I preached last Sunday on the pure in heart. Below is the link:
Tag Archives: christianity
Do Something.
29 Jan“We care more about you than what you do for us.” We say that to folks a lot at Center City–and for good reason. Essentially we’re saying, “we care about you as a human being beyond your functional role here. You are more than a door greeter.” It is an important thing to communicate to people.
I am sick of “functionary relationships.”
Hello (insert function), I am (insert function).
These types of conversations don’t interest me much. I like talking to people–to souls for that matter. C.S. Lewis said (as I wrote about earlier in an earlier post), “you have never met a mere mortal.”
However, I think we need to be careful when make blanket statements like “God cares more about you than what you do for him.” My friend Steve Witherup says that sometimes you must reject the premise of an either/or proposition. If someone asks me if I am married or if I have brown hair, I would obviously reject the either/or nature of the questions and say both. I think that applies here. See, when we make the aforementioned statements we are pitting one thing against the other. We are saying that what we do is divorced from who we are. This premise, I believe, is a false one.
I am reading a book by NT Wright about the nature of Christian character and virtue. His contention, as well as the belief of many others, is that what you do is intrinsically tied to who are. A belief otherwise is due to what I believe is an anemic gospel message. It is a message that sounds wonderful, and it is. It’s just limited. It is a gospel that says God is only concerned with your eternal destination–as if God only cares about two days of your existence: the day you are saved and the day you die. The Gospel is more than that. The Gospel deals with all of life’s DNA. There is not one thing on the earth that the Gospel doesn’t affect. This clearly would include your character. When you accept Christ’s invitation for salvation you haven’t arrived. You have been put on the right path for the beginning of a journey. Don’t hear what I’m not saying. I am not saying that we can earn our salvation or that what Christ accomplished on the cross is limited. I am saying we limit the implications of the Gospel by making it merely about our eternal status. Salvation is not just a “get out of hell free card.” It’s not just about life after death. It’s about eternal life. It’s about life before death. Jesus is both Savior and Lord. The implication of Jesus as Lord is that he rules the whole earth and his Kingdom has come and continues to come.
So, what does this mean for us? It means that God is in the process of forming (re-forming, transforming) us progressively into the image of Jesus. It means that all of life is included in the apprenticeship. It means that what you do today matters! It means that God cares about every second of your life. It means God cares about who you’re becoming. So do something. Because what you do matters.
Nike said, “Just do it.” Or as my Jordan t-shirt I’m wearing right now says, “Just Dunk It.”
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Update: Watch this!
Effective Prayer
28 AugThis is a rough sketch of a talk I gave to Center City on Sunday. I believe it’s a great way to end our series on prayer.
This past month we have been discussing the topic of prayer. Our pastor has been challenging us to pray bold prayers and circle them. We have talked about persistence in prayer and the idea of pushing through until we get an answer. I think it needs to be said, though, that we may have a very limited definition of prayer. We have been told or made to believe that prayer is something that starts with “Dear God” and ends with “Amen.” With this definition in mind, how do take Paul’s charge to the Thessalonians to pray continuously? Does that mean you need to quit your job? Is the effectiveness of your prayer based on the amount of time you are engaged in “Dear God, Amen” prayers? Not at all. Prayer is a posture of the heart. Prayer is your life. We try to drag law into this. We try to measure our prayer life on an achievement scale–as if God gives a quarterly performance review. “Your prayer hours are really down this quarter. You better bring those up in Q4” This is not the case. We do not engage in prayer because God demands it. Rather, we pray because God desires communion and relationship with his children. Our hearts long to be intimate and close with the Father. But when we make it about achievement it becomes a drudgery and we colossally miss the point. God wants to be with you. Prayer absolutely includes “Dear God, Amen” type moments in the day and it will certainly include extended times of that kind of prayer. But we can’t be legalistic with ourselves or others–however appealing it may be. It would help up to remember that we are in a relationship. When Chelsi and I sit in silence, is our relationship less? Does she end the night with a pie chart of our time together? ” We really need to bring up our talking hours and increase the amount of handholding.” Of course there would be an issue if we never spoke but that’s not an issue. We are in relationship. I am deeply aware of her love for me, so I love to converse with her. So what does a life of prayer look like?
