Wednesday, April 7, 2010

A Very Present Help in Time of Trouble

Lack of prayer in the life of a believer is a great sin, indeed, as we have seen. So, what, typically, rises up in our flesh as our first response to the conviction of any great sin? ‘I must strive to do better! I must work at getting victory over it. I must pull myself up by my bootstraps and do this thing.’ But is that the correct response? No, it is not.

The Psalmist says, “Cease striving and know that I am God!” The same psalmist who said this said in the very same psalm: ‘God is our refuge and strength, a VERY PRESENT HELP IN TROUBLE.’ As a Christian who understands the malignancy of sin, I believe I am in no deeper trouble than when I have sinned against my holy Father. Listen, if I am spending five minutes in prayer a day, I’m in trouble!

Is there something, then, I must do when I find myself in any kind of trouble? Yes! I must run to my Father. I must abide in Him. You say, ‘But it is I who must do the praying, right?” Yes. But our efforts are futile unless we first learn how to abide in Christ by a simple faith. This alone is the key to victorious living. To understand this fully, we must understand this battle that is raging inside every believer between the flesh and the Spirit.

I’ll give you two examples of what I’m trying to say. First, we must understand the story of Sarah and Hagar that Paul uses to illustrate for us the life of the flesh versus the life of the Spirit in Galatians 4. The question is, ‘Who are the true sons of Abraham?” That’s what the Galatians needed to understand because the Judaizers were trying to tell the church at Galatia that the law and circumcision had to be added to Christianity in order for it to be of God. Paul’s argument was, ‘No, it is the sons who believe, the sons who have the same faith as Abraham, who are truly his sons. They are the ones who will receive the promises of the covenant made to him and his seed.” By the way, the Judaizers, so active in the early church, are just as active today in the church and Paul would say, “No, you don’t need to add Tradition or Papal dogmas, indulgences and confession, etc.” The whole story of Sarah and Hagar is a picture of what happens when we try to do things in our own flesh rather than to obey God and have faith that He will accomplish His purpose in us.

Just like Hagar started persecuting Sarah, the Hagar religion will always persecute the Sarah religion. The flesh will always try to rise up against the Spirit and try to convince us that there must be something more we must do to be right with God. We can live according to the flesh and do things according to the law out of a cold, adherence to rules, rituals and regulations or we can live according to the Spirit which is true life, hot, passionate zeal, delight and joy in worship. We can only worship Him truly in spirit and truth. Now, if we understand that everything we do is worship as a Christian, we will either do things in the flesh or in the Spirit.

My second illustration is a simple one. When I was a very small child, whenever I was in trouble, perhaps I fell and skinned my knee, at the first glimpse of blood I fearfully ran immediately to mother or father. If mommy or daddy were not in sight, I screamed bloody murder for them. No one else could stand in their place.

I didn’t stop and whip out my first aid kit or my list of first-aid rules and say, “Wait, I can fix this! All I have to do is so and so.”

I was watching ‘Cops’ awhile back, (I know, right? I’m the only one I know who can start crying while watching ‘Cops’) and this father was driving around recklessly with his two very small children in the car. He had, apparently, ‘kidnapped’ them from their mother. I guess he didn’t have custody of them. The whole situation still makes me so sad. Oh, how sin destroys lives!

The cops (and there was a really compassionate woman cop involved) yanked this guy out of the car and threw him on the ground, the kids were screaming for him, and then the woman asks him if he is okay. Once inside the house with the kids and the mom, you could see this little, adorable brother and sister – she was probably 3 or 3 ½ and he was probably 2. Wide-eyed, they’re sitting on a couch while the cop is talking to the mom. The little girl is trying to be so brave and the little boy is petrified. He sits there with his little lip quivering the whole time trying to blink back tears (as I am trying to do once again), and when his mom puts out her arms, he just completely loses it and jumps into her arms and holds on so tightly for dear life. Confused and terrified, the arms of love are the only safe refuge he knows for sure.

THIS is what our Father wants from us. We are to respond in situations as we would as children, with childlike faith. Complete trust that all will be well as long as we are safe in our Father’s arms.

Why do we trust Him? Because we know Him through His Word and spending time alone with Him in prayer. We are saved by faith, but we must learn to live moment by moment by that same type of faith.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

How Sick Am I?

What is the cause of prayerlessness? To answer that question we must, first, be able to answer the question, ‘What is the ultimate cause of all sin?’ All sin is unbelief. It is the age-old cause of all sin as seen first in the Fall of man. When I don’t believe the promises of God, refuse to take Him at His Word but, instead, buy some lie of Satan wherein he offers something that would better suit my fancy, the result is sin against God.

This is where we get down to a proper understanding of exactly what we have been called to as Christians when we embraced the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Called to repent of our sin and to believe on Christ, we responded by turning from our sin and establishing in our hearts that desire to follow Him no matter what the cost. That cost would automatically call for a life of self-denial. Jesus told us that we are to ‘deny ourselves, pick up our crosses and follow Him.’

