What God Put in My Heart: A Sermon from Nehemiah 2

Posted on July 3, 2024 by salooper57

You can watch this sermon at https://www.christianworldmedia.com/watch?v=wr4nhf4VsDU9. The sermon begins at approximately 20:57 and lasts about 27 minutes. If you would prefer to read a manuscript (not a transcript) of the sermon, you can read it below.

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We have spent the last month-and-a-half in a series on prayer. Prayer is such a big subject that we could spend years on it, but we haven’t been trying to treat it comprehensively. I have instead been trying to look at prayer from angles of approach that are not usually taken. I have a strong sense that we don’t fail at prayer because we lack proper techniques. Technique is important in communication, and prayer is a form of communication, so I don’t want to minimize it. But communication is more than technique, and it’s the “more than” that we’ve been focusing on.

Last week, we looked at how strands of prayer can be woven through daily life. Our teacher was the biblical hero Nehemiah. We left him in a crucial conversation with King Artaxerxes. Well, actually he was carrying on two crucial conversations simultaneously: one with the great Artaxerxes and the other with the greater king of heaven. Chapter 2, verse 4, says: “Then the king said to me, “What are you requesting?” So I prayed to the God of heaven. 5And I said to the king…” We saw how valuable it is to be able to talk to God and to someone else at the same time. To talk and listen to God while we are talking and listening to others can transform both our relationships and our prayer lives.

We also saw that the “spontaneous” prayer of verse 4 was launched from a platform of prayer that Nehemiah had built over the previous five months. Both kinds of prayer – intentional and emotional, planned and spontaneous – must be kept in balance for a prayer life to be effective. People who try to live on spontaneous, as-the-mood-hits-me (or as-the-crisis-erupts) kinds of prayer are not good pray-ers. That kind of praying – what people used to call “arrow prayers,” the kind you shoot toward heaven in a time of crisis – lacks powers when it is unconnected to a daily, disciplined prayer practice.

Trying to shoot a prayer to heaven without the strength generated by a discipline prayer practice is like trying to shoot an arrow from a bow that is only strung from the upper limb. That arrow is going to fall to the ground. And so do many spontaneous prayers because they have no connection to an ongoing prayer life.

One more reminder of what we learned last time from Nehemiah, and then we’ll move on. If you aren’t willing for God to interrupt your life, you might want to think twice about praying, because when we call on God with a request, he often returns the call with a command. When Nehemiah prayed, he ended up taking a leave of absence from his job and moving out of the country. Prayer is not a practice for people who are committed to the status quo. If you don’t want your routine interrupted, you might not want to pray.

Successful pray-ers have the kind of attitude the prophet Isaiah had. He said to God, ‘Here I am, send me!” But if we say to God, “Here I stay. Send someone else,” we’re not going to see many answers to prayer.

So, let’s pick up Nehemiah’s story in chapter 2, verse 4: “(Nehemiah 2:4-12b) Then the king said to me, “What are you requesting?” So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ graves, that I may rebuild it.” And the king said to me (the queen sitting beside him), “How long will you be gone, and when will you return?” So it pleased the king to send me when I had given him a time. And I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, let letters be given me to the governors of the province Beyond the River, that they may let me pass through until I come to Judah, and a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the fortress of the temple, and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall occupy.” And the king granted me what I asked, for the good hand of my God was upon me. Then I came to the governors of the province Beyond the River and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent with me officers of the army and horsemen. But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite servant heard this, it displeased them greatly that someone had come to seek the welfare of the people of Israel. So I went to Jerusalem and was there three days. Then I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. And I told no one what my God had put into my heart to do for Jerusalem. There was no animal with me but the one on which I rode.”

So, five months after Nehemiah had begun asking God to intervene for Jerusalem, he found himself asking the king to do the same. If you’re like me, you are more comfortable asking God for something you need or want than you are asking someone else. We know God will understand and want to help, but we are not so sure about our boss, spouse, friend, neighbor, or fellow-church member.

But when you ask God for something, he may tell you to ask someone else. That was the case for Nehemiah. And make no mistake: It can take faith to ask people, especially people in authority, for help. But when asking comes out of praying, good things happen.

Did you notice that Nehemiah didn’t ask the king for just one thing, but for many Send me to rebuild Jerusalem (verse 5). Write letters for me to the governors of Trans-Euphrates (verse 6). Order the king’s forester to provide timber (verse 7).

Do you know what that means? Nehemiah had not only been praying for Jerusalem; he’d been thinking about Jerusalem. He thought about what needed to be done. Prayer is a phenomenally important part of the Christian life, but it is not a substitute for thought. We want to pray and then forget about it, as if we’d done our duty; that’s a mistake. We need to pay attention to the thoughts that come to our minds during and after our prayers. Write those thoughts down. Think them through. Have a two-way conversation with God; give him the chance to speak to you.

Very many times, while in the act of praying, unexpected ideas have come to my mind. I don’t immediately assume that those thoughts are from God, but I do think about them. I remember them. Sometimes, I write them down so I won’t forget. I may talk with other people about them. I believe that God does communicate to us in this way.                                                                                   

We see something here that could have hindered that two-way conversation with God, the same kind of thing that can prevent us from hearing him or recognizing the answer he wants to give. Call it the “We’ve-never-done-it-that-way-before” syndrome.

