Tag: god

the profound prayer of Jesus

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

Jesus was actually quite a wise student of human nature. When his disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he gave the best answer. His prayer includes everything we need. It’s theologically, practically, psychologically and poetically brilliant.

  • Worship: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Your name.
    • This reminds me that all prayer and living must be done in the glad worshipful awareness that God is our Father, and that God is the ultimate reality over all creation.
  • Submission: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
    • This reminds me that ultimately I have to submit to God’s plan and desire. God is the ground of all ethical/moral imagination. All notions of health, well-being and flourishing are only able to be conceived or pursued because of the sovereign permission and power of God.
  • Gratitude: Give us this day our daily bread…
    • This reminds me that God provides everything: a universe, a fertile planet with liquid water and friendly for complex life, grain and humans who know how to make flour, and ultimately the nourishment and simplicity of bread. It reminds me of the need to share bread with the needy. It reminds me that there is enough to go around. It reminds me that I can be secure in the provision of God.
  • Reconciliation: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
    • This reminds me that my own experience of God’s forgiveness is linked with my own willingness to be forgiving. If I stay angry, resentful and self-pitiful toward others, I will hinder my capacity to engage fruitfully with the mercy of God that is continually offered to me and the people I may be angry with.
  • Righteousness: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the Evil One.
    • This reminds me that I am always progressing either towards sin or righteousness. I’m either going with the flow of the Evil One, or seeking the power and presence of the Holy One. If that sounds binary, it’s because it is. Some things are just that simple.
  • Mission: For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever – Amen.
    • This reminds me to carry this prayerful unceasing awareness into each day. My life is offered to God’s mission. Every situation I may face is an opportunity to practice Worship, Submission, Gratitude, Reconciliation and Righteousness. Everywhere. Always. Till kingdom come.

The final observation is that each line instills a principle that enables the next.

Worshipful awareness of God’s ultimacy compels me to submit to his reign over all…
This enables me to see and appreciate his provision…
This security in God’s love is the foundation for giving up my anger and working at reconciliation…
And if I’m secure in God and being reconciled with others, I’m less likely to have a mind that feels angry, victimised, wronged, sore and therefore less tempted to engage in a range of soothing, self-justifying sins like gossip, vengeance, lust, greed, substance abuse, self-harm or other-harm.

Lord, you are the king of the universe. It’s all about you.
I worship you in all of my scientific ignorance and all my poetic babbling.
Your way is what we need. It’s what I need.
If we did what you want, we would know peace.
Literally everything is a gift from you…
From singularity to solar systems to sourdough…
From creation to redemption.
I am safe in your loving provision and forgiveness.
Unclench my angry fists towards others who I feel wronged by…
And hush the frustrated self-talk that blocks the flow of your mercy to me, and through me to others.
Help me help myself to be a person of reconciliation, forgiveness and understanding.
Help me help myself to say no to the luxurious comforts of indulgent greed, lust and power.
Unlock the chains I bind myself in.
Train me to be of service to others in your mission of love for all people and all creation.
It is always all about You.
Amen.

fashionable help

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

In my arrogance…
I don’t want help that looks to simply like help…
I don’t want help that makes me look too desperate…
I wouldn’t want anyone to think I really needed help…
I’d rather be seen as someone who is a smug curator of the most desirable help.

In my arrogance…
I want fashionable help.

In my arrogance…
“I lift my eyes up.
Up to the mountains.
Where does my help come from?
My help comes from…”
Things that sound cool…
Things I can wear like fashion accessories…
Things like “12 step spirituality”
or “neuroscience”
or the scintillating book quotes I might drop…

What about people whose help is… God?
What about people who find it helpful to listen to Christian top-40 worship music?
What about people whose help is saying the serenity prayer?

Instead of arrogance…
intelligent help for intelligent people…
trendy help for trendy people…

What about simple help for simple people…

Lord make me humble.
Make me a servant.

the sneaky allure of selfishness

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

I’m a prayer guy, and I’m a fan of 12-step spirituality.

So one of the resources I use for prayer is the guidance offered in the AA Big Book for step 11.

It suggests some patterns of meditation and prayer “upon awakening”. Here’s the first bit of advice…

“On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.”

AA Big Book, page 86

I am in awe of how practical this advice is. If I’m not directed by God, I will eventually (or immediately!) drift into spiritually unhelpful ways of thinking about my day. It mentions three huge categories of bad day-planning: “self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.”

