Tag: Richard Foster

29Jan

Dangers of Prayer

“Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us.” (Shadowlands)

Some of you may recall Anthony Hopkins intoning that line in the movie version of “Shadowlands”, as he portrayed beloved author and oxford don C.S. Lewis.  This idea was articulated also directly by the danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. 

Does this mean that prayer is pointless? A one way street? Merely talking to the air or a cosmic brick wall?  No, for we are instructed to pray by Jesus himself.  “Ask and it shall be given unto you. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.”

Prayer takes us into God’s presence.  In fact, people often get more than they bargain for.  Pop culture has sometimes cheapened prayer or tempted us to use it as a kind of gumball machine in the sky.  People think of it as a way of attaining health and wealth.  Church people sometimes admit to praying over the most mundane stuff, like finding a parking spot.  This has made me think that an essay is in order to remind us of the dangers of prayer.

1. You may have the misfortune to get what you ask for.  

Remember the haunting tale of the Monkey’s Paw? That is the danger of prayer as talisman. God doesn’t actually work like the evil talisman, but be aware that an answer to prayer may be something that comes with unseen consequences.  Maybe you get the promotion you wanted, only to have to face new struggles with colleagues and stress in the marriage.  Maybe the thing you wanted turned out to be a source of trial and testing.  God can use the very thing you want to humble you, and teach you the art of surrender to His will.  Which brings me to a major point.

2. Prayer means a surrender of the will.

When we pray, we bow before our maker, and if we are rational, His greatness and beauty overpowers us with a sense of our limitations.  We gasp “Thy will be done, Lord.”  Kierkegaard again writes of prayer as a struggle, “The righteous strives in prayer with God and conquers, in that God conquers.” (From Edifying Discourses, vol 4)

3. You may be forced to look at some hard truths about yourself.

Facing who God is, encountering His living presence, means discovering who we aren’t.  We are not deities.  We are more like little toddlers pretending to drive the big car. And we soon see that we need to give up the driver’s seat.  (Or as a nurse acquaintance used to say, “Jesus take the wheel!”)

God is love. We aren’t—we are often selfish, petty, jealous, and eager at other’s losses. 

God is holy.  We realize that we are sinful; we have addictions that are unhealthy, habits that are shameful, relationships that lead us astray.  

God cares about injustice, making us realize that we suffer a lack of passion about the woes of the less fortunate—we “care” but usually not enough to do anything much.

4. Your view of the world may change in ways that are uncomfortable.

I mentioned the injustices.  A will informed by God is more awake to the misery of sin in the lives of others.  You are more awake to injustice.  You care more about inequalities.  You care more about nature itself.  

5. You may be led to go somewhere you don’t want to go.

I recall a lecture by the theologian R. C. Sproul on discerning God’s will. He recounted how he was deciding between two job offers after seminary, one at his beloved bucolic institution in Pennsylvania, and another position in Boston. At the end he felt God’s clear guidance, and ended up moving and having a couple of unhappy years in Boston.  Years later he mused “I have no earthly idea why God led me there except maybe to get me out of my comfortable environment.”

Dr. Jerry Rankin, president of the Southern Baptist International Mission board reflects on some who heeded the call of Christ to leave behind their comforts and proclaim the Gospel in foreign lands.

“During my seventeen years as president of the International Mission Board, I never got used to the funerals. Death wasn’t necessarily the result of violence or because of a missionary’s Christian witness. Missionaries succumb to disease, are killed in a carjacking, or in an accident while traveling a dangerous highway. Some were in the wrong place when a terrorist bomb exploded in a shopping mall or got caught in a mob of anti-American demonstrators. But there were those who were targeted because they dared to proclaim the truth of the gospel in a hostile environment.” (You may read more here)

Prayer doesn’t necessarily lead to riches and health, as some have erroneously supposed.  Sometimes it is rather the very way of the cross, as it was for Jesus himself at Gethsemane.  After Jesus went through his passion and resurrection, he predicted to his disciple Peter, “when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” John the gospel writer further elaborates this, that “Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.”

Jesus’ early followers were men whose prayers were effective They healed people who were sick, and transformed lives.  They “turned the world upside down” (in the complaint of their enemies).  Yet for all their spiritual success (or rather because of it), they nearly all died as martyrs to the cause of Christ.

