The Good News

We use language like, “I gave him the gospel”. What does that mean? It means, “I gave him the good news. Gospel is Greek for good news. In this case the good news. The Gospel is the good news of good news. It is not the ten o’clock news. It is actually good news. We are therefore left with two questions to answer. 1) What is the good news? 2) What makes this news so good? If we do not ask these questions separately, we run a great risk of saying something is the Gospel that is not, or that something is a part of the Gospel that is not. There is a difference between what the Gospel is and what the Gospel contains. There is a difference between a jug of water and the water. The jug is the jug without the water. It may seem to you that I am splitting hairs. Perhaps, I will grant this. But I do not mind splitting hairs over something that the Apostle Paul claims in not so many words to be the purpose of our lives. So what is the Gospel?
In 1 Corinthians 15 the Gospel is defined for us as the good news that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again. That’s the jug. That’s it. That’s the Gospel.
It’s in the “why is that good news?” that things get tricky. To answer these questions, over the years we have come up with all sorts of little phrases to describe the teachings that answer that question. We talk about “justification by faith”, “total depravity”, and the penal/subsitutionary atonement. I would say that the conclusions we come to on these ideas are considerably important, and can affect the preaching of the Gospel. But “justification by faith” is not the gospel, anymore that the water contained in the jug is the jug. For that matter, God is not the Gospel. The Bible is not the Gospel. You are not the Gospel. Social equality is not the Gospel. The Gospel is the Gospel.
So why is the good news so good? It is because we are all individually hopeless sinners who have no way of saving ourselves, or earning a lenient relationship with a God who requires nothing less than holiness, blamelessness, and moral perfection. The good news is good because God acted. He did what only He can do. He provided the atonement necessary to cover our sin. He was the blameless, Holy, morally perfect sacrifice. In Christ we are not hopeless, but utterly hopeful, perfectly hopeful. We have an assured hope that in Christ, we are saved from our sin, and its penalty, death. By death I mean, separation from God eternally.
The good news is good because, Jesus was buried just like the rest of us will be. He lived a human life, and died a human death. Because He lived a human life, He is able to understand our pain and suffering. We can go to a God with assurance that He knows our pain.
The good news is good because Jesus came back to life. As the second Adam, second representative of humanity, He effectively defeated eternal death. Because He lives, so can we.
The one caveat is this. The good news only becomes effective upon our accepting it on faith. Faith is simply belief. There are some objective things that we must accept in order to believe the good news. We must believe that Jesus’ death was penal in nature, and that he died in our place. We must believe that He rose physically from the dead. We must believe that He is God, otherwise, how is He a perfect sacrifice? We must believe that He is also human, otherwise, how could we know Him, and how could he actually die, and really be a sacrifice? There are all these things that are not the good news, but are absolutely essential parts of the good news.
The more subjective things that we are required to believe in order to accept the gospel are the most difficult. We must accept that we need a Savior. This is humbling. That our good works are not good enough, and our bad works are so bad as to require God Himself becoming a man to die a gruesome death by crucifixion is really humbling. And when you think about it this way, the goodness of the good news increases and decreases as you realize more or less how much you need a savior. The more you understand the size of the gap that was created between you and God by your own sin, the better the news is that that gap has been filled by Christ. This is the part where many people stumble. And is it not conceivable that many brilliant arguments have been built up against the Gospel, on the basis of the offence of the cross, the unwillingness to admit that one really needs a savior? When we share the good news with people, we need to get straight to the heart of the matter, which is that Jesus died for them.
What has all of my hairsplitting accomplished? I would not deny the importance of explaining to people the gravity of their situation, the penalty of their sin, and their justification by faith. Does it really matter that these things are not the gospel themselves? It matters as it pertains to the order in which we present the Gospel. In my life I have found the suggested order to be effective in getting people to see the truth of the Gospel on their own without getting bogged down trying to figure out why this stranger is coming up to them and the first things he tells them is that they’re hell bound. Usually we present the Gospel as bad news, good news, in that order. What if we just told people the Gospel and helped them see to see the implications and why it was good news. They would see their sin in light of the cross, and therefore be able to see their sin how God sees it. Whenever people are led to get something on their own, they are more apt to understand it and own it. Is that not what we’re going for in our sharing of the Gospel?
Sharing the Gospel with people, particularly strangers, is very awkward and uncomfortable for all of us. Of course this does not remove the mandate to share the good news. I am now saving a lot of comments for another day and time, but what I have found, at least for myself, is that I spend so much time trying to find the most convincing arguments, the most comfortable way to approach someone one, the most clever ideas, is that I never actually share the good news with people. At Steamtown’s First Friday Outreach in June, I wrote the words, “There Is Good News” on the Wyoming Avenue sidewalk. And people stopped, and asked me, “What is this Good News?” It’s never been easier to share the Gospel than when I decided to share the Gospel, and then let it go from there. From the death, to the burial, to the Resurrection, to “all have sinned and fall short”, to justification by faith, to eternal security, and the Incarnation all mixed in.

Doubt

In our day and age, philosophically speaking, doubt is synonymous with temperance and/or moderation, and can therefore be viewed as a virtue. But for those who experience doubt in a personal way, it can be painful. Is there a time when rashness in decision making is advised? Ironically, God has left the decision of our salvation, in some sense, up to us. In other words, we can hear the offer of salvation through Jesus and reject it. The time we have in which to make the decision is indeterminate. "It is appointed unto man once to die, and after this the judgment" says the writer of Hebrews". None of us knows the appointed day of our death, and subsequently judgment. So at what point does the questioning become the rejection? Certainly one cannot question and accept at the same time? Still, the decision to accept Christ is not a true decision to accept Christ if it is on the basis of merely escaping the judgment. The decision must be genuine. A person must actually believe that Christ's death and resurrection is his only hope of escaping judgment. No one wants to be judged, but faith (accepting Christ in this case)doesn't just hope that a few words will count. You can't say, "I'll say this prayer and hope it works". No. True faith truly believes. Hence what makes doubt painful. You cannot believe without truly believing, and you cannot know that you believe without believing.
But is there good reason to doubt the Bible's account of things, how one knows God, receives salvation, finds meaning and purpose in life? I think there's good reason to believe. You ought to ask me (Pastor Matt) if you're curious. I am trying to shorten these posts.

