St. John Studies

On this Valentine’s Day, it is fitting to discuss a chapter entitled “Loving: the Prayer for Other People.” What does love for one another mean?   Does it mean feelings? Does it mean actions? For many, it may mean flowers, candy, jewelry, or a nice meal. Love is one of those words in our language that is hard to “pin down.” It has a lot of positive connotations but it is not definitive or specific.

What does love mean for the practicing Christian? In the Old Testament, it was a part of the religion for those who worshipped the God of Israel. Certainly in the New Testament, Jesus lived a life of love and preached love for others.

It is the most important thing that we can do as followers of Christ.

When Christ died, He not only reconciled us to God, but He also reconciled us one to another. Paul explains in Ephesians 2 that the starting point for reconciliation was the Jew and the Gentile. Christ came to create a “new man” out of these two groups, making peace so hostility would end. The Christian community is supposed to be a community of love and unity.

As Christians, we celebrate the love and unity that is in our community in the Lord’s Supper which is referred to as an agape meal or love feast. This meal serves as a remembrance of Christ’s death and the communion between God and man, as well as man among man. 1^st Corinthians 10: 16-17 examines the words of unity: “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.”

In marriage, Christian husbands and wives should practice love and spiritual equality. 1^st Peter 3:7 states “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the [physically] weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.” To fail to love and respect your wife displeases God and breaks Christ’s command.

If we don’t obey God’s commands and love one another, we have no right to claim the title of “Christian.” The words of John are very clear: “If anyone says, ‘I love you’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And He has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”   The upshot of this message is this: if you are not expressing love for your Christian brothers and sisters, you have no right to claim that you are a child of God. Prayer which comes from one who is without love is dead.

Love is an amorphous word; it is hard to “put legs on it.” We want to see it, we want to touch it, we want to smell it but it is a feeling that emanates from deep within a person. Maybe that is why we objectify it with the purchase of gifts during Valentine’s Day.   We want to give someone something that signifies that we love them. Florists, candy makers and card manufacturers are happy to supply what we need to communicate our feelings but the purchase of an item seems inadequate to express Christian love in the world.

God wants us to come together in unity and acceptance.   God wants us to share the single loaf. God wants us to respect one another in marriage. He wants us to have prayers for our brothers and sisters who are in need; prayers that signal our true concern for them.

St. Augustine was asked once “What does love look like?” He replied “It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy.   It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.”

I think most of us would say that Augustine got it right.

His definition of love provides wonderful insight about the Christian pathway to love, a pathway we should all be taking. A pathway that leads from God through us and heads straight to the needs of our brothers and sisters…

Probably you have been there.

You have an unruly child and you need to use some discipline. You are mad that the situation has come to this and you might even say to your child something like “This hurts me worse than it does you.” Since this is your child, you may be irritated at his or her behavior, but you know that you love them. You know your anger and disappointment will pass; yet discipline is necessary so the child can learn what behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable.

As adult Christians, we don’t want to see ourselves as the child in this scenario but we are very much in it, when it comes to God disciplining us. He is our Father; we are His children and yes, from time to time, we get “out of line.”

Discipline, chastisement and rebuke are the loving responses of our Creator. W. Bingham Hunter* illustrates how we can come to understand this; how discipline can actually benefit us. “If two people float downriver and one person’s craft is holed by a submerged rock, is the wet, bruised and bedraggled soul who crawls ashore having lost all the gear better or worse off than the other person, who is dashed to pulp on the rocks below the hidden waterfall?”

As adults we don’t want to experience discipline in any form.   We are the ones who feel we should be disciplining others, but the fact of the matter is that we all make mistakes.

Some of those mistakes are very serious sins.

Most of us focus on the negative effects of punishment. Most of us have a very short-term view.   Sometimes a short-term correction is far preferred to eternal punishment. God wants us to grow closer to Him throughout our lives. He wants us to become spiritually mature.   He wants to help us develop our character.   He does not want us to perish in the “pit.” He wants us to come to know His spiritual truth.

Probably the best way to understand discipline from God is to think of it in the context of the family. A parent’s job is to train and develop values and characteristics which are in the child’s best interest. Like a loving parent, God is not mad at us when He disciplines us. His punishment never comes to us in rage but always in love and compassion. The problem is that we focus on the pain and discomfort and the shame of being disciplined. As adults we just don’t like it.

God’s discipline becomes worse when we begin to associate the pain of the moment with God not loving us. We get angry at God and turn away from Him.   We can even get so angry that we stop praying.   We need to be aware that God is closest to us when we hurt. Revelation 3:20 says “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will go in and eat with him, and he with Me.”   He is not inside, saying to us “Go away until you can be good and then I will let you in.”