In my insecurity, I can lapse into the self-pity of imagining how certain situations may not go my way, or dreading the experience today of the effects of having been wronged yesterday.

In my self-protecting fear, I can drift into dishonesty, looking at the day ahead with a distorted lens that lies to myself by exaggerating the good that I think I might do, or minimising the mistakes I may make.

In my grandiosity (itself a product of insecurity), I can wade into the waters of imagining how impressively I might perform in this or that situation.

Later on in these couple of pages of advice, the AA big book has a strong suggestion around making our prayers that are oriented to being useful to others.

We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only. We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped. We are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends. Many of us have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn’t work. You can easily see why.

AA Big Book, page 87

I don’t think it is theologically wrong to pray for ourselves, of course. But it is not hard to see the wisdom of this advice. Our thinking about the day, and our ways of going about the day itself, are quickly distorted by self-focused motives. Heck, I can find myself drifting into worry, fear or self-protecting resentment even during a time of prayer itself!

The advice here is to always remember our priority of being useful to others. That is damned good advice.

surprising God speech

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

This morning I am up to 2 Chronicles 35 in my daily readings.

I was excited to read more about Josiah, who is becoming a bit of a favourite of mine. No king like him before or after him, says 2 Kings 23:25. The account of Josiah in 2 Kings is very brief in its narration of Josiah’s death. It simply says that Josiah went out to fight against the Egyptian king Necho, who “faced him and killed him.” It’s given as a very short footnote in the life of the great reformer.

The account in 2 Chronicles has a fair bit more to say about Josiah’s death. Despite all of Josiah’s inspiring life: the years of learning as a young king, his seeking after God, the purging Judah of idols and images, the repairing of temple, and the celebrating of a Passover like no other, we are given a blunt account of his stubborn end.

Necho came up to fight against Carchemish by the Euphrates. Josiah is determined to stop this, and moves into position. Pharaoh is off-put and sends a message to Josiah, effectively saying: “Hey, what are you doing? My fight is not with you, but with them.” And then we have a fascinating record of communication from this Pharaoh. This Egyptian brings God into it, saying, “God commanded me to make haste. Refrain from meddling with God, who is with me, lest He destroy you.”

That’s quite a statement. “I’m acting under the command of God. God is with me. If you resist me, you’re resisting God, and you’ll be destroyed.”

Immediately some of our intuitive sensibilities leap in here in confusion. “Oh sure, the Egyptian king may be claiming that God has sent him, but we know that God only speaks to and through the good people of Israel, like prophets, priests and kings. God doesn’t speak through Pharaohs…”

But then, the narrative continues and shatters those sensibilities: we are told that Josiah, unwilling to turn away, disguised himself and went to fight, and in so doing “did not heed the words of Necho from the mouth of God.”

What? This is not just Necho being used as a mouthpiece for God, but God’s mouth being used as a channel for… Necho’s words!?.

Here again we have an expectation-shattering narrative. God gets involved in the world in ways we don’t like, don’t approve of, and don’t expect. God not only gets involved with passionate prayerful reformers like Josiah, but also with warring Egyptian kings who are being resisted by the ‘good guys’.

As we learn much later in the biblical metanarrative, God is not only the God of the Jews, but of Gentiles also (Romans 3:29). God can speak through stars, donkeys and silence as well as prophets, preachers and holy writ. When it comes to God, we do have a definitive narrative to help us know when something is or isn’t from God, but we also do well not to overly absolutize or restrict our expectations.

Maybe today God is speaking through people and groups we don’t like, as well as ‘The Christians’.

God speaks in surprising ways. May I listen, hear and obey.

the idolatry of seeking bad help

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

In 2 Chronicles 28, amidst the familiar but irregular back-and-forth rhythm of ‘good king, bad king’ in this part of the Bible, we are introduced to King Ahaz. He did not do what is right.

Bad king.

One of the familiar refrains of this part of biblical history has to do with burning incense to, building altars to, or not removing the high places to foreign gods. The original readers or hearers of these stories would have known the practical detail of the idolatry that is summarised by such words. But we modern readers don’t.

Early in the chapter (28:2-4) we get a list of his idolatrous practices (the Baal images, the child sacrifice, the incence at the high places, hilltops and trees), but later (28:22-23) we are given a window into his idolatrous mindset. Here’s how the text puts it.

