Unity is not an add-on to the gospel. It is not something in which we say, “Well…if it works out that’s great, but if not…oh well.” Paul writes in his letter to the church in Ephesus that God’s “plan for the fullness of time is to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:10).
As you continue to read on in Ephesians, you will observe Paul write that God is bringing together both Jew and Gentile. As I’m sure you are aware, the Jews did not necessarily see themselves as equals in regards to the Gentiles. This is especially true in regards to religion. After all, it was to the Jews that God gave the law. They were the chosen privileged people. They were the “circumcised.” Those “uncircumcised,” that is the Gentiles, were considered outside the circle. Yet Paul is declaring that God is creating one new body out of the two. He is birthing a new family and building a new temple. And it will include both Jew and Gentile. TOGETHER!
So salvation is not just personal. It is a remaking of the people of God. It is about God bringing together all things to the praise of his glory. There is no privileged group. No social hierarchy in which one people are better than another. It is about unity. And when such togetherness takes place, it produces an aroma in which the world stops and takes notice.
We are a world divided at the moment. I’m sure this is not a startling revelation to you. In fact, if you are entangled in social media these days, it doesn’t take long to witness just how disjointed we are. But when we as the people of God come together and realize that what we have in common, that is, Christ, is greater than any differences we might have, the world turns it eye toward us and marvels.
Now this unity thing is not easy. It takes work. Just as becoming like Christ is a journey, so is getting along with one another. So we need to be patient with one another. We need to listen to one another. And we need to lighten up at times and give others a break. Why are we so hard on others who don’t live up to our ideal of what we think they should be? Why do we demand forgiveness and acceptance when we sin but talk down to and alienate those who commit a similar or lesser sin?
“Be kind to one another,” Paul writes, “tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph 4:32). These are words we need to tack on our bathroom mirror, our fridge, the dash of our car (not to where you can’t see the speedometer however), the background on our phone along with our computer screen saver, and our coffee cups and water bottles.
The truth is that if we are going to live like the “together people” God is creating us to be, then Ephesians 4:32 is going to have to be our mantra. It is going to have to be fleshed out in our daily lives for when it becomes so, our divided world will see that there is another Kingdom which is more true and rich and wholesome and beautiful than any kingdom they have ever witnessed. And they will then want to be a part. And when they do, we will say, “WELCOME!”
So it is unity for which we are being saved as God is creating a people for himself. And it is a people who are to show his kindness and grace by the way they treat one another. A people in which the light of their living in unity together so shines before others “that they see [their] good deeds and glorify [their] Father in heaven (Matt. 5:16).
"I pray they will be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you." -Jesus (John 17:21)
I have just started re-reading A.W. Tozer’s book The Pursuit of God with a group of students. It’s been quite a while since I have read much from Tozer so I was excited when our reading group at the Baptist Student Ministry at Texas Tech wanted to tackle this book.
If you don’t know much about Tozer, I encourage you to look him up. Though not having a formal theological education, Tozer still is known as a “theologian, a scholar and a master craftsman in the use of the English language.” His heart was to know God and so his prayerful study of Scripture and other literature (especially the evangelical mystics) moved him to become a man whose heart burned with and for God.
At the outset of The Pursuit of God, it is obvious that Tozer is concerned with the superficiality of much Christianity in his day (Pursuit of God was first published in 1948). He writes in chapter 1:
The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all.
page 23-24
Has much changed? Well, yes and no. But regardless, our need continues to be one to know God. In the midst of a pandemic and all the anxieties and struggles it has produced coupled with the past election and its creation of walls of division, the people of God, that is, the church, must hunker down and seek God and the story of peace he establishes.
Personally, I find myself listening to the wrong story at times. I get caught up in the panic of the hour rather than the narrative of our Creator. I get sidetracked by the 24 hour news instead of getting oriented by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I must allow God’s story to rewrite my own as well as allow it to help me see the reality behind what is put before me by the kingdoms of this world.
I’m not writing that we should not pay attention to what’s happening in the world around us. We most definitely should. But as we do, it’s not the narrative that defines us. We as the church must live and make our way by diving into into the grace, mercy, goodness, and love of God for as we do, we can then offer the world what it most desperately needs. We can then show the life of peace and unity offered in the true Kingdom of God.
We must know God! As Tozer makes clear, we must pursue him. We must pray for a hunger and a thirst to know him and to be content with nothing else. Let us taste and see that the Lord is good today (Psalm 34:8). Let us grow deep in our pursuit of him knowing that it is God’s presence for which we were created. And it is by his presence in which we go deeper and hunger for more.