False Teachers

A study on the topic of false teachers can become something very bad in a hurry. I’ve never imagined Steamtown Church being the kind of church that takes a defensive posture, nor do I imagine the church in the Bible as being defensive in nature . The wrong way to approach the topic of false teachers is to act as if the Bible is a sort of handbook for them, as if we can pull out certain types and classify them for all ages. This will probably lead to some nasty finger pointing. There should not be a chart in anyone’s church that diagrams how to find a false teacher in your midst. If anything we ought to approach the issue the way that the Bible does, and the Bible does approach the issue, and so we shall. And the truth is that you can classify 3 to 8 different false teachings in the New Testament. The purpose of this study is not to break down these three or eight false teachings, and then go on a witch hunt for their 21st century version. There may not be an exact 21st century version. What I seek to do with this study is to study what I have classified as three different groups of false teachers in the New Testament and see if there are not some strand similar to all of them. In other words, for those of you who have studied logic, this is an inductive study as opposed to a deductive. Once each false teacher class has been discovered and explained, we will then see if there is a common principle, something universal we can apply to our own culture today. Our motivation is not fear. We are not afraid of false teaching. Falsehood is by default the loser. Rather our motivation is the removal of darkness so that more light may shine in. We shall be proactive, not reactive. The truth has never asked for our protection but it does want us to make it shine, and so we shall study the likes of the legalists, the skeptics, the hedonists.
Of course there’s overlap with these categories which are also fairly broad. But in my estimation these are the three major classes of false teachers in the New Testament. We will start with the legalists.
The legalists showed up in two forms. In the form of the religious leaders of the Gospels and Acts, and in the form of the Judaizers of Galatians. The Judaizers are the more pertinent people to talk about because they came from within the church, but understanding a little about the former group will be beneficial. It’s the former of which we begin.
The first kind of legalist is the scribe and the Pharisee that Jesus dealt with and then the Apostles in Acts. Jesus had these sorts of names for them; blind guides, hypocrites, brood of vipers. They constantly opposed Jesus doing miracles on the Sabbath, as they said it was a work. Of course Jesus pointed out that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and that there was no law against doing good on the Sabbath. Even the Pharisees would make an exception if one of their livestock was in mortal danger. Why couldn’t Jesus heal a human being on the Sabbath?
They also were confronting Jesus for not conforming to Jewish ritual cleansings, which were by the way, extra biblical. You see, the Pharisees had made all sorts of laws that governed how one could best keep The Law, that is the Scripture. The original motivation, which was noble but awfully misguided, for writing these commentaries, if you will, was to ensure that the Law would be kept. The Pharisees “filled in the gaps” in a way, as if God’s Word was imperfect without their commentary. What ended up happening is that the laws became the Law, and man’s opinions on equal turf with God’s eternal Law. So when the Pharisees asked Jesus why he didn’t wash his hands before eating, (because Jesus would’ve been breaking a Pharisaical law) Jesus pointed out that the Bible didn’t say he had to.
Another area of conflict with Jesus and the Pharisees was over the subject of “sinners”. The Pharisees kept as far away as possible from those considered sinners. To have intimate fellowship with them in any way was out of the question. Sinners would include mostly prostitutes, adulterers, and tax collectors, but were probably not limited to Romans, and other “lowlifes” and beggars, of which the Pharisees assumed were in the state they were in because of theirs or their parents’ sin. The Pharisees believed that the Messiah would not come until the land was pure, uncontaminated by these sinners. So you can imagine the scandal when Jesus procured a reputation for eating with sinners and tax collectors, while also claiming to be the Messiah. On several occasions Jesus said, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Jesus conceived the mission of the Messiah exactly opposite of the how the Pharisees conceived it. And if we ever see Jesus being antagonistic, it’s towards the scribes and Pharisees.
But the problem with the Scribes and Pharisees is deeper than this spiritual arrogance, it’s the hypocrisy. For it is not the truth or the Scriptures, or the will of God that they really care about. It is the power, prestige, and recognition. And the result of their quest is the weighing down of burdens on the people, the divisions along arbitrary and subjective lines. And Jesus knows that this is the motivation, and he calls them out. And they kill him.
On many occasions the Gospels tell us that the Pharisees were jealous. And they were jealous because Jesus had won the heart of the crowds, stifling their power. They used religion to intimidate, and control, and for this did Jesus save his greatest displays of anger.
In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians we meet a different kind of legalist. They’ve been traditionally referred to as Judaizers. They were Jews who had “converted” to the Christian faith but were persuading the Galatian believers that they needed to be circumcised to be in, to be considered true believers. The book of Galatians is the definitive New Testament book on the primacy of grace. There is no such thing as Christ plus “something else” in order to be in. You are in upon faith in Christ. Paul says that this is the good news that he preached, and if anyone preached a different gospel “let him be accursed”!
In both the cases of the Pharisees and the legalists the false teaching was characterized by addition to God’s Word. The Pharisees by “putting their traditions above the commands of God” (namely loving their neighbors), and the Judaizers by adding circumcision to the Gospel.
The second class of false teachers are those that I will refer to as the skeptics. Their common problem seems to be an overemphasis on intellectual questions that are peripheral to what’s really important, which would be the preaching of the Gospel. Speculative people abound, no less in the Graeco-Roman culture of the New Testament. Paul warns his apprentice Timothy.
“…they devote themselves to myths and endless geneologies, which promote speculation rather than stewardship from God that is by faith”.
This is such a particular group of persons, that its not immediately applicable to our day and age, but as said before, speculation, not faith, is the prevailing characteristics of many the “Christian” throughout the ages. We may not have people who devote themselves to myths and geneologies, but we certainly have speculative folks in our midst.