You see, when an earlier group of exiles returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple (you can read all about that in Ezra), the leaders decided to make the long journey without any military presence. They thought that asking for protection demonstrated a lack of faith. So, they went without military escort. But later, when Nehemiah went to Jerusalem, he welcomed a detachment of cavalry. Sometimes we get the idea that the only way to do something is the way it was done before. We get it in our heads that God will only do it the way we’ve always done it. But don’t tie God’s hands. He is amazingly creative. Too often, we can’t see what he’s doing and can’t hear what he’s telling us because our own expectations are blocking our view or drowning out God’s “still, small voice.”

When Nehemiah reached Jerusalem after what would have been a two-month journey, he did not call a meeting or arrange a press conference. Verse 11 says that he settled in and stayed for three days. That is reminiscent of something the prophet Isaiah wrote: “Whoever believes will not be in haste” (Isaiah 28:16). When we know that God is working in the details, we can take time to look and think and pray. But when we think it is all up to us, we panic and rush in. That’s the “We have to do something now” syndrome. I know about this from personal experience. But Nehemiah, who had been in an ongoing conversation with God, took his time. He didn’t panic.

But he could have. When God answers (or is about to answer) our prayer, it is not unusual for opposition to flare up. You can see this clearly in what happened to the Israelites in Egypt. The time finally came for God to fulfill his promise to Abraham. People were praying. God heard them. So, what happened next? Their troubles got worse! They were on the edge of experiencing God’s answer when opposition flared, and they wanted to give up. Spurgeon said something like, “The devil roars loudest right before we experience a victory.” If we give up then, we give up too soon.

Don’t be surprised if things get worse after you have prayed! Nehemiah prayed, and (verse 10) “…When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about this, they were very much disturbed that someone had come to promote the welfare of the Israelites.” They were disturbed and they did everything in their considerable power to oppose Nehemiah and prevent his prayer from being answered. The rest of the book chronicles that opposition.

And that leads us to something else we need to know about prayer. If you only pray in order to get out of uncomfortable or painful situations, it won’t be long before you give up on prayer altogether. Prayer is not a way to get around conflict. Prayer is a way to join God in his work, and his work is accomplished in a broken, conflicted, and often hostile world.

After three days passed, Nehemiah had a look around. Neither during those three days nor during his inspection did Nehemiah try to sell anyone on his plan to rebuild the walls. He didn’t even mention it. Verse 12 says, “I had not told anyone what my God had put in my heart to do for Jerusalem.” That may have been because Nehemiah did not trust the people in Jerusalem. As we learn later, some of the nobles had aligned themselves with the opposition. Had Nehemiah told them what he was thinking, they would have done whatever they could to hinder him.

But I think there is more to it than that. Nehemiah had learned to talk to God first, and only then to talk to others. He’d learned to spend more time talking to God than to people. Nehemiah let God speak to people’s hearts before he tried speaking to their minds. Just because you believe God wants to do something doesn’t mean that other people will believe it. You need to give them time and allow God to convince them.

I’ve seen pastors make this mistake. They come to a new church, diagnose all its ailments, and then set about changing everything. But even if their diagnosis is spot on and their course of action is well chosen, they make a huge mistake because they are going about things in the wrong order. They are speaking to people first when they should first speak to God. And they compound that mistake by trying to push their ideas rather than asking God to show people the things they’ve seen. It takes faith to talk to God first. It takes faith to wait.

Did you notice the phrase in verse 12, “… what God had put in my heart”? That’s interesting: God puts things in people’s hearts. All that time Nehemiah was praying – those four or five months we talked about last week – he was not just talking to God, God was talking to him. God was putting something into his heart. If we are going to be effective at prayer, we need to learn to recognize when God has placed something in our hearts. That something will energize our prayers and sustain them.

But how do you know when God has placed something in your heart? How do you know it is not just your imagination? Even more importantly, how do you know that it is not the devil, for Scripture teaches that he can also place things in people’s hearts? How do you know when God has placed something in your heart?

That is not an easy question to answer because it is concerned with a relationship, and relationships are not comprised of simple questions and answers. I know it would be nice to have a five-step process to accurately discern whether or not God has placed something in your heart, but if we had that kind of process, we’d skip the relationship, which is where almost everything God is doing in your life is based. There are principles to go by, but there is no substitute for knowing God.

There are times when I will know what my wife would like before she has even thought of it. She says, “How did you know I wanted that?” I know because I’ve lived with her for 45 years. More than that, I know because I have loved her for all those years and more. In the interactions of a loving relationship, we come to understand each other … at least a little. I admit that there is still much about Karen I don’t (and may never) understand, and there is even more about God I don’t understand. Nevertheless, it is in relationship that I will understand them, not in a sheet of bullet points.

That being said, let me share a few principles for discerning whether the idea in your mind and the burden on your heart comes from God. But remember: these principles can’t be reliably applied outside of a healthy relationship. That cannot be stressed enough

First, if the idea in your mind and burden on your heart is all tied up with your self-image, go carefully. If the pastor who comes to a church with a grand plan to make it successful is tangled up in anxiety about his own reputation, it will be very easy for him to mistake his own thoughts for what God is saying. Ask yourself: who gets the glory if this idea works – God or me?

Second principle: when God puts something in your heart, it stays there. There is a weight to it. It is not effervescent, not here today and forgotten about tomorrow. You can’t get away from it. It took Nehemiah four or five months to act on what was in his heart, but it didn’t go away. In fact, if was still there ten years later!