Do you have the gift of healing? Well, according to Scripture you do. We all have it! We are born with it. The problem is that we don’t use this “gift” to heal, but to destroy. Proverbs states it most clearly: There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing (Prov. 12:18). A half-dozen chapters further states it even more distinctly as it is written that “death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Prov. 18:21).
In addition to these proverbs, there is the clear-cut style of James. He writes that with [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing” (James 3:9-10). For James, one’s speech was an indicator of whether his/her religion had any value or not (see James 1:26). James does not hold back from the truth much does he?
Now I know what you might be thinking. People need to hear the truth even if it hurts! Just look at James quoted above. He was pretty cut-throat with his writing. And so was Paul at times. So we don’t need to hold back from speaking the truth to others! But who’s and what truth are we talking about here?
You can agree that 2020 was a most interesting year. Pandemic. Election. Race issues. Masks vs. no masks. Trump vs. Biden. Black Lives Matter vs. everyone’s life matters. And to top it all off, there was the hoarding of toilet paper. So many opinions that led to so much hatred. Opinionated groups claimed “THE TRUTH” to the extent that those who didn’t agree became the enemy.
I don’t believe that folks should be banned from having opinions and thoughts on whatever topic they feel passionate about. It’s good to hear from others. But there has seemed to be a loss of civility. And it’s not just that we have stopped listening, it’s that we have taken the next step and have begun to verbally belittle our opponent as well. And BTW, the fact the we use the word opponent already says something about how we view “the other side.”
This is probably an understatement, but we need healing. And I think it can happen from speaking life instead of death. It can begin when we learn that what we say can be either cancerous or healing. And this must start with those of us who are Christ-followers. I’ve heard so much hateful speech come from the lips of those who claim to be Christian. As James wrote, “this should not be” (James 3:10).
So will you heal? Will your words be the fresh water amidst the bitterness? Will your tongue produce the fruit of life rather than the fallout of death? You may wonder how to begin. Can I suggest something that I learned from my grandfather when I was a kid? He told me, “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.” I realize there is more to having a life-giving tongue than this…in fact…there is much more. But for some of us, we need to start by learning just to “shut up” and “listen.” And as you do, you might come to find out that you have something nice to say after all.
Why do we tend to remove the mystery out of prayer? I guess I could rightly ask why do we remove the mystery out of anything? The truth is that prayer is not some sort of philosophical phenomenon we need to solve in order to get God to give us the answers we want. Prayer is more than a barter system with God. Or at least I hope it is.
The craziness about prayer is that the God who creates, sustains and saves listens to us. In fact, he begs us to come to him. If you really think about it, it sounds as though one would have to be outrageously naive to believe such a thing. “How can God listen to all the people in the world at one time?” “And what kind of a God wants to hear from his creation?” We can answer questions by saying that God is “big” and God is “loving,” but is it not still a bit mysterious?
I’m not sure our questions about prayer are going to end, but that’s ok. Let’s embrace the mystery of it. And I guess I should note that when I write of prayer as being a “mystery” I’m not talking of some spooky or mystically weird type of experience. What I mean is that we are not going to figure it all out. Therefore, our questions of it should not inhibit our praying. Perhaps they might lead us to pray more.
So when it comes to prayer and our continued questions about it, I hope we keep in mind a a few things. First, I hope we never lose the wonder of it. To be beckoned to approach God with confidence (Hebrews 4:16) as we are told ask, seek, and knock (Matthew 7:7) should at times, lead us to a stance of awe. Oh how sweet the hour of prayer “that calls me from a world of care, and bids me at my Father’s throne.”
Second, we need to realize that prayer is more than just spouting words. It is about being in the presence of God. The Psalmist writes: One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lordand to seek him in his temple (Psalm 27:4). To be in the presence of God is that which we must cherish. It is that which we must linger. We must not let our world of speed and obsessive productivity rob us of our need to sit at the feet of Jesus.
Finally, we need to keep in mind that praying is about being honest before God and to God. On an episode of Pete Enns podcast, he interviewed Sarah Bessey about prayer and her book on the subject. One comment stood out to me. Sarah said, “There was something about the honesty and the rawness and even the anger and the joyousness and the earthiness of prayer that I saw in the psalms that I didn’t really see in a whole lot of places around me.” I’m afraid many of us are like Sarah and have not been shown that we can come to God and speak openly and plainly about life’s ups and downs.