We should make a careful distinction. The Apostle Paul, and Jesus can sometimes seem anti-intellectual. Recall Jesus’ prayer thanking God that He has revealed His Word to “babes” and not the learned; or when Paul exclaims, “God has used the foolishness of this world to shame the wise.” But the call to faith is not a call to stop thinking all-together. Clearly, Paul was an intellectual. The Epistle to the Romans is considered by religious and secular scholars alike one of the most brilliantly written pieces of work in all of religious history. The call to faith however is a call to stop entertaining certain intellectual questions. Christians don’t question the existence of God, the truth of a personal Creator, the reality of the Incarnation, the atoning sacrifice that is the death of Christ, the mystery of the Trinity, and the physical resurrection of Christ. We have made a decision about these matters. That’s the first decision made by a Christian, and it is that decision that is called faith, and the amount of humility, and abandon it takes to make this decision accounts for its “foolishness”. The intellectually astute cannot abide such an immoderate decision. To the world, our faith will always look juvenile and/or unenlightened. Of course those unhindered by intellectualism, who have never been accused of having an abundance of intelligence, are willing to accept any doctrine in which they are told that their sins are forgiven. This accounts for the popularity of Christianity in third world countries and it’s dropping off in nations of rationality and affluence. And this is not a bad thing. If you read I Corinthians, you will find it to be prophetic. But the content of our faith is as rich and as deep as any doctrine devised by man. Our claims may be incredible, but our faith is deep and meaningfully without end.
I think that the Apostle John’s perspective on this matter is enlightening. A common idea in his Gospel, and his epistles, especially in the epistle 1 John, is that only those who have been enlightened know the truth. Only those who have been supernaturally made to see the truth will see it, and the litmus test by which you know if someone is truly in the faith is seen in 2 things. 1)How they treat their brothers in Christ 2)Their opinion of the incarnation (which are related). They are certain things that are up for debate, but one of them is not the Incarnation. In straightforward manner John says in his first epistle, “…many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God (the teaching of God): every spirit (teaching) that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit (teaching) of antichrist.”
Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. If you deny this with your words you are a false teacher. If you do not love your brother, you deny this with your life, and your words are useless. Intellectual debates can be fun and even edifying. But they can also be a waste of time and damaging. If the debate doesn’t promote love or edify, the debate is a “sounding gong”.
The final class of false teachers we see in the New Testament is the hedonist. Hedonism is defined in Webster’s dictionary as “the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life”. This is a working definition for our purposes, but I wish to broaden this category of hedonist to “those preoccupied with pleasure“. Allow me to give a brief summary of the philosophical atmosphere of 1st century Mediterranean culture. Most of the philosophies shooting around were offshoots of Platonic philosophy which makes a fine distinction between soul and body. Working from this distinction, you have the Stoics and Epicureans; two groups of people mentioned by name in the New Testament in Acts. The Stoics taught a kind of “mind over matter” philosophy. They believed essentially that happiness was not attained through the fulfillment of desire, but from the removal of it. Epicureanism taught that matter was everything, that there was no afterlife, and death was simply a loss of consciousness, and that meant that the chief goal of life was the pursuit of pleasure. To be fair, hedonism is a sort of crude form of Epicureanism, as Epicurus himself taught that immorality could bring temporary pleasure but pain in the long run. However you can see how hedonism could be a logical distortion of Epicureanism. Many who saw the distinction between soul and body accepted the Gospel, at least in their minds, on terms with their souls only, and saw the idea of Jesus being physical and fleshly as abhorrent. Their religion was ethereal and given the vast grace of the Christian God who required no sacrifices or penance, it was convenient for them to live the party life. The problem is of course that the Christian doctrine teaches that the Holy Spirit lives in our physical bodies, and changes us from the inside out, that were saved in order to do good works, that the grace of God doesn’t excuse us from doing good works but frees us to do them, that drinking and carousing and promiscuous sexual exploits are not pleasing but binding and makes us slaves, that choosing to seek bodily pleasure defames the purpose of the cross and insults Jesus’ sacrifice and God’s will. Naturally these hedonists also mocked the subsequent return and judgment of Christ, and were irreverent in their attitudes towards spiritual things and spiritual beings. (2 Peter and Jude)
Today I am not sure that these types show up so blatantly denying the need for good works, but we can certainly see those who make a mockery of the cross with their complacency, constantly saying that they are a “work in progress” without ever progressing.
At this point it’s important to maintain a balance between the hedonist and the legalist. For it is true that we are a work in progress, and that its God’s work in us, not our own that effects change, and that God is infinitely merciful, compellingly gracious. We don’t do good works in order to be followers of Christ, or even to give ourselves assurance that we are saved, but if we are in doubt by chance our works can serve as a self-test for us. If we constantly rely on the boundless grace of God, living in constant realization that we are helpless without his decision to love us, then the results will show up in us doing good works, loving the brothers and sisters.
In a sense the three classes of false teachers have something in common. In all three situations the focus is on themselves instead of God’s Word. The legalist is focused on his own good works. The skeptic is focused on his own mind. The hedonist is focused on his own immediate pleasure.
Like I said, I don’t want the result of this little essay to be a witch hunt in which we all start looking for the three classes of false teachers and then “torch” them. We are not looking for legalists, hedonists, and skeptics, but we are first checking ourselves for legalistic, hedonistic, or skeptical tendencies, and then examining those who are in the position of teaching us to see whether or not they are preaching the Gospel, that Jesus came in the flesh, and died, and rose again and saved us from our sin. There is not an exact science for finding false teaching and I don’t mean for this essay to create one. But this essay has succeeded if it helps us to see the kind of false teaching that Jesus and the apostles were dealing with, examine their attitudes to it, reactions against it, and reasons for declaring it false teaching. The ultimate measure of falsehood is truth, and the truth is that Jesus came in the flesh, and is God, died, and rose again. He alone gives us eternal life. Every so called Gospel which preaches otherwise is a false teaching, whether it tells us we can earn our salvation, rethink our salvation, or mock our salvation. When it comes to the Gospel, we must only humble ourselves and believe.

