Uncategorized Murray McLellan on 09 Jun 2007 07:27 pm
Jesus and My Mini-Van pt. 5
Here is the fifth entry from Steve Lehrer. I pray that they have made a difference in your spiritual walk for the glory of our God and King. If you haven’t already read the previous entries, please scroll down and begin at the beginning!
If this series about living for Christ has you saying, “I can’t do it! I just can’t live up to what you are suggesting. I can’t be so introspective! I can’t live with those high standards of radical living hanging over my head and I can’t study the Word like you suggested,” then you are in the perfect place to consider this blog entry as we talk about prayer. You see, I can’t do it either. I need God to do it for me and in me. He needs to change my cold stony heart into a warm God-loving heart. He needs to comfort me with the assurance that although I fall so short of exalting Him with my life as I should, that His steadfast love never ceases because He sent His Son to die as the perfect sacrifice for my sin so that God would continue to love me and allow me to know Him, enjoy Him, and live for Him. I can’t do it, so I need to ask God for help and I am assured beyond all doubt that He wants to help me: “He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will he not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things.” In light of this, let’s talk about prayer.
Prayer
(I have not included Scripture support in this section because I simply have not had time to do it. I hope to do it in the future when I teach a study on this whole issue of living for Christ in suburbia)
Let me be honest. I have really struggled with prayer and I have been mystified how some believers in church history could spend hours on their knees every day. I have been to prayer meetings and I have found them almost intolerably boring…and yes, I felt guilty as I struggled with patience and tolerance with the saints who droned on in flowery language about somebody’s aunt Mildred who has gall stones! (I hope to address why most prayer meetings are often a waste of time and how to have a prayer meeting that is “alive” and wonderful in a separate post) Early on in my Christian life I committed to praying an hour each day for one year. I made it through six months before I threw in the towel. It was a very sleepy and difficult time. What is there to say to God after the first ten minutes? Why do I struggle so much with what should be the warmest and most vibrant time of my Christian life? I would like to answer that question with a positive presentation of the heart of Christian prayer and some practical tips that flow out of my view of what prayer really is.
The God We Pray To
God is absolutely sovereign and omnipotent. There is nothing in the universe that is out of his moment by moment perfect control, power, and predestined plan. He causes all things to happen just the way that they happen. In fact, before anything ever was, God planned that everything in history would happen as it has and He has been intimately involved to cause that plan to happen by His almighty power in its minutest detail every step of the way.
God loves to be glorified by our treasuring Him above all things and considering Him our all-powerful hero on whom we depend for everything.
God is emotionally invested in the lives of His people. He truly cares what we do and think. I realize this is hard to reconcile with God’s absolute sovereignty but both ideas are solidly biblical so we must simply deal with the fact that we cannot understand God exhaustively.
The People Who Pray
As unbelievers, we were fragile creatures made out of dust and naturally bent toward doing evil by loving ourselves and the creation more than God.
As believers we are fragile creatures made out of dust who are supernatural bent toward pleasing God by loving God more than ourselves and the creation. The new heart is essentially a work of God in us that makes us desire God’s will more than our own self-centered will.
As believers we have no power in and of ourselves to defeat Satan, our own sinful passions, or the God-hating world. We cannot think God pleasing thoughts or do God-pleasing actions simply because we are believers. Being a believer gives me three main things: 1) Forgiveness of sins. 2) A changed heart finds God and His will more desirable than the pleasures of the world or my own comfort and safety. 3) Access to the God who saved us and is willing to work on our behalf to deliver us from evil and make our lives glorify Him (this access was purchased by the sacrificial death of Christ on behalf of those who believe. Believing does not earn our access to God, but rather belief itself is God’s gift and was purchased on the cross. God gives His people the ability to see their sin, repent, and cry out to God that we have nothing to offer Him and we need the Savior to reconcile us to God).
So, What is Prayer?
Let me put some of the thoughts above together here so I can define prayer. As I wrote above, our sovereign all-powerful God loves to be glorified by our treasuring Him above all things and considering Him our all-powerful hero on whom we depend for everything. He is emotionally invested in our lives and cares about the choices that we make. In addition, I noted that believers have a foundational desire to do God’s will more than our own self-centered will. I also wrote that we, as believers, have free access to a God who loves us. God is willing to exercise His amazing and incomprehensibly great power toward us.