Our God who loves and values you does not go away if you quit talking to Him, but you will miss a great deal if you decide to go into spiritual seclusion. Yes, even if you feel that the rebuke from God is very painful, He wants to talk with you. Don’t shut the door to communication with God. Do the reverse; open the door and have more communication and fellowship with Him.   In your times of correction, you can have your best talks with God. Express yourself and try to understand God’s purposes in your struggle.

The more you try to understand, the more you will grow.

Indeed, growing closer to God, becoming more spiritually mature and experiencing character development are all good things.

Remember, God our Father loves you enough to correct you.

And that [I am thinking] is a very good thing…

*author of The God Who Hears

God disciplines us today as He always has.

What may be different today is our attitude toward God’s discipline.

Don’t get me wrong. If the discipline comes in the form of pain or suffering, I don’t like it. I am sure you don’t either.

Also, I think it is folly to equate pain, adversity or tribulation with the degree God loves you or does not love you. God loves us all the time. Prayer helps in time of trouble. Another folly is to equate the effectiveness of prayer with the amount of suffering that is reduced by fervent petition. God hears all prayers; He just responds the way He wants to, not how we want Him to. We want a quick alleviation of pain when we pray.

Maybe it is our contemporary lifestyle but many of us struggle with God’s discipline today.

J.B. Phillips, writing in our book The God Who Hears, discusses the attitude of the New Testament authors. “the New Testament epistles present life as an incident…compared to the timeless life of God Himself. To these men, this world was only a part…of God’s created universe. They trained themselves therefore, and attempted to train others, not to be ‘taken in’ by this world, not to give their hearts to it, not to conform to its values, but to remember constantly that they were only temporary residents, and their rights of citizenship were in the unseen world of Reality.”

This is quite a contrast to the worldly temptations Christians face today. The world today is all about making the most we can out of life. We are confronted by people every day who think that this world is all we are going to have. We see media all the time with the message that we need to enjoy life; after all, it’s a bowl of cherries, we need to look on the sunny side of life, we need to get that new lease on life so we can be the life of the party. It is all about now and what we can experience now.

It is easy to have such a life affirming positive attitude until tough times arrive and then many of us struggle. C.S. Lewis states “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains…a bad man, happy, is a man without the least inkling that his actions…are not in accord with the laws of the universe.”

When we are in the midst of tribulation we have what I call “foxhole prayers”, you know those serious petitions that soldiers offer up when they are trying to survive withering artillery fire from the enemy. When we are flat on our backs, God has our attention and we get serious about prayer.

Today, we just can’t seem to understand why all those hard times come.   We say things like God does not love me.   God is a hateful God. God refuses to answer my prayer. God is turning His back to me.

Maybe He is not doing any of that. Maybe He is just trying to reorient us. Unlike the New Testament writers, we just can’t see that God’s purpose is to help us attain salvation through faith in Christ.   The long-term goal is not to make our lives miserable, it is to direct us toward becoming a spiritual child of God and more importantly to help us live like children of God in the world today.

One of the most famous scriptures in the Bible may be the one that most contemporary Christians do not want to take seriously: “Look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal” [2 Corinthians, 4:18].

Maybe when we are being disciplined we think God is using his whip.

Maybe we need to realize that is not true.

He is really using His megaphone.

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize?  Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.  They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.   Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air.   No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.”

Sounds a little like an athlete training for the Olympics doesn’t it, but no, it is Paul writing in 1 Corinthian: 9.

He is talking about something that many people don’t want to discuss…

Discipline.

Today many Christians don’t seem to understand discipline. They associate it with punishment, hardship, suffering, grief and adversity. Discipline is often thought of as a disruption in our lifestyle. We should be pursuing happiness, peace and security. When we think about discipline, it is depressing and some may even consider discipline as God turning His back on us, making us do something we would rather not do.

Let’s explore the Biblical definition of discipline. The Hebrew and Greek term for discipline is most often associated with learning.   W. Bingham Hunter says that over ninety percent of Biblical uses of discipline refer to teaching, instruction, training up, pointing out, making obvious or bringing conviction about.   “The Bible never says learning is convenient or fun, but [it] is necessary and universal in the family of God” [Hunter, 122].