Love Your Neighbor

This is an essay corresponding to the current sermon series called “Love Your Neighbor“. Let’s (just for fun) ask two fundamental questions. “What is love” (“Baby don’t hurt me”. Sorry. If I didn’t say it, you would’ve.) and “Who is my neighbor?” But let us start with the latter. One, because it has a simpler answer, and two because it is a question directly in the mouth of a speaker in the Bible. The greatest commandment is: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This requires our high attention given the virtual agreement that these are the greatest commandments. And they are two separate commandments. Furthermore Jesus affirms with the prophets that “all the law and the prophets hang on these.” If you were looking for a purpose in life, you just found it. Love God. Love your neighbor.
Seeing that this is the love your neighbor series, we shall not delve into what exactly it means to “love God”, but when we get to the section, “What is Love” there will be some apparent overlap. Notice that Jesus says that this second command is like the first. What relationship must there be between love of God and love of neighbor. John helps us see this in an interesting light when he says in his Epistle, “If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar, for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” It seems they are necessarily related. In fact, part of loving God is loving your neighbor. This is why the second is like the first.
This brings us to the question that we’re supposed to be dealing with: Who is my neighbor? It should be noted that the text in Luke tells us that the lawyer asked Jesus this question with the purpose of “seeking to justify himself”. He must not have been loving very many people. He was maybe hoping that Jesus might give a narrower definition of “neighbor“, a definition that would allow his current state of care for others to be acceptable. Of course Jesus, ever not the legalist, and always up for a story, tells one as a response to this self-justifying question. This is the famous story of the Great Samaritan.
And as the story goes, a Jewish man on a dangerous road to Jericho, was beaten, robbed, and left for dead. He was passed by two of the lawyer’s buddies, who made up excuses for refusing to love their neighbor, and then the man who finally stopped and helped was a Samaritan. It’s really a big deal, and rather clever of Jesus to slip this part into the story. The Samaritans were “half-breeds” if you will allow the vulgarity. They were leftovers of the exile; part Jewish, part Gentiles, and were purposely excluded from participation in Judaism, and so formed their own cultic version, which of course only further divided the Jews and the Samaritans. They were natural enemies.
So when Jesus concludes the story with this question: “Which one of these was a neighbor?”, he brings to light how faulty the lawyer’s original question was, how tainted it was by selfish, and defensive motives. In the lawyer’s question, the “neighbor” designated the passive member of the care, but in Jesus’ question, the implied notion is that the neighbor is active, exposing the futility of the lawyer’s question twofold. One, that a neighbor is active not passive necessarily, and two, by the neighbor being the Samaritan, the lawyer has no right to assume that there is anything that qualifies being a neighbor besides being a human. Thus the question ought not to be, “who is my neighbor?” but, “to whom have I been a neighbor?”, and if one feels he or she needs to ask who might be exempt from neighborly care, they need look no further than the Samaritan who cared for his natural enemy. If our enemies are not exempt, who is? And so the second part of the greatest commandment is fulfilled by us caring for anyone, no matter who they are, and if you read the story again that includes praying, and going to church. This is, as we have pointed out, a part of loving God.
Our second question: What is love? It’s quite foundational really. But really what is love? It’s important to not read our modern notion of love into the Biblical text. They are really not the same thing. This is not Greek’s fault, it is that the English word “love” is so vague, general, subjective, and emotional. It can mean anything from a state of being, to a declaration of approval. (e.g. “I am in love”. “I love country music”) I can rightly love an object, an idea, or a person. Here is one of my favorite, humorous definitions of love.
“Love is a happy time. It is that time when the male part of the species says to the female part of the species, “Hey! You wanna go on a date?” And she says yes, if he’s lucky. And he takes her to a place called a restaurant. And she orders for herself a salad. And he orders a big piece of beef. And that ladies and gentlemen is love”
But love in the Bible is not so vague, or humorous, and carries not the same heavy romantic overtones. Nonetheless they are variations of meaning. There are three main words in the New Testament that are translated “love”. First, there is “eros” from which we get the word erotic. This is sexual love. Second, there is “phileo”, which can be translated, as brotherly love. Hence we get Philadelphia, “the city of brotherly love”. But the words brotherly carry more than just a familial or neighborly love but also refer to a sweet and compassionate love. Then lastly, there is “agape“, which is somewhat commonly used in the Bible as well as other Koine Greek texts. Most of the time it seems to con notate an unconditional love, but is also used in places in Scripture where that would not make much grammatical sense. The safest understanding of “agape” is an intense, unwavering, intentional love.
Despite “love” being still vague in the Greek, though to a much lesser extent. It is not near as subjective as it is in English, and when we look at it closely we shall see that, whether it be “eros”, “phileo” or “agape” that it is always active and volitional. Therefore when Paul says in the famous love chapter 1 Corinthians 13 that love is (all these things, let’s for the sake of example say “kind”), he is not saying that the definition of love is kindness, he is saying that love is the act of kindness, and that it also the act of all these things. In the Greek the word love cannot ever escape its active nature, and the idea of appreciating something, or approving of something, or admiring something is never attached to the concept of love. Love is active. As DC Talk once said, “Love is a verb”.
With that said we understand that in the greatest commandment that God is not calling us to a subjective feeling towards him, but to an action towards him (which might lead to a feeling, but that’s another essay) And he’s not calling us to merely like our neighbors, but to actively care for them, to actively be neighbors to all people.
One question remains which I didn’t mention before. What does it mean to love your neighbor, “as yourself”? Much has been made of that little phrase, particularly in the last couple of individualistic, post-modern, psychological/introverted centuries. Perhaps too much has been made of it. Some have said something similar to, “You can’t love others unless you love yourself”, to which others have replied, “The Bible assumes that we all love ourselves” To me the conflict is clarified when we think of love as being active, and not necessarily a state of being or statement of admiration. I’m not sure what exactly is meant by the retort, “we all love ourselves” for if we’re using the vague modern concept of love here, there certainly are people who do not love themselves, which really means that they have too much pride to see their worth as a person. But if we take the active biblical understanding of love, we find that indeed everyone does (naturally) actively care for themselves, at least physically if not hygienically. If taken that way then the Bible does assume that human beings generally do care for themselves. So the commandment to love your neighbor (everybody) is the commandment to be equally concerned with everybody’s well-being, including yourself, as you would be useless to help if you were not taken care of.
But the greatest love Jesus says is that a man lay down his life for his friends. To consider your life worth sacrificing for the sake of another’s, this is the apex of agape. John says in his epistle: “In this is love. Not that we loved Him, but that He loved us, and became the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Christ sacrificed His life so that we might live. He is the greatest lover of all time.
So. The greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. It is as important as the first commandment to love God, and is a major part of loving God. Everyone is our neighbor. We are to be a neighbor to everyone, including our enemies. Love is volitional and active. To love our neighbor as ourselves is not to concentrate on good self-esteem, but to concentrate on others, knowing they need the same things that we do, to take care of ourselves with the motivation of allowing ourselves to take care of others, and to be willing to put our own life on the line for others, as Christ has done for us. In the next month, and beyond, this is what we shall do.

Scranton Revisited

I wrote a post about Scranton a few months ago. It was highly romanticized. Something has changed over the last few months in my overall attitude towards the city. Although it still contains much of it's charming quirkiness, reality has started to set in through a series of certain events, and I have been unpleasantly enlightened to the darkness of the city. A defeatist mindset pervades. A sense of distrust accompanied by its usual partner, the tribal mindset, is a cultural norm, and the divisions among ethnic lines is stunningly sharp, as if the city lives in a pre-enlightenment time warp, but doesn't know it.
I have never lived anywhere in which telling someone your religious heritage is the same thing as telling someone your ethnic background, and how baffled these people are when they hear than I'm a German-Irish protestant, whose mother was Roman Catholic, and whose father was Amish. In fact, they are even more baffled when they hear that I am not Protestant in any of the ways that they think of Protestant, and I've had to realize, living in this culture for most of the decade, that in order for people to understand where I'm at religiously I have to explain the entire Gospel of Jesus Christ, His Virgin Birth, His death for our sins, Resurrection for our life, that we only can have a relationship with God if we repent of our sins and turn to Him in faith, and this is only possible by His Grace, because in this religious/cultural atmosphere, there is no name for that set of beliefs, not even "Christian". Upon sharing this I have received 2 reactions, one extremely positive, and the other extremely negative, and ought not to be surprised by this because it is the only kind of reaction that the Gospel has ever received.
It might seem ironic that folks who call themselves "Christians" would react with strong opposition to this, but it ought to lead us to conclude that their idea of "Christianity" (the majority use of the Word), is false. Thus it is not entirely false, nor should it be problematic to say that in Scranton "Christianity" is false. Now we might go about addressing this problem in one of two ways. One, we could take pains to explain what true Christianity is, which will probably confuse people more than help them, make them think that we are trying to convert them to our version of Christianity rather than Christ, and offend them more than they need to be. Or, we could just share the Gospel, and let them reject it or accept it, and in that way we are sure that they understand the Gospel. There is little confusion, and that if they reject or accept the message, we are assured that they are rejecting or accepting the message and not some new man-made/ legalistic version of the Christian religion.
The realization that Scranton is a dark dark place, while diminishing my comfort level in the city has emboldened my belief in the exclusive power of the gospel to change lives, motivated my witness, and caused me to cry out for the city with the compassion of Jesus. In Scranton, we followers of Christ cannot afford to be religious, or get bogged down in debates over terms, and eschatology. This city, this dark place, like the rest of the world, needs the light of the Gospel, and she needs it now.

John 1:1-17

John 1:1-17 is in need of a good paraphrasing. Allow me to attempt my own.

“In the beginning there was the Word. This Word was with God. This Word was God. He was with God at the very beginning. All things were made through Him. Everything. Nothing was made without Him. In Him was life. This life was the enlightenment of mankind. This light shines in the darkness. The darkness does not overcome the light.
A man sent from God, whose name was John, came as a witness to this light, so that all might believe through the light. He himself was not the light. He was a witness to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming. The Word was in the world that was made through Him, but ironically this same world did not know Him. He came to His own people whom He created, and they did not even accept Him. But for the few who did accept Him, He gave them the right to become the children of God. They were not children of blood, nor the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but they were born of God.
And this Word, He became flesh, and lived among us. We have seen his glory. Glory that only the Son from the Father can have, full of grace and truth. And from His infinite glory storehouse we have received and unending supply of grace. Through Moses came the law. Through Jesus Christ (the Word, the light) came grace and truth.”