In his time of trouble King Ahaz became even more unfaithful to the Lord. He offered sacrifices to the gods of Damascus, who had defeated him; for he thought, “Since the gods of the kings of Aram have helped them, I will sacrifice to them so they will help me.”

Here is the implicit idolatrous ideology we are invited to consider: if you want help in a particular area, you sacrifice particular things to particular gods. If you have food insecurity or drought, you sacrifice grain to get more from the gods. If childbirth and reproduction isn’t going so well, you might sacrifice your child to get help with having more children.

By contrast, the faithful leaders and prophets understood that the Lord doesn’t require dead children, or even rams or bulls, to bless his people. They knew how inhumane and anti-life such practices and ideology were.

In our modern world, we don’t literally make these same kinds of sacrifices, but we still can fall into idolatrous thinking that leads to idolatrous living. We see other people who seem to be enjoying certain things, so we sacrifice to get in on the action. We might think: “Their holiday photos looked amazing. I’m going to work extra and save so we can go.” or “That newest smartphone model has amazing features, instead of using my money for other purposes, I’ll shell out for one.”

Those are just some easy examples. Idolatry can be much more subtle. Even church leaders can be tempted: “Their church services look amazing, let’s invest in all of their tech so we can have that too.”

Then and now, the contrast is grateful obedience to the Lord and not enslaving ourselves to a false god, even if the offer looks enticing. The things we really need, oxygen, grace, meaning, purpose, are free of charge and not in short supply.

the king and the parent

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As the theologically-astute preachers’ line goes, “If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.” When it comes to the Lord’s prayer, we are not so much looking at as listening to Jesus. He speaks of God as “Our Father”. God is just ‘like’ a Father, God is a Father.

Much has been said about how it is virtually and psychologically impossible for our human experiences of fatherhood (and motherhood) to not colour the way we understand and experience our relationship with our heavenly Father.

For those of us who have the privilege of being parents ourselves, this dynamic divides into two: We experience parenting ‘upwards’ and ‘downwards’. And both experiences colour us.

Positively we may be able to remember wonderful moments where our parents imprinted us with God-like love. And we likewise may have managed to have supremely divine moments where we were conscious of participating in truly loving parenting to a child of our own.

Negatively, however, our ‘upward’ experience of parenting in various ways can be a source of wounding as we recall various times that we were under-parented or over-parented, manipulated or abandoned, spoiled or abused.

Likewise, our ‘downward’ experience of parenting can provide a steady diet of shame as we fail, again and again, to live up to even our own limited standards of what a good parent should look like, and see the disappointment in our child.

In short, upwards wounds damage our trust in our parents, and downward shame damages our trust in ourselves. It is psychologically hard work, shall we say to trust God when our trust in our parents and ourselves is broken. We may scan the Bible and find stories that seem, especially when disconnected from the scriptural metanarrative and interpreted in the counter-narrative of progressive secularism, to show a God acting in ways that are wounding.

Back to Jesus we must go.

Jesus shows us not only how to truly see the loving Fatherhood of God, but also what it looks like when a Son fully trusts and enjoys that fatherhood. Jesus shows us a Father that is just, for sure, but radically merciful and self-sacrificing. A God who can be trusted.

thoughts on prayer

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

Prayer is unavoidable. We are always praying. We are always giving expression to spoken or unspoken, conscious or sub-conscious hopes, longings, hurts or questions.

Specifically, prayer is the essential, basic and transformative practice that followers of Jesus the King must engage in if they are to even begin to truly participate in the life of the kingdom. There seem to be different levels or modes for this.

  • At one level, prayer is all about personal sustenance and devotion. Whether this looks like a desperate plea for God’s presence, power, transformation, rescue, and deliverance, or a disciplined habit that trains and forms me in the shape of Jesus.
  • At another level, prayer is about communal development and formation. This could look like a simple shared practice where we support one another on the road of discipleship, or like an intensive and rigorous programme of activity to collaboratively pursue dynamic change in a community.
  • At another level, prayer is about societal transformation and revival. This could look like quiet, gentle and empathetic longing for the local and global state of affairs to shift in God’s time, or a public protest march calling on God to judge, heal & revive society.

All three of these modes of kingdom prayer ask for, plead for, work for, long for, seek for the transformative presence of God. In my personal space. In a shared community space. In my neighbourhood, city, nation or indeed the world.

All three modes of prayer pray the same three words over hearts, communities and societies: Come. Lord. Jesus.