Interconnecting Insttruction (04/29/23)

What a marvelously opportune time to be revisiting these instructions!  Rejoice, pray, and give thanks.  It’s been a difficult week or two, between Jan being hospitalized, and now dealing with a cold while she is still on the course to recovery.  Sometimes, it all seems to be trials, trials, trials, although a bit of perspective would quickly remind me that trials such as these are pretty minor affairs.  If I have a cold, I shall recover.  It’s not like we haven’t seen this before.  We know pretty much the whole arc of the story, having been through colds enough times.  If it seems a most inconvenient occasion for such a trial, well, when has a cold ever been convenient?  As for Jan’s experiences, while she might account it a great trial, and a most traumatic experience, honestly, it’s been pretty mundane.  Had a bit of a scare.  Had relatively good medical care readily available without needing to concern ourselves with how we might pay for it.  Had praying support both here in the local church that she has more or less been ignoring, and from others scattered here and there.  Even had our ex-pastor’s ex-wife stop by out of the blue, because Jan had been on her mind.  Another source for prayer support.  And praise God for it all.

But I cannot say that I have been particularly godly these last few days.  Drippy nose and lack of sleep have not put me in the best frame to deal with the needs of others.  And I can get very cranky, very short-tempered.  And brothers, these things ought not to be.  So, as I say, particularly timely to have these three brief commands shoved under my nose.  If only I can take them to heart.  And key to this, I think, is recognizing that they are not just Paul rattling off a series of disconnected points as he sees his writing materials running out.  No. Rejoicing, prayer, and thanksgiving are tightly connected, and the connective tissue, as I wrote previously, is recognizing God for Who He Is.  He is our Sovereign Lord.  And let me stress, that this holds whether we opt to acknowledge it or not.  He is every bit as much Sovereign Lord over the most reprehensible proponent of ungodliness – of which, it seems, we have plenty – as He is over you and me, who are accounted among the elect.

We have our own difficulty with maintaining perspective.  We lose sight of God, and we do so often.  It shows in that we lose the capacity for rejoicing, we find our prayer life drying up, assuming it ever had much of a reservoir to begin with.  It becomes difficult to offer much thanks, for all we can see is the difficulty.  I have the discussion often, with my fellow believers, just how much attentiveness to the news of the day can present roadblocks for this attitude we are encouraged to have.  How do we rejoice, when all we see is a world gone spiraling down into hell at a rapid pace?  How do I give thanks for the sort of governance we have?  Pray for your rulers?  Does praying for a new set count?  I think honest assessment must say, no.  Even in this:  Even amidst a life of trials, whether they are the perceived trials of living in the world as it presently consists, or very real trials of life, or even of true spiritual persecution, the command to us remains the same.  The will of our unchanging God remains the same.

I am not alone in perceiving a connection between these three points.  Calvin observes the same thought, and notes how these three matters depend upon one another.  He writes, “For when he recommends constant praying, he points out the way of rejoicing perpetually, for by this means we ask from God alleviation in connection with all our distresses.”  Indeed, where prayer is lacking, we are likely to find our capacity for rejoicing much reduced.  But it’s not just the rejoicing.  It’s the thanksgiving as well.  The JFB carries this connectivity forward, as we must.  That commentary echoes Calvin in observing that if we would rejoice constantly, we must pray constantly.  But observe as well, that if it is our habit to give thanks to God in all things, knowing that in Him, all things are indeed for the best, then we shall know as a result more than sufficient cause for continuous joy.

Isn’t that something?  We are called to pray, not as a duty, but as a recharging of the soul.  We cannot long bring our petitions before this Sovereign God who loves us, and not be brought to bursts of thanksgiving.  At least, we ought not to be trapped in this place of petition only.  Think about Who it is you approach.  Think just how incredible it is to have the privilege to come before Him whenever you will, to bare your heart to your Maker, and to receive His compassionate attention!  And will you not give thanks?  Can you really be brought to remembrance of how He has saved you, of what He has pulled you free from, and not find ample cause for thanks?  And as we are restored to our senses, seeing all these reasons for thankfulness, remembering that we are children of the all-powerful, all-wise God of all Creation, surely we can rediscover joy, even if our hard providences persist.

And so, we find Matthew Henry writing, “We should rejoice more if we prayed more.”  This isn’t an attempt to guilt us into action.  It’s a simple statement of cause and effect.  Would you have more joy in this Christian walk?  Pray more.  Make it a priority.  Schedule times in your day to stop and pray.  If you’re like me, this is going to sound a tall order.  I mean, it’s well enough to have these established times in the morning, but even here, it tends more towards study and thought, rather than prayer proper.  And once the day gets rolling?  Sorry.  Maybe it’s male compartmentalizing.  Maybe it’s the evil influence of a world driven mad by the powers of darkness.  Maybe it’s just laziness.  But my mind is now on the needs of the day, and it will likely be bedtime before I am back in any mind to think on God.  And by then, I may very well be too exhausted to give it more than a passing notice.  But there it is:  “We should rejoice more if we prayed more.”  I shall consider that more in coming days.  And I shall no doubt find cause to stop and pray given such considerations.  But I can’t help but notice a great need here, a need for change that goes beyond me trying to establish some new exercise in piety.  I shall have need of God’s aid if this is going to change.  So, what is one to do, but ask?

Father, I know I’ve been here before.  I know those occasions when I become briefly mindful of a certain lack of prayerfulness on my part.  I know how I can even find myself a bit edgy sitting through the lengthy prayers of others, perhaps giving more thought to critiquing the way they pray than really listening to their hearts poured out to You.  I know how swiftly I can set aside whatever brief sense of conviction comes in regard to this matter of prayer.  But I also know I need change in this.  And I know that change isn’t in me to achieve on my own.  So, I pray for wisdom, wisdom to pray.  I pray for a change of heart that would see in this business of prayer a thing of utmost value, rather than merely a work to be done.  I need You.  Would You be pleased, then, to speak to this soul of mine, to bring me back to mindfulness throughout each day, that I have need to talk to You and to hear from You?  May it be so!

Bookends (04/30/23-05/01/23)

We have these bookend instructions to rejoice and give thanks.  It might seem that they are effectively the same thought repeated in different words, but there are differences, aren’t there?  Yet, they find definite connection one to the other.  It would be hard to imagine finding cause to rejoice without finding cause for thankfulness.  And it would be impossible to offer earnest thanks where there is no cause for joy, wouldn’t it?  I mean, we might get the words out, feeling them a necessary duty, but they would ring hollow, even to the one we are thanking.  It would be kind of like receiving underwear for Christmas.  Oh, socks.  Thank you so much.  I mean, they might be our truest need, and they might be the best socks we’ve ever put on our feet, but somehow, they don’t really produce joy in us in that moment, and our thanks will sound rather more dutiful than earnest.

And yet, the command here is not to rejoice when all is grand.  Who would need such a command?  Rejoicing comes naturally when everything is going well.  One would hope we’ve at least enough maturity to be thankful for good things done for us by others, even if it’s merest politeness on our part.  Oh, you’ve done me such a good turn, thank you.  But when our circumstances aren’t so grand?  When it’s matters of discipline rather than reward?  Is there still thankfulness in us for those who love us enough to take on such tasks?  Can we still rejoice amidst hard providences?  I tell you we can.  It won’t come naturally, but then, we are no longer a people governed by nature.  We are a people reborn in the Spirit, given newness of life, and in that newness of life, given a new perspective by which to assess events as they unfold.

Here is what Scripture has to say as to our circumstances:  “All things work together for the good of those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Ro 8:28).  How many of you, hearing the first part of that, mentally filled in the last bit with some idea along the lines of ‘those working according to His purpose’?  But it’s not about that.  It’s not contingent upon that, though I hope we should all know an urgent desire to be doing those things He purposes and prepares for us to do.  It’s about having been called for no other reason than that it was His purpose to call you, and having been called, having received of faith by the Holy Spirit come to grant us awareness of spiritual truths, we see God for Who He is, and we have indeed fallen deeply in love with Him, discovering in Him a love unbreakable.

