Monday, November 19, 2007

How much can / should you ask from God?

A reader asks:

"Pastor Paul came from New Jersey the past weekend for the refuge praise night. He said to pray and trust the Lord, to sort of expect things of Him.

How much can we expect from God? I know that He is all powerful and can do anything, but when we ask Him for things, is it our little faith in Him that limits His response? For example, I know it is possible for God to bring everyone on campus to the refuge praise night, but I would not ask for that nor expect that, mainly out of fear of it not happening."

I remember meeting Pastor Paul a couple years back and enjoying interacting with him. He says many valuable things, some of them also very thought provoking, and I can only guess that he said many such things at your Praise Night! :-)

When I read this one quesiton, I see a whole lot of other questions, like a load of tadpoles all under the surface of a pond! I'll try to answer the ones that jump out at me, but don't think I'll manage to hit all the issues. Maybe this is a good time to have a good long talk among all of you on prayer, so that the Holy Spirit would encourage all of you through your adventures with Him in prayer.

First, there is a group of people out there who teach that if you pray and you believe strongly enough that God will grant your prayer that God has to automatically give you whatever you request. This same group of people teach that if you don't get what you ask for, that is a sign that you "didn't have enough faith." The people who teach this are false teachers! They are blaspheming God and hurting God's people. They don't know the gospels, or if they do know the gospels, they are ignoring them. In the Garden of Gethsemene, Jesus Christ our Lord asked three times that the cup of suffering be taken from him, and three times God the Father refused. You don't get holier and more full of true faith than the Lord Jesus! Paul the Apostle asked three times that a "thorn in the flesh" be removed from Him; God in Christ responded "My grace is sufficient for you; no, I won't remove the thorn." I dearsay, Paul had more faith than I, more faith than any person I've ever met. Paul had so much faith, frankly, I'd be afraid of His prayers -- afraid of the influence they wielded in the heavenly realms. Still, God said "No." At the end of the book of Daniel, Daniel the Prophet has a bizarre vision and asks God to show him more. God says, "No, Daniel." Daniel had an incredible relationship with God. In the intimacy of that relationship, God still said, "No."

So, greatness of faith doesn't make things "easy" in prayer. In fact, the real heroines and heros of faith often get put in the thick of the most frightful spiritual battles. Read Hebrews 11. The chapter ends saying that there are some people who are so holy that "the world is not worthy of them", and that those people die because they are so faithful to God -- and yet not only do they not get what they asked for, they have to wait for what God promised to them! God calls on them to wait for the resurrection from the dead to receive what He promised to them. If your faith is great, watch out! -- You'll be called to serve the Lord with bigger, bolder, more dangerous prayers, pitted in the thick of battle with the very powers of darkness, and before powers who blaspheme and hate God you'll be slandered and made to look silly too. The promise to you is this: the victory God owns at the last day will be your victory also. Those who mocked Him, and therefore mocked you saying "Where is your God?", will not only bow before God, but they will have to admit, "Truly, God loves you!"

Now, I've answered the main question through the back door. The original, main question was How much should I ask for? The answer is: Get to know God's character, familiarize yourself with God's goals, then apply yourself and your prayers to those goals with gusto. I wouldn't be ashamed to make very concrete requests. As you wait on the Lord, planning and praying for an evangelistic outreach, if a friend of yours who doesn't know Christ is heavy on your heart, pray with everything you have that that person would come and be saved! If you see obstacles to your being able to have a successful outreach, and your ministry team has discerned that the outreach is in the Father's will, pray He would deal with the obstacles creatively and give your team wisdom.

Pray with faith! What is prayer with faith? Praying with faith is relating to God your heavenly Father with confidence that you are standing in heavenly places with Christ Jesus, your Lord and brother by adoption, at the right hand of the Father praying for you. Praying with faith is partnership in the Holy Spirit with Jesus our God. But what does that mean? When Jesus ascended (read the book of Acts, chapter 1), he was told, "Sit at my [God the Father's] right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool." (Psalm 110:1) So our Lord Jesus is waiting for God the Father's wise plan to reach completion, for the last enemies to be put down. If our praying is partnership with Jesus, then our praying should share in the conditions of His ascended rule, even as at the same time our prayers are also tainted and limited by our mortal, sinful condition. Sometimes, because we aren't perfect, we ask for imperfect things, and then God the Father simply says, "No." Other times, mysteriously, our prayers are the right prayers -- but in the thick of a spiritual battle with enemies who aren't yet put down in God's wise plan, and so the "Yes!" we get might seem for the moment to be a "No" or even pure silence as we wonder, "Why? How long?" Faith is spiritual stubbornness in the thick of war. When clear answers come in the midst of that battle, they taste all the sweeter.