5. Prayer changes your will, but your own will needed it.  You will be transformed in a positive way:

Richard J. Foster in his great book Prayer, wrote:

“The death of my own will”—strong language. But all of the great devotional masters have found it so. Soren Kierkegaard echoes Woolman’s experience when he notes, “God creates everything out of nothing—and everything which God is to use he first reduces to nothing.”4

Do you know what a great freedom this crucifixion of the Will is? It means freedom from what A. W. Tozer called “the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit.”5 It means freedom from the self—sins: self-sufficiency, self-pity, self-absorption, self-abuse, self-aggrandizement, self-castigation, self-deception, self-exaltation, self-depreciation, self-indulgence, self-hatred, and a host of others just like them. It means freedom from the everlasting burden of always having to get our own way. It means freedom to care for others, to genuinely put their needs first, to give joyfully and freely.

Little by little we are changed by this daily crucifixion of the Will. Changed, not like a tornado changes things, but like a grain of sand in an oyster changes things. New graces emerge: new ability to cast all our care upon God, new joy at the success of others, new hope in a God who is good.

Please remember, we are dealing with the crucifixion of the will, not the obliteration of the will. Crucifixion always has resurrection tied to it. God is not destroying the will but transforming it so that over a process of time we can freely will what God wills.”

Amen.

14Dec

Spiritual Disciplines

In mid-Advent we are in the midst of a season of discipline and penitence, a “mini-Lent”. Fittingly, I have worked on an overview of disciplines for our parent website:

Spiritual Disciplines

Marines-scaling-mountain

(Photo Credit: Training Exercises, U.S. Marine Corps, by Cpl. Will Perkins, Sept 10, 2015; Public Domain)

This is where the rubber meets the road in Christianity. Through these activities which we refer to as “spiritual disciplines”, we can grow in faith and knowledge, and are permitted to assist in the work of the Holy Spirit, our divine companion, who is dwelling and working mysteriously within us.

St. Paul in one of his letters advised his readers: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:12-13: English Standard Version). The “work out” part is where these activities come in to play.

At our baptisms, God could probably have chosen just to “zap us” with instant knowledge and all the “fruits of the Spirit” in full development. He could have made us fully impervious to temptations and further sins. However, God has graciously chosen to allow us to cooperate with Him on a lifelong journey. This idea flows from the Christian idea that “God is Love”, that He wants relationship with beings who can choose love, and not merely a bunch of robotic servants.

Baptism is the beginning for us, not the end. We refer to the earliest part of our spiritual journey as a “new birth”–it is a beginning, a moment of decision, an emerging. We have answered the call to become “God’s woman” or “God’s man”. It may be for some a “mountain top experience”, but in fact answering the call and being baptized are but getting to the trailhead in the foothills, at the beginning of our trek. At this point we are picking up our trail maps and donning the clothes and tools we need for the climb, but hard work remains ahead. The mountain top lies before us, in the remote distance. We will get there, with God’s help.

It should be made clear that these activities we call the “spiritual disciplines” are tools to help us to draw closer to God’s presence, but ultimately the work of transforming our inner being belongs to God alone. In advocating these disciplines, we are not endorsing a “works” based doctrine of salvation. Christianity teaches that “works” flow from “faith”, and not vice versa. Furthermore, even faith itself is mysteriously a gift to us, and not something we conjured up alone. A vital (living) faith produces good works, while dead faith produces none.

We should also make clear that our efforts are designed to bend ourselves toward God. We don’t pray or meditate in order to bend God or the Cosmos to our wills. We are not wizards or necromancers. There are disciplines that if used wrong can become empty incantations, and lead to a false sense of power. You might hear in some quarters about plugging into or wielding the power of the Spirit, or reaping the benefits of prayer. And there is something to that, but the major effort of God’s power is to scrub us and polish us, not merely that we may shine with our own glory, but that we may be better mirrors to reflect God’s glory.

What are the disciplines? Well, you will find a variety of categories and lists. The biggies would be prayer, Bible study, and the various activities that are done in community, what some refer to as “corporate” disciplines. Prayer is a discipline that connects us to God. Bible study connects us to the history of God’s work in the world, His teachings through prophets, and the words of His Son, our Lord, Jesus. “Church” or corporate disciplines involve what we find in Acts 2:42: “And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.”

One of the recent classics of the subject spiritual disciplines is the book A Celebration of Discipline, by Richard Foster, founder of the “Renovare” movement. He is not universally embraced, of course, but that aside, I have borrowed his classification of the disciplines.

He perceives three categories or types of disciplines: Inward, Outward, and Corporate. The four inward disciplines are meditation, prayer, fasting, and study. He lists four outward disciplines as simplicity, solitude, submission, and service. The remaining corporate disciplines focus on the development of Christian community as a whole; these are confession, worship, guidance, and celebration.