But here’s the thing.  If you’ve been in a longstanding relationship, preferably such relationship as Scripture permits and blesses, then you surely know that such love is not always evident in surface interactions.  Such love does not somehow ensure there shall be no rough spots in the relationship.  Even with the deepest love for one another, there remains the reality that, “Iron sharpens iron.”  There will be disagreements.  There will be causes for disagreement, clashes of wills, the necessity of submitting one to the other when everything within is screaming out for the right to rule.  Well, carry that into the spiritual realm, and into your relationship with God your Father.  Indeed, recalling that He is your Father may help shake you loose of such gauzy ideas of love.

A Father, a good father at least, will love sufficiently to discipline.  He’s not so busy trying to be your friend and playmate that he will let your misbehavior slide unchecked.  He knows, after all, where such misbehavior leads if it is left to fester, and that won’t be for your best good.  And so, though it will mean rejection and maybe even hatred in the short term, he does what he must to catch this error while yet it might be gently corrected.  And if needs must, he will take sterner measures still, doing as he must to see you mature into one who truly could be friend to him, could truly lay claim to being his son or daughter as evidenced by proven character of like kind.

As it happens, our evening reading last night came to John 15:13-14 – “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.  You are My friends, if you do what I command you.”  Sounds almost like conditional love, doesn’t it?  But He’s not telling them to earn His friendship.  He’s identifying what true friendship with Him will look like.  And He is also, in somewhat oblique fashion, indicating the depths of His love, as it will soon be proven to be.  And therein lies sound basis for us to rejoice and be thankful regardless what comes our way.

Try that Romans passage again.   All things work together for good to you, given that you love God.  All things.  Not just the happy providences such as the health and wealth folks tout.  All things.  Even the hardships.  Even suffering and loss.  Clarke sums it up this way.  “While you live to God, prosperity and adversity will be equally helpful to you.”  Honestly, I think you could cut that conditional right out.  Prosperity and adversity will be equally helpful to you regardless.  If indeed you are one called to Christ, then they shall indeed prove helpful, though some situations will be more welcome than others.  But if you are not called, then in the long run, both prosperity and adversity will prove utterly pointless to you.  Neither will avail you the least good, but you shall come to your end acknowledging what Solomon learned.  “Vanity of vanities.  All is vanity and wind.”

Job understood this clearly.  Talk about facing adverse providences!  He had known significant blessings, yes.  But in the span of a day, those blessings were being ripped away.  Riches were lost.  Children were lost.  Health was lost.  What was left him, but questionable friends with bad counsel?  And yet, how does he respond in all this?  “Shall we accept good from God and not accept adversity?” (Job 2:10).  I grant you, this is yet early on in his trials, but the mindset holds, and it serves as sound counsel to us in our own adversities.  This is, after all, exactly what Paul is getting at with that all things business.  It’s not about happy circumstances.  That’s not the core of Christian faith.  Indeed, it could be reasonably argued that it is practically the antithesis of Christian faith.  Our joy, our thankfulness, is not rooted in living a life of ease and comfort.  It is something that shines through in spite of the hardships of living in this fallen world.  And these things shine from us because we recognize that hard though our circumstances may be, God is in it, and if He is in it, then these things are indeed working for our good.

We have this going for us:  Knowing God and knowing that we are His, we know that even the worst days of our lives come only as necessary ingredients of the best days.  And our best days, beloved, are not here and now.  If this is as good as it gets, we might just as well hop on the nihilist bus and scoot on out of here.  But this isn’t it.  This is not all there is.  And whatever miseries may be ours in the present day, it’s not pointless.  I am mindful that Paul was writing to a Greek church on this occasion, to a pagan culture.  Something in the Table Talk article I read last night points to the distinction, but it should be familiar to anybody that had a proper bit of social studies and world history in grade school.  Greek gods, Roman gods, they were a capricious lot.  They didn’t much care about humans except as means for amusement.  They might afflict a poor human just for the chuckles.  They might send one off on some grand but doomed adventure just to watch how it plays out.  Adversity might prove pointless, and all the offerings and obeisance paid to this god or that might prove entirely ineffective.  Think the priests of Baal when confronted by Elijah.  Do your best, guys.  Maybe he’s sleeping and you need to wake him up.  Or maybe he’s just busy elsewhere.  But for the Christian this is never a concern.  There’s no question of which God to seek out.  There’s no question that He’s attentive and watching.  And there’s no question as to His motives.  God is Good.  That’s so much more than happy talk.  That is a statement of fundamental Truth.  And if God is Good, then of this we can be sure:  However we may feel about current circumstances, they come to good purpose, and not just a general sort of cosmic good, but a personal good.

God is good and perfect.  Ergo, that which comes by His command is likewise good and perfect.  And we must surely recognize that everything comes by His command.  “All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (Jn 1:3).  He it is who appoints rulers and empires.  He it is who declares their end.  He it is who causes the sun to shine and the rains to fall.  “The One forming light and creating darkness, Causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the LORD who does all these” (Isa 45:7).  And in all these things, God remains good, and the outworking of His purposes in all these things remain good.  And on that basis, as we consider the currents of life, we can recognize a higher reality.  We can recognize that hard times produce good results.  We can recognize that whatever worldly sorrows we may endure, yet we have great cause to rejoice.  These things are working for our good, our greatest good, insured by God Who Is Good.

And there it is!  As Clarke observes – though hardly him alone – You have God!  There alone you already have ample cause to exult and rejoice.  Indeed, you have cause for ceaseless joy.  That is the key to our weathering the storms of life.  The Wycliffe Translators Commentary has this to say.  “Christian joy is not dampened by affliction or other harsh circumstances, because it is rooted in one’s unassailable relationship to God.”  Well, let me state that in a somewhat negative light.  If your joy is proving dependent on circumstances, I think we must conclude that this is not Christian joy you have. 

That’s hardly cause for surprise.  We are in a world besotted with materialism, and it urges a materialistic viewpoint constantly.  This may be one of the worse aspects of the modern forms of commerce.  You search the web for some wanted, perhaps even necessary item, and you purchase it.  And ever after, you’re getting daily emails to set further desires before your eyes.  Perhaps you’d like this?  Lust after that.  Look what’s on sale this week!  Hurry and buy!  You know you want to.  And if we are not careful, we find contentment slipping away.  Oh, yes.  I’d like that.  Bit pricy, though.  Or, gosh, I really need a vacation, and I really deserve something grand this year.  Or maybe your car’s not quite new and shiny enough.  There are myriad avenues by which the cry of materialism is brought to our ears.  But beloved, you have God!  You are already possessed of that pearl of greatest value.  Don’t trade it in for a bowl of lentils.  And that’s the offer that’s being broadcast at you.  You can’t eat a pearl, can you?  Why not trade that for this sumptuous meal?  Just look at the pictures.  Read the reviews.  All your friends have been enjoying this, and why should they have it better than you?  You deserve this.  Just do it.

No!  Something’s wrong here!  If your joy is dependent on stuff, something is terribly wrong.  If your joy is dependent on a life free of pain, on experiencing uninterrupted bodily health, something is terribly wrong.  If your joy is so wrapped up in wife and kids, house and land, that any blow to any one of these things would cast you down, something’s wrong.  That’s not to say we go through life callous and unmoved.  Far be it from us!  No, our family should be a matter of deepest concern to us, but no so deep as to become a necessary support for our love for God.  If our love for God is contingent, conditional, only given when He gives us enough good things (as we count goodness), then I will go so far as to say we are not His children.