How are we to do that? What are we to deny? As I said, Jesus said we are to ‘deny ourselves.’ We are to deny the flesh that still wars inside every believer. Paul, in Romans 8, talks about this war between the flesh and the Spirit which is waging inside every true child of God. Where does the flesh most love to be? The flesh loves to be right in the center of the world. Now, that presents a problem for the Christian. In 1 John we are told not to love the world or the things in the world because the world is passing away and all its lusts. All that is in the world is temporal; we now are to live for what is eternal. We know that we are to be people who are ‘in’ the world but not of the ‘world’. As children of God we are most comfortable in His kingdom, not the world.
What does this have to do with prayer? Prayer is laying hold of heaven. All that is in the world and of the world is what we can see with our physical eyes. The Christian walks by faith, not by sight. The righteous man lives by faith. Faith can only be exercised with the EYES of faith; it is being able to see things that are eternal and believe that they are what Christ says they are in His Word.

The Christian, in his daily battle with the flesh, the world and with Satan must put his faith in the promises of God and treasure those promises more than the sin that he so loves in his flesh. Faith is only lived out as it holds onto God’s promises.

I asked the reader to ask himself a question at the beginning of this study: ‘Do you believe that you live more in the flesh or in the Spirit?’ Here is one way to find an honest answer to that question: A life lived according to the flesh and not according to the Spirit is the origin of the prayerlessness of which we so often complain. Uh, oh, there’s a speed bump in the road!

The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. We’re racing along through life, and we think that we’re okay because that’s what many in this world of ‘post-modern Christianity’ are telling us. We’re busy with this and busy with that, and can’t stop all this busyness for any number of reasons. All of a sudden we hit one of these stumbling blocks and we can either get angry that it is there and find some way to walk around it, or we can go over it very carefully gaining insight as to why it is there. It is there intentionally to slow you down, to show you something. Once we have seen it, we can deal with it. The person who walks around it has not clearly seen the truth of Jeremiah 17:9.

Hopefully, we have all admitted that we don’t pray as we should. Right away we must realize humbly that we don’t live according to the Spirit as much as we think we do. We ARE more fleshly than ever we would have classified ourselves.

When a person is sick and wants to be healed, it becomes a primary matter of importance to him that the true cause of the sickness be discovered. This is always the first step to recovery. We can’t just mask the disease by dealing with the symptoms instead of the cause, or healing will be out of the question. That is why it is vitally important to secure a correct insight into the cause of the sad condition of deadness and failure to pray. Prayer in the inner chamber of our hearts should be the most blessed place for us that we cannot wait to get there and long to stay there. This is why we need to fully understand what is at the root of this sin.

Oh, the depth of our sin! How can we come to understand it? God must show us our human depravity, the sin-stained blackness of our hearts before Him. Only the Light of God can expose what is in the heart of man.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Pastor: Please Teach me to Pray!

Why is prayerlessness such a great sin? That is the question we want to consider today.

The Almighty Creator God of this universe has invited us to come to Him, to have communion and fellowship with Him, the ultimate blessing a human being could experience. What an incredible privilege is this opportunity of prayer.

Our response? We give Him five minutes a day. Some days we can’t even be bothered to do that. We’re much too busy, we think. If truth be known, most Christians wouldn’t know how to spend half an hour with God in prayer.

Even those who go to Him out of a sense of duty or rigid discipline do so without joy in their hearts. They don’t go to Him as though He is everything to them. Why? Because we believe the world revolves around us. It shows up in every facet of how we “do religion” today. We start with a man-centered Gospel telling us that we need to love ourselves more and have a better self-esteem. We are told that we need to learn to forgive ourselves. We want to focus on us and have the focus on us; we have little time for things that focus on another, let alone God. So even if we do ‘pray,’ it is to take our many petitions to God for every little hang nail we have. We’ve just adopted the world’s religion and slapped the title of Christianity on it and wonder why we have no joy in doing all the things the Bible says we should delight in.

Why are we so busy anyways? First of all, Satan loves to keep us busy so that we do not have time to stop and focus on God and on the true meaning of life. It’s ultimately why we hate silence and have to have the squawk box on 24/7 when we are home alone. We love to keep busy, too, because that somehow means we’re important. We love to tell people, “I have to do this and this and this today. I don’t know how I’ll get it all done. This person needs me and that person needs me, and I have a hard time telling anyone, ‘No’! My, aren’t I such an important person?”

But what happens when, in the midst of all our business, a friend drops by to visit? Do we push them out the door and say, “I’m sorry, really I am, but I’m much too busy for you today”? They say, “Well, I just really wanted to spend some time with you.” Do we reply, “Sorry, don’t you know how important I am?” No! We wouldn’t dream of doing that because this person needs us, and, after all, we so need to be needed because then we’re important. It feeds our egos to be needed! Funny how we can find time for a creature who can be of service to us, but we can go day after day without spending even one hour with God.

We must ask ourselves why we have time for the things that really interest us, but admittedly often have no time to practice fellowship with God and delight ourselves in Him. This is such a dishonor to the one we call our God. As a pastor I know once said, “There should be a blood bath taking place in our souls right about now.” With deep shame we should be crying out: “Woe is me! For I am undone! O God, be merciful to me and forgive me this awful sin of prayerlessness; this hideous sin against You.”