If you are still confused, let me break this passage down even more. Let’s see if you got out of it what I got out of it. Jesus Christ is the Word. In the Word was light and life. The light enlightens. The Word was with God. The Word was also the same God who created everything. The Word became human, and made His home among us in order to enlighten us. So. Jesus Christ is Creator God a.k.a. “the word” who became human, and made his home among us. He possesses life and enlightens us. If we will accept him as such, he will make us children of God.
Does that make sense?
Perhaps it makes sense and it doesn’t. Perhaps you understand what the passage is saying, but don’t quite understand how what the passage is saying is true. Perhaps you are wondering why the Apostle John used such confusing language. To be fair, John’s Greek was a little strange even in Greek. He is repetitive and often says the same thing he just said in a different way. But you ask: “If John wanted us to know that Jesus is God. Why didn’t he just say, “Jesus is God”. The mostly likely answer is that John didn’t just want us to know that Jesus is God, but that He is the Word. He is not simply indwelt by God, but He actually is the God who created everything. He is, so to speak, the inherent logic of the universe, He is the one that the Apostle Paul says, “holds everything together”. John wants us to know this so as to communicate the extent of Jesus’ condescension in “becoming flesh”. He is God and I mean God; the one and only God, the God who made every single thing, the God in whom all our hope rests, the God who shines light in the darkness, I mean God, the heretofore, unseen God of everything, God became a human, and his earthly name was Jesus.
The reason He came, John tells us is to enlighten us, and to shine God’s light in the darkness that is this world. At least in this chapter. In fact the book of John can be seen as a treatise on why God sent Jesus at all. In John 10 Jesus says explicitly, “I have come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly.” In John 3 Jesus says, “[That God] gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him, should not perish but have everlasting life” This is pretty consistent with John’s comments in Chapter One when he said “In Him was life and the life was the light of men” He came essentially to enlighten us to eternal life. Apparently God thought that the best way to show us the way to life was through becoming one of us.
Every year we celebrate Christmas. And the truth is for many of us that we celebrate family, and/or consumerism, and/or Christmas specials, and/or Rudolph. Somewhere in the back of our minds we know that this is really about Jesus. Everyday is really about Jesus. And Jesus made every day. And everyday is another day to think about, and contemplate, and meditate on Jesus’ becoming one of us, so that we can know God, so that we can be enlightened, so that we can have life. And Christmas is also the perfect time to think about being like Jesus ourselves. God did not just ignore us in our situation. He did not simply condemn us. He did just send us a memo., He came down. He became one of us. He identified Himself with our situation. He modeled for us what ministry is. May we not forget Jesus this Christmas and what He has done for us. May we also not forget that we are called to be his disciples, to follow in his footsteps, to be (here’s the word) incarnational, to be the light in the darkness, to bring life and hope. May we realize, as God has modeled for us, that the best way to do this is to “dwell among them”, identify with their situation, break into their world, and show them what Jesus showed them. God. If you’re thinking about a good Christmas gift, how about eternal life? Merry Christmas!

Good Books

I, Pastor Matt, in case you were not aware, enjoy reading. I'd like to now have a list of all sorts of books that I think you all should read. I will put them into different categories as well. It should be self explanatory.

The Basics
*There are a lot of theology books out there. In my opinion the best systematic theology book is Wayne Grudem's.
*"Walk Thru the Bible" by Bruce Wilkinson

The Deeper Stuff
*"Knowing God" by J.I. Packer
*"The Pursuit of God" by A.W. Tozer

Not For the Faint of Heart
*C.S Lewis. Read anything and everything by him. (The ones that I recommend in particular are: "The Great Divorce", "Mere Christianity", "The Chronicles of Narnia Series"{fiction}, "The Screwtape Letters".

*The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton

*The Cost of Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

*Desiring God" by John Piper (The thing with Piper is if you read him once you simultaneously read both everything he and Jonathan Edwards ever wrote)

For the Truly Adventurous
*"The Gagging of God" by D.A. Carson (It's 600 pages long and would be worth it if it were 1000, one of the most important books on postmodern culture you could get. Be warned this is the furthest thing from an easy read)

*"Confessions" by Augustine. (Despite my penchant for hyperbole, I have to say that next to Jesus, and Paul stands Augustine as one of the three most influential figures in the Western World. In other words if you don't read Augustine, then you might as well only read the Bible)

Fiction
*"The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck

Personal Favorites
*Plato's Republic
*"The Irresistible Revolution" by Shane Claiborne
*"The Meaning of the City" by Jacques Ellul. (This one's a little crazy)

Faith Like a Child

When I was a kid, I was selfish, and to make it worse, entitled. It's one thing to always want to get your way, but its worse when you believe you always deserve it. And then the worse kind of entitlement complex is the kind in which one is not aware of his entitlement complex, because that one is of course always entitled. And these are our children. Not only our children, but all children. Children learn quickly within the first months of their existence, that if they cry they will get what they want. It's funny to think that it may take a lifetime to beat out of them what we conditioned in them within the first few months of their life. As parents, we (we being human beings, not me and you, for I am not a parent, and this is not about parenting)spend 18 years (or more)unspoiling the child. Of course, the diaper must be changed, naps must be taken, food distributed, and of course babies have no other way to communicate to us their helplessness except to cry, but it does not take a way from the fact that babies learn to get what they want by crying and usually they get it, and once they're old enough we then have to deprogram of this. What a strange inconsistency this must seem to be to the toddler, who has heretofore, always been supplied his basic needs by employing the tool of crying, now he gets scolded for doing so, and is suddenly made to "go potty" on his own. We allow our kids to be selfish because they're helpless and clearly we have no choice, but we mistake the helplessness for innocence and the crying for polite requests instead of calling it (the crying) what it is; selfishness. Almost all kids struggle to share their toys, learn the word "mine" very quickly, and spend most of their first 3 years thinking the world revolves around them. And if we do nothing to discourage this behavior, they grow up to be entitled, winey, selfish adults. I always laugh when people talk about children as if they are saints. If kids were saints, you wouldn't need recess ladies, paddles, or bubble baths. When I was a child, I got kicked out of class my first day of Kindergarten for publicly making fun of another kid who peed his pants. In fourth grade, my first day at a new school, I was kicked out of class for laughing at a kid name Morgan. He was a boy. He had what I thought was a girl's name. You get the picture. These were not the worst things I ever did. The other things I did might put my pastoral position on the line if I mentioned them. The thing is, I wasn't the worst kid either. Some of you with children are thinking; "Yeah, tell me about it".
But children however have two redeeming qualities. They are worth emulating. These are the qualities of sincerity and faith. When a child says something, he means it. If he lies, its because he going to get in trouble. But if he tells you that you look ugly, its because you do. And if you tell a kid that the sky is pink, that elephants fly but only on Tuesday, and that the Cleveland Browns are going to win the Super Bowl she will without question believe you. So when Jesus takes a child and puts him on his knee, and tells the disciples that in order to receive the kingdom of God they must become "like one of these" He is obviously not telling them to be good. He is telling them to believe God, without doubting, the way that children believe everything their parents tell them. No matter how ridiculous something may seem to a skeptical adult, a child will never fail to believe it. No matter how ridiculous the thing is that God is asking us to do seems, the kind of person who will receive the kingdom of God is the kind of person who doesn't even give a thought to the ridiculous nature of the thing. In fact the thing is never ridiculous because in the mind of a "child" God would never ask us to do something ridiculous. If God says "I am for you", a child thinks, "He is for me".
Also, a child always means what they say. In may be inappropriate, but it is always sincere, without pretense or any impulse to manipulate. Sarcasm is not a vehicle employed by a child. Wittiness is not a virtue.
In conclusion, children are not innocent, but they are sincere, and they have tremendous faith. Therefore when Jesus tell us and His disciples that we must become like a child in order to inherit the Kingdom of God, he is not telling us to be innocent, but to be sincere, to mean what we say and to have tremendous faith.