Yet, I am hardly unaware that we shall all of us know seasons of sorrow.  It’s not a question of avoiding such seasons, as if that were even possible.  Recall to whom Paul is writing.  This is a church that has known adversity.  This is a church that has, even while so very young in their faith, experienced death and loss in its members.  And it is to them that he gives this instruction, this command to rejoice and give thanks.  Here’s the thing:  Sorrows come, but joy comes in the morning, right?  Why?  Well, it wasn’t because we spent the night wallowing in our misery.  Neither is it because we pulled ourselves together and lifted ourselves out of it by our bootstraps, as the old phrase goes.  Joy comes in the morning because we have remembered ourselves by night.

Ironside provides a helpful bit of guidance in this regard.  First, there is this:  We must recognize that if indeed we have lost this joy in God, something is terribly wrong.  We must do a bit of an examination.  What has caused this distress?  I’m not talking about the circumstance so much as the response.  Hard times are bound to produce sorrow.  That’s not the issue.  But if sorrow has cost you joy, why?  And what to do?  Well, what to do is really right here in Paul’s brief instruction.  Figure out what’s causing you this distress and take it to the Lord.  Pray, in other words.  And if you can’t figure out the cause?  Pray.  Ironside’s conclusion is worth drilling into yourself.  He advises that if joy is gone, we have only ourselves to blame.  Joy’s dissipation in us is evidence that we are out of fellowship with God.  And beloved, if we are out of fellowship with God, I assure you that’s not His doing.  It is ours.  We have cut ourselves off, and then we wonder at the lack of supply.  What ever shall we do?  Remember!  You have God.  And He has you!  Whatever this present moment, that hasn’t changed.  Remember!  Remember and discover once more that you yet have ample cause to exult.

And remembering this, give thanks.  Ironside also offers this for our consideration.  Giving thanks is how we voice recognition that God is author of all our circumstances.  Now, be careful!  This is not permit to make God out as the perpetrator of evil.  Far from it, though as He acknowledges that He is the one who creates calamity, as we have seen, it’s not the case that evil arises apart from His permitting it to happen.  To put it otherwise, it is most assuredly Satan who brings evil, but we, as sons of the living God, and loving servants of our King, look beyond his doings and see that it is our Lord who granted him liberty to do so.  That’s hard to do.  I mean, it’s easy enough while it remains in the abstract.  But when that time comes that you are in the midst of trail and tribulation, that’s when we really need to take hold of this lesson.  That is when we need to find our way to rejoicing and giving thanks to God, acknowledging that He being Who He Is, this awful present is for our future good.

I have to say that between leaving off at the start of that paragraph yesterday and completing it today, I have been seeing just how hard that is.  It was a day of trial in various forms.  I don’t care to go into the details because I could still too readily be moved to anger rather than anything of rejoicing thankfulness.  Nor can I say as yet that I am seeing what good outcome is being produced.  Yet, at least in this morning quiet, I can recognize that this good outcome must pertain.  It may not be today.  It may not even be so soon that I would recognize the connection. But it must pertain, because God is Good, and God is working all things together for the good of both my wife and me, as we love Him, and are called as He has purposed. 

Have we been wandering?  Is that it?  Let me scope that in.  Have I been wandering?  Probably.  I have become entirely too ready to be distracted.  Indeed, I think it could be said that I prefer being distracted to being focused anymore.  That’s not good.  Nor am I finding it in myself to fight it all that much.  Oh, I might opt for a different distraction to break free of the current one, but that’s hardly progress, is it?  Can I become too caught up in the material comforts of the present?  Oh sure.  Even with all that garbage that comes attached to those comforts, even with the arguments, the dissatisfaction, the anger and the disappointment, it’s a comfortable prison, this life.  It’s easy to become entirely too ensconced in its embrace, and lose all sight or interest in heavenly things.

So, perhaps that’s the whole deal here.  Perhaps it’s all a matter of making Jeff aware just how far he’s wandered off, and if that’s the case, well, assuredly it is cause for thanksgiving.  At minimum, God being God and all, I can venture that these present matters, including the broad swathe of moral failures as I have faced them – or not – are in some mystical manner preparing me for heaven.  Maybe it’s to serve in wrenching me from close attachment to the present.  There ought to be something in the nature of aging, I should think, which begins to loosen the grip of this present existence on the soul, don’t you think?  I mean, we contemplate God, however frequently or infrequently, we sit – hopefully – under sound preaching week by week, having again and again the power of the Gospel applied to our sorry selves.  It’s bound to have an effect.  Indeed, Barnes observes that this aspect of preparing us for heaven is in all of God’s dealings with His people.  How they respond may be another thing, although even this, He has long since taken into account in preparing those very dealings.  But, beloved, if in fact God is dealing with us in a fashion that leads to our being better prepared for heaven, then however much we may loathe the process, surely we must love the outcome.  Surely, here is cause for thanksgiving.  God could have abandoned the work.  Pretty sure I would have done so long since.  Who wants to keep laboring on at some clearly hopeless cause?  But God sees more clearly than we do.  And what He sees is not hopeless.  It is not hopeless because He is in the work, and where He is in the work, nothing shall be impossible.  The very concept of impossible loses all meaning in the presence of His glory and might.  And that, dear ones, is where we find ourselves.

Calvin offers another diagnostic for our consideration:  the diagnostic of patience.  And here, too, we should have to acknowledge that the whole force of the modern age, and of those dark powers who rule the roost in this age, are arrayed against us, giving everything a rushed sense of urgency.  The news industry has long been geared to this.  After all, nobody’s going to tune in to hear a half-hour or an hour of somebody reporting that basically there’s nothing much to say.  It’s only gotten worse with the 24-hour news cycle.  Some major, or even not so major event transpires, and we’ve got to fill the airwaves.  We don’t know anything, but we’ve got to say something, and given that we have nothing substantial to offer, we’d best at least make it sensational.  Emphasize the awful.  Broadcast the hurt.

Look at the modern weather service, if we can still account it a service.  Every least variation in weather patterns is cause for pronouncements of impending doom.  I’m a bit surprised that we haven’t yet reached the point where we receive nightly warnings that the sun has gone missing, and we’re all gonna die, or a morning alert that soon this great fiery ball is going to arise in the sky, and again, we’re all going to die.  Seriously?  We’re getting maybe an inch of snow over the course of the day, and you’ve got emergency warnings up on the highway?   Are we that stupid?  No.  But an alarmed society is more readily persuaded of whatever they feel they need to persuade us to do.  Where your mask!  People might die.  Switch your energy source to something else.  It may not be any healthier over all, may have more confirmed kills than the entire history of oil-based energy, or even nuclear, but we’ve got to do something!

And there, we hit the cry of the impatient.  We’ve got to do something!  It’s the lever by which those in power seek to impose further regulation on those of greater sanity.  It’s for the children!  If we don’t do this, people could die!  Well, sure.  And if we do, people will most certainly die.  Indeed, in the grand scheme of things, it honestly doesn’t matter what course you choose.  People will die.  It’s what they do. 

And we’ve allowed this mindset to invade even our parenting.  Oh.  We must do something, else little cherub here might not get into college.  He’s three.  Seriously?  And frankly, given the state of the modern college education, it’s quite probable that he’d be better served if he couldn’t get in.  But leave that aside.  Because that’s not the only pressure point, is it?  No, even the leisure activities of our offspring have become a matter of urgency.  My goodness, just look at the average parent’s schedule.  We have to take junior to this game, daughter to that one.  We’ve got this activity, and that activity, and this show and that event, and everything becomes hurry, hurry, hurry.  Youth is too short.  I wonder how many children, pushed into this hyperactive lifestyle, will look back on it with thanksgiving when they arrive at adulthood.  What did they learn from it other than impatience?  What values did they have trained up in them other than self-gratifying materialism?  How well did such a childhood serve in producing a truly mature adult?