I think Hunter’s image of discipline is a good one. He says that discipline functions like warning signs or guard rails on a highway. God expects us to use His discipline in order to avoid “spiritual collisions.”   He does not want us running off the road. He knows the disciplined and narrow way of life leads to the best fellowship with Him. A disciplined lifestyle furthers better prayer with God and an undisciplined lifestyle hinders prayer.

In my personal experience, when I know I am straying away from what God expects (maybe doing what I want to do and sinning in the process) I find it very had to pray.   I am so self-centered that I do what I want and ignore what God expect of me.   Why would He want to hear from me?   I assume He wouldn’t want to listen to the prayer of a sinner. I feel so guilty praying anyhow.   Prayer time diminishes and can even disappear.

Athletes have tangible goals for their training. The medal or the trophy or the recognition all motivate them to train so they can win. For the Christian, the goal is less “tangible.”   The goal of the Christian is to be Christlike.   We all know that this is impossible because Christ came to be with us on earth, faced temptations we face and yet He lived a sinless life.   That does not mean that we have to throw up our hands in despair, give up on our training and say “what is the use!”   We all fall short of the glory of God and as we fall short, we depend of His grace for help.

We know we will never be able to train hard enough, work hard enough and be good enough to get to heaven on our own.   We depend on Him to get us to the finish line.

“Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.   They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever”.

Think about the words of Paul. Think about the reward.

Do you need to inject some discipline into your life because it shows a solid love commitment for God?

He certainly loves us; maybe we should work hard to show our love for Him.

As Nike says… “Just Do It!”

“Christians have a tendency to turn. . . consequences into judgments. (If something bad happens, God must be punishing me) (Hunter, 120).

However, God created the universe in an orderly fashion. He made gravity as well as other physical and material laws but that does not mean that a human being’s encounter with physical and material laws can be interpreted as God is out to hurt us for our sins, God is punishing us for our indiscretions.

When accidents happen, many of us should just leave it at that. “I have suffered an accident.”

Do we sometimes contribute to circumstances by our mental attitude?   Yes, we do.

I am going to be honest here.   In my fall on October 18 [sorry if I am boring you with referring to it one more time] I had a very prideful attitude toward my capabilities.   I felt I was strong enough, had good enough balance and was courageous enough to climb a twelve foot ladder and whack away on my trees. When I was on the ladder (about ten feet up), I realized that the base was not on flat ground and the ladder started swaying.   All this was not God; it was physics.   When the sway got too pronounced, the ladder fell, along with me.   Due to gravity, I hit my backside and that began my journey with pelvic trauma.

Did pride get me up on the tall ladder? Yes. Did my bravado embolden me to ignore safety and not secure the ladder on flat ground? Yes.   Did God engineer the whole episode to punish me? I really doubt that.

All this leads me to W. Bingham Hunter’s next chapter entitled “Responding: The Prayer of the Chastened Disciple”.

Accidents do happen and we hate them.   We don’t want to have trauma in our lives but it occurs. Jim Rendon, in his book Upside, reports that approximately 75% of people will have some traumatic event in their lives, unplanned damaging accidents that will cause some form of suffering [often great suffering]. He has studied trauma victims and what they go through as a result of their events. “Most reported negative effects. But to [his] surprise, a majority of the 600 trauma survivors interviewed reported positive changes to their lives.”

We have all heard clichés about life, you know expressions like “It is not how hard you fall, it is how well you get up.”   I had someone tell me that “to grow stronger, sometimes we have to be broken.”   Rendon’s positive trauma victims said they “had greater inner strength, were closer to friends and family, and were reorienting their lives toward more fulfilling goals.”

Could those clichés be true?

Scripture teaches us that God has established principles which guide us in our spiritual lives. Many of us have had human experiences that reinforce those spiritual principles.  You might be asking how all this talk about accidents relates to prayer.   I believe God can teach us a lot from the mistakes we make; the discipline we need can come from the errors we make in life; yes, even those accidents that occur.

Maybe prayer was lukewarm before trauma but prayer can accelerate greatly after trauma. Hunter says “some of the greatest factors affecting our willingness, desire and attitude in prayer are our reactions to the events God allows or sends into our lives.”

Pain and prayer are closely connected.

Even though Jim Rendon has not written a book based on scripture, his thoughts echo sentiments that can be inspirational to all people who are dealing with trauma and change. “Growth begins with healing from trauma. But people have the capacity to do far more than heal. Ultimately they can become better versions of themselves.”

When I read those words, I was heartened.

I wanted to respond well; I wanted to pray the prayers of the chastened disciple.

Probably everyone occasionally wonders “Who am I?”   Maybe you question “Why am I here anyway?”

Well the answer is simple.