Third principle: you have to have room in your heart and mind to receive the things that God wants to put in there. This is one of the biggest problems we face, and one of the main reasons we don’t see more answers to prayer. If your heart and mind are filled with what Jesus called the “worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth” (Matthew 13:22) or with unforgiveness or pride, you won’t have room for what God wants to put there. This was the case with the Pharisees to whom Jesus bluntly said, “…you have no room for my word” (John 8:37, NIV).

There are other principles, but I’ll just mention one more. Whatever God puts in your heart will be consistent with what he’s put in the Scriptures. No hidden word from God in our hearts will ever contradict his revealed word in our Bibles. You can count on that.

I think God puts things in our hearts regularly, when we have room to receive them, and the thing he puts there becomes one of principal drivers of our prayers. But we must have room in our hearts.

With that in mind, I close with this prayer from A. W. Tozer. If it echoes your desire, make it your own: “Father, I want to know You, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from You the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that you may enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shall You make the place of Your feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for You will be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

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Straightening Bent Souls: A Study in Transformation

Posted on June 22, 2024 by salooper57

Be sure to read the brief addendum. The timing – and the irony – was perfect.

I recently bought a hand-held shower head and hose from a big box home improvement store. The shower head and five-foot PVC hose were embalmed in an impossibly small package. I worked hard to extricate the goods without destroying the packaging, just in case I was dissatisfied and wanted to return it.

But it worked fine, though the hose was stiff and wanted to spray at a 30-degree angle, which meant the shower wall got more water than I did. I assumed it would relax after a day or two out of the package, but I was mistaken. I tried warming the hose, hanging the hose, wedging the hose, but it kept returning to its 30-degree angle for weeks.

Once, while in the shower, I tried to physically manipulate the hose at its trough, unknowingly twisted the shower head, and shot the spray over the shower curtain and doused the whole bathroom. In the two months that have followed, the hose has slowly bent to my will, but it clearly had a way about it that was not my way.

People are like that too. They have a way about them. What begins as a propensity in childhood is bent into a way of life after years of confinement in the small package of adulthood.

I have a friend who applied for a position in the CIA when we were both still in our thirties. The CIA turned him down because he had already reached their cut-off age for new hires (though they encouraged one of their contractors to hire him and employ him at Langley). They did not want to take on the challenge of unbending someone who had reached the advanced age of 34 and was already stuck in his ways.

People are like my shower hose: they have a way about them. That way is deeply engrained and usually bent. The problem is that we don’t know that we are bent. We think that we are the norm, the standard for what is right and good.

But the prophet Isaiah told us long ago that God’s ways are not our ways. We assume that we are the straightedge that determines morality, even though we have been twisted by sin and sorrow and hardened by routine. We imagine ourselves the measuring stick for what is normal. We are mistaken.

Christians believe that God is the standard of what is right and good—God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. But how can we measure up to that? Jesus oriented his life around God. He put others’ needs before his own. He refused to pay back evil for evil. He spoke truthfully and eschewed manipulative and deceptive speech.  He poured out his life to help others.

If Jesus is the straightedge of normality, we are all crooked. We are “curved in on ourselves,” as Augustine of Hippo, one of history’s greatest thinkers, described us. And that curve has hardened. Can we ever be straightened out?

It is possible. Augustine himself had been bent in the wrong direction, but he was significantly straightened out. Millions of others have been too. But for a human to be reshaped, especially one who has been tightly restrained by sin and selfishness for a long time, is no easy thing. Straightening a stubborn shower hose is a cinch compared to straightening people who long have been coiled around themselves.

For one thing, people need to see and admit that they are bent. Biblical writers call this “repentance.” Until we see the problem, there is little hope that we will be straightened out.

It took many gallons of hot water, running through the shower hose for months before it was pliable enough to be straightened out. There is something that corresponds to this in Christian spiritual formation. People need a new Spirit within to soften them and make them supple.

They also need to develop new habits. Spiritual disciplines like giving, worshiping, serving, silence, and many others are tools the patient Divine Helper uses to bend us back into shape. That shape, not surprisingly, resembles Jesus, and makes us useful to others and a joy to ourselves.

Addendum

After I finished this article, and before my wife proofed it, I went to the basement and into the aptly named crawl space in search of a shut-off valve to an outside spigot. We are new to an old house, and I hadn’t been in the crawl space before. I searched in vain for a shut-off valve, got dirty in the process, and took a shower afterward while my wife proofed the article.

The shower head, which has been well-behaved for more than a week, immediately bent back to its old, familiar 30-degree angle and sprayed the shower wall. When I readjusted it, it turned stubbornly back. If I may put it this way, I have a backsliding showerhead.

It’s a lot like us. Even after we have begun to change, we can fall back into our old ways. How we need a patient Divine Helper to straighten us out!

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Life as Prayer (James 1:1-8)

Posted on June 19, 2024 by salooper57

This sermon compares our “lived prayer” with our spoken prayers. When the two contradict, it is unlikely that we will see answers to the prayers we speak. You can watch the sermon by clicking the link below.

https://www.christianworldmedia.com/watch?v=hQ4igcy251-f. (Sermon starts at 31:15.)

Excerpts

In the church and in devotional literature, people often refer to a life of prayer, but that doesn’t go far enough. A life of prayer? Your life is a prayer. We may say a great many prayers about a great many things, and not see any answers because the prayers we occasionally speak request very different things from the prayer we constantly live. When it comes to prayer, a primary reason people do not receive answers is that their lived prayer contradicts their spoken prayers. God hears what your whole life is saying.