Suffering and Salvation Part 2

The idea that I am about to write about has been written about well in many books. One of the more popular books being "Jesus Wants to Save Christians" by Rob Bell. This is the idea that throughout the Bible and Judeo-Christian history the people of God have been persecuted and rescued from persecution on such a regular basis that one can reasonably believe that persecution is a distinctive of being "the people of God"as well as a major theme of the Bible. From Egypt to Babylon; Persia to Rome; the Crusades to the Holocaust, to the present day persecutions of almost epidemic proportions, the "people of God" have suffered at the hands of the unjust. Indeed the symbol of our faith is the innocent Jesus, blessing His persecutors. Jesus' type is David who wrote a seemingly unending amount of Psalms asking God to deliver Him from his enemies. The Bible begins to come alive and really make sense when we put ourselves in the place of a persecuted people. With the lens of persecution on, books like
1 Peter, Philippians, 2 Timothy, James, and Revelation become surprisingly clear. Persecution is the world that the Biblical writers lived in. It's the framework from which Jewish people understand who they are. They see themselves as the persecuted people of God, awaiting their deliverer, Messiah. Paul, James, Peter and John were of course Jewish people operating in a Jewish framework. And we are part of the Jewish heritage. I assert that, given everything I have written so far, that we would be seriously lacking in our understanding of our faith, if we are lacking in our understanding of persecution, not only cognitively, but also experientially. Persecution is to the people of God what the Big Mac is to McDonald's. The New Testament is essentially the Apostles trying to understand and explain their Jewish religion in light of Jesus' being the crucified and Resurrected Messiah. Considering that suffering and persecution was the standard of their lives, (they all were martyred, with the possible exception of John) a suffering Messiah was perfectly in line with their experience. The New Testament is a rearticulation of the Jewish faith in light of Jesus' Messiahship, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and imminent return.
We claim that in Jesus we are the people of God, the church. I don't know if the Bible teaches that persecution teaches is a prerequisite for Christianity. I would doubt that because faith is the first prerequisite on our part. But if we find ourselves avoiding persecution at all costs, it is reasonable to check our faith. If we are in the world so much that we are actually of the world, the world will not hate us, and we will have no way to identify with our leader. (Jesus) The people of God have always been a threat to society, not in a violent or manipulative way, but society is threatened by a group of people committed to justice, righteousness, and Jesus. True dialogue must begin on what this looks like. For we cannot force persecution. As Peter says our suffering is not godly suffering if it is not "as a Christian". In other words, there is basic suffering that everyone experiences, and then there is persecution that comes from the hands of the same unjust opposition that crucified our Savior. We're not looking for it, or avoiding it. One is simply left to wonder: If I never suffer persecution, am I really a Christian? Am I really one of the people of God?

A Final Word About Prayer

I would encourage everyone to read my article about prayer. Some of you may see how long it is and think you really don't have time for that. Well this little post intends to sum up that huge article about prayer. But for those who would love to read the big article; be my guest.
The most confusing thing about prayer is defining what it actually is. At it's basic level, prayer really is simply communicating with God, whether it be spontaneous or liturgical. God hears both. But I do believe that it is a conscious effort; an entering into a holy place. It is not simply thinking about God or about God things. It is consciously recognizing yourself in the presence of God and talking to him about whatever. There is no set of rules about what we're allowed to pray about or pray for. We literally can talk to God about anything. But... we must not forget to remember that God's name is holy when we pray, that God is our daily provider, that we are nothing without Him. We must pray for His heavenly kingdom to invade the earth. We must pray that He would help us to be gracious and merciful like He is, and to keep us away from sin. This is what Jesus told the disciples to pray for when they said; Teach us to pray. I think we would do well to pay attention.
We tend to think of prayer as more than communicating with God. We tend to think of it as a way to get what we want. Some of us get discouraged when we don't get what we want and we start to doubt God, and others of us set up motifs like "God said yes. God said no. God said maybe." Not that this isn't helpful or true, but the request way of looking at prayer is limited. If we are upset that God hasn't "answered" our prayers we are revealing that are motives in prayer are misguided. We ought to pray as an act of relying on God, and showing that we trust him, being content with our circumstances before we ever enter the holy place. Prayer is all about showing God, and even ourselves that we recognize that we need Him and that He knows better than us. Not praying is communicating that we do not need God. Therefore, not praying is a lie. Praying is an opportunity to experience the special presence of God, and can do nothing but bring us closer to God in such a way that our circumstances become of little importance in comparison to knowing God.
There's a lot of general things there. Assuming that there are questions. Let the discussion begin.

The Deal

You may not have realized it, but Steamtown has a blog. We now plan on utilizing it to its greatest potential. It seems the best way that this blog can be used is to entertain any questions you may have about Steamtown Church including doctrinal, philosophical, and/or operational. So let this be a place where people at Steamtown can ask, discuss, converse, minister, and fellowship, using it as yet another way to grow in our walk in Christ. I, Pastor Matt, am the keeper of this blog. I am here to entertain your questions, and be a reference and resource. From time to time I will also post some ministry, philosophy, or theology related things written by me or others to give some food for thought. If you look at it several times a week you'll be bound to find something of interest. If you find nothing interesting, let me know. Or if you have something you think would be interesting to put on the blog, whether it be a thought, or book suggestion, interesting article etc. feel free to let me know. Be sure to read the next post concerning my thoughts on prayer. Peace all.