So, back to Calvin, since this has long since devolved into diatribe.  Here is our antidote to impatience.  It’s simple in the stating of it.  Take your attention off of present evils, and turn it onto consideration of your Lord and Savior.  Consider yet again, ‘how God stands affected towards us in Christ’.  Those are Calvin’s words, and they may come across as odd to our modern hearing.  The phrasing may be a bit archaic, or perhaps a bit too elevated for our earthy perspective.  But the point is simple enough.  God loves you.  In Christ, Who, we might note, came to do the will of His Father, we have been redeemed from sin’s power.  Our unmeetable debt to the court of heaven has been paid in full by this Redeemer of ours.  And this He undertook to do on our behalf while we were yet His enemies!  Who would do such a thing?  Well, God would.  And we, as His children, are supposed to be coming to have something of that same character in ourselves.  You have been reborn into newness of life, a life now lived in light of knowing that God has done this for you, for no other reason than that He loves you, and chose to do so.  An honest assessment must surely bring us to recognize that His love for us didn’t come about because we were so wonderfully lovable.  Far from it!

“I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners.  The healthy don’t need a physician.  It’s the sick who have need of him” (Mt 9:12-13).  And this is so very much God’s nature, isn’t it?  We saw it in the last passage, I think.  He causes His sun to shine on righteous and unrighteous alike.  He waters the crops of both good men and evil.  That’s pretty much the basis for our own commanded behavior:  Never repay evil for evil, but doo good for all men.  For thereby do you show yourselves to be true sons of your Father, who does likewise.   This is ‘how God stands affected towards us in Christ’.  As I observed in earlier notes, He stands with a view of us as being the apple of His eye, a most prized yet most fragile possession, to be guarded with all diligence and alacrity.

Beloved, and I am no doubt talking to myself first and foremost, combat this impatience!  Take time to pry yourself away from your attentive focus on present evils.  Do what you must to begin directing your thoughts more and more in the direction of considering Christ.  Therein is the perspective by which to count it all joy.  In joyous contemplation of His loving Lordship, there is reason for hope.  The anchor holds.  His hands still hold you, and nothing, not even your own stupid rebelliousness, can snatch you away from Him.   Are you in the midst of trials?  Count it all joy, knowing that this testing is producing endurance, and endurance shall have its perfect result, rendering you that much more complete, indeed, lacking nothing (Jas 1:2-5).  And if that’s proving hard, ask God for wisdom.  Which is to say, pray.  That, as I have suggested, and as we shall explore further in the next part of this little study, is the connective tissue of these commands.  Would you know this joy that withstands the worst circumstances unscathed?  Would you be filled with thankfulness to God for the rich gifts He has bestowed upon you in bringing about your salvation, indeed, bringing about your existence?  Pray without ceasing.  Prayer necessarily takes our eyes off the world and puts them on Christ.  Well, I say necessarily, but that assumes prayer from a proper place as concerns our motive and our focus.  We are quite capable of offering prayers that are little more than trying to place an order with the cloud services of heaven.  But we don’t pray to some genie waiting to grant us our three wishes.  We pray to God Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.  We pray to the One Who knows us better than we know ourselves, Who knows our needs and indeed, encourages us to prayer, even supplying, where necessary, the words, because we, in our benighted struggle, can’t manage to pray aright.

Don’t get defensive about it.  Or would you have me suppose I am the only weak-kneed Christian to suffer such things?  Not buying it, frankly.  If it were just my personal failure, I shouldn’t expect to find more than sufficient subject matter in Scripture addressing exactly that failure.  Always, in everything, without ceasing, turn yourself back to God.  Heed that urging in you, for it is God Himself urging you back to the way that leads to Life.  Stop trying to do this in your own strength.  You don’t got this.  Sorry, horrible English, but it serves the purpose.  You don’t.  You haven’t got it all figured out, and you haven’t arrived to save the day.  Your prayer life is in tatters, your joy and thankfulness have been utterly swamped by events, and all you want to do is sleep.  But even in sleep, the impatience arises, the anxiousness asserts itself.  And still, still you will not avail yourself of the medicine needed for your well-being.  Oh, but this heart is desperately sick.

I have felt it in mind, this morning to finish by turning myself back to that wonderful prayer of St. Patrick.  They are words I come back to again and again, usually at some point of need.  Indeed, for the last month or two, they have hung on the window shade next to my desk, that I might be reminded of them now and again.  In the dim light of early morning, which is when I am generally at this exercise of study and contemplation, they are not really visible.  But I know they are there.  And isn’t that just the way with us and God?  He’s not really visible.  Too caught up in the sensory world, we can go hours and even days without much noticing Him.  Yet He’s always there, and Christian, there is something in us which knows it.  That something, I think we can put down to being the Holy Spirit, which is to say, God Himself knocking on the door of conscience and reminding us prodigal children.   Look up!  See the mess you’ve chosen and remember what is rightfully yours – rightfully yours because He has willed it so.  Return to your heritage.  Return to the loving embrace of your Father.  But let me pray that prayer of Patrick.  Let me take it to heart once more and truly make it my own prayer this morning.

“I bind upon myself today the power of God to hold and lead; His eye to watch, His might to stay, His ear to hearken to my need.  The wisdom of my God to teach, His hand to guide, His shield to ward, the word of God to give me speech, His heavenly host to be my guard.”  Oh, God, might I do so.  Might I be keenly attentive to Your word, ready to speak as You give me to speak, not out of my frustration, but out of Your wisdom.  Might I find moments amidst my day today to come aside and spend time with You.  I know too well my capacity to compartmentalize, to throw the switch and shift of an instant from contemplating Your instruction to pursuing whatever’s next.  I go to work, and that’s it.  But it needn’t be that way.  There is time I could spend with You, rather than perusing that very anger-inducing news of the day I have just been considering.  I know that we’re supposed to be wary of praying for patience, but it’s clearly patience I need, and I’m certainly not going to obtain it by anxiousness.  No, patience comes with Your wisdom, and as James reminds me in that letter of his, You give wisdom generously and without reproach when we ask.  So, I’m asking.  You know my present trials and concerns.  You know my present weaknesses.  And You know perfectly how to address each and every one of them.  Come, then, my Lord.  Speak, and grant that I might actually listen for a change, and not just listen, but do.  Be my guide and my guard.  You are.  I don’t need to ask You to do that.  I do, however, need to drill it home in my own thinking, don’t I?  You are my guide and my guard, and I must be attentive to Your instruction, that it may indeed go well with me.  May it be so, Father.  Come, sweet Holy Spirit, and keep me in remembrance of these things as the day unfolds, and may I be found following faithfully in the footsteps of my Lord and Savior.  Amen.

Centrality of Prayer (05/02/23-05/04/23)

So, let’s consider this medicine of prayer.  It’s interesting how Paul chooses to set this between the commands to rejoice and to give thanks.  Indeed, it is something we have need to hear when confronted with that command to rejoice always.  Always?  Sorry, I just don’t have it in me right now to rejoice.  Have you not been paying attention?  Don’t you see what all I am dealing with at present?  This is often how we feel, particularly when things get challenging, which for many of us may mean little more than that our comfortably ordered, predictably patterned life has been disrupted.  And rather than do the things that we should that we might be encouraged, we allow circumstantial weight to bear us down, and discover that we have become the fainthearted, the weak.  What has happened?  We’ve lost sight of our true condition.

And so, Calvin perceives in Paul’s instruction a remedy.  If you are cast down, pray.  Prayer will raise your spirits as no other action will.  How often do we observe this very thing as David prays in the Psalms?  Time and again, the psalm begins in concern and even despondency.  It’s one that takes rather a different order, but the verse that comes to mind is Psalm 120:5.  “Woe is me, for I sojourn in Meshech, For I dwell among the tents of Kedar!”  As much as I want peace, everybody around me wants a fight.  As I say, this psalm flows differently, and this note of desperation actually ends the poem.  But it moves swiftly into the response of Psalm 121.  “I will lift my eyes to the mountains.  Where does my help come from?  My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth!”  Can you hear the heart lifting in that?  Can you not feel the load of woe taken from the shoulders of the one who sings these prayers?  And prayers they are, though in poetic, singable form.  They are a communing with God, a hearing of His response to our needs.