The second reason prayerlessness is such a great sin is because it is proof, for the most part, that our lives are still under the power of the flesh. Prayerlessness shows us the true state of our heart. The doctor can listen to a person’s heart and know whether that person has heart problems. Remember the show, “Lost in Space?” Remember when the robot would say, “Danger, danger Will Robinson?” Prayerlessness should send off sirens to our hearts that there is danger; something is not right in our spiritual lives. In fact, the life of God in the soul is deadly sick and weak.

Men sit around and devise ways to bring large amounts of people into the church because it does not seem as though the ‘church’ today has much power or influence. They assume they must be doing something wrong. Is that the case? Why is the church so weak? We must ask the deeper question: Where does the power in the life of a believer come from? If we spent time in the Word of God and got to know it as we should, we would know that attached to faithful prayer is the sure promise of the Spirit and the power from on high.

We must ultimately start with the leadership in the church. The pastor(s) in the church cannot lead a congregation higher than he is himself. It is his business to train believers up to a life of prayer. If he is not doing that, we must ask ourselves why that is. What I have found to be true is that those Christians who do spend a great deal of time in the Word of God and in prayer find it very difficult today to find a solid church, especially when they live in a small community. I don’t want to be taught by a man who spends far less time in the Word than I do. Is that being arrogant? I don’t believe it is. Why would I want to submit to someone who obviously takes a very low view of the Scripture and of God, Himself? Is it possible that many pastors today do not understand the art of conversing with God and receiving from the Holy Spirit every day the grace he needs for himself and for his work?

I am convinced that there are multitudes of Christians who know next to nothing of the blessedness of prayer fellowship with God, but there are also many who know something of it and long to be further taught to understand and implement this awesome privilege each child of God has been given.

I, for one, have had this great struggle throughout my walk with God regarding prayer. For years after my daughter died I wrestled on and off again with the assurance of my salvation (a whole other subject for another day!), but each time I would stop and examine myself to be sure I was truly in the faith the Spirit would always bring me back to this great sin. I had times when I spent great amounts of time in prayer, but usually when things were going wrong in my life.
I, too, just thought this was a severe weakness, not a real sin, so I would shrug it off and think there must be something else wrong. (Yeah, my heart is desperately wicked above all else…). After about five years of this, I seriously started seeking His face to teach me to pray. (Okay, I admit that I am one of those who has to be hit over and over again on the head with a brick!!!) But I GOT IT!!! Better late than never.

I’m so far from where I should be at this time in my life, but I do see a change in my heart and God’s power working through my prayer life like it never has before. I have been devouring great books on prayer over the last couple of years, and it turns out that I had a lot of hang-ups about prayer that I didn’t fully realize. It’s been good. However, I can look back to a time in my life when the last thing that would have interested me is this subject of prayer. It just didn’t seem all that important to me. I hate hearing myself say that, but it is true. This is yet another proof to me that I am growing and that He is putting His desires in my heart and making them mine, too. And I’ve had the best teacher…the one who asks Jesus to teach him how to pray will never be disappointed.

Am I where I want to be? I’m absolutely nowhere near where I want to be. I find I’m still so negligent. Am I praying more, with more sincerity and passion than I ever have? Absolutely.

I have never truly heard an in-depth teaching on the Christian’s prayer life worth anything. Maybe it was because I didn’t have ears to hear at the time, but I don’t believe that it is something the average pastor in the average church is spending a great deal of time teaching. I have sought great teaching out on the internet, in books, etc. and it has opened up a whole new world to me that I didn’t know existed. Maybe people in congregations come from so many different backgrounds that pastors do not want to tramp on the toes of those who think they have a ‘prayer language’. I would hope not because that would be pure compromise and such a tragedy. I’ll deal with the subject of ‘prayer languages’ at some point, but not today. I don’t understand why there is not more teaching out there on this great subject. Every new believer should at least be made aware of what has been made available to him by God in prayer. Maybe there are those who believe it is not something that needs to be taught, that people will somehow grow naturally into a life of prayer by following examples within the church. The disciples had the greatest example of prayer, yet they still asked Him to teach them how to pray.

I have heard numerous pastors complain because the prayer service is severely lacking in attendance. News flash: people don’t know how to pray automatically. People talk a lot about prayer, “They say, ‘I’ll pray for you pastor.” But that doesn’t mean they are praying. In fact, it should scare every pastor out there that there is a possibility their congregation does not know how to pray.

So prayerlessness is such a dreadful sin because it is a slap in the face to our most holy God, it is the cause of a deficient spiritual life, the church suffers because of a lack of prayer, and, then, we will never be able to reach people with the Gospel without prayer.

Prayer clothes us with power from on high. We will never be able to preach the Gospel to men with power until we know this fellowship with God in prayer. It is impossible to walk with God, to obtain His blessing or leading, or to do His work joyously and fruitfully apart from close, unbroken fellowship with Him. He, alone, is the living fountain of spiritual life and power.

If someone came to you and asked you to be very instrumental in the work of some monumental project, how would you feel? Overwhelmed, I would imagine. Especially if you knew that it was not in your power to do so; in other words, you had no capability to do this work without the resources that were needed. What if you knew that the person who had asked you to do it had all the power and resources in himself to do it, but was asking you to be a part of his work? What if he said, “Anything you need, just ask and it will be made available to you.” Wouldn’t you ask for those things you needed? How stupid it would be to just sit there and try to do it yourself, and then wonder why things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to. What do you think this person would say to you when he came and found that you never asked for any resources?

