Beyond Cameraman Prayers

If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

Matthew 21:22

cameraman So, I ask for relief from financial distress, safety in travel, smooth relationships, healing from every sort of malady that I hear about.

Aren’t they the best prayers?  Don’t those requests reveal my belief in the truth of this verse?

Yes and no.  I think my eye gets so fixated on what comes after the comma that I fail to weigh the significance of the words that come before.  “If you believe…”

The second part of the phrase really has no substance or benefit apart from the first.
It raises the question, what do I have to believe in order for the second phrase to stand in all its truth?  Psalm 145:13 answers that question.

The LORD is faithful to all his promises.”

“This, then, is the prayer of faith: to ask God to accomplish what He has promised in His Word.  That promise is the only ground for our confidence in asking.” ((Sinclair Ferguson, In Christ Alone, Reformation Trust 2007, p. 146))

So, if I believe — that is, have unswerving confidence in the promises of God, how will that affect my prayer life?  Both Peter and Paul address this question:

“He has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”  2 Peter 1:4

“Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.”  2 Corinthians 7:1

These verses reveal that through God’s promises He reveals His goal of holiness.  The promises that I believe impact what I will pray and what I pray is intended to impact what I become.  With promises in mind, my prayers would be focused not on health, comfort, ease, convenience, prosperity and approval but for God to progress His promised plan of transformation within me!

“It’s as though we each look at life through a video camera and ask for changes in everything except the person filming.  The cameraman is never in view.  We will pray with parents for their straying teenager to straighten out; we rarely pray for the parents not to be fearful, bitter or controlling.  We will pray for a person to get a job; we rarely pray that he would grow in faith as he learns not to fret about money.  We pray for the conversion of someone’s loved ones; we rarely pray that the believer would grow more loving and honest in the way she treats the loved ones.”  ((David Powlison, Speaking the Truth in Love, New Growth Press 2005, p.118))

As a cameraman whose view finder is full of the disruption of joblessness, today I want to believe more and pray something bigger than, “Lord, please bring us a good job.” Today, with reverent trembling I want to pray, “Lord, you have promised to perfect holiness in me–that will mean purifying my heart from so many contaminating loves that reside there. 

Let me love your transforming work and the tools you use to accomplish it. I believe you are accomplishing your promised goal of helping me escape the corruption of this world, so I am bold to ask now, allow me to be a participant in the divine nature. 

That is a promise prayer too wonderful for me to comprehend.  I believe that you are working out 1 John 3:2 and so I say, your will be done Father.  In the name of Jesus.  AMEN

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure

Confident Approach

"Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."  Hebrews 4:16

prayer Most of us confess that we find it difficult to draw near God in prayer –  much less in doing it confidently! 

I sometimes wonder if the words to the Santa Claus song "You better watch out.  You better not pout.  You better not cry I am telling you why"  haven’t spilled over and become our default thinking about God rather than the view expressed through this verse in Hebrews.

Though it has a jolly tune, the message is anything but inviting! 

Remember how it goes?

Continue reading “Confident Approach”

Full of Leaks

22616740Under the conviction of your Spirit I learn that

the more I do, the worse I am,

the more I know, the less I know,

the more holiness I have, the more sinful I am,

the more I love, the more there is to love.

O wretched man that I am!

O Lord, I have a wild heart,

and I cannot stand before thee;

I am like a bird before a man.

How little I love thy truth and ways!

I neglect prayer, by thinking I have prayed enough and earnestly,

by knowing

that you have saved my soul.

 

Of all hypocrites, grant that I may not be an evangelical leakyBuckethypocrite,

who sins more safely because grace abounds,

who tells his lusts that Christ’s blood cleanses them,

who reasons that God cannot cast him into hell,

for he is saved,

who loves evangelical preaching, churches, Christians, but lives unholy.

My mind is a bucket without a bottom,

with no spiritual understanding,

no desire for the Lord’s Day,

ever learning but never reaching the truth,

always at the gospel-well but never holding water.

am_porteuse_d_eauMy conscience is without conviction or contrition, with nothing to repent of.

My will is without power of decision or resolution.

My heart is without affection, and full of leaks.

My memory has no retention,

so I forget easily the lessons learned,

and they truths seep away.

   Give me a broken heart that yet carries home the water of grace. ((Arthur Bennett, The Valley of Vision, A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions, Banner of Truth, p.128-9))

 

Do you Sense His Love?

image154 This morning I was revisiting a favorite book by A.W. Tozer The Pursuit of Man.

He used a wonderful illustration to make the important distinction between knowing about Christ and His love andknowing it experientially.

Tozer asked, “What good would it do a starving child to know about bread when his stomach rolled and growled begging for food to be satisfied?”

A person can die of starvation knowing all about the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables but knowing about them will not save him from starving!

“Knowledge by acquaintance is always better than mere knowledge by description.”

With that illustration in mind, I wondered about the love of God.  It is not uncommon to hear people proclaim that God is love, that He is by nature a loving and caring being.

loveofImage10b (Small) Wouldn’t life be more viscerally satisfying if we knew those truths by acquaintance rather than description? 

Maurice Roberts wrote on the subject of sensing the love of God and he suggested:

“The way to get God’s felt blessing on our hearts begins with an act of faith.  That is to say we must believe that there is such a thing to be had in this life. If we do not expect or even believe in such experiences, the probability is that we shall know but little of them.

There is, as we have sought to show, a true and scriptural enjoyment of Christ which is no fanaticism but the subjective fruit of the gospel.

Then, having become convinced that there is a genuine experience of a ‘felt Christ’ to be had on earth, we must go to God in prayer for it.  We come to the throne of grace as suppliants to receive this choice favor of ‘tasting’, or being made subjectively conscious of the love God has to us in Christ.

We do harm to our souls and hinder our own progress in the knowledge of God (remember how that differs from knowing about God) if we treat prayer as an exercise of the mind only and do not expect to emerge from the presence of God with a fresh token of His love born in us. ((Maurice Roberts, The Thought of God, The Banner of Truth Trust, 1993, p.61))

What vitality would be breathed into our living if we stopped existing on the knowledge about God and sunk our teeth into subjective experience of tasting and seeing that God is good! Psalm 34:8

Let’s starve no more!

Forgiving

We must always bear in mind that in the prayer that Jesus taught His followers we pray,

“Forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors.”

There is the thought that the sinner seeking forgiveness must himself practice forgiveness.

Think about it: Each time we pray this prayer we are asking God to limit His forgiveness of us to the way we forgive other people!

Continue reading “Forgiving”

Nutty Prayers

acorn_sprout “Sometimes our prayers are for deliverance from conditions which are morally indispensable—that is, conditions which are absolutely necessary to our redemption. God does not grant us those requests.

He will not because He loves us with a pure and implacable purpose: that Christ be formed in us. If Christ is to live in my heart, if His life is to be lived in me, I will not be able to contain Him.

The self, small and hard and resisting as a nut, will have to be ruptured. My own purposes and desires and hopes will have to at times be exploded.

The rupture of the self is death, but out of death comes life.

The acorn must rupture if an oak tree is to grow.”

Elisabeth Elliott

Loving Prayer

Praying-Hands (Small)If the cruel torture of crucifixion

could not silence our Lord’s prayer for

His enemies, what pain, pride, 

prejudice, or sloth could justify the

silencing of ours?”     John Stott