Prayer

In college, the pettiness and passions of youth becomes a part of every theological discussion. A lot of times to the outsider, these discussions seem to be about things that have no value except to stir up to dissension. It seems,(to the outsider again) that Bible students are in a big bubble and are ignorant of the fact when they leave, their midnight conversations about free will and providence will have no bearing on anything they do. There may be some merit to this criticism. And you always have the one who just likes to stir things up. But some thoughts expressed at certain times while in college, maybe in a dorm room, maybe at bedtime, are worth thinking through deeply. And maybe the theological training really matters at this point. Maybe matters of life and death are being conversed about in this dorm room. I remember one such a time in my Bible College days that such was the case. It was the day that one of my dormates asked; “If God knows everything, and is in control of everything, then why do we pray?” It’s a question that troubles the heart and mind of any conscious seeker of Jesus, and one that few, especially in the midst of theologians in training, have the courage to verbalize so ingenuously. But it was the question of the hour, indeed, the question of a lifetime, I have come to believe. It is to a large extent the question that this essay seeks to take on in its attempt to persuade you, the community of Steamtown Church to make prayer, not just a priority, but the priority of your lives.
Before we tackle my dormates specific question, I want to set the precedent for the priority of prayer. For it seems that every time prayer is talked about in the Bible, it is talked about with a sense of urgency, and with a sense of necessity, often without explanation. Take for instance, two of the Apostle Paul’s admonitions; one to the community of believers in Colossae, the other to the community of believers in Thessalonica. To the Colossians, Paul says: “Devote yourselves to prayer”. The New King James version says: “Continue earnestly in prayer”. Do you see how the words “continue earnestly’ go hand in hand with “devote”. I grew up “doing my devotions” which meant that I set aside a fifteen minute segment of my day at breakfast time to read my Bible, and pray. A lot of thinking has been done by this individual over the years on the topic of self-discipline, and how it relates to the grace of God. Today I understand that both the capacity to engage in self-discipline and the results of self-discipline are manifestations of God’s grace. Devotion implies and to a great extent means discipline. But there is also a more relational ring to the word “devotion” as well as a hint of positivity. “Devoted” does not sound as rigid or legalistic as maybe discipline does. We need to “continue earnestly” in prayer. It will not be easy at first, that’s why it must be earnest, but it must be done. If the Colossians needed to devote themselves to prayer, should we not do the same?
Paul tells the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing”. This is not a command to never do anything but pray, it’s what is called in literary circles, hyperbole. In other words, its exaggeration in order to make a point. What Paul is telling these believers is that they need to pray like it was the thing to do. Make it a habitual part of your life. Make it such a part of your life that’s it’s as natural as breathing, except you don’t take it for granted. (After watching M.Night Shymalan’s new movie “The Happening” I don’t take breathing for granted.)
There is a proverb that subtly espouses the priority of prayer. It says: “The LORD detests the sacrifice of the wicked, but the prayer of the upright pleases him”. At first glance this appears to be a proverb about how God accepts the upright person, and rejects the wicked person. But as is the case with the majority of the proverbs if we do not look deeper than the surface, we will get nothing more out of it than, “Be a good person, and God will make good things happen for you.” This is one of the basic messages of the proverbs, but each proverb requires a little bit of searching in order to see its true profundity. This proverb is not a mere affirmation of the upright over and against the wicked person. It actually does a good deal to tear down the cultural prejudices of the contemporary reader. To the contemporary reader of this proverb, a sacrifice, meaning an animal sacrifice, was the apex of religious devotion. Actually, to these readers, prayer accompanied sacrifice, but it was the sacrifice that impressed the gods, and it was the sacrifice by which they could hope to gain the gods’ favor. If this proverb were merely an attestation to the “upright” person, then “sacrifice” is a redundant word. The proverb might as well read: “The LORD detests the wicked, but is pleased by the upright”. But the word sacrifice is contrasted in the next part with “prayer”, which is now separated from “sacrifice”. This God, the God of Israel, is not like the gods of the pagans, who can be manipulated when mortals caress their brittle egos, but this God is pleased by a prayer without a sacrifice, bearing that the one praying is upright. This means that when it comes down to it, this God, our God, would rather us pray, than do anything. We don’t have to give anything to God but our time.
Going back to the question at hand; “I understand that prayer is a priority in the Scripture, but why? What does it accomplish?” In response to this question, I will refer to two passages of Scripture in the New Testament. One is from the mouth of the Lord, and the other from the pen of the Apostle Paul.
In the 26th chapter of Matthew’s gospel we find Jesus in agonizing conversation with the Father in the garden of Gethsemane hours before his crucifixion. Twice he leaves his disciples to be with his Father alone. After his first go round with the Father he returns to find them sleeping. This seems to perturb Jesus, and he says to them: “Watch and pray lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” These are universal words of wisdom from the Son of God. Although it is applicable to the current situation that the disciples find themselves in, there is universal truth in what Jesus is saying. It was important that they prayed because their faith, indeed their world, was about to be rocked. There is no hope of staying faithful to our faith without prayer. Because prayer beckons the help of the one who is powerful enough to help us ward of the attacks that the enemy will bring against us. We will not be able to beat him in our flesh, albeit our spirit wants to. Apparently the spirit is destined to lose to the flesh if the spirit is not drenched in prayer.
Hard times bring questions. Good questions, but if these questions are being entertained, and the presence of God is not, then these questions will lead to doubt. Doubt asks different kinds of questions than faith asks. And eventually doubt will lead to disbelief. And this has always been the enemy’s strategy. He puts obstacles in front of us to make us doubt, so that we will fall. And if we are not praying then the truth is that we will fall. Faith needs prayer like pizza needs an oven. You can have all the ingredients ready and prepared, but without an oven you can’t have a pizza.
Paul tells the Philippians in his profound letter he wrote them while in chains to be “…anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God which surpasses understanding will guard your heart and mind through Jesus Christ.” Are you anxious? Are you worried? Are you afraid of what might happen if…? There is a way to peace. But it doesn’t make sense. It’s sort of magical. Will you simply believe it? Here it is. Tell God what your worried about, and tell him what you’d like to see happen, and the peace of God will guard your heart through Jesus. Of course, you must be careful of your motives. God is not a God to be tested. But if you really believe God, and that he loves you, has your best interest at heart, and wants you to be at peace; then pray.
So the biblical answer as to why we pray is twofold. So that we may not fall into temptation and so that we may have peace. But the nagging question remains: Why, really, do we pray? Is it just so that we may increase our faith, and if so, how do we ask God for this? Do we simply say: Dear God, help me not to give in to temptation? Dear God, could you please…, and then we get peace? Do we get peace because God answers the prayer, or do we get peace even if he doesn’t? And what about unanswered prayers; aren’t their passages in the Bible where we’re promised that if we ask in faith, that we will receive? Ok, so it’s about seven questions. I think these are commonly asked questions about prayer. We should understand by now that prayer helps us with our faith. It may be yet unclear how. And the one thing that is truly mysterious about prayer is that there is no way of knowing how much of an effect it actually has on the course of our lives, let alone the course of the entire universe? Is God waiting for us to say something, before he’ll do something? If everything happens according to the will of God, aren’t there a lot of things God does without anyone asking? If so, if God is just going to do what he’s going to do, then why ask him to do anything at all? Maybe because the point of prayer is not to get God do something, but to get us to see what God does? Maybe prayer doesn’t so much change the mind of God as it does the heart of man. Maybe prayer doesn’t form the universe to our wills, but aligns our wills to the reality of the universe. Because prayer is about our joy, not God’s will. This perspective of prayer really requires faith. It requires us to believe that God really knows what’s best for the universe and us, and that we really don’t. It requires us to pray, watch and see how God answers it, and then be okay with the result knowing that all circumstances are a gift from God, and even ones that we consider bad or unwanted are what we need because God doesn’t give bad gifts, nor does he neglect to always do what is best for us, even if it is against our will. How does this produce joy in us? Because real joy does not come from our ability to control our circumstances, or getting what we want, but joy comes from contentness in the midst of bad circumstances beyond our control. When we see a prayer get answered, we gain insight into God’s idea of goodness. When we see a prayer unanswered, we gain insight into God’s idea of badness.
