is going to give me today through his church that will have the potential of leading me into something greater with him, if I don’t get stuck at the signpost.

[1] A longer presentation will arrive in the near future (hopefully).

[2] Psalm 147:3

[3] I have often shared how the Beatitudes of Matthew 5:1-12 show the transforming work of God that confronts us with the poverty of our spirits in any area of our lives (including the inferiority of signposts contrasted with the satisfaction of the destination), blesses us with the freedom to mourn whatever is wrong with us, leads us to the meekness that admits it cannot fix whatever is broken, and brings us to hunger and thirst for the righteousness of Jesus Christ that is ours by grace through faith. Then then matures us into the merciful people of God whose pure hearts lead them to live as peacemakers who are fearless and joyful even in the face of persecution.

The point here is that God may need to show us our poverty of spirit where we have set up camp at a signpost, bring us to mourn that where we are is nothing like the joyful life at the destination, cause us to meekly accept we cannot fix this in our own strength, and yet we can hunger and thirst for what God would do for us by grace through faith in leading us to the destination of knowing him as much as it is possible to know him this side of heaven.

[4] This attachment to God would likely keep those people in our lives, but our self-protective blindness usually has no ability to imagine this because our faith is in the power of bad experiences more than in the power of God to do all his love, and grace, and mercy, have planned for us.

[5] Hebrews 13:9