Sometimes pastors tell people, “You just need to pray more.” But more prayer is only a solution when too little prayer is the problem. It is not the solution when the problem is the wrong prayer – when our life is repeating a different request than our words.

Take the Lord’s prayer: We may say, “Hallowed be thy name,” while our lived prayer says, “Honored be my name.” We can say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” but contradict that by a life that says, “My authority be established, my desires be done.” We might pray “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” when our life is saying, “I want him to pay.” Many people pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” but their life is saying, “Get me as close to temptation as possible.”

What does God hear people say in their real voice? Some say, “Just leave me alone.” Others say, “Worship me. I would be like God.” Some people’s lives just repeat idiotically, over and over, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.” Others say, “My will be done, my will be done, my will be done, my will be done…” to all eternity. On the day of judgment, the real message of our lives will be dug out of us, and we will hear, beyond any shadow of a doubt, our true voice. We will know then what prayer our lives have been repeating all along.

God does take note of our prayers and pious feelings, but he sees those things for what they are: a part of the whole; a few lines from an enormous manifesto. If you’re thinking, “How then can any of us be saved?” the answer is, “We can’t – not by our own efforts – but we can be saved by Christ. Our lives can be redeemed, our hopes secured. Not because we are as good as we think but because God is better than we dreamed.

And don’t give up. Perseverance is key. Don’t quit trusting God. On the cross, suffering a separation we cannot imagine, Jesus refused to stop trusting. The very last thing he said from the cross was, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). You’ve trusted God this long; if you stop now, you stop too soon.

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How to Drain That Other Swamp

Posted on June 15, 2024 by salooper57

In 2016, Donald Trump reintroduced the phrase “drain the swamp” into Washington-ese. He may have remembered how Ronald Reagan used the phrase in 1983 when he said he was in Washington to “drain the swamp.” However, the slogan predates these Republicans by a long shot. It was first introduced by American socialists Winfield Gaylord and Victor Berger as early as 1912.

Gaylord spoke metaphorically of draining the “capitalist swamp,” but he probably took the phrase from U.S. efforts to drain literal Panamanian swamps in the decades long project to build a canal. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands of workers had died from mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and yellow fever during the 33-year construction program.

Mr. Reagan resurrected the metaphor to signal his intent to root out corruption in Washington, D.C., and Donald Trump followed his lead. Though I am not any kind of expert on swamps, it doesn’t seem to me that Washington has become any less swampy. Though there are a lot of decent people working there, the infestation of greed and self-interest is as bad as ever.

The swamp problem is not just in Washington; it is much more provincial than that. It is so close as to be present in the human heart. This is how Jesus spoke of it: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person.”

The swamp in Washington will never be drained as long as we keep sending swamp creatures there. And we are all swamp creatures. That is the thing no one wants to admit.

Ours is the generation that discovered systemic evils and forgot about personal ones. But Jesus, on at least three occasions, spoke of people as evil. St. Paul acknowledged that “nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.” This is not to say that everything everyone does is evil. It is to say that everything everyone is has been tainted with evil. Under the right circumstances – say, in a position of power in Washington, D.C. – that evil can emerge and spread.

If draining the swamp must begin in individual’s hearts, and we cannot even admit that our hearts are swampy, there is no road forward. But what if we can admit that we have swampy hearts where some bad things hide? Can that swamp be drained?

“Drained” is perhaps not the right word. The Bible speaks of “cleansing” the heart. Indeed, God has designated the human heart a superfund site and has expended infinite resources to clean it up. He knows it is the only way the world will ever be set right.

Perhaps “cleansed” is more correct than “drained,” but how does that cleansing happen? It is more on the order of Hercules cleaning the Augean stables than Teddy Roosevelt draining the Panamanian swamps. In the fifth of Hercules twelve labors, he was required to clean the massive stables of King Augeas in one day. The king owned thousands of heads of livestock, which his herders drove into the stables each night—stables that were never cleaned.

Rather than grabbing a shovel, Hercules diverted two rivers, the Alpheus and Peneus, so that they were channeled right through the stables, washing away all the filth they contained. Hercules made the preparations, but the rushing water did the work.

Something analogous to this is required for the clean-up effort when it comes to people. We have our own role to play – as the biblical writers make abundantly clear – but the streams that do the work come from outside us. Those streams are faith, hope, and love. Whenever there is a confluence of those streams, people are changed, cleaned up, made new.

It is unrealistic to expect swamp creatures (like us) to drain the swamp. It goes against our nature. Before that can happen, we need, in the words of the old spiritual, “to be changed, changed from this creature, Lord, that I am.” That change cannot be initiated through political, technological, or organizational means. It is a spiritual problem which requires a spiritual solution.

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The Role of the Holy Spirit in Prayer

Posted on June 11, 2024 by salooper57

This sermon is based on Matthew 7:7-11 and Romans 8:26-27. It explores the ongoing relationship of the Holy Spirit with the believer in prayer. Understanding that prayer is a joint venture between God and the believer is crucial to an effective prayer life. You can watch by clicking below. If you prefer to read, the text is included under the link.

https://www.christianworldmedia.com/watch?v=3Pvt5g0l83cV. (Start time is 25:33.)

(Matthew 7:7-11) Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

When the psychologist and Christian writer Larry Crabb was 10 years old, he first heard Matthew 21:22, where Jesus, whom he knew never lied, said, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

He ran outside, stood on the driveway, closed his eyes tight, and prayed: God, I want to fly like Superman. And I believe you can do it. So, I’ll jump, and you take it from there.