To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

I am heavily into the book Desiring God by John Piper in my Sunday School teaching. Piper’s premise is that experiencing joy in our love of the Lord is our ultimate goal and we experience that joy through glorifying God. W. Hunter Bingham* expresses the same idea in his chapter on “The Prayer of a Grateful Soul.” We should be grateful that God has given us this purpose.

“God made you and me, gave us personality, gifts and His image with something in mind” [Hunter, 110]. Our existence is completely dependent on God sustaining us, which means we are alive because God wants us to be alive. We are valuable to Him; we are special.

At times, we may all feel “out of time” when the pace of life is outstripping us, technology is getting so complex that we have no idea what basic tech ideas are and cultural ideas are so foreign that we seem to be from another planet. We may think that our life right now is wrong; we are in the wrong place and living in the wrong time.

We should stop and realize that all this does not matter.

What matters is that we matter to God, or we would not be here right now. We are not “merely the chance result of a process which began between friendly protein molecules in some ancient, warm soupy sea. And you can forgive the well-intentioned suggestions of hymn writers that you are nothing but a worthless worm” [Hunter, 110].

Knowing that you are important is important. Thinking you are here for no reason makes you live a life as if it is for no reason.

When we give thanks to God, do we thank Him for allowing us to live in this world today? Do we give Him thanks for giving us an identity in Him?  Do we thank Him for giving us the purpose of glorifying Him?

We should.

We should take the words from Isaiah 43: 6-7 literally where God says to Israel: “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth—everyone who is called by My name, whom I created for My glory, whom I formed and made.”

What does it mean to have our identity in God?

We exist to honor Him.

We exist to increase the fame of God.

We exist to make His name great.

We exist to extol the virtues of our Savior.

We exist to magnify the reputation of the Lord.

We exist to cause others to think positive thoughts about Him.

In John 17:4, Jesus said   “Father…I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you give Me to do.” The same idea is expressed by Paul in the lines “whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” [1 Corinthians 10:31].

If our reason for being on earth is to glorify God, then our whole life is intended to be a testament to God’s glory. As we live out our days, our love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness gentleness and self-control should speak volumes.   That is what God intended for us if we are accepting our identity in Christ.

Yes, it is perfectly appropriate to say “my identity rests in God.”

We are here to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever”.

We should be thankful for this identity and this life purpose.

The closing words of Hunter’s chapter say it best and they bear repeating: “Because of who you are, no one can do it better. And that is what God made you for.”

*from the book The God Who Hears

“Stop and smell the roses.”

That is one cliché most of us know. In most clichés there is a kernel of truth. That’s why they become popular expressions. We assume that stopping and smelling roses refers to taking the time to enjoy life but in the context of grateful prayer, it may also strongly relate to how we express our gratitude to God.

Thanking God is something we all should do but sometimes it seems we find time to do everything but thank Him. When I call for prayer concerns in my Sunday school class, the list of prayers for the sick is long but the list of praises is often short. When I read a book of prayers, the book is often filled with prayers about common problems; there are few prayers of thankfulness.   When I pray, I suspect I am like a lot of people; I ask God to help me tackle my problems.   I don’t give Him credit for all the problems He has already resolved.

Why is this?

Maybe it truly is the fact that we need to “stop and smell the roses”.  W. Bingham Hunter says that it could be the pace of life that keeps us from being grateful. Life is hectic and we just don’t take the time to reflect on our blessings. We are so busy that we don’t even take the time to examine how we spend our time.

First of all, gratefulness centers on the thoughtful evaluation of what is important to each of us.   How many of us stop long enough to appreciate what we have?   Instead, it is almost like someone else is controlling us as we put off expressing thankfulness because we are too busy pursuing complex agendas.   There is no time for appreciation because we are rapidly moving on to the next thing.

To pursue gratefulness, it takes a commitment of time.   Not only do we have to find time to think about what we appreciate, we have to find private time to pray to God about what He has given us.   Too many of us have the philosophy that “Christian busyness is next to Godliness” [Hunter, 115].   Prayer time is sacrificed for doing anything but prayer. I know it is an old complaint, but how many hours do we devote to watching television, playing computer games, or surfing the web?   Could that time be spent in prayer?   Of course it could, grateful prayer at that.

Hunter states that thoughtful consideration of busyness is the key.   Why do we have to do so much?   Are we busy because we are letting our lights shine before other men or are we hustling through life to draw attention to ourselves or maybe we are just struggling to keep pace with our contemporaries? Keeping up with the Joneses applies not only to houses and cars; it can also apply to busy agendas.