If you are cast down, pray.  Calvin proceeds to observe that life is constantly hitting us with things that disturb our peace.  Our days often feel like that, don’t they?  Trials without ceasing!  Of course, it’s not truly so, but it feels that way.  I can’t take any more!  I give up.  But you don’t give up, because you really can’t.  It would only add to your trials and woes if you did.  And you discover that you actually can take more.  You would just prefer it if you didn’t have need to do so.  But it’s not some hidden reservoir of personal strength that carries you on in the face of these trials.  Try that, and you’ll soon find your words to have been prophetic indeed.  No!  But far better you avail yourself of the true source of strength to carry on.  Pray!  And if trials come without ceasing, what better reason to pray without ceasing? 

Indeed, wisdom would tend to suggest we stock up a bit and get to a place of having prayed in advance.  It is somewhat our problem (somewhat?) that we tend to turn to prayer as a means of last resort.  When all else fails, pray.  But that is backward thinking.  Look to your Lord.  Jesus, in the midst of ministry, took Himself away to be alone with His Father, to recharge and prepare.  This wasn’t recovering from unexpected ministry.  This was preparing to minister.  Yes, there is, hopefully, a place for rest after serious ministry because it does require a great deal of energy from us, even if the occasion is all talk.

I used to wonder why my father was so tired when he returned home from work.  I mean, what had he been doing?   He sat at a desk most of his days, when I knew him.  Yes, there would be occasional runs out to the island, but even that was little more than sitting behind the wheel of the boat and pointing it.  How hard is that?  Or the commute.  Long, sure, but it’s not like you had to run it.  You’re just sitting again.  What’s the big deal?  To a kid, this seemed absurd.  This is what you do all day and when you get home you’d rather have a nap than play?  What is wrong with you?  Well, having gone into a field that requires days filled thinking your way through challenges, trying to hold together manifold threads of thought and necessity so that you can weave a solution out of them without causing greater issues, I can tell you:  Sitting, in that situation, can be more exhausting than running.  Or, having endured a season of hour-long commutes:  Yeah, driving amongst all these other madmen is wearing.  It’s the constant alert, the maintaining of awareness of every moving component in every direction around you.  We all know that reaction of the GPS:  “Recalculating.”  But that’s our steady state when driving.  Every little shift in this vehicle’s speed, or that vehicle’s choice of lane, every blink of a tail light up ahead, and the alarm goes off.  “Recalculating.”  Well, friends, the brain requires a fair amount of energy to keep working those calculations.  The senses require great stores of energy to maintain their alertness.  Yes.  Sitting takes a lot. 

And in very similar fashion, so does the seemingly easy task of ministry.  I recall the surprise of discovering just how much it takes out of you serving as an elder.  It’s not the hours spent meeting as a board.  Those are actually relatively refreshing times.  It’s not even the trials that come up dealing with issues that arise.  Some of those could truly try the soul, and certainly would prove sufficient to move you beyond thinking you could deal with matters from your own strength and wisdom.  But even that wasn’t really the source of it.  No, it was, quite simply, the weight of responsibility.  It’s like this.  You recognize that God, for some crazy reason, has assessed you as suitable to the task.  He has set you to stand as shepherd over His sheep.  And you know how dear His sheep are to Him.  He does not suffer their loss, and Scripture offers plenty of input as to how He feels about shepherds that leave them in peril, or worse yet, lead them into it.  There’s a weight.  I’ve been given this duty, and as I look at it, I can’t but notice my utter lack of qualifications.  I can’t do this.  And you’re right.  You can’t.  But you can stand as God’s local representative.  You can be His appointed ambassador and governor.  You can do it because you aren’t doing it.  This same God who appointed you is in you, and He has given you everything needful for life and godliness.  Remember that (2Pe 1:3)?  You are here in this position because He wants you here in this position.  And I would have to suggest that He wants you here in this position because, if nothing else, you have enough spiritual sense to lean hard on His wisdom rather than your own.  That you know you can’t do it is critical.  That you know to come early and often to prayer, that He might equip, might answer, might guide, is critical.

So, you learn, even if it seems at times that the lesson has been forgotten now that the office is a thing of the past.  You learn to pray, because you know He hears.  Indeed, you pray because you know He has already answered.  It’s on this basis, or at least partially on this basis, that Jesus instructs us to a certain brevity in prayer.  “Don’t use meaningless repetition.  That’s a pagan business, for the pagan supposes many words will get them heard by their gods.  But you?  Don’t be like that!  Your Father knows what you need, before you even ask Him” (Mt 6:7-8).  And then, Jesus proceeds to lay out the template for prayer.  You be glorified.  You be obeyed.  Meet our needs for today, and let us be found doing as we should.  Guard us and deliver us.  Amen.  (Mt 6:9-13).  Yes, you can be specific.  I don’t think Jesus was insisting that we should stick with grand generalities in prayer.  But once you’ve made the need known, once you’ve given expression to your grief, or made note of your circumstance, once you’ve turned the matter over to Him, evidence your trust.  Let it go.  Exercise that assurance that He already knows, and He already answered.

It seems to me that repetitive prayer has about it this idea that maybe we can offer God some really good advice as to how He should answer.  Of course, that already misses the mark on several counts.  First off, He’s God and you are not.  Who shall advise Him or give Him counsel?  His knowledge and wisdom are perfect!  Second, it loses sight of that already part.  He knew what you needed before you even thought to ask.  Did you think He just left that package on the shelf until you placed your order?

This leads me back round to one of those questions that always seems to arise.  You may hear it phrased along the lines of, why should we pray?  If God’s already got this, what’s the point?  If my prayers don’t alter God’s decisions, where’s the value?  It comes down to this:  Does prayer alter God’s course, or does God’s course lead me to pray?  Alternately stated, is prayer about changing His mind, or tuning mine?  Well, God does not change.  Neither does He find it necessary to alter His plans, being as He planned perfectly and with full and perfect knowledge from the outset.  You’re talking about the one who had established that you would be among the elect from before the dawn of creation!  You’re talking about the one who, from that same unfathomably ancient moment, had laid out the entire course of human history leading from Adam to Jesus.  And further, He laid out that continued history from Jesus to you.  And He’s also laid out the entirety of that same history from you to the Last Day.  All of it.  In every detail.  Right down to where I’m going to be stopping in these notes today, and what we shall discuss at men’s group this morning, as well as who shall be there, and which donuts each may select.  And you think your prayer changed His mind?  His mind already accounted for your prayer!  Indeed, His mind gave impetus to your prayer that you might think to pray it.

Pray, knowing you pray because He has given you to pray.  Pray as recognizing this reality that He already knew, already has the answer in motion, and it has to keep you humble in your requests, doesn’t it?  Here is an antidote to treating God like a genie.  He has known of your need of this moment since forever.  He has had the answer sorted since that same forever.  You?  You’re likely praying because you’ve been taken by surprise at how events have fallen out – again.  And you  would advise Him as to the best course?  You can’t even see your way to breakfast from here!  So, does prayer change God’s mind?  May as well ask, does prayer change God?  Then, at least, the answer comes clear.  No.  Of course not.  God does not change.  Prayer, dear ones, gets our attention back where it belongs:  On heaven and on heaven’s King.  Prayer puts us in touch with God, and gets us sufficiently out of our distracted reasoning that He can speak.  Prayer, in short, changes us.  Prayer reminds us Whose we are.  Prayer gets us thinking about Him, recalling the depths of His love.  Prayer tunes our minds to remember that He is ever doing what is for our best good, even when we have been too foolish to pray.  Indeed, prayer reminds us that the whole reason we are praying is because He has got us back in a proper mindset that desires to do so.