He jumped four times—and each time landed half a second later and half a foot further down the drive. He had believed (or at least he tried to believe), and he had asked, just like Jesus said. But he didn’t receive. And so began Larry Crabb’s lifelong confusion about prayer.[1]

Lots of us have been confused. The promises regarding prayer, some made by Jesus himself, seem so extravagant, and yet our experience of prayer seems so paltry. We have had some answers that we can point to, but we’ve also had many letdowns. Is it possible that we have misunderstood Jesus? Or misunderstood prayer? Or misunderstood ourselves?

The answer, I think, is … yes, yes, and yes. For example, we might misunderstand Jesus and so mistake ourselves for the recipients of this promise. But Jesus was talking to his disciples (5:1). He did not and could not make this promise to the Pharisees or Sadducees, even though they were very religious people. He would not say it to the irreligious. He could only say this to “his disciples.”

They had devoted themselves to him. They used their energy, time, and money in learning to live the Jesus way, which they practiced until it became “their way.” Their goal was to do what Jesus would do if he were (like them) a farmer or a fisherman, if he were married to their spouse or was raising their kids.

Today’s disciples are in exactly the same position. They are learning to live with God the Jesus way. They are learning to do what Jesus would do if he were in their place – if he were an engineer, a store employee, a CNC operator, a teacher, or an insurance salesman. They are learning to do what Jesus would do if he were married to their spouse or raising their kids.

So, when we read what Jesus says here, we must remember who his audience is. He is not making these promises to moderately religious folk safely ensconced in society’s hierarchy. He is making them to disciples who have relinquished the ordinary way people live for the extraordinary way of Christ. The “everyone” Jesus mentions in verse 8 – “everyone who asks” – is everyone within the corps of disciples.

But in saying that, I am not trying to explain away the promise. Jesus absolutely meant what he said. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration. Just remember that he is talking to people who were all in, to disciples, who had committed themselves to Jesus through thick and thin. It would be a mistake to suppose these promises were made to anyone else.

I make a point of this not to gloss over what Jesus said but to save the moderately religious from confusion and doubt when their prayers are not answered – which will certainly be most of the time. There are no promises of answered prayer extended to half-hearted Christians. The adventure to which Jesus invites us is reserved for those who are all-in.

It is better from the outset to know that. If I, a half-hearted Christian, expect God to answer my prayers, I am like a man that goes to a business owner known for his generosity. He explains that his financial responsibilities have increased because he’s gotten married, and he really needs $25 an hour to make it. The compassionate owner asks the man’s name and writes it down. They he says, “Let me see what I can do.”

The businessman asks his secretary to bring up their files on John Smith … and discovers that John Smith doesn’t even work for him. John Smith is asking for $25 an hour but he is not even employed in the shop.

That is what it is like when a person who is not a disciple of Jesus assumes that God is obligated to answer his requests. That person neither understands Jesus, nor himself. He mistakenly thinks that Jesus made this promise to him when he has merely overheard Jesus talking to his own disciples.

What did he tell those disciples? He told them that God will answer their prayers, but that they must persevere in praying. When Jesus says, “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened,” he is not talking about asking once, or seeking for a minute, or rapping a brief knock. In Greek, each of these commands is in a tense that implies ongoing action.

When I was pastoring a church in northeastern Ohio, I met a man whose wife had been diagnosed with cancer. We were standing in a hospital hallway and I was about to pray for her when he said, “I prayed once. I am not going to dishonor God by praying again.” That man didn’t understand the first thing about prayer. Jesus expected his people to pray and keep on praying.

But why? Why is once not enough?

There is much about this I do not understand. Someone has said, “I cannot tell you why a prayer that has been prayed for ten years is answered on the 1,000th request when God has met the first 999 with silence.”[2] I cannot tell you either. But I can tell you that Jesus wants us to persist in prayer, to “pray always and not give up” (Luke 18:1).

A Chicago company is one of the world’s largest magazine fulfillment firms. They handle millions and millions of subscriptions. (They are the ones that send out renewal and expiration notices.) Because of a computer glitch, they sent a rancher in Colorado 9,734 separate mailings informing him that his subscription to National Geographic had expired.

He may have ignored the first one or two, but 9,734 got his attention. He drove to the post office, which was miles away, and sent in the money to renew his subscription. He added a note that said, “I give up!”

Is that why we persist in prayer, so that God will give up and do what we want? No, we persist in prayer in order to participate with God in what he is doing in the world. Remarkable as it seems, he intends human beings to be his coworkers, and prayer is the nexus of that work.

Yet no answer to prayer – not even the healing of our best beloved from the illness that threatens their life – will ever content us. After our best beloved is healed, discontentment will grow again. We will not be content until we become like Christ. God knows this, and he uses even our troubles and our needs to transform us into Christlikeness. Prayer – continuing, earnest prayer – is one of God’s chief instruments in shaping us into contented, joyous, productive people.

God cares about what happens in us and not just what happens to us. Prayer not only works to change things; it changes us. And when we are praying as Jesus intended, our requests will change as well. That’s important to understand.

If you are old enough, you will remember analog TV and its blurry, fuzzy pictures. When I was a kid, when my favorite rerun wasn’t on the nearby Cleveland stations, I could get it on one of the Toledo channels. But Toledo was far enough away that the picture was usually fuzzy. So, I would “adjust the dial,” zero in on the frequency, until the best picture I could get emerged.