Think of the magnitude of the Kingdom that God is asking us to partner with Him in building. Oh, that the thought and work of the kingdom might drive us to the acknowledgement of the sin of prayerlessness! I pray that this burden will be laid so heavily upon us that we will not be able to rest until we learn what it means to have fellowship with God.

The next time we will look at the causes of prayerlessness.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

What Do you Desire?

We’ve finally come back to looking at the sin of prayerlessness in the Church today. I think right off the bat we need to see that we are dealing with the lack of prayer IN THE CHURCH.


When we first started looking at this subject, we said that: We must fight the urge to look at sinners and compare ourselves to them. We tend to dwell on the sin in the world around us instead of examining our own hearts before God and dealing with the sin that is there. That is the focus of this study, our own hearts before God. Why, when we have been forgiven so much as God’s children, do we condemn the world for its hopelessly lost condition and then refuse to see our own sin as it is? Simply, it is because we don’t have any real idea of what our sin looks like to our holy God.


I hope to show you that the sin of prayerlessness is a heinous sin of the worst kind. The greatest sin that man is guilty of is not murder, child abuse or the greatest social injustice we can think of, but that he would not give glory to God. Lack of prayer in the life of a believer fails to give God glory on so many levels.


I asked awhile back if up until you have been forced to think about it, did you view the lack of prayer as a weakness or a sin? Knowing our true selves, it should not come as a surprise when many believers confess that they have always looked at it as a weakness, and not a great sin.


We’ve all looked back in the Old Testament and shook our heads at those pathetic Israelites who just couldn’t seem to stop worshipping idols. And, even if we don’t admit it, we think to ourselves, “What was wrong with those people? Why couldn’t they get it?” Hopefully, though, as soon as the thought enters our head we stop and confess our own sin of idolatry which is a daily affair.


“Idolatry,” according to Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “the worshipping of idols, is the greatest enemy that confronts us in the spiritual life. The greatest danger confronting us all is not a matter of deeds or of actions, but of idolatry.”

Idolatry is anything in our lives that occupies the place that should be occupied by God alone. It is anything that holds my life and my devotion, anything that is central in my life, anything by which I live or depend. It is anything to which I give much of my time and attention, my energy and my money. Anything that holds a controlling position in my life is an idol.


So we must be forced to ask ourselves these questions, ‘To what do I give the majority of my time and devotion?’ ‘What do I find myself thinking and talking the most about?’


The last time this subject was mentioned in this blog, I asked the following questions, ‘How much time do you spend in prayer? How much do you think would be enough? Would you say that your life is characterized more by living in the flesh or the Spirit?’ That is where I want to pick it up today.


At the onset, I want to stress that no matter if we spend four hours a day in prayer or less than five minutes in prayer, we should all feel as though we don’t pray enough. The holiness of our God and all that He has done for us demands that thought from us. Once the light of God’s Word shines upon our guilt, all excuses that come crashing into the forefronts of our minds should be smashed immediately before words are ever formed in our mouths. There is no excuse that suffices for the lack of prayer in the life of a child of God.


Instead, this sin needs to be acknowledged by each one of us in deep shame. Our hearts ARE desperately wicked above all else, and we should never question that or try to believe otherwise. There is way too much evidence of it.


We talked a little bit about the difference between the law and a compulsion in the life of a believer. While God does tell us repeatedly in His Word that we are to pray, it should be our greatest delight, and we should need no reminder to do that which delights us most. What three-year old needs to be told that he needs to spend time with a loving parent? Are you kidding me? On the contrary, there are multitudes of three-year olds in the care of others, for whatever reasons, who long for this time alone with their parents. Why? Because they love their mother and father. Mother and father are the whole world of the three-year old (after himself). There isn’t anything else that compares to spending time with the ones who loves him the most.

Believers are told to pray unceasingly. How could anyone make a command like that unless he understood that no one is going to earnestly pray night and day unless it is an internal compulsion, unless it is something that he longs to do. The desires of our hearts are the foundation for our actions. Simply put, we do what we want to do.


Natural man has evil desires. The reason he will have no excuse before a sovereign God on judgment day is because he ultimately followed the desires of his heart during his lifetime on earth. He had no desire to repent of his sin, believe in Christ or follow Him. On the other hand, believers get new desires at the time of their spiritual rebirth. They are born from above and have the same desires as those of their Father in heaven. He puts new desires in their hearts that reflect Him and His will. The compulsions we have as Christians, these right desires, are generated or prompted by the Spirit of God within us. The believer on judgment day will find himself in the eternal presence of God because of the desires that God placed in his heart to repent of his sins and believe on Christ for salvation. Due to the fact that God is sovereign over all aspects of salvation, that believer will stand there in humble gratitude before God and will be able to take no credit for his salvation or even acting on those desires that were given to him by God. Just as physical life is given by God and sustained by God, so, too is the spiritual life of the believer.