We pray so that we may know God, so that we may love God, so that we may know God, so that we may obey God, so that we may know God more, so that we may have more and more and more joy. The knowledge of God, the love of God, the obedience to God, and our infinite joy, are inseparable. Every time you pray, you have an opportunity to comprehend the heart of God, a little more. Even if your prayer is unanswered, a circumstance may show (if you’re paying attention) you why it was unanswered, and that should show you, if you have eyes to see, more of what kind of God God is.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says something pretty interesting to his disciples. He asks them a rhetorical question (I’m paraphrasing): How many of you if your child asked for a fish would give him a scorpion? Don’t you as earthly fathers know how to give good gifts to your children? How much more does your heavenly Father give good gifts to you? There is something here that is easy to miss, but potentially devastating if it is (missed). I owe this observation to Ken Rudolph, who may have got it from somewhere else. Of this I am not sure. At any rate, this observation is not original to me. Jesus is not suggesting that God is a good father who gives his children everything they ask for. What kind of father gives their child everything that they ask for? Sometimes children think they are asking their fathers for a “fish” and they are really asking them for a “scorpion”. What kind of father gives their child a “scorpion” even if they ask for it? What kind of father gives their child candy for dinner even if they ask for it? What kind of mother sends her kid to bed without brushing his teeth, even if that would make junior so happy. (It won’t on the next visit to the dentists).
We are stupid “prayers”. We are not able to discern the difference between a “scorpion” and a “fish”. Our gracious father knows what’s best for us. He knows that taking our loved one from us will bring us closer to him. He knows that losing a job will somehow bring us closer to him. You see, a tragedy may be a “fish”. Conversely, winning the lottery may be a “scorpion”. Getting that girl, dating that boy, getting that house, that job, that acceptance letter, that grade, that applause, that raise, may be a “scorpion”. And you learn that those things are scorpion’s when you pray for them, and don’t get them, because our heavenly father only gives good gifts. Eventually you begin to see what’s really important in life, because your scorpions keep getting denied you. You begin to see fish for the fish that they are. You begin to ask for those things. Maybe you’re not specifically asking for God to kill your loved one, or to take your job. You probably shouldn’t do that. But it starts to become more important to you that you know God, and that God knows you, that this is what you ask him for, and by asking him for this you are telling him that you’ll will be fine with the resulting circumstances because you know that whatever happens, happens to bring you closer to God, who is your joy. Yeah, it’s a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. This is just yet another reason that prayer must be a priority. We only have so much time to gain maximum joy in our life. We have only so much time to figure out the difference between a fish and a scorpion. How will we know God’s opinions of things if we do not pray? How we will know that we must turn the direction of our lives without unanswered prayers? The more we pray, the more that we understand God, and the more we know God, the more joy we have.
Is there anything that the Bible tells us to pray for? I can think of one place where people are told what to pray for and it’s found in the example of a prayer that Jesus gives his disciples after they ask him to teach them how to pray. I think we would do well to pay attention to the words of Jesus as well.
Jesus says that when you pray you should pray like this: “Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Jesus says that we should pray like this, not that we should pray exactly this. It’s like he’s saying: “You can pray to God about anything, but you can’t forget to mention these things.” It’s like he’s saying: Make sure that when you pray, you recognize that God is not on earth, but that he lives in an eternal, infinite realm beyond your understanding, yet not beyond your prayer. Make sure that when you pray you recognize that the name you invoke is but a symbol, that you cannot actually utter God’s name with your lips because it is too sacred, too holy. Don’t forget to ask God for his rule to come to earth, for the reality that he exists in in heaven to be the reality that we exist in on earth as well. Don’t forget to ask God for your daily provisions. You wouldn’t have any if it wasn’t for him. This is a sign of gratitude. Ask him to forgive you knowing that this requires you to do your part and forgive those who have wronged you. And ask him to lead you out of and/or through situations that might cause you to fall away from your faith.
Jesus brother James tells us to ask for wisdom because God gives it out like a Democrat gives out welfare. (This is not a political statement. It’s just my attempt at political humor). We’re not commanded to ask for wisdom. But the Proverbs tell us to “Get wisdom” at all costs. And if God’s giving it out like there’s no tomorrow then I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to ask him for some. But James says that we must ask in faith or we will not get it. “The double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. He should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.”
At this point I hope that an impression has been made. I hope that my readers’ see the grand importance of prayer. I hope that they have a better grasp as to why they pray even though God may be in control of all things. I hope that my readers have a better understanding of what to pray for. And I hope that as we all pray more and more together that we gain a better and better understanding of what to pray for, and consequently who God is.
There is one final thing I need to address. After all, what is prayer? Prayer is not asking God for things you want and hoping that he finds the grace to give it to you. It is not appeasement to a pagan God who requires it or otherwise it might not rain. Prayer is the spiritual if not verbal recognition that God, not the person praying is in control. And when this is done continually, with devotion, God’s idea of how the universe should be run, a.k.a. heaven becomes his children’s idea of how the universe should be run, and lo and behold, his children are motivated to make heaven come down to earth. What would happen if we never prayed? Could God hypothetically be defeated? Would nothing change? And if God would carry through his plan without us praying for it, why waste our time praying? Assuming that nothing else I have written matters. God can’t be defeated because his people will pray. But what if they don’t? Why wouldn’t they? We cannot entertain these kinds of questions. Their answers, if “answers” is the right word, are beyond our understanding. The wonderful mystery about prayer is that it is what God uses to bring about his will, while at the same time bringing the participants in prayer closer to the knowledge of God. His ways our not our ways, his thought are not our thoughts. Maybe this is why prayer is so important. Maybe it is only way to get inside the mind of God, and make his thoughts our thoughts, and our ways his ways. Prayer itself is also an act of humility. It may seem that when we start to pray that it is an act of faith in chance, as opposed to faith in a real infinite person. But by praying instead of worrying, or becoming anxious and trying to fix everything ourselves, we are showing God that we know that he’s in charge, and that he can do a better job of running the universe than anyone else. Prayer is an exercise in faith and humility that result in knowledge and ultimate joy. Also prayer is our opportunity to participate in God’s revolution; his kingdom. Why are we not praying? Why are we not gathered somewhere crying out to God for the “fish” that we need, crying out for his provision, for his forgiveness, for his help to forgive, in humble recognition of his wholly otherness, and greatness, in anticipation of heaven coming to earth? Why are we still sitting here?