Something similar happens when we pray. We need to adjust the dial. Our first request got us going in the right direction – we’re in the frequency range – but we are not yet asking for what God is ready to give. If we will continue to pray, the Spirit can help us dial in, and find that right frequency: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8:26). Effective prayer is always a cooperative venture between us and God. It is a process, not an isolated occurrence.

We take for granted that our first prayer is a direct hit on the will of God. So, if the answer doesn’t come, we get discouraged. But that is not how prayer usually works. We need to keep praying so that the Spirit can steer our prayers, alter their course, change their goal until we are asking for what God intends to give. But the Spirit cannot do that when we’re not praying, just as we cannot steer a bicycle that is not moving.

During the Second World War, artillery commanders would fire at enemy locations, but from where they were, they could rarely see if they had hit their target. So, they would have “spotters” behind enemy lines, reporting back by walkie-talkie. A spotter might say: “A quarter-mile short of target to the south, 750 yards wide of target to the west.” The big gun would then be redirected and fired again. This time: “One-eighth mile south, 350 yards west.” Redirect again. And again.

In our lives, we know something needs to happen and we pray in the general direction of the need, but our request is a quarter-mile short and 750 yards wide. If we stop praying right then, we will never hit the target, we’ll not see God’s answer, and we’ll not be changed into the confident, joyous believers that God intends us to be.

God wants to answer our prayers. If you don’t believe that, you will never be any good at prayer. God has given us prayer for our joy (John 16:24). He wants us to partner with him in his great campaign. He wants us to succeed, to overcome, to be productive with him. Remember what Jesus said? “…ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit” (John 15:8). God wants to give. He wants to answer our prayers.

Years ago, a sixth-grader’s dad wanted to reward his son for his performance in school, so he took him to K-Mart. As they walked through the entrance door, he made a sweeping gesture with his hand toward the whole store, and said: “To congratulate you, I’ll buy you anything in this whole store tonight.” The boy’s eyes widened at the thought of the possibilities.

But he was a boy, and he didn’t yet have a grasp on how money works or how much of it his very successful dad possessed. So, he didn’t even look at the huge stereo systems, expensive bikes, or anything that cost over a hundred dollars. He chose a cassette tape case that cost forty-some dollars. Only many years later did he find out that his dad had a thousand dollars in his pocket that night. What’s more, he brought his checkbook just in case that wasn’t enough.

God has more in his pocket than we can imagine.[3]He is ready to give – not to reward us for our performance, but to include us in his. And that happens as we pray. Prayer is more important to the Christian life than we have begun to realize.

Please note that Jesus does not rest this remarkable promise of answered prayer on our spiritual maturity, exceptional faith, or successful performance. He rests it on God’s character. Look again at verses 9-11.

 “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” 

The basis for this promise is the unchanging nature of the gracious and compassionate God, not the attainments of his imperfect little children. Thank God that is so, for we are still very imperfect and very little.

During the height of the pandemic, grocery shopping services sprang up all around. You can download the app, order your groceries, and someone will pick them up for you and deliver them to your door. But global supply chain issues left grocery store shelves depleted, and often what you ordered wasn’t there. So, the services substituted recommended replacements for unavailable items.

A couple of years ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on these shopping apps. They learned that order packers often replaced missing items with whatever they could find. Roses were swapped for bell peppers. A thermometer was switched for mac and cheese. A rapid COVID test replaced Halls cough drops.[4]

God is not like that. He will not give us a stone in place of bread or a serpent in place of a fish. If we don’t receive what we have asked for, we are probably not yet dialed in on what God wants to give us. We mustn’t give up. If God has a substitution recommendation, it will always be an upgrade, something “immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine.” But he wants to give us what we ask.

That is why we keep asking, seeking, and knocking. By doing so, we give the Spirit opportunity to work with us to dial in our prayers. God wants to give, and he wants to give us what we ask, for our joy, his glory, and the advancement of his plan for the world.

There seems to be a progression here in what Jesus says. He starts with asking, which, as Andrew Murray pointed out in his classic book, With Christ in the School of Prayer, means asking for something. Seeking goes beyond asking. “Seek” is the strong word biblical writers use of searching for God himself. For example, “Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always” (Ps. 105:4).

But knocking goes beyond even seeking. Knocking opens the way into God’s presence; it opens the door to join him in what he is doing. God made us for this. It is his desire. It is our destiny.

Let’s apply this. God wants to answer you, to give you what you ask. That’s how he wants this to work. You ask; he gives. In that way, you have joy, and he gets glory. He does not want you to ask for one thing when he intends to give another. He wants to give what you ask. I don’t think we appreciate this enough. But that means asking for what he wants to give, and for that we need the Spirit’s help.

Our asking does not usually start off on target. (This may be the main thing many of us need to understand.) If what we are asking is a quarter mile short and 750 yards wide of what God wants to give (which is often the case), that doesn’t mean we should give up or settle for something other than what we ask. It means we need to keep asking, trusting God’s Spirit to keep dialing in our request until it hits the target.

It is not enough to say, “I guess it wasn’t God’s will,” and give up. It is God’s will to give and it is God’s will that you ask. That means, if he has not yet answered your prayer, keep praying and pay closer attention to the Spotter – the Holy Spirit. He will guide your prayer to the target of God’s will. Don’t give up. God wants this for you. And it entails benefits that go far beyond the answer to this or that request, for the process shapes us into people we would not otherwise be, people who are a delight to God and to themselves.