Our great and loving Father allows or sends afflictions and trials in our lives so that we will learn to run to Him for answers, for healing, for comfort, for EVERYTHING. Those who need God the most will pray the most. But, we must all learn to live close to Him and to abide in Him at all times. A three-year old child feels most safe and secure when his father or mother is near. During those times, all is right with the world. When a believer spends time abiding in the presence of His heavenly Father, all is right in his world even though he is in a world that is under the dominion of the evil one. Unfortunately, growing up is hard and where the natural child learns to be more independent of his parents, the believer must learn to be more and more dependent on God. This is a training process.


Because we are fallen creatures, what often happens when the trial is removed? We go back to ignoring God. I don’t know whether it is an American concept or what, but we have been raised to be independent. I guess that is how we chose to live at the Fall, so it part of our human sin nature. That is why the five-year old today is nothing like the five-year old 50 years ago. Sadly, the five-year old of our post-modern world has learned to be brave and is often thrown into the world long before he should be. As Christians, we must learn to be dependent upon our Father for everything since it goes against everything we know, everything that is ingrained in us. What should be natural for the child of God is to pray and stay close to Him.


Part of the problem is that we don’t have a clue how much we need God. Sitting right where you are reading this, you don’t even realize that you need Him for your next breath. We take things for granted, because we still have a lot of selfishness in us, and we are ungrateful. We must learn to be grateful for all the blessings that God has given us, including life, especially new life. Natural man wants to do everything apart from God – his own way. He wants to be able to say with Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way.’ Deep down, the fight we all must struggle against is this unbelief that we really need God for anything. Just the opposite, however, is true. We need God for absolutely EVERYTHING!


Regarding prayer, then, the measure of a person’s spirituality is not determined by how well he conforms to the DEMAND to pray but by the extent he is compelled to pray because of an internal passion for others in God’s kingdom.


Because our passions will come out in our prayers, we need to examine our prayers. If our prayers are focused upon our needs, problems, questions and struggles, then that is an indication of where our heart is. If we pray infrequently, briefly and in a shallow manner, our hearts are cold because prayer is just not that important to us. There is no inner desire. What would my relationships be like if all I talked about with my friends were those things that interested me, if every time my friend started to talk about something other than ME, I turned the conversation back to myself? Or, what if I never wanted to talk to my friend but only talked about the weather and things that really don’t matter a whole hill of beans? If we find that this is what our prayer life looks like, we need to be concerned that our hearts may be deceiving us into thinking things are okay between ourselves and God when, in reality, there is something desperately wrong.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Communications 101

Sometimes I think I’m the only one in the world who has the strange hang-ups that I do. One such quirk that always drives me crazy, but which can also get me into a lot of trouble, is my dreaded fear of a lull in the conversation with another person. I’ve learned to deal with it better than I used to, but every once in a while there is that nagging fear where it ought not to be. The tendency I once had, when the conversation drops off into dead silence, is to fill that air with babble. Every time this fear rears its ugly head, I find myself guarding my tongue. Filling air with worthless chatter has led me to gossip and all kinds of other sins of the tongue in the past. I have come to understand that silence can be a time when we are gathering our thoughts for the next round of conversation, and it’s a good thing.

When I get together with the girls on Friday, there seems to be a never-ending stream of good, usually edifying conversation. Even when I get together with someone alone, the fear is easily withstood as the conversation naturally flows from like-minded hearts who love the same God of the Bible.

This is how our time with God should be in prayer. When we love someone, our conversation with that person should flow freely and naturally. We don’t need to ‘make conversation’. Even when there is silence, we are resting in one another’s presence. Sometimes it’s just good when a friend is there saying nothing. That’s how it is in prayer. There are nights when I am distraught over this, that or the other thing and I am exhausted. As I cry out to the Father, I can’t speak for crying, but I tell Him that I just want to sit and cry in His presence knowing that He is there. It’s a sweet time of fellowship. I’ve had those times with friends in the past, and they are some of the sweetest memories of all.

Remember when I started this whole series of posts? My intention is to get back to how great a sin it is for the one who professes to be a believer to have a lack of prayer in his life. We will soon be getting back to that. In the meantime, I want to show this basic fellowship that every human being understands.

There are times when something happens in my life when I know immediately that I need to get away somewhere and pray. I know that He is the only one who can help me, and I need His help desperately right then and there. But always there should be this desire and delight to speak to Him, to share our hearts with Him. I hope to get into a whole in-depth study on prayer in the future; for now, I’m just skimming the surface.

Another thing that we naturally want to do with someone we love is to praise them. And there is no one more worthy than our praise than God, Himself. When we love a person, we can’t help but tell them so. We show him love by our actions; yes, but we also want to express our love in words.

This whole idea shows us that we don’t just come to God because we want something. What kind of relationship would that earthly one be in which I just went to a friend when I wanted something? They would soon come to call me ‘a user’. The dearest relationships we have on earth fill us with joy. They are a delight to our souls. We can’t wait for those times when we can share our love one for another.

