Christian Living – Page 18

Burning Hearts

From an e-mail exchange with a friend who is going on a mission trip to Laos:

We can gather our ministry stories and use them to challenge Caloocan singles to get involved in future ten-day mission trips. I really would like to encourage people to be all out for God, to step out in faith and dare to believe God.

One of these days, Victory Caloocan singles will talk about ministry and world missions over cups of coffee. We’ll cry a little, our hearts will burn for the cause of Christ and missionaries will come out of those conversations.

His name was Ananias. He was the guy in Acts 9 that God sent to pray for blind Saul. At first he was hesitant to obey. Why would he go and see someone who was notorious for dragging Christians to prison? He was just an ordinary disciple in Damascus who happened to be there when God was looking for someone to turn the tides of world history.

He debated with God for a while but eventually gave in. He went ahead and prayed a miraculous healing for Saul. We never heard from Ananias again because he simply faded into the background. But the person he prayed for became the greatest missionary of all time, the apostle who brought the gospel to the Gentile world.

Continue reading Extremely Ordinary

God at the Center

As I see it, the Christian life must be comprised of three concentric circles, each of which must be kept in its proper place. In the outer circle must be the correct theological position, true biblical orthodoxy and the purity of the visible church. This is first, but if that is all there is, it is just one more seedbed for spiritual pride.

In the second circle must be good intellectual training and comprehension of our own generation. But having only this leads to intellectualism and again provides a seedbed for pride.

In the inner circle must be the humble heart — the love of God, the devotional attitude toward God. There must be the daily practice of the reality of the God whom we know is there…

When each of these three circles is established in its proper place, there will be tongues of fire and the power of the Holy Spirit. Then, at the end of my life, when I look back over my work since I have been a Christian, I will see that I have not wasted my life. The Lord’s work must be done in the Lord’s way.

Excerpted from Francis A. Schaeffer, No Little People (Crossway Books, 2003), via Ray Ortlund’s Blog.

Subtle Heresies

I once heard Ravi Zacharias talking about two kinds of heresies according to Frank William Boreham: the heresy of hereness and the heresy of thereness.

The heresy of HERENESS is the idea that God is HERE (not out THERE) and so therefore, if I am to escape His presence, I simply have to get out from this place. Jonah is the perfect example of this. When God called him to preach in Nineveh, he FLED to a distant land, falsely believing that by going away, he had escaped from his accountability to God.

The heresy of THERENESS is the exact opposite. It is the idea that God is out THERE and if I am to escape His presence, I just need to stay right here and not go out there. Adam is the perfect example for this. When he and Eve succumbed to the temptation, they hid in the bushes and covered themselves with fig leaves. When they heard God walking in the garden, Adam falsely believed that God is just out THERE, unable to see him.

Both views of the presence of God are wrong. But of course we know all that. In theory, at least.

Things would only get a little complicated when we fool ourselves into believing that we could get away with little compromises just because we’re outside church walls or on vacation and nobody sees us. In Psalm 139: 7- 11, David wrote these classic verses about the omnipresence of God. If this psalm doesn’t make us think twice about sinning in private, I don’t know what would.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day.

Shut Out

Interesting insight in Andy Stanley’s book Creating Community. He wrote about how in the past decades, American homes have front porches as prominent feature of the house. The front porch is the middle ground between the living room and the world outside. Years ago, it was normal for people to “run into” their neighbors sitting in the porch. A simple hello could lead to short conversations and before long, neighbors find themselves in the living room of the house next door and friendships are built.

Just recently, there is this change in modern architecture that changed this natural progression of relationships. Instead of porches, people prefer to build houses that are closed to the outside world. Instead of building connections, people now prefer seclusion. When people get home after a long and tiring day at work, they watch TV because do not want to see anymore people. They don’t want to have another conversation, or make another decision, or do another favor. So instead of going outside to the front porch, they retreat to the deck at the back of the house.

A similar trend can be seen in Manila today. It used to be that Filipinos invite friends over to their homes when they want to spend time together. Not so today. The mall is the ultimate solution to all our visitor problems. When we want to meet with friends, there’s Starbucks. It’s easier, it’s not messy. And we avoid having to explain our family to them and them to our families.

We try very hard to protect our inner sanctums. We work very hard to keep people away from us.

Would My Tears Make a Difference When I Pray?

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. –James 5: 16

Many people think that this verse means that if we only pray long enough, hard enough and often enough, God will grant our prayers. That if we are just intense and emotional, the heavens would answer us.

I once had a conversation with a college friend who said that God has this one weakness: the tears of a praying Christian. While that sounds like a comforting (and cute) idea, it is actually theologically wrong on all fronts. God doesn’t have a weakness and our tears have no bearing in the way He will answer or not answer our prayers. He is not your mother for crying out loud! He is not fooled with your incessant yapping. He doesn’t answer prayers on the basis of the tears we shed or the emotional weight we put into our supplications.

The verse we quoted above actually says something entirely different. If we go back to the originals, the KJV rendering “effectual fervent” came from a single Greek word where we get our English “energy.” It literally means “to be at work or to effect something.” Meaning, something that is being powered (by God, as the context suggests).

The word “avail” in that verse also means “strength and ability.”

Put these two words together and you get a clearer meaning for this verse. It now says, “The God-powered prayer of a righteous man is strong.” Bible commentator Clarke says that this verse signify “energetic supplication, a prayer that is suggested to the soul and wrought in it by Divine energy.”

One thing I’d like to say here: the driving force behind a prayer should not be your emotions or your own intensity but the power of God. It is God that fuels your prayer life, it is His strength that does it. I believe this is liberating to a certain extent. Some people have this mistaken notion that they should be praying hard enough to get God to answer their wishes. The problem with this mentality is that nobody actually knows how much is hard enough.

So, would your tears make a difference when you pray? The answer is a big NO. It’s not tears that move Him, it’s faith.