Blessing/Sending

Though we leave this building, we do not leave God’s presence. The Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness, interceding for us when we don’t know how to pray. Rest in the sweet assurance that God works all things for good for those who love Him. We are more than conquerors through Him who loves us.

[1] Larry Crabb, “Great Expectations,” Pray! magazine (November/December 2006), p. 34

[2] Stand Firm (September 1999), p.19

[3] Steve DeNeff and David Drury, Soul Shift (Wesleyan Publishing House, 2011), p. 55

[4] Jem Bartholomew, “Raspberries for Cauliflower? The Bizarre World of Online Grocery Store Substitutions,” The Wall Street Journal (2-3-22).

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The Hardest, Gladdest Prayer: Learning to Call God Father

Posted on June 8, 2024 by salooper57

When we recite the Lord’s Prayer, as millions of people worldwide do regularly, we begin with the word, “Our.” However, in the Greek in which the New Testament was written, the first word of the prayer is “Father.” It is the first word, and the most important. If we cannot say, “Father,” and mean it, we will not benefit from the rest of the prayer as we should.

Until “Father” becomes a word we love and speak with joy, praying the Lord’s prayer will prove difficult. The Scottish novelist, poet, and preacher George Macdonald once said, “The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is, to cry ‘Father!’ from a full heart.” Those who can make this hard, glad cry can pray the Lord’s Prayer to great advantage.

But why should calling God “Father” from a full heart be hard to do? For clearly, it is. It does not come naturally to people and, for many, it doesn’t come at all.

One does not need to look far to find an answer to why calling God “Father” is difficult. An after-school program director recently told me that three out of four of his students do not have a father living in the home. Some students do not even know who their father is. When a father is absent during a person’s formative years, one of the chief helps in relating to God is missing.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of children living only with their mothers has doubled in the last fifty years. These children are more likely to live in poverty, to go to prison, to experience unwanted pregnancy, and to abuse drugs and alcohol. The loss of dads in the home has been disastrous.

The absence of dads has also had a deleterious effect on faith. It is not, I think, coincidental that America is experiencing a crisis of faith at the same time it is experiencing a crisis of fatherhood. As recently as the 1990s, 90 percent of all Americans identified as Christian. There has been a startling drop in that number, but among those raised in the dad-less years the decrease has been greatest. When fathers fell away from the family, children fell away from the faith.

Yet many people who have trouble crying “‘Father’ from a full heart have not fallen away from the faith. They are genuine Christians who find it either difficult or unhelpful to think of God as their heavenly Father. The problem for these sincere believers is often not that dad was absent but that dad was present in ways that caused them to distrust fathers.

As a pastor, I have met many such people. Their dads were not absent but distant, uninvolved, and disinterested. If, as is certainly true, children learn what fatherhood is all about from their dads, these people learned that fathers are distant, uninvolved, and disinterested. Such an upbringing makes faith in God as Father much more difficult.

Other people had a dad that was too involved. He was demanding, critical, and impossible to please. These people struggle to believe that God can ever be happy with them. They do not relate to God; they perform for him. And they feel their performance never measures up.

Still others were raised by manipulative, deceitful, and abusive fathers. I know a gracious Christian woman whose mother abandoned her to her father’s sexual abuse for years. She learned that a father is an unstoppable force that hurts and uses people at will.

It is not just bad dads who make it difficult for people to call God “Father.” Inconsistent dads do too, and we who are dads are all inconsistent to one degree or another. Sometimes we are involved and sometimes we are not. The “fun dad” is sometimes unreasonably angry. The wise dad occasionally does something stupid.

On Father’s Day, we don’t celebrate perfect dads, but good dads who try to be better dads. Although the reflection they offer of the heavenly Father is inevitably distorted, they give us glimpses of what he is like. Such dads are worth celebrating. They are more important than we know. 

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Who’s Asking: Mark 11:22-25

Posted on June 6, 2024 by salooper57

Here is a link to the sermon Who’s Asking. It explores the question: “What kind of people get answers to prayer?” Hope you enjoy and find it helpful. The sermon begins at the 36:35 mark.

https://www.christianworldmedia.com/watch?v=XYO44rkrb5-k

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The Gospel in a World of Fake News

Posted on June 1, 2024 by salooper57

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries people chose the term “post-truth” as their “word of the year.” Questions about truth and even doubts about there being such a thing pervade society. A number of things have brought us to this place, not least of which is the ubiquitous presence in our lives of social and news media.

Our days are saturated with information, whether about people we know on Facebook or about the president of the United States on the evening news. Some of this news (and in certain settings, much of it) is either fake or “enhanced” news. Fake news reports something that is not true and has not happened as though it is true and has happened. Enhanced news presents something that has happened but does so in a way that is intended to move the reader or listener in a certain direction.

News corporations pride themselves on their fair and accurate reporting. Yet they frequently allow or even direct reporters to introduce emotionally ladened words into a story, reflecting at best the news staffs’ biases and at worst exposing a calculated attempt to shape listener’s views and influence their actions. That is enhanced news.

We cannot trust what we hear and see. Online sites employ tools to covertly influence our thinking. Some are relatively straightforward: paying people to submit likes or to become followers. Others are more sophisticated, like stuffing online polls, forcing site owners to take down stories, crashing entire sites, and more.

A study from Carnegie Mellon found that something like 45% of tweets on the coronavirus originated from bots – automated computer programs – instead of people. Furthermore, 80% of the most retweeted posts on Twitter (now X) came from bots. The “likes” that boost a post and give it visibility often come from bots created by people who are trying to game the system.