In light of all of these amazing facts, prayer is one of the primary ways that we glorify God. We do this by: 1) praising and thanking Him for His heroic and powerful deeds (past and present); 2) Going to Him as a refuge in times of trouble because we need protection (we acknowledge our lack of strength and His all-sufficient strength); 3) and asking Him for power to do His will or glorify Him in specific situations (again, we acknowledge our lack and His sufficiency).
So, let me make it really simple. True prayer is the overflow of the God-lover’s heart who has a right view of his own inadequacy and desperate situation without God and who has a right view of God’s sovereign power and fatherly loving care (purchased by Christ for His people). So, I am always trying to know more about who God is, What He has done, and what He is doing so that I can praise Him and thank Him. I am always considering my inadequacy and how much I need His help so that I can cry out to Him. Then I am always looking for how God helps me so that I can thank Him and praise Him all the more.
But What If My Heart is Stone-Cold?
I have to beat the cold stony-ness out of my heart everyday. Some days I think that is about the only thing I accomplish! Now, how do we pray when our hearts are stony and cold? Cry out to God! You have no power to change yourself and God is all-powerful! A stone cold heart is a great way to begin prayer because God gets glorified from the very beginning when we express our need to our God who is all-powerful and desires to deliver us. I begin almost everyday by crying out to God for help and my prayer generally goes something like this: “God, I am so lost without you that right now that although you are the very meaning of life and everything else in all creation is nothing in comparison to your glory and worthiness, my heart is cold toward you. Help me to see your glory and your worthiness. Please don’t let me remain hard-hearted!” But continuing to babble to God will not soften my heart. I realize that I need to hear from God. God does not talk to me audibly but He has given me His Word. From His Word I need Him to reveal things about Himself to me, to remind me about who He is and what He has done and then to cause me to love and embrace those things. So, I begin to read Scripture, prayerfully. I rarely ever sit down to pray without God’s Word in my hands because I realize that not only will my heart remain cold and hard if I don’t hear from God (though, I pray often in my car or on walks without Scripture in my hand. At those times I depend on what I already know and I try to pray in accord with it), but I also realize that the only prayer that is truly God honoring and truly Christian prayer is prayer that is according to God’s agenda. So, prayer should be soaked in or saturated by Scripture. In fact, I don’t separate my Bible reading time from my prayer time. I have prayerful Bible reading time and Bible soaked prayer time. I almost always do them together because I always want my time in prayer to be informed by God’s Word and I always want my time in God’s Word to overflow with prayer. I think that much of the time people have such a misunderstanding of prayer that their prayers are actually dishonoring to God because they are self-centered.
God-Centered vs. Self-Centered Prayer
True Christian prayer is always prayer for something that we understand from Scripture to be God’s will. Remember, prayer is one of the chief ways we glorify God and show Him and the world that we think God is the most important and most glorious person in the entire universe. If we pray for our will (our desires without reference to God’s agenda), then our prayers are self-centered and we make God into nothing more than a genie in a bottle. When we pray, we should be self-consciously trying to exalt and glorify God. We should be self-consciously recognizing that His agenda (and how we fit into it) is all that we are to pray for. When self-centered desires that have no connection to His glorification and His Kingdom come up in our hearts (e.g. “God give me discipline to stay on my diet so I can look good in my bathing suit on the beach this summer,” “God, make this business deal go through so that we have the money to buy the new ‘whatever’ that we want,” or “God, make my teaching time go well so that the people that I teach will like me and think that I am a really great and godly guy”). We need to repent and ask God to kill those desires and when we do that, then we are praying according to God’s agenda!
Bible Reading, Prayer, Jesus, and My Mini-Van
So, what does all of this have to do with my struggle with the amazing demands in Scripture for a self-sacrificial life and the fact that I bought a Mini-Van and I live in suburbia? God has caused me to recognize that I am in love with comfort and that I am almost blind to my own greed. Well, if I am even going to begin to change and treasure Christ more than comfort and covet Christ and security in Him more than things, my family, and security in this world, then I need to be a man saturated by Scripture and by prayer. In this land of pleasure and leisure, I need to make my first steps into living for Christ by transforming my mind through His Word and crying out to God to help me to see and to live for what is truly wonderful and worth living for. I need to begin by sacrificing my time and perhaps even my favorite programs on TV, so that I can read Scripture and pray. I need to beat on Scripture with all of my might and I need to beg God with all of my strength that He give me Spiritual riches and wisdom from my time in Scripture and that He give me glimpses of His power and love in answer to my prayers.
The next issue I want to address in this series is money.
Steve