In Matthew chapter 6 Jesus helps us out.
5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.
6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.
8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
9 “This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.”
I want to point out a few things from the passage that stick out.
1) Don’t pray to be heard or seen. God isn’t impressed by how spiritual you sound and if you’re doing it for that reason, you’ve already received your reward. God isn’t impressed by the quality of your prayers.
2) When Jesus says go into your room and close the door and pray in secret, this is a puzzling remark. Almost all of Jesus’ hearers lived in a 1 room house. There was very little privacy. Many commentators believe Jesus was talking about a heart posture. “Close the door to the noise of the world and pray to God who is unseen.”
3) The quantity of your words has nothing to do with the effectiveness of your prayers. Don’t babble on like the pagans. The Father knows what we need before we articulate a single word. The prayer Jesus gives us is a 15 second prayer. Feel the freedom to interact with God from a place of love not duty. The thing God blesses in prayer is purity.
So prayer is not simply our “Dear God’s” and “Amen’s.” It is so much more. Our worship is prayer. Our silent listening is prayer. Richard Foster says our desire to spend more time with the Father is in and of itself prayer. Our work is our prayer that we offer to God. The entirety of our life is prayer. Kierkegaard says purity of heart is to will one thing. With that in mind, purity in prayer is to will one thing–namely, communion with the Father.
Prayer (Week 2)
30 JulCenter City is corporately focusing on the topic of prayer this month and reading Mark Batterson’s “The Circle Maker.” In the first section of Batterson’s book he challenges us to dream big. In order to dream big we must first understand the complete “otherness” of God. He is far above and beyond anything we can fathom. He warns us against being prisoners of our left brain (the side that focuses on all things rational and logical). The reality of this God-saturated universe requires much use of our right brain (the seat of our imagination and dreaming). One of my favorite professors from Southeastern, Dr. Waddell, says that the moment you’ve figured out God, he’s no longer God. We have to relentlessly free God from the boxes we’ve put him in. A.W. Tozer was fascinated with this idea. He says that the most important thing about us is what comes to mind when we think about God. Our thoughts about God are of infinite importance. Batterson, paraphrasing Tozer, says that a higher view of God is the solution to ten thousand problems. When we get a fresh revelation of the “otherness” of God, his omnipotent power, and his divine love it will greatly impact our prayer life.
There are so many questions surrounding the topic of prayer. Doubt creeps in regularly. Philip Yancey writes, “Why pray? I have asked myself that question almost every day of my Christian life, especially when God’s presence seems far off and I wonder if prayer is a pious form of talking to myself.” I have asked myself at times “What if prayer doesn’t change anything?” But as Dallas Willard puts it, you should always doubt your doubt. What if prayer does change things? What if God does hear and respond to us? All of this is a mystery. Batterson says that we will not always know the will of God and we can’t be sure God will answer our prayer. What is most important is that we pray and believe that He is ABLE.
But what does this mean in practice? Richard Foster has a wonderful first chapter in his book “Prayer” about simple prayer. He says that we often have a love/hate relationship with the practice of prayer. This tension is usually because we are trying to pray perfectly. We attempt to pray with perfect theology, without any hint of cloudy motives, and with rigid discipline. Foster says, “…we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives–altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. But what I have come to see is that God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture.” C.S. Lewis encourages us to “lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.” There is no pretension in prayer. God sees us for who we are. We don’t have to come to God as a blameless over-achiever. He frees us to come to him as we are–sinners and sons.
We must re-define prayer. Prayer is not simply an act of language. Prayer is a turning of our attention toward the Creator-God. Thus, prayer is not defined by the words we speak but the posture of our heart. Our desire to pray may in fact be prayer. Desire should give birth to action. Foster says we should not seek any ecstatic experience in prayer. We need only to come to God with simple faith knowing we are his beloved children.
“My heart is not proud, O Lord,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.”
Psalm 131:1-2
Joseph Phillips 