Another thing about a good friend is this fact that you know they are always there for you. You can trust them to want your good and to be a very present help in time of need. Unfortunately, this cannot be said 100% of the time with our human relationships just because of that very fact – they ARE human. But, God is always there for us. Do you know that? Do you really know it experientially? If you don’t, there is no use to try and pray – you might as well be speaking to a wall because you don’t believe you are being heard by anyone who cares. It’s just like my babble – worthless chatter. For good communication to be accomplished, two hearts have to connect. To know that my heart connects with the Divine heart of God each time I pray is an overwhelming, yet glorious thought. But that is exactly what I know to be true. Knowing my Father is listening and always available to hear the burdens, desires, and praises of my heart gives me confidence in prayer.

One of the best tests we can apply to ourselves to see if we are truly in fellowship and communion with God is to examine our prayer life. First of all, does it exist? How often do I find myself in prayer? Is there freedom there to express what is in the depths of my heart? Is prayer a wearisome task or a great delight of my soul?

I get incredible joy from reading the Psalms. Invariably, I find myself with the psalmist crying out in unison with him only to find that they are the inspired words of God written down for me to pray back to Him. The psalmists bear their souls with so much passion that it becomes contagious at once and I find that I cannot contain myself. Before long, there will be tears of joy and I find my heart leaping up in praise to God.

Our conversations and communion with God our Father should be as easy and as natural as those with our most trusted friends, yet even more so because of who He is. What about those people who say that our conversations with friends are easier because there is a two-way conversation? After all, everyone knows that there are two sides in fellowship, right? We’ve already said that communion with God necessitates this realization of God’s presence. Every person who claims to have fellowship with God must be able to say that He has known God’s presence at that time. I understand that this teaching, in the past, has opened all kinds of doors to the false ideology of mysticism. Although He does not speak with an audible voice, He does speak. He always speaks in one way or another to our souls.

Sometimes we know His comfort as we read His words in Scripture. He also gives us wisdom, understanding and strength for every situation He allows in our lives. Sometimes He impresses upon us holy desires and longings. Only God gives us those desires and longings that line up with His will for us as recorded in Scripture. There are many ways that God speaks to us, but they will never contradict His Word which has once-for-all been recorded for us in the pages of Scripture. I have never heard an audible voice, but I know without a shadow of a doubt that God has spoken to me.

God also reveals His will to us in many ways, leading us and guiding us as we move alone in our walk with Him. You can’t recognize the sovereignty of God without knowing that He is the one causing all the good in your life and allowing everything else in your life to be worked out for your good and His glory if you are truly His. To know this fellowship is to know that you are in His hand and aware that He is daily working in your life to bring you to Christlikeness.

I love the illustration I heard a long time ago. Our lives may look like the underneath side of a tapestry to us, but when we get to heaven, those same tapestries will be turned right side up and we will see the beautiful picture He created out of our lives.

Monday, March 29, 2010

The Remnant Versus the Crowd

Sit down in a room with someone you have absolutely nothing in common with, and after you have fully exhausted all conversation about the weather, it soon becomes a very uncomfortable situation. As someone who has struggled with making chit-chat all her life, I have faced many such challenging encounters. I have always had a problem with making conversation with those I don’t know well. Backward, shy, introverted – all are terms I would have labeled myself with in the past. However, because I understand what the Bible says about this, I have had to face the fact that the root of all these symptoms is the fear of man, the fear of rejection, which is a nice way of saying, “Pride!” How I hate the sin of pride! Especially when I see it in myself! And, yet it is one that we all struggle with day in and day out whether we admit it or not. THEN, if we want to go a step further, we will come to the realization that all sin resulting from pride is nothing but shear unbelief. Oh, how that light bulb-moment wounded me deeply! It hurt…you guessed it…MY PRIDE!

We’re talking about fellowship. What is meant by ‘fellowship’ in the biblical sense? First, we start with the premise we began with in the earlier blog posts, that light can have no fellowship with darkness. It’s a biblical principle that should be readily acknowledge if one accepts the truth of Scripture. There is nothing ambiguous about the concept.

The last time I talked about fellowship I said it was going to involve sharing or partaking of things. Biblically, those who are able to have biblical fellowship are those who share the life of God in Christ. Christianity is NOT about living a better life – basically being the same person you once were but just adding or subtracting certain things. Christians are those who have received the divine life.

The second thing that biblical fellowship involves is partnering with God – being intimately involved in the things that interest Him – in other words, those who have this new life in them will have a sense of being partners with God in His great plan of salvation. His purposes become the Christian’s greatest passions in life. We have the same attitudes as He does toward this world, sin, evil – EVERYTHING! We see things through different lenses. We come to know that “there are evil forces that are in the world which are manipulating the life of the world in their enmity against God and we are concerned about that.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Part of this partnership we have with God necessitates that we be a people who pray, meditate, read His Word, and do everything we are enabled to do to further His kingdom of light while in this dark world. “We are sharers in God’s thoughts and in God’s enterprise and in God’s whole interest in this life and world.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Someone very close to me once said, “When are you going to stop trying to save the whole world?” I said, “Silly. I know I can’t save anyone, but it’s my job to partner with Him in the work of salvation.” Needless to say, she didn’t get it. She thinks I’m hopelessly disillusioned about life. Come to think about it, we’ve never talked about much since that day.