It’s hard enough, often times, to remember to pray at all.  And here we are instructed to pray unceasingly.  Now, I would venture that any of us, looking at this command, come away with an immediate sense of impossibility.  It can’t be done!  If nothing else, I’ve got to sleep now and again.  And really, how am I to pursue the many necessities of life if all I’m ever doing is praying?  So, maybe we shall simply decide Paul’s gone hyperbolic here.  It’s always, without ceasing, in everything.  Clearly, he’s overemphasizing to make a point or something, right?  Well, honestly, no.  This doesn’t strike me as a place suited to such an understanding.  Generally, when he goes big, you can feel that doxological urge behind it, or he’s expanding to the point of ridiculousness to hammer something home, and he’s usually pretty obvious about it when he does that.  No.  I think these are simple instruction, and with that, we should properly come at them with the sense that if God commands it, then He surely expects that it is at least possible to comply.

You might, with that, turn me back to the Ten Commandments as we now recognize them to apply.  See?  Those were impossible to keep, designed to force our awareness onto our desperate need for a Savior.  You have seen how Jesus dealt with those who thought they had obeyed.  Indeed, I have.  I have also seen that Jesus did obey.  Yes, He is, and was at the time, wholly God.  But He also walked as being wholly man.  If His obedience has been a matter of divine power alone, then I can’t see that His obedience lent any value to His death and resurrection.  Add that we are beyond the point of needing our need for a Savior made clear.  We have already discerned this fact, and indeed, encountered the saving power of Christ s we have heard His call and found ourselves moved to answer.  All of this leaves us to accept that what is instructed here is expected of us.  And what is expected of us is possible to do.  For God has given us everything needful for life and godliness (2Pe 1:3), and these instructions Paul supplies pertain to exactly that.

So, how do we comply?  I find several of our commentaries pointing us in a direction that admits to reason.  The Wycliffe Translators Commentary, for one, writes, “Prayer is an attitude as well as an activity.”  This is key, for while the activity of prayer may not always be possible, the attitude can assuredly be unceasing.  What does that attitude look like?  In what does it consist?  Ironside suggests a pretty simple diagnosis.  He suggests that being in this continuous attitude of prayer simply requires us to walk as those who know themselves to be dependent upon God for all things.  To go about my day at the office in an attitude of prayer, then, is to recognize that even as I dive into whatever tasks and challenges today has in store, I do so as leaning not on my understanding and experience, but leaning on God Who knows all things, knowing that apart from Him I can do nothing (Jn 15:5).  It means that as I try to love my wife and children, and to be a good husband and father, I do so by availing myself of that wisdom which God provides, not by consulting Dr. Spock, or whoever the current preferred expert on family is thought to be.  Now, God, in His wisdom, might direct me to such a source for input, and if He does, then far be it from me to despise it.  It’s the same with medicine, with animal husbandry, farming, or any other aspect of life.  Trusting God does not require us to reject the input of man.  It requires us to test, and to accept that His ways must take precedence.  It means that I can, as I have often suggested in various ways, turn to the writings of Plato and find things in them that are true.  Yet, I must also recognize that there are things there which are not.

Where am I going with this?  Attitude of prayer, acknowledged dependence on God, or as Micah reports God saying, walking humbly with Him.  It’s that humility aspect that is in view.  Humility comes of acknowledged dependence.  But it is a joyous humility, knowing that Him upon whom we depend is utterly dependable, and incorrigibly well-disposed towards us.  There’s your joyousness.  In my need, I know I can trust Him to supply.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to play the game of presumption with Him, because I know better.  I have the enormous benefit of my own father’s example in that, who made it clear that presumption was a good way to get nothing.  When asking a favor, don’t make demands.  It’s a lesson that seems to be lost on many, but it’s one to take firmly to heart.

But I want to loop back to that John 15:5 part.  “Apart from Me you can do nothing.”  Well, how do we remain connected, then?  Prayer!  If you want the life of the Vine running through you, here is how you keep the veins open and flowing.  Our brother has returned from caring for his mother, who had a stroke.  It seems this artery was 80% occluded, and that one 50% occluded, and the end result was that insufficient blood reaches the brain, and boom!  Shutdown.  We have a similar consideration to bear in mind in the realm of spiritual health, for if there’s one thing you don’t need, it would be to suffer a spiritual stroke.  You don’t want anything constricting the flow of life-imparting power from Christ to you, nor blocking the return passage from you to Christ.  Surely, our great desire should be to remain a fruitful branch, or to become one, if we have yet to achieve such state.  The consequences of not doing so are simply too dire.  “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch.  He dries up, and they gather that dead branch, and cast it into the fire to be burned” (Jn 15:6).  But He has loved you, and continues to love you, and thus, you continue to love Him, to abide in Him, and therefore, to bear fruit.  How do we abide?  We pray.

Barnes writes, “We are to maintain an uninterrupted and constant spirit of prayer.”  It’s somewhat the same thought, but he gives it a different sense.  This spirit of prayer, to his thinking, presents us as being of a mind to pray instantly when requested, and also a mind to seek out moments to pray when we are alone.  This is far more challenging, I think, than Ironside’s take, not that his is as easy as it sounds on the surface.  Walk as depending on God for everything?  Sure, why not?  I mean, I know it’s the truth.  It’s just that so much of the time, my male character asserts, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got it now, thanks.  I’m always wrong, as it happens, but that doesn’t seem to stop me from thinking the same way next time.  It’s like that tongue James speaks of as blessing in one breath, and cursing with the next.  These things ought not to be!  But readiness to pray whenever requested?  I don’t know.  Maybe it was easier before email.  I think we like to believe life went at a slower pace back then.  Somebody asked for prayer, it had probably required them to come by, and you could stop whatever it was you had been doing, and take some time with this person to do just that.  Move it to the phone, and the one calling you to tell you to pray has others they need to call, so it’s unlikely you pause then and there to do so.  And it’s quite possible that any prayer beyond the rather immediate, “Oh, that poor so and so,” may get lost in the shuffle.  Bring it to email, and it becomes too much like all the junk mail that comes in of a morning.  We’ve become too adept at scanning the from, and perhaps the subject line, if the from hasn’t already made the call for us, and we’re already moving for the delete button.  This doesn’t need my attention right now.  Delete.  Or maybe we figure we’ll get to it later, which of course, we won’t, so the delete may be deferred for a bit.  But none of this reflects that spirit of prayer which is urged upon us.

And I don’t know about you, but the idea of seeking out moments to pray during the day just sounds entirely foreign to me.  And I know it shouldn’t.  I know I should be nodding along in agreement with all of this advice, and maybe finding cause for a small pat on the back because it has been my habit all along.  And that may move me to some guilty determination to try and do better.  Oh, yeah.  Today, I’ll do that.  (No you won’t.)  Oh, I need to establish a new routine that allows for this.  (Good luck with that.)  I mean, these aren’t impossibilities, but if that’s where you turn, you’re back to your own strength.  You’ve already begun constricting those spiritual veins.  Prayer, after all, is not, must not become some rote exercise with us.  It’s well and good to have specific times set into your day for that purpose.  Absolutely, it is!  It’s rather like the time I have set to come to these studies.  It’s done here and now, so that I have it as ingrained into my being as having breakfast, or getting dressed, or whatever other daily action you care to consider.  But if it’s just something I do because this is what I do?  It has lost value.  If it becomes a thing I must do, because if I don’t, well, I don’t know.  Maybe for me, there’s that slight urgency of getting something up on the web.  But, honestly?  Who reads it?  So who cares?  Other than having it as an alternative storage, perhaps marginally easier to find things in, it’s hardly a matter for urgency.