One more thing: If there is an area in my life that I feel undisciplined in, it is prayer. Perhaps you might feel the same. And yet as I think about why I feel this way, I wonder if it’s because I have viewed prayer as only a morning ritual to complete a daily “quiet time” instead of a relational presence I embrace as I go about my day? This is not to say there should not be disciplined times of prayer, I believe there should be. But when I move prayer from a check list of things to do to a walking with God in the mundane tasks of life, things change for me. Prayer becomes an hour by hour dialogue and a posture of gratefulness for God’s continual presence as I acknowledge God’s mercy in meeting me right where I am. Again, this does not eliminate the need for discipline in my life of prayer, it just frames it with a new end in mind.
Yep! Still asking questions about prayer. I once heard about a pastor who spent two years preaching through the book of Romans. There is no denying that there is much to preach from Romans, but for me, two straight years seems like a bit much. I’m not anticipating this series on prayer to go 104 weeks. In fact, I think next week will be the final week. Not because I’ve answered all the questions, but because I don’t want readers to sigh and think, “What? Another question?”
So here’s this week’s question. “How do we learn to pray?” Again, pretty simple. But when you dig down beyond the surface of it, I think we discover it is a much needed question. And it is not just my question. It is a question that Jesus’ disciples asked him. His response? He said, “When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be your name, Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation'” (Luke 11:2-4).
We do well to listen to what Jesus said about how to pray. When I was growing up, Jesus’ words spoken here and recorded by Luke were more likely to be repeated by a football team ready to storm the field than a church on Sunday morning. Why is that? Is it because that we, or at least some of us, are a bit apprehensive about repeating a prayer that someone has already prayed and put to paper. Where’s the spontaneity? Where’s the heart in it?
But does not praying, in addition to studying, these words of Jesus to his disciples in effect teach us to pray? When we pray them back to God with our mind and heart, do they not capture our imagination? Can’t praying these few words which we call the Lord’s Prayer subtly reframe our praying as they become absorbed into the core of our very being? I feel they can!
I did mention at the start of this series that prayer is not complicated. And I still hold to that. But this doesn’t mean that our prayers shouldn’t grow and develop as we discern more fully the heart of God. Saturation and praying through and with Scripture (ie. The Lord’s Prayer) therefore, matures us in prayer. It pushes us to come before God more honest, free and bold than we might do otherwise.
So will you begin to pray the Lord’s Prayer? Will you pray it for your family? Your church? Your neighborhood? As you do, I think you will begin to discover a new depth in how to pray; a depth not made of pious “out of touch” words, but of a heart longing to know God more fully and of eyes watching and waiting to see him restore all of creation.
So we begin another round of questions concerning prayer! I started this a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to dive a bit deeper into this critical vocation of prayer we have been given by God. I use the word vocation here concerning prayer intentionally because I feel it is our “duty” as Christ followers to go before God on behalf of ourselves and on behalf of the world around us. Paul writes to those in Colossae to “keep on praying” (Col. 4:2). It’s not an optional activity.
This idea of praying being vocational, coupled with the past couple of weeks of battling with the understanding that God interacts with us as we pray, I feel we must now ask, why is prayer so hard for us? If God invites us to pour out our hearts to him, both the good and the bad, and our prayers have an affect upon us and the world, then why don’t we pray?
“American culture is probably the hardest place in the world to learn to pray,” writes Paul Miller. “We are so busy that when we slow down to pray, we find it uncomfortable. We prize accomplishments, production. But prayer is nothing but talking to God. It feels useless, as if we are wasting time. Every bone in our bodies screams, ‘Get to work.'”
Miller writes further that “one of the subtlest hindrances to prayer is probably the most pervasive. In the broader culture and in our churches, we prize intellect, competency, and wealth. Because we can do life without God, praying seems nice but unnecessary. Money can do what prayer does, and it quicker and less time-consuming. Our trust in ourselves and in our talents makes us structurally independent of God. As a result, exhortations to pray don’t stick.”
We have been duped into acting out our culture’s lie that when we pray, we really aren’t doing anything. Now I know the truth. Prayer changes things. Yet ever so slowly I’ve seen myself evolve into behaving otherwise. I’m a guy that has to be busy and prayer is…well…is it doing anything?