In this environment, who can we trust? I say, “In this environment,” but fake and enhanced news is not new; it has been around forever. It’s just the form it takes that is new.

The difference between real news and fake news is that real news reports something that has already happened, while fake (or enhanced) news is intended to bring about something the reporter hopes will happen. That distinction has ramifications beyond the evening news. It can teach us something important about religion.

One of the big words of the Christian faith is “gospel,” which means something like “good news.” The word has an important place in the Old Testament and is central in the New. The gospel is to the Bible what the core is to an apple. It is to the church what the constitution is to the country. The gospel is not fake news; not enhanced news; it is good news.

That means the gospel is news about something that has happened. One scholar suggests translating the word as “newsflash.” Someone else thought “breaking news” might be better. Both have their problems, but they do capture something fundamental about the word: it is a report about something that has already happened.

Christians who fail to grasp this end up following the example of the news corporations mentioned above rather than that of Jesus and the apostles. They come to think of the gospel as an instrument to make something happen rather than an announcement about what has already happened.

Rather than sharing the remarkable news that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” they make a pitch. It goes like this: “You can go to heaven when you die if you are ready to make a decision.” That decision, which usually includes “repentance toward God and … faith in our Lord Jesus Christ,” is not wrong; it is right. But the decision is a response to the good news, not the news itself.

When we present the pitch as if it were the good news, our hearers will lack an adequate understanding of the faith. If they trust in anything, it is liable to be their decision rather than God’s world-saving intervention. And that is simply not enough to sustain them in the faith.

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The Gift of the Spirit (Acts 2)

Posted on May 29, 2024 by salooper57

I have been trying to figure out how to capture video from our streaming service so that I could post only the sermon on my blog. Two requests for help have gone unanswered to date. So, if any of you know how to snip the sermon out of the stream on a Christian World Media format, please comment below. For now, I will provide a link and a counter number for the spot the sermon begins.

Go to https://www.californiaroad.org/pages/watch and click on the Sunday, May 19th service. The sermon begins at approximately 54:10.

This survey of Acts 2 can be outlined this way: What Happened: The Event (vv. 1-4); What Was Going On: The Setting (vv. 5-13); What it Meant: The Sermon (vv. 14-35); What to Do About It: The Application (vv. 36-41); and What Resulted: The Church (vv. 42-47).

If you have comments, be sure to leave them below.

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How to Find Freedom From Anger

Posted on May 25, 2024 by salooper57

A professor at the University of Texas once gave students an unusual assignment: if you have ever thought about killing someone, write an essay about it. 91 percent of the men and 84 percent of the women handed in detailed, vivid homicidal fantasies. Shootings are now so common that they receive little press unless multiple people are injured or killed. What’s going on in America?

Surely, people don’t want to be angry. Or do they? Is there something that people get, something they value, from being angry?

Certainly, there is. Anger brings a burst of adrenaline; it is energizing. It provides a counterbalance to the harm people have suffered, offering a peculiar kind of equilibrium. Anger serves as a shield to protect people from further hurt. In some cases, people’s identity is indivisible from their anger. They need their anger; without it, they would not know who they are.

Anyone who has been around the church for a while knows that anger is not just a problem “out there.” It’s in here too. It is in the church, disrupting relationships and injuring families. Parental anger has caused many young people to doubt, and eventually abandon, the faith mom and dad confess. Angry splits have brought the church into disrepute.

Doctors now prescribe medication to treat menopausal hot flashes, but is there any remedy for this other kind of hot flash, the kind that injures and disrupts? There is, and it has been around for a long time, but few people know about it and fewer still are willing to take the prescribed treatment.

Anger disorder was right at the top of issues that Jesus addressed. In his deservedly famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke about the beautiful kind of life that makes living worthwhile, then went on to address the most pernicious threats to that life. First on his list was anger. Anger is a headwaters from which flows a virtual cataract of evils that can destroy families and friendships, communities and even nations.

A newspaper column does not provide sufficient space to tease out Jesus’s brilliant teaching about anger, which can be found in Matthew 5:21-26, though readers would do well to pan out and read Matthew 5-7 in its entirety. I intend simply to point out a few conclusions I have formed from studying Jesus’s and the apostles’ teaching on the subject.

For someone who desires to be free of destructive anger, the first step is to decide to stop being an angry person. Perhaps that sounds ridiculous. If it were that easy, everyone would do it. But no one said it would be easy. And even if it were, some – and perhaps even most – people would still hesitate to give up their anger.

The biblical writers repeatedly say things like, “Put away anger. Lay it aside. Get rid of it.” It is natural to think (perhaps with a flare of anger), “I would if I knew how.” But how is not the first concern. Knowing how to put aside anger no more guarantees that a person will do so than knowing how to diet guarantees a person will lose weight. The first step is to firmly decide to stop being an angry person.

It is important to understand that anger is a natural response to a blocked desire. It is even more important to understand that we are more than our desires. That is confusing in a culture where people so identify with their desires that they have no identity apart from them. It is possible to acknowledge desires without always acting on them. It is more than possible. It is necessary for even a tolerable life.

It is not enough to try to stop anger; it must be replaced. This is an intentional process that requires serious thought. A person needs a replacement for their anger. If they don’t have one, they will fall right back into it. Scripture offers plenty of help in finding a replacement.

Fear is an obstacle to overcoming anger. People will only lay down their shield of anger when they have a replacement for it: a shield of faith. For that they need God.

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