It’s not about honing my writing skills, and it’s not about showing off my theological chops.  It’s about preaching to myself, more than anything.  It’s about widening those veins so that the richness of my God’s wisdom may flow that much more freely, might indeed more fully inform my day in all its varied activities.  There are other habits that impinge, I know.  There are sundry sites I should wish to review before I launch into my work day.  This being Wednesday, there’s trash that needs to be rounded up and brought to the curb before that same deadline.  And then, of course, there’s the work itself, which tends to impinge even upon the earliest morning thoughts as I’m debating whether to get up or sleep longer.  Nothing more welcome than thoughts about work at 3 in the morning, right?  I mean, thanks for the input, Lord, but I’d ask that You remind me again when I’m actually there later.  Just now, I need more sleep.  And yes, I would acknowledge that those night-time flashes of insight are welcome input of wisdom coming down that rich vein.  Sometimes, it seems, God has to put us to sleep so we’ll shut up long enough for Him to speak.

But back to Barnes.  He observes with concern that any Christian who finds, for whatever worldly reason, that he cannot come to prayer with proper feeling is indeed in a very bad state.  He writes, “There has been evil done to the soul if it is not prepared for communion with God at all times, and if it would not find pleasure in approaching his holy throne.”  This, I think, is one of the great dangers of trying to establish mere habit of prayer.  It swiftly becomes an imposition.  Works tend to do that, don’t they?  Oh, I’ve got to do that.  I don’t really have time for this, right now.  Something’s come up, and schedule is tight, but okay.  I have to do it.  So, quick, let’s toss off a prayer and get this over with.  That, my friends, is not ‘proper feeling’.  Am I the only one who has known such reaction on occasion?  I pray it is not so, for if it is, then woe indeed is me.  But such an attitude is, I think, a warning sign that privilege has become a work.  It may in fact point us to the most immediate need for prayer, not to satisfy some perceived schedule of events, but because there is a clear need.  Something’s wrong in the system, and I need my Great Physician now more than ever.  Yes, I am doubtless mixing metaphors wildly.  But so be it.

There has been evil done, and I have need of my Lord’s tender ministrations to see that evil rectified in me.  I have known long seasons of spiritual dryness when it comes to prayer.  Arguably, it’s been a life-long season, but I can recall seasons when it was not so.  I can recall times when it was an absolute joy to get together with one brother, or with a group, and pray long and seriously.  And I miss that, honestly.  I miss it a lot.  Somehow, prayer with my spouse is different.  For one, we have some wildly divergent views about how that should be approached, what’s suited to the occasion, and so on.  But maybe it’s more to do with the unique perspectives man and woman bring, and I just don’t handle that well.  I don’t know.  And in these morning studies, though I try to leave place for prayer, they often prove to be rushed matters towards the end, when other duties of the day are beginning to press in.  There are answers to this.  There are, somewhere, ways to improve in maintaining this constant spirit of prayer.  And prayer would seem rather critical to that improvement.  But I’m going to try something perhaps a bit odd, just enough to throw me off my routine a bit, and suggest to myself that tomorrow I begin with prayer, rather than trying to find some spot at the end when the urgency of it is strong enough to push aside all else.  Maybe, like moving these study times from second thing in the morning to first thing, that may open up a greater space for God to speak with me, and I with Him.

Father, if nothing else, these last weeks have shown me how much I have need of You.  It’s one of those things that I think I know, but then I discover just how much I’ve been leaning on myself rather than You.  But You have been gracious.  You have been patient even when all patience was gone in me.  And You have been faithful.  How could You be not?  You are my God, and You are God period.  You are the unchanging One, faithful today as You have been in ages past; keeping charge over all things today just as You have been doing since before the beginning.  And still it holds together.  And still I find that all things are working together for my good, and for the good of my beloved wife, this woman You have blessed me with.  I confess, as if You didn’t already know it, that I have found it near enough to impossible to find it in me to rejoice through this, or to give thanks for these things, but I see it.  I see joy maintained by Your Spirit, even through it all.  I see moments of gladness.  I see growth happening in both of us, even if I’m not too keen on the means by which growth has come.  And so, yes, I can say thank You for these weeks.  And I pray we might both have truly learned from them that which was ours to learn.  If nothing else, I pray that You would keep me more attuned to Your company.  I think I have had somewhat a better sense of it of late, yet even so, I know I can too readily just stick with my distractions.  I need help to maintain a proper balance, and I know You are my help and my strength.

Lord, it has been much with me, that comment about the sickness of soul that is indicated by this lack of interest in communing with You in prayer.  And I know that sounds too familiar a description.  I hear my fellow believers who are, at least by their description, far more constant in the activity of prayer, let alone the attitude of prayer.  I see my Janice, with her lengthy mornings spent in such forms of prayer as she pursues.  I know that often, it strikes me as odd, even aberrant, yet the devotion to You is clear enough.  And something in me is rather jealous of that, because I just don’t feel the urge for such times, and it concerns me a bit.  Yet, I could also look upon these times we spend together as I consider Your word, and perhaps that’s a prayerful time of sorts all on its own.  Certainly, it’s a practice that few would claim to pursue in the same fashion, and some, I suppose, are envious of this exercise of mine.  So, perhaps it’s a matter of gifts, a matter of how You’ve individually designed us.  Yet, I would know greater depths to my prayer life.  I would know earnest desire to seek You out for time together during the day, in the evenings, and the assurance that atop these efforts to know what You have revealed of Yourself there is also the intimacy of knowing You personally, as my Father, my Lord, my Beloved.  Even so, let it be done according to Your good and perfect will, and grant that I may see it and be satisfied.

I think I come near to at least finishing this subsection, but I am not there yet.  I am mindful of the counterbalance to my prayer, which is that I must not allow prayer to be no more than rote exercise, the duty of necessity.  It is that, for He is worthy to be obeyed, and here is our instruction:  Pray.  It is, as I was considering yesterday, as necessary to us as the veins which transport blood through my body.  Yet, if it is mere duty, then I dare say, it isn’t prayer.  It is no more prayer than deadpan reading of a Psalm constitutes poetry.  What is before your eyes may be poetry, but what is coming out of your mouth is as meaningful as the aping squawks of a parrot, perhaps even less so.  We have then a balance to discover.  Prayer ought not to be rote performance of onerous duty, but at the same time, it’s not optional.  These spiritual disciplines are not a menu from which to select one or two items and let the rest slide.  They are a thoroughgoing prescription.

Isn’t it something?  We find ourselves battling an illness, and we go see our doctor.  Our doctor gives us a prescribed course of actions to undertake, more than likely involving medicines of some form.  And many of us will take it upon ourselves to alter that prescribed course if it doesn’t suit us, and progress seems good enough in our eyes.  Mind you, we know no more of our inward condition now than we did when we first became ill.  We will convince ourselves that everything is on the mend, because that, after all, allows us to shake free of the bonds of necessity.  And perhaps we are right.  Perhaps we rolled the dice and got lucky this time.  But perhaps not.  Perhaps the disease is still percolating within and we are fooling ourselves in our rebellious insistence on being free of this foreign regimen.

But now, let the same progression play out in one we care about.  Let that one decide, off the cuff, to just up and stop medication, or in some other fashion decide they know better than any darned doctor what their body needs.  Now, how does that rebellious independence look?  How long before you are berating this person for a fool?  How much of that is because you care for them, and how much because you just don’t need the stress of dealing with another emergency on their part?  As you may surmise, this is something of a recap of my last few weeks.  And the response has been mixed at best.  It’s been a rollercoaster of emotion, and a rollercoaster, so far as spiritual considerations are concerned.  There have been highs and lows, slow climbs, and plunging descents.  But through it all, God has remained faithful.  He has shown us both, I think, aspects of ourselves that are not as they should be.  He has shown us both attitudes we have been carrying which are, at the least, overblown, and entirely detrimental to our well-being.  And the message, at least one message, has been don’t suffer gaps in your prescribed treatment.