Productivity abounds in our world. Just consider the number of books and articles written that help expose the secret formula to how to get more done. Now I’m a believer in productivity. And I’ve benefited from many of the resources on the market these days. However, I think there needs to be a bit of pushback when our desire to be productive clouds our understanding of prayer. If Miller is right that we live as though we can do life without God, then prayer becomes a non-essential. Though we do pray at times, it is the first to be abandoned in a busy day.
When our world began to shut down due to COVID, I noticed in myself a feeling of loss in regards to how to continue the ministry I am involved in. The outreach efforts I led were stopped. The weekly Bible study gathering I oversaw had to be reworked and moved online. My schedule though still busy, was not as hectic. What was I to do? Just sit around and pray?
What was laid bare during those first weeks of apocalyptic-like shut down was my attitude of prayer as a “nothing else I can do so might as well pray” mentality. Now on the surface, I don’t think I believe this about prayer. Yet deep down I discovered something different. Something that had been formed in me via the story of the culture I live in. Thankfully, I am now working to be refashioned by another story, the Biblical story. It’s a slow work, but it’s a good work.
So what about you? Is it hard for you to pray? Why or why not? Does our hurry up and get something done culture influence you to view time spent in prayer as neglecting your being productive? What would it take for us to wake up to what God has called us to do in relation to prayer?
Can I encourage you in a couple of ways in your life of prayer? First, start slow. If you are like me and have struggled in this area, then just begin with a simple prayer in the morning and one in the evening. Nothing extravagant or lengthy. Just begin. Second, be honest with yourself and with God about your lack of discipline or motivation in praying. Humble yourself. Then realize the goodness of God as he meets you where you are. Praying is a relational journey. Yes, it takes discipline. But it’s a discipline that must not lead to empty ritual, but to a vibrant relationship with our King.
Last week I began asking some simple and yet not so simple questions about prayer. I’m doing this not because I doubt the importance of prayer, but because I feel that asking such questions can both spur us to pray more deeply while at the same time help us to be honest about the struggles we have with it. And yes, it is okay to struggle!
The question about prayer that I brought up last week was, “Does anything happen when we pray? The complication of answering this question comes when we face God’s sovereignty. We know God is control (whatever that means) and so as a result, if nothing can thwart his plan, then what good is our prayer? He’s going to do what he’s going to do, right? (I realize this is not the only way to think about God’s sovereignty…and personally…not a healthy way to think about it.)
I have a few comments about this way of thinking. (And yes, I guess you could say I’m still working through last week’s question). First, I realize that this question concerning God’s sovereignty and prayer is not necessarily one the Bible is asking. For the Biblical writers, the truths that God was in complete control of everything and that humanity had true freedom to do as they wished was not seen as a problem. So does prayer change the course of history? Of course! Does God control all of history? Of course.
Second, when I think about God’s sovereignty, I’m not viewing it as something in which God is stiff-arming his creation to get it to do what he wants. There is a relationship that God has with what he has made. He loves us. So I think there is a relational aspect to God’s sovereignty as there is a working together of God and us as his image bearers to make this earth “as it is in Heaven.”
Third, we have to be okay with a bit of a mystery as to the workings of God and how he holds all things together and yet gives us freedom to live as we please. There has been much ink used in discussing God’s sovereignty and our free will. I’m glad there are those who have the intellect to tackle this issue. But I think each of these folks who dove into the depths of this subject will say at the end of the day that there is still quite a bit of mystery.
Historian and theologian N.T. Wright remembers facing this question of God’s sovereignty and prayer when he was quite young. Though he didn’t have a complete answer for it in his teens, he still believed that God answered his prayers and thus, felt his prayers changed things. As he has aged and given this question a bit more thought, he says…
As I've gotten older and have thought about Genesis 1 and the role of human beings in creation and bringing that forward into Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God and Paul's appropriation of that, it looks as though what Scripture is trying to tell us is that God who made the world made it in such a way that some of the most important things he wants to do in the world would happen through human agency. So the mystery of prayer is that when we humbly come before God with our requests, there seems to be something there that delights him.
As always is the case in these short posts, much more could be written. And perhaps it will. Also, it could be that what I have typed here as only caused you to ask more questions (of which I would be delighted). But can we end with the most incredulous thought that, regardless of where you land on the question of how God’s sovereignty and the voicing of our prayers to him relate, God delights in our bringing ourselves and requests to him. Think on that for a bit. Oh what a privilege it is to come before him. Oh with what love does God bend his ear toward us. Blessed be his name!