When I sit in a room with a believer, I will always have something to talk about. That is a truly amazing aspect of our fellowship in Christ. I have been in conversations with Christians the first time we met in which I didn’t want the conversation to end. We, literally, could talk for a lifetime and not exhaust all that we have in common. I have gone to conferences where I have been with like-minded believers who I have felt I have known my whole lifetime. It’s an incredible thing to be part of God’s universal family. There is a oneness there that the world cannot know apart from knowing Christ.

Fellowship means communion. Conversation, sharing, intercourse – all things that represent fellowship whether it is the fellowship the world or the Christian knows. Everyone gets the idea of what fellowship looks like.

Back to our illustration. As hard as it is for me to engage in superficial chit-chat with unbelievers, what would make it somewhat easier? If I knew them, right? It will be much easier for me to hold a conversation for any length of time with an unbeliever I know than one I do not know. The key to fellowship in any sense of the word is relationship; it’s knowing the other person. The longer I know someone the more I find we have in common that we can talk about. This basis of knowledge for the believer with an unbeliever is a great foundation in which to start laying the bricks of the gospel.

That is looking at fellowship from man’s side. But what about this fellowship with God that John talks about in 1 John? How am I to have this fellowship with God? I must know Him. I don’t just know facts about Him. The Christian who can have fellowship with God has come to know Him as Father. It is a sweet, intimate communion between a child and his Father.

Most of us know what it is to have come from churches where there were long, formal ‘prayers’ to a ‘Higher Being’. The ‘priest’ ‘Reverend’ or pastor may even started by addressing God as “Thou, Holy Father” or something to that affect. But looking back we realize that there was no intimacy or familiarity – no sense of a family relationship. It was just a list of petitions given by rote. No heart – no passion. There was no sense of shame, guilt and remorse over sin as when a child who adores his father realizes that he has offended him or disobediently sinned against him. There was no delight and awe and holy reverence. There was a real difference! One could say it was the difference between light and dark, night and day, white and black.

To have communion with God means that I desire to speak with Him and I know that I CAN do that. I don’t need to go through a priest or a saint or anyone else. I go running straight into the open arms of a loving Father who is waiting eagerly for me to come. The door is always open. He is never too busy for this one He delights in…ME! Do you know that love of God? As His beloved children, He wants you to know it. What is stopping you?

Now, I’m not saying that prayer is easy. Prayer is one of the hardest aspects of living the Christian life. We all know the difficulties we have at times of connecting with God. But we must always know that it is on our part, never on His. We will camp on this subject at length later on. Understand for now that prayer is the conversation part of our fellowship with God. It is something that grows in its intensity over time as one gets to know God more intimately.

I have a Bible study in my home on Friday mornings. We’ve been meeting for about eight or nine years. From the 40-50 some women who have walked through my doors, there are only three or four left. Does the word ‘remnant’ ring a bell? Occasionally we have one or two continue to come and leave shortly thereafter. Let me tell you there are not too many people who want to sit and listen to hard teaching for an hour or an hour and a half each week. Any teaching that cuts us open and exposes us for what we are before a holy God is hard, in case you didn’t know!!!

Yet, these few continue to come. Why? Because we are all growing in our love for God. We are getting to know Him in a way that we didn’t know Him before. The more we seek to know Him, the more we come to know about each other. And, can I tell you about our fellowship? The fellowship we have is ‘other worldly.’ Our friendship is based on our same love for Christ. We talk about a lot of things when we go to lunch afterwards, but we always come back to what is most important in our lives, and that is Christ. And we never run out of things to talk about. I’m not saying that we’re all at the same place in our walk with Christ, but there’s that essence of family life. It’s family talk around the table – we are comfortable with each other, able to share the deepest longings of our heart, our weaknesses and the areas we seem to struggle with the most. And there is accountability there. We come alongside and support one another encouraging each other in godliness and holiness. I know we’re not perfect, and sometimes we may even agitate each other as we continue to sharpen each other, but I walk away every week with a small glimpse of heaven knowing that this is love, and the anticipation of spending eternity with my whole family causes me to yearn eagerly all the more to go home. I guess I already have some fellowship with the hymn writer, Fanny Crosby, who said, “Oh, what a foretaste of heaven divine!” I know what that means. I’m certain we have much in common.

That’s what the remnant is like. However, when we were a much larger group, we had people from all different mindsets, many different denominations who were curious, I guess. And even though there seemed to be a connection for a short while, it soon became evident that there were huge differences between us. One by one they each left, most often because my teaching was too hard. I’ve got accused of ‘bashing’ more times than I care to count. In all honesty, I can say that some left because of jobs or other commitments on Friday morning, but for the most part I can only say like John, “They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us, but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us.”

Then, too, they probably wouldn’t recognize my teaching today because I’m growing, and the boldness that God has given me to proclaim the truth in teaching His Word has gotten stronger and stronger over time. What’s the difference? I have come to know Him better. A lot of the junk out there that is promoted as Christian teaching, which I had exposed myself to in the past, has been replaced with the truth. I guess you could say that even though my eyes may be getting worse (rapidly going downhill after 40), I can see much more clearly than ever before. The truth must stand alone, uncompromised and uncluttered. Clear water, not muddied. True fellowship rests on the Rock of solid truth.