Where does it all end? Paul says, "Be excellent at what is good. Be innocent of evil -- and the God of Peace will soon crush Satan underneath your feet." (Romans 16:19) So learn to be bold, "excellent" at the good of prayer. Be innocent of evil -- learn how to turn your prayers away from selfish, measly ends, and be more like the intercessory prayers of our ascended Lord Jesus. The process will sometimes be dissapointing, painful, and likely confusing. At the end, though, we'll all see that the God of Peace put every enemy under the feet of the Prince of Peace, and that we ruling and reigning with Christ our Lord and Brother by adoption, Satan himself has been put under our feet.

Now, of all the answers I've ever published, this one I think needs the most careful consideration and response. Pastor Mike?

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The Voice of God or Another Voice?

Question: Pastor Mike, when I listened to your sermons a few weeks back, you told us that we should not always consider what we think as a word of God, because it could be what Satan is telling us OR what our "instincts" or something is telling us. So, my question is this: "How is this 'instincts' different from word of God or that of Satan and how can we differentiate between those three?" Come to think of it, I think the second part is covered in the sermon (that those thoughts should be compared with the Bible), but refreshers won't hurt.

I think there are few things that give a pastor more joy than when someone asks a follow up question to a sermon. It shows you’re paying attention. Thank you!

To lay out a bit of context, we’ve been looking at Revelation chapters 1-3 over the past several Sundays. In chapters 2 and 3, Christ addresses 7 specific churches. The overall story of Revelation is the story of Christ winning the battle over evil, and of how the Church, as God’s people, shares in that victory. In Chapter 21, we see a picture of the triumphant Church, the New Jerusalem. This city is perfect; there is not trace of evil or suffering or struggle in it. God’s people and God are living in perfect, harmonious fellowship. In chapters 2 and 3, however, Christ is addressing the struggling Church on earth. This Church is still fighting in the battle between good and evil. In our day, we still live in the Church of Revelation 2 and 3, and so the struggles they faced then are still prevalent today. Even as God speaks to the Church, there are other, evil, voices also trying to tell us what to do and believe. Looking at these chapters, and the rest of Scripture, we can identify four voices that speak to us today. One is good, and the other three are evil.

The good voice, as you might expect, is the voice of God. We might break down how God speaks to us in two ways, and our inquirer who asked this question hinted at both of them. Firstly, God communicates to us by Scripture. Scripture provides us with God’s own self-revelation, and reveals to us the type of life we are called to live. God gave us Scripture by means of the Holy Spirit inspiring human authors, namely the prophets and apostles. The second way in which God speaks to us today is by this same Holy Spirit. It’s tempting when we speak of this to think in terms of supernatural phenomena, but most often the Holy Spirit speaks in much more subtle ways. The phrase many like to use to describe this is “the still small voice.” Sometimes when we pray, for example, we might later get this “hunch” (for want of a better term) that God answered us. It’s not that we necessarily hear a voice speak to us out of a burning bush, but we simply come to a peace that we didn’t have before regarding our concern, or we simply feel prompted to take a certain course of action. In both cases, when God speaks in Scripture and to us directly, it is in both cases by the power of the Holy Spirit, and in both cases for the sake of pointing us to Jesus Christ and His will for us.