We know what happens if there are gaps in the flow of medicine in the IV.  Air bubbles are not your friend.  We know, too, though with less concern, that cutting out medicines early at the very least raises the potential for resurgent illness.  Our bodies lie to us all the time, and yet, we will still take their glowing report over the cautions of those who know better.  And sin will cause us to hide away what we have done, lest somebody point out our foolishness or seek to drive us back into compliance.  But take that into the realm of spiritual care.  (Yes, I am trying to make a point here, and not just vent the frustrations of recent events.)  The JFB advises us not to suffer prayerless gaps in our lives.  Precisely!  Those are the bubbles in our spiritual IV.  Those are our sinful ways seeking to take control and deciding we know better than God what we need.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!  In my first-pass notes on this passage, as I prayed, I said, “I might as well cease drinking water and wonder why I am thirsty.”  That is a relatively benign diagnosis of the situation.  But to refuse to pursue the course of treatment for this disease of sin, and then wonder why it is resurgent?  To suffer these prayerless seasons, when blockages form in our spiritual veins, and then wonder at the weakness of our faith?  No.  The time to consider and correct course is before the trials come.  The time to see to the health of our spiritual support structure is now.  And chief consideration must go to this gift of prayer.

The JFB goes on to say, “Cherish the spirit of prayer; let devotion be the chief business of life.”  Now, again, that doesn’t mean we spend all day in nothing other than prayer.  We don’t stop all activity to sit quiet before the Lord, perhaps mumbling out prayers like Hannah seeking answer from God.  We may find such extended times in order on occasion, but even this, I think, we can turn into mere rote exercise or habit, rendering it wasted effort.  It’s not about showing God how much we commit ourselves to doing these things.  It’s about the desire to be in communion with Him, and that may not always consist in parking in our prayer closet.  Most of us simply don’t have that luxury.  Even the Apostles did not have that luxury.  There was still that pesky matter of earning a living, of seeing to the necessities of being alive.  One must eat, and if one would eat they must cook, and if one would cook, they must have that which can be cooked, and that in turn requires earning wherewith to purchase such things, or time spent producing them yourself.  If you have children, they will require time and effort, and guess what?  That time and effort is every bit as much commanded of you as these times of prayer.  And so on, and so on.

Yes, cherish the spirit of prayer.  It may lead you to carve out more such times of private communion in the activity of prayer.  It may just keep you mindful of His company as you go through the day.  It may just attune you to recognize His wisdom when it comes, or to withstand more readily the temptations which the day will doubtless present.  But in all, I am quite thankful to see this thread of a spirit of prayer, and attitude of prayer, a going through each day in the mindful awareness that I am His, and He is mine, and He is ever with me.

Lord, I know how fast that awareness can slip from me, how readily I can turn to things which, to be honest, I would prefer You were not with me to witness.  But You are, and this my heart knows very well.  Let my head remember.  Let my eyes remember, and turn away from those things they ought not to take interest in.  Let me be more keenly aware of Your company, and glad of it.  And grant, as the new day begins, that I might face it with greater grace than yesterday.  And may this continue to be my story as each day unfolds, as You continue Your patient work in me.

God's Will (05/05/23)

I come to the last clause of this short passage:  “This is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”  Now, the first point to be recognized in this is sufficiently clear, although its proper extent may be open to discussion.  This is God’s will for you.  What is? Well, certainly that gratefulness commanded in this same verse.  To give thanks in everything is God’s will for you.  Barnes, for one, leaves it there.  This gratefulness is, he suggests, what God requires of you in Christ.  But then, we should have to sort out what the significance is of it being in Christ.  But you will find many translations, and many commentaries, suggesting that this matter of God’s will links all the way back through verse 16.  Matthew Henry would be in that camp.  In his view, it comes down to this:  We always have every reason to praise God and give thanks.  Always.  And there always being reason, this is always His will for us.

Perhaps the most striking thought I came across in this regard comes from the JFB.  “God’s will is the believer’s law.”  Some of us might get caught up on the point that it’s thelema that appears here, a matter of preference on God’s part, not of decree.  We might even make that some basis for wiggling out of any sense of necessity in the instruction.  Well, yes, He’d prefer that, but it’s just a preference, and we can do as we please.  Well, yes, you can do as you please, and as a child of God, one might hope that it would please you to please Him.  It’s as though He had taken us aside and said, “You know what would really make me happy, My child?  If you were always filled with joy, always thankful for what I bring to you, and always seeking opportunity to talk with Me like this.”  And hearing it thus, perhaps we would find cause to make it our business to do just that.  Maybe.

There is one further comment I wanted to look at here, because it begins to supply some understanding for that last bit, ‘in Christ Jesus’.  The Wycliffe Translators Commentary, which I again note I have found to be the most often mentioned commentary in my study of this book, has this to say.  “God’s will includes constant joy, ceaseless prayer, and boundless thanks, made both necessary and possible in Christ Jesus.”  It is because of Christ, you see, that we can find grounds for joy even in the worst of our days.  It is because of Christ that we can look at our trials and know that there is good coming of them, whatever the present case may seem to be.  And so, joyful thanksgiving in prayer is possible because we know ourselves to be in Him.  And the possibility produces at the same time the necessity.  If, in Christ, we find ourselves able to comply, and if in Him we find ourselves with sufficient cause to do so, then it takes up the strength of necessity.  What is it James says?  “For the one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, it is sin” (Jas 4:17).  You know that this constant joyous thanksgiving prayer is the right thing to do, because in Christ you have come to know the Father.  He has revealed Him to you, and made known to you what it is that God requires of you.  You know.  Now do.  God’s will is your law.  It is your law, because He has given you every reason to so act, and He has given you reason that you might, having learned of His ways, see how reasonable it is that you should do so.

Put it this way.  To seek always these opportunities for prayer just makes sense.  Here is your lifeline.  Grab hold.  Here is air to breathe.  Inhale.  Here is your sustenance, your lifeblood.  Take care to keep it all flowing and flowing well.  You know Him now.  You can see that all things are working together for your good.  You may not always see how.  You may not presently discern how the current thing is producing any good outcome.  But it’s not the thing that matters.  It’s Him.  You know Him.  You know His goodness.  You know His steadfast love for you.  You know how much you mean to Him.  Therefore, in spite of what the senses may be reporting at the moment, you know great good is coming, and therefore, you can be joyous even in the trial.  You know, at minimum, that these things are producing for you an eternal weight of glory.  They are strengthening you to endure.  They are showing you your progress, and showing you, perhaps, where you need to be working a bit harder.  They are showing you that your Father loves you enough to discipline you.  And there, too, we have more than sufficient cause for thanksgiving. 

Yes, Father, thank You!  Thank You that You care for me.  You don’t leave me to wander off after my own poorly considered plans.  You don’t give up and let go of me.  You keep on me.  You keep pursuing the work of sanctification in me, that I might indeed come to be fit for Your presence when at last I have reached my fulness of days.  I will say that it seemed to me there was at least some small shift of spirit yesterday, a somewhat more constant awareness of Your company.  It could have been better, to be sure, and I have none to blame but myself that it was not so.  But thank You.  The need remains, as I say, for more.  But I thank You for this evidence of change, and may it please You to so will and work in me that I lay hold of this beginning and exercise myself to see it established and growing.  This, I know, can only come of Your working.  But this, I also know, will not come of Your working if I disincline to take up my part in the action.  Or perhaps I should more rightly say, it will not come of Your working until I determine to do my part.  Even so, Lord.  Bring the change.  I pray it shall find me ready to change.  For change is surely needed.