Would I want to go back to so many people in the Bible study if it meant giving up what we now share? Absolutely no way! I know that numbers are not what count, but like-minded people sharing their hearts in true biblical fellowship!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Crux of Christianity

Fellowship with God. The concept alone is enough to blow our minds if we have the right view of God and the right view of ourselves. Yet this is what the Apostle John wants his children in the faith to understand and know. In fact, it is the theme of his epistle in 1 John. He says, “You can have this fellowship. You can know that you have this fellowship. And there are things that must be in order if you are to realize this fellowship.” Yesterday we saw that sin is one obstacle to our fellowship with God.

I alluded to the next thing in one of the first blogs when I was talking about having true fellowship in the Church. Before you can have true fellowship with God, true communion, there must be likeness. There must be a sameness. What do I mean by that?

We all have acquaintenances in our lives, people who we like well enough, but we just don’t seem to have that much in common with them. We don’t have the same interests . We don’t have any depth of communion with them – there is a kind of superficial relationship with them. For the Christian living in this world, he finds that he has a multitude of acquaintenances as compared with those he has true fellowship with. Why? Because true fellowship demands like natures.

Paul is very clear about this when he says in 2 Corinthians 6:14 that there can be no fellowship between righteousness and unrighteousness, no communion between light and darkness. These things, logically, cannot mix or be blended. Light is no longer light when there is darkness. Darkness no longer is darkness when the light is turned on. Literally, these are issues that are black and white. There are two realms – light and darkness – in this world. People are in either one of those categories, but can never be in both.

This same principle applies to people in their relationship with God. Before a person can really know God, to have fellowship and communion with Him, he must be made like Him. All throughout Scripture we see that as Christians we have become partakers of the divine nature. This is what makes us children of God. To have the nature of God is to share His life. Christ made this possible for us. A believer is one who has the very life of Christ living inside him.

Another characteristic of fellowship or communion is that the two parties love the same things. We must love one another as John repeats over and over in all his letters and his gospel. When two people truly love each other there can’t be any suspicion or doubt. There must be complete understanding and complete confidence and no lack of trust. There is no fellowship apart from true love.

This is why people who ‘say’ they love God yet do not know who He is as seen in the Lord Jesus Christ, are liars. They believe they love God but their god is not the God of the Bible.

Why is this world in the state that it is in? Because the world is not in fellowship with God. The world is at enmity with God and hates the things of God. There is no likeness or sameness. The kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness under the power of the prince of darkness is light and dark, black and white in contrast.

The Christian, on the other hand, lives in the same world, the same environment with the same chaos and conflict going on all around him, yet he has peace because he has fellowship with God. His joy is not found in circumstances or his surroundings, but in Christ alone. He knows that this world is passing away and all its lusts. But he also knows that what will last cannot be taken away from him.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones says this: “‘Truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.’ Here, let me repeat, is the very acme of Christian experience and at the same time it is a goal; it is the whole object of Christian experience and of Christian faith and teaching.”

What is your overall concept of the Christian life as you examine yourself? Do you see Christianity as more or less primarily concerned about the application of certain laws and principles and Christian teaching of doctrine? There definitely is a need for Christian teaching of doctrine, and I don’t want to discount that in any way, but it is not the crux and heart of Christianity. The heart of Christianity, of the Christian life is fellowship or communion with God Himself. That is to be the focus of our life. To know Him. While it is important, even crucial, to hold to orthodox teaching…there are, without hesitation, certain things that every Christian must believe, even to be defenders of these right doctrine… this does not necessarily equate with Christianity. In other words, I may hold to all the right doctrine and not be saved. Why? Because right doctrine is not the essence of Christian life. It is fellowship with the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.

I will swing to the other side and adamantly stress that apart from right doctrine, one cannot be saved, either. Further, right doctrine should lead us to this fellowship with God based on our knowledge of Him which produces love for Him. Christianity is not only intellectual but it also involves the will, the desires and the emotions.

Again quoting Lloyd-Jones: “There have been people in the Church, alas, many times in the past, who have fought for orthodoxy and who have been defenders of the faith and yet they have sometimes found themselves on their deathbeds coming to the realization that they have never known God. They have only held opinions; they have only fought for certain articles of creed or faith. The things they fought for were right, but, alas, it is possible to stop at the negative position and to fail to realize that the whole object of all the things they claim to believe is to bring them to this central position. This, let me emphasise again, is the essence, the summum bonum, of the Christian life; it is the theme, the objective of everything that has been done by the Lord Jesus Christ.

I have been confronted many times by people who I think I am out of balance on this whole issue. They see me fighting for certain doctrine or truth and believe that my Christianity is nothing more than intellectual, but they do not see the other side of my heart which is every day crying out to Him to help me know Him more. My heart’s passion is to know Him. He is the beginning and the end. He’s everything! In this world, however, there is so much profession by people not holding to sound doctrine who claim to love God that there is great need to fight for truth. People are perishing for lack of knowledge. They are deluded, deceived, blind and walking in darkness. We must give them the truth about our God and pray that He removes the veil from their eyes enabling them to see with the eyes of faith.

Christ came to bring us into fellowship with the Father and with Himself. So what exactly does fellowship look like? We’ll see next time.