The three evil voices are commonly referred to as the world, the flesh (what our questioner and I in my sermon referred to as “instincts), and the Devil. We’ll consider each of these briefly. We see in Revelation 2-3 how the Church struggled with the world around them. The world tried to tell them to worships idols and Caesar, and to indulge in sexual immorality. Even today, the world tries to tell us what to do, what we should look like, how we should dress, act, believe and so on. We also see in Revelation 2-3 how the Church struggled with it’s own flesh or instinct. Some of the churches we read of had people within them who taught that it was ok to be sexually promiscuous, other churches had, even as they opposed the “world,” still on their own forgotten their first love, Jesus Christ. Even today, we still struggle with our own sinful desires and actions, even as people saved by Christ. Our own natural instincts are sinful, and tempt us turn away from Jesus Christ. Lastly, we see in Revelation 2-3 the Church attacked by the Devil. Again, it’s tempting to think about the Devil and demons and such in terms of supernatural things. While I don’t want to discount such phenomena, the Devil most often works and speaks to us in more subtle manners. Anything that takes our attention away from Jesus Christ, the Devil uses. (If you have a chance, I recommend reading C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Even if you only read a chapter or two, it will give you a good idea of what I’m talking about.) Frankly, these three “voices” are often very difficult to distinguish from one another, and what’s more frustrating is that they’re all very good at sounding like the voice of the Holy Spirit. This is why we need to be careful when we’re discerning God’s will for our lives, or when others in the church claim to have had a “special revelation from God.” The Devil, and even the world and our own flesh, are capable of producing such revelations.

So, the next question is: How do we tell the difference? How do we know if our decisions and actions are God’s will, or the will of one of the three “other voices?” As the questioner reminded us, we first need to know Scripture, God’s Word to us. The Holy Spirit is not a schizophrenic, anything the Holy Spirit calls us to will be in conformity the principles of God’s working in Scripture. If we think God has told us something or called us to something and it turns out to be in opposition to Scripture, then the call wasn’t from God. Secondly, the purpose of God working by the Holy Spirit in our lives is always to point us to Jesus Christ. So, when we try to determine whether a particular call or course of action is of God, we should ask ourselves, “will this course of action bring honor to Jesus Christ?” Answering that question will help us to see which voice we’re hearing from.

Friday, November 9, 2007

Using Scripture to think about the Problem of Evil

"God gives all people their talents to glorify Him. He gives Christians gifts to praise God. Why does he give non-Christians, let alone sinners, great gifts that are used against Him like the very talented satanic metal bands?" -- Anonymous

This anonymous brother / sister in Christ focusses the question on the talents given by God to people who then abuse them -- and, worse, use those talents to abuse Him and others. In passing, I want to note that my sibling is asking "Why is there evil?" in a very specific context. Rather than reflecting on the larger question, I'll try to stick to this specific one. Before doing so, though, I must point out one thing about the larger question, "Why is there evil?", that deserves mention whenever considering any problem of this type. The answer to the larger question is not an idea, not a concept, but an invitation by God to get to know Him: God responds to the question, "Why do You allow evil to exist? -- I thought you're completely good!" by saying, "I am completely Good -- but more good than you know! Come and get to know me better by worshiping me and being my partner in opposing evil." God isn't content to simply explain his ways to us (when we probably wouldn't understand the ways of an infinite Being anyway). God wants us to know Him as the answer to the problem.

Specifically when talking about wicked people, God gives not only talent to them, but much else besides. The apostle Paul noted that "In Him we live and move and have our being." Jesus observed that the Father causes the sun to rise on the just and unjust alike, the rain to fall on just and unjust alike. The Holy Spirit is "the Lord and Giver of Life" according to the Nicene Creed. Every time you take a breath, God is there giving you that breath. Every time your heart beats, God is there giving you that heart beat. Whenever you experience love or kindness -- or even the pain that tells you "I am still alive!" when you're in a hard place -- God is there in that moment, that gift. The answer to the question, "Why do you give talents to bad people?" is something like "Come and see -- get to know me." And the God we come to know is the God who "...so loved the world that He gave..." God's goodness and love is a sacrificial goodness that spends itself on worthless, spiteful, selfish people. See how St. Paul writes in Romans 5 "God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners (!!) Christ died for us."

So, part of the answer to "Why does God give talents to horrible people?" is "He loves them." We may think God a great fool for doing that and at times wonder, along with the Psalmist, how long is He going to put up with all the crap -- and make us put with it! The suffering righteous in the Book of Revelation put the question well in Chapter 6: "How long will it be, holy and true master, before you sit in judgement and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?" Here, the second part of the partial answer is given to the whole church, "Join me!" We read on in chapter 6, "Each of them [the martyrