grace

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Christianity, confession, forgiveness, God, grace, Lord's Prayer, prayer

My oldest grandson is a charmer.  He is sweet, gentle, generous,  thoughtful and a con artist in the making.  He will work the cuteness angle, bat those impossibly long lashed eyes and convince you that black is white.  His most overworked con, however involves the sentence, “It was an accident”.  This sentence covers a multitude of sins, from a cup slipping through his fingers, to throwing a ball at something, to deliberately pushing his brother down.  

Yet this is also one of the hallmarks of his generosity.  One day I was helping him with a task when I dropped something on the floor.  He immediately said, “that’s okay Grammie, it was an accident.”  Then yesterday I left a glass of juice sitting where the baby could get it and with a thunk, it spilled all over.  My boy jumped in and said, “It’s okay Mommy, it was an accident.”  I said, “It’s okay if Mommy is mad at me, I should have checked where the glass was.  His immediate response, “No Grammie, Mommy is not mad at you, it was an accident.”

It seems to me that there are some lessons here about prayer. We see those lessons in the Lord’s Prayer as we ask God for our daily bread (the time we spend with God) and ask him to forgive our sins as we have forgiven others.

Lesson 1:  We need to be honest in our confession.  Was what we did an accident?  An oversight?  Or the result of our attitude and deliberately done.  We cannot con God.  We need to be honest about ourselves and our motives when we ask for forgiveness.

Lesson 2:  forgive us as we forgive others….we need to be as willing to forgive.  Those around us are simply trying to figure out life with God just as we are.  They make the same mistakes and have the same failures.  When we are generous in forgiving others, then God promises to be generous in forgiving us.

Now I am fairly certain the God doesn’t say, “It’s okay, Ena, it was an accident”, but he does say, “I love you.  In Jesus Christ you are forgiven.”

Aaah, the sweet sound of grace.  

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friendship

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Christianity, friendship, God, prayer

I am having a wonderful time with my grandsons.  But as they are only 3 and 1 the conversation does get limited.  Yes that’s a ball.  Good job drawing.  Yummy.  Car.  A car says vroom.  The nice thing is that because we talk on the phone often our relationship picked up immediately without any real ‘shy” time.  I love our time together.  It is very precious to me.  Yet, as much as I love those conversations, there are moments when I long for adult conversation.

A couple of days ago, my daughter and I travelled to visit a friend for a play-date.  The boys played with their friend, my daughter talked with her friend, and I talkled with the friend’s mother, who as it happens, has been a long time friend of mine.  We hadn’t seen each other since August, and had only emailed infrequently in the interim, but we sat down with a cup of tea and had a great deep conversation.  We talked about all those things that are of the greatest importance….. our children and their  life-mates, our grandchildren, our faith, God, our congregaitons, God’s calling, and the importance of the spiritual disciplines. 

Our conversation flowed, as if we had not been apart for the last 8 months with no contact.  We just picked up where we left off.  My friend commented that it was much the same way in the depth of her relaionship with God.  She has noticed that it can take 2 to 3 weeks of no study and no prayer before she notices the lack of God’s presence in her life; but that when she sits down with God the relationship they share picks up right where it left off.  They don’t have to try and re-establish thier relationship, it is there as solid as it ever was. 

Picking up with God after a period of absence is just like sitting down with a good friend who you haven’t seen for a long time and the friendship takes off like it was only yesterday.

It seems to me that we can get in the way of picking up that friendship.  We complain about the distance between us and God and we don’t know how to get it back.  We can feel guilty about letting the relationship slip and that guilt holds us back.  We get out of the habit of prayer and the new habits take root in our lives….. BUT if we just stop and spend time with God again, we will discover that our time together is as rich and deep and meaningful as it has always been.  . 

failure

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attitude, cats, Christianity, God, prayer

I blame the cat.  Last night I crawled into bed after a very busy and productive day.  I remembered that my new attitude was “Not too tired to pray.” and so I did start to pray.  And then the cat curled up beside my pillow, nestled his head on my palm and started to purr.  I stroked his ears and told him what a wonderful cat he was and then…. we both fell asleep.  Such was the lure of  a soft warm body and the peacefulness of a purring cat.

 

This morning I remembered my renewed commitment and apologized to God.  I blamed the cat, and then with a sense of wryness confessed to my Lord, thatit really wasn’t much of an excuse.  I could have prayed, the cat wouldn’t have known the difference between the words, “you are such a good cat” and “I thank you God for the blessings of this day.”

So tomorrow I leave to spend 2 weeks with my two gorgeous grandsons.  I no doubt will be tired at the end of each day.  That’s two whole weeks to practice my new attitude.  I’ll try to report in on how it goes.

 

Too tired

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Christianity, God, heaven, Jesus, prayer, re, resurrection

I am truly blessed to have great friends who say profound things that make me think and ponder.  This is the snippet that has kept me thinking yesterday and today…

After the resurrection Jesus didn’t take  any time off.  He went to see the disciples….

Most of us will have a busy couple of days and we will head for bed, and say, “Hey it’s been tough and I’m tired, I’ll pray tomorrow.”

What if Jesus had taken that attitude.  “Hey God, I’ve had a rough weekend.  In fact it was hell.  I think I’ll take a few days off and rest up.”  But Jesus didn’t say that.  He rose from the grave, appeared to Mary, ascended to the Father and then appeared to the disciples.  He ministered to them, blessed them, prepared them to receive the Holy Spirit, and took the last few chances he would have to teach them something.  

So maybe  I need to check my own attitude, and instead of saying, “i’m too tired to pray,” and instead pray.  Surely I haven’t done anything as difficult as Jesus did, and if he didn’t take a day off from doing God’s will, maybe I shouldn’t either.

I need a new attitude, and I am going to try this one on for size:

Never too tired to pray.

 

The other day a…

Tags

Bible, Father, friends in Christ, God, holy spirit, intercessory prayer, prayer, Son

The other day a friend and I were talking about the growing trend in some congregations to make worship for the  worshiper.  When this happens worship becomes about what you or I need, want, desire or feel and not about giving honor and praise to God.

That conversation started me thinking about what Eugene Peterson says about the new Trinity.  He writes that we have been trained to to be in control and to choose what is best for us, and as a result we can end up seeing ourselves as “a divine self in charge of our own lives.”   It is no  wonder then, that even in our worship we have become self-centered and choose what we need and want.  In Eat This Book, Peterson writes,

 

The sovereign self expresses itself in Holy Needs, Holy Wants, and Holy Feelings.  …the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating our needs, wants and feelings.  My needs are non-negotiable.   My so-called rights, defined individually, are fundamental to my identity.  …My wants are evidence of my expanding sense of kingdom.  …My feelings are the truth of who I am.

What concerns me is that I know people in the church who are like that.  What alarms me is that I can be like that, and that is so often evident when I pray.  I pray about what I want.  I ask God for what I think I need.  I remind God that I don’t like the way he is ordering my life and that I think he should arrange this, that, or the other instead.

Peterson argues that the corrective to this “me centered theology” is found in Scripture.  The key for us is to do as the angel commanded John in the vision on the Isle of Patmos…. EAT THIS BOOK.  He writes, 

it us so urgent to revive the angel’s strong command to St. John.  If we want to keep our identity, if we want a text to live by that keeps us in the company of God’s people, keeps us conversant with who he is and the way he works, we simply must eat this book.

It seems to me, that when we immerse ourselves in Scripture that we discover the corrective to the self-centered theology.  We stop being a people of wants, needs and feelings and learn to see ourselves in the light of God’s revelation of himself to us, in creation and in salvation.  What God has done for us in Jesus is fundamental for our identity–we are children of God.  Our wants, needs and desires are subdued and we proclaim with gratitude that God supplies all of our needs.  Instead of our feelings defining the truth of our own little universes, we learn that God’s word is truth and it becomes the truth that we live by.

How does this affect the way that I pray?  Over the years I have learned that we (I) can pray for something so often and with such fervor that we begin to believe that what we want is God’s will.  When I want something very badly, when I have a concern for myself that I need prayer for… I leave the praying to others.  I tell them the situation, and then I ask them to pray that God’s will and direction will become clear and that the wisdom of God’s Spirit will direct my actions (and those of any others involved in that situation.)  And I am particular about who I ask to pray for me.  There are some very special friends that God has given me, who are wise and spirit filled, whose counsel I have found to be trustworthy and these are the people that I ask to pray for me.  