And yes…

Sometimes we can’t even get to the roses because we are never around them.   If we never see them, how can we smell them?   What Hunter is talking about here is the fact that we don’t take the time to explore God’s natural beauty. He goes even further by saying, “gratitude eludes us because the ugliness of life around us makes it difficult to remember God’s gifts” [Hunter, 115].   We love our air conditioning, we love our television sets and we love our computers so we stay indoors and we don’t explore the beach, the mountains, or even that hiking trail right down the road. Many Christians don’t take the time to catch a fish or touch a flower.   “It is hard to find God in the concrete, steel and plastic in which modern man lives, moves and has his being” [Hunter, 115].

If we are lucky enough to get outside, pause and look around. See the flowers in the yard, watch the beautiful horse run through the field, enjoy that hawk flying through the sky and the sun going down in a blaze of red and bright purple.   What man creates can be fascinating but what God has made is truly miraculous.

We need a reminder that God is worthy of praise and thanksgiving.   Devoting time to thanking Him is important. Paying attention to the blessings that He has given us makes us aware of His working in our lives.   Looking for God’s work in our environment gets us out of ourselves; we can see His touch on the world and it is a beautiful touch if we would just look.

Our time on earth goes quickly, the structures of man do not last but God is forever.

Before our time is past, we need to open our eyes and see His work…

And thank Him…

Due to forced inactivity, I have found myself watching more television in the past four months than normal. When your doctor says you have to sit and heal, television is one option that an “invalid” has in order to pass time. As I have watched countless hours of tv, I have paid my share of attention to the mind manipulation that advertisers use to sell products. I have always been interested in persuasion. I found it challenging in my teaching career to instruct speakers about how they could persuade audiences.

Consumer persuasion via television is a different “animal”, relying mostly on the inadequacy of the viewing audience. W. Bingham Hunter* feels that this type of persuasion may be directly related to our lack of gratitude for what God has given us in our lives.

Media advertisers show us the flat abs that we can have if we just purchase the six hundred dollar piece of exercise equipment.   We look at our abs and they aren’t flat but the fitness model has a trim stomach.   We want flat abs so we pick up the phone and order the equipment.   The “supercool” movie star is seen driving the luxury car on water, no less.   He is so relaxed; he never makes a quick move.   Everything is in slow motion. Wow, we would like to have such control in our lives.   Maybe we need to investigate purchasing that automobile and we will be like him. Our lives are such a contrast to his.

We can go on and on but you get the point.   In our consumer-driven world, we are made to feel insecure.   We don’t have the best clothing, we don’t take the best vacations, and we lack personal beauty.   We compare ourselves to others and we are lacking.

The sad thing is, once we buy a life-changing product, nothing much changes.   A purchase is not going to change our lives.   There has to be something else out there that we need to have.

There is a constant feeling that we lack something.

Where can we find the gratitude we should have for what we already have?

We have lost it because we feel constantly dissatisfied. What we do have is never enough. Hunter even goes so far as to say that some may feel “God has not been doing as much for us as He should have.”   We look around at others who are not doing as much good as we are and they are getting blessed; why not me?

Couple this with consumer temptation and the relative ease we have to accumulate debt and we feel we can do what we want to feel better about ourselves.   Just call up the handy number or click on the website, enter the credit card number and wait for the packages to come to your door.   I don’t have to depend on God for my satisfaction. I can take care of myself.

Once the objects of our desire are purchased, the “look at me” temptation comes into play.   We feel pride in our new outfit, power in our new car and increased status in our new home.   We need the attention.   We work hard.   We are good Christians. We deserve the materialistic blessings.

Where is God in all of this?

Proverbs 3:6 and John 3:27 acknowledge God in the activity of life. When we hear the words “ in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight” and “A person can receive only what is given them from heaven,” we hear the true reason for our blessing and it has nothing to do with television ads and credit card plastic.

It has to do with the humble heart that the Christian should have.

Hunter says “The spirit of our age—especially much modern advertising—actively wars within our minds against the spirit of thankfulness” [114]. People become objects instead of unique creatures of God. Inner beauty takes second place to the glamour of outward beauty. God given skills and abilities are demeaned in favor of what can be purchased.

Psalms 100:3 should be at the forefront of a Christians mind: “Know that the LORD is God. It is He who made us, and we are His; we are His people, the sheep of His pasture.”   We must be aware of mind manipulation. Maybe it is good to be content with God’s gifts.

What He supplies is sufficient…

*Author of The God Who Hears