The benefit of this is that first of all I don’t cloud the issue with my needs, wants, and feelings.  The people who are praying for the important issues in my life can be trusted to pray, they don’t just say they’ll pray and then forget about me.  And most importantly they will pray for God’s way of blessing to be  revealed so that when the time comes, I can walk the road before me with confidence.  

Do I still have an outcome that I want to happen?  Yes.  I am human and I struggle with all that being human means.  But I desire to live a life that honors God and so I am willing to leave the praying to others and the outcome to God…what ever that may be.

And now, to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit be the glory, now and forevermore.  Amen.

do prayers make a difference?

Tags

God, holy spirit, prayer, the church

In my denomination we have been spending a lot of time lately wondering about the future.  We are in decline.  We wonder about and search out church growth strategies.  Sometimes we want to jump on the bandwagon of whatever innovations that seem to work in other congregations.  And we forget the one necessary thing.

Those people who have been listening to my preaching the past few years will tell you that one thing I say over and over again is this:  “It is not an accident that the Holy Spirit came when the church was in prayer.”

We read in Acts 2:   ^1-4 When the Feast of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force—no one could tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks, and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them.  (The Message)

This was the original model for church growth, and as we continue through Acts we keep  reading that the believers met regularly for worship in the Temple, and then gathered in homes for prayer and the breaking of bread… and that God added to their numbers daily those who were being saved.

It really is that simple, and that profound.  The problem is that we don’t feel comfortable engaging in prayer.  We aren’t sure that we know how to pray.  We are afraid that God won’t listen to our prayers.  We don’t know how to begin.

The place to begin, is at the beginning.  Pray.  Just pray.  Babies don’t sit down and worry that they don’t know how to talk to their parents.  They simply try talking, one word at a time.  Sometimes  those words are so unclear that only the parents understand what they really are.  But they are those first awkward attempts at speech, attempts which the parents encourage over and over again, until one day that baby is a fairly fluent toddler who talks non-stop.

That is how we learn to pray.  By praying.  I have been re-reading the book, “The only necessary thing” –a compilation on Henri Nouwen’s books on prayer.  In the preface Wendy Wilson Greer writes, “On several occasions I asked Henri to recommend books on prayer to me…He always said emphatically, ‘You learn to pray by praying.'”  Yet Greer was so grateful to have had Nouwen as a guide in her journey of learning to pray, and so after his death she compiled some of her favorite lessons on prayer gleaned from his books.  Those lessons comprise the book, “The only necessary thing.”

This book begins at the beginning.  Just pray.

Nouwen writes in “Prayer and Ministry”

The more we pray–in the sense of living a prayerful life–the more we desire to pray.  If we live a prayerful life, then there is a growing desire to spend more time with God and God alone.  It is always the opposite of what people think.  It is not, “oh my life is prayer so I don’t have to say prayers.”  Rather, the desire to pray and to spend time with God and God alone is always growing.  

I have to say that since starting to blog about my own prayer journey, I have discovered that I think about God more often, I meditate on the spiritual dimension of events, I am more aware of my need to pray.  Do I still have unsuccessful days.  Of course.  But the discipline of sharing my journey with you, has caused me to pray more which has caused me to desire to spend more time with God.  

Prayer is the route of blessing, the source of strength and the beginning of passionate service.  It begins in individuals and then flows into the congregations with whom they worship.  My prayer for you is that you will enjoy prayers’ blessing, strength and passion, and be filled with the Holy Spirit.   

Finding God in Unexpected Places

Tags

creation, Easter, God, hope, Jesus, life, resurrection, tomb

On Friday afternoon I scrolled through my cousin’s photos of a Good Friday “hike” to commemorate the journey that Jesus took from judgement, to the cross, to the tomb.  The photo journal was for me an unexpected treasure, personally and as someone who seeks to know and understand God.

First of all that hike took me home.  I miss the West Coast and as the worshipers walked through the forest I recalled the damp coolness of the air under the trees, the musty dank aroma of the fecundity of the earth.  I felt comforted and restored with the beauty of God’s creation.

As I reflected on this journal and what it meant for the remembrance of Good Friday, it seemed to me that the richness of the earth, the freshness of ferns and new growth at the base of  the towering trees hinted at the promise of Easter.  Such a different journey from that first one taken through the dirty streets of Jerusalem, then enduring the scorching sun on the top of a cross  topped hill.  Even though the hope is there, we are not aware of it….and we certainly are unaware of the hope as the stone is  rolled across the opening in the rock.  We are plunged into despair.

But what really struck me was the photo of  the location where these pilgrims stopped at the tomb.  

This tomb is not a dry life forsaken place in the hillside dessert.  This tomb is covered in moss and teeming with life.  That of course is the promise that we look forward to–the promise of life.  Yet I think that the message here is much deeper, it is a message about finding God, when we look for him, in unexpected places.

One summer I took a course on the Midrash, looking at how the stories told about Scripture point us to the truth that God seeks to reveal.  One of the stories told was about the day that Joseph was thrown into a cistern by his brothers, who subsequently sold him into slavery.

The midrash said that the cistern was empty and there was no life there, except a snake and a scorpion.  The question of course, is, if there is no life there, can God be found there?  

But then upon reflection if there was a snake and a scorpion there was life there.  It may not be the kind of life with which we would like to  share a space, but it is life.  Where there is a snake and a scorpion, there is creation.  And where there is creation, God is present.  Where God is present there is hope.  Where there is hope there is salvation.  So it was for all of Joseph’s family as God’s purpose was fulfilled in Egypt.

So it is for us as God’s purpose was fulfilled in the empty tomb.  There is no place that is so devoid of life that we cannot find God.  The key is that we need to keep looking, and we need to be prepared to find God waiting for us in unexpected places.  

An Easter Response

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Easter, Jesus, Meditation, praise, worship

When I woke up this morning, I was humming the hymn When I survey the wondrous cross, and the words of the fourth verse were running through my mind.  It seems like such an appropriate response to the miracle of life, forgiveness and salvation.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

I have spent the whole morning pondering this hymn and wondering if it were in my power what is it  that I could give God that would be equal to the gift he has given me.    There is nothing.  And that is  the point of a gift of grace, it is freely given with no expectation on any of us to make an appropriate response.  Just as we cannot earn our salvation, we cannot pay for it after ward.

All we can do, is to pour out our love and gratitude before God–so that is  what I will do.  In a few minutes I will go to worship and in the company of the other saints in this place will sing praises to God.  Jesus Christ is Risen.  He is risen indeed.  Hallelujah.

Mr.Toad’s wild adventure

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Christianity, God, Good Friday, Jesus, Meditation

When I graduated from theological school I went with my sister and my daughter on a trip to Disneyland.  I loved one ride in particular, a part of the Alice in Wonderland story, Mr. Toad’s wild adventure.  As rides went, it was pretty tame, which meant that it was perfect for me.  But the part that impressed me, and which to this day is the only part that I remember is the stop we made at the judges bench, where we were pronounced guilty and directed through the swinging doors to hell.  We plunged into utter darkness.  The overwhelming stench of sulpher filled our nostrils.  We descended down the tunnel, and the air became fetid, and heavy as we traveled through the steamy underworld.  Then we rounded a corner and in the dark, right in front of our eyes was the smirk of the Cheshire Cat.

This image often comes to mind as I meditate on the Biblical truth that we are all sinners and worthy of eternal punishment.  So it seemed to me that today is a good day to introduce another of the Spiritual Disciplines that I attempt to practice…..MEDITATION.  The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible defines Meditation as:  Prayerful rumination upon God, his Word and his world.  I’m not sure how a ride from a fantasy world fits into this definition, but the images invoked by that ride, often causes me to think about the journey that Jesus took through death and hell.

Tomorrow is Good Friday, and as I reflect and meditate on the death of Jesus and what it means for me, I recall  portions of Mr. Toad’s adventure and impose them upon the sacrifice of Jesus.  In my mind I can see Jesus standing before the judge and being pronounced guilty.  I can see Jesus being sent through the doorway to hell and plunging into the utter darkness.  And I can see the Cheshire cat-like grin of Satan as he gloats in triumph over the victory that he thinks that he has won.

Then I recall with joy that this is not Satan’s victory, but God’s.  Jesus paid the penalty for the sin of humankind and forever ensured our righteousness (right standing) with God.  Paul writes to the Romans saying:

Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.  Romans 5: 18

 

 

 

 

Prayer for Holy Week

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prayer

Eternal God,
whose Word silences the shouts of the mighty:
Quiet within us every voice but your own.
Speak to us through the suffering and death of Jesus Christ,
that by the power of your Holy Spirit
we may receive grace to show Christ’s love
in lives given to your service. Amen.  (The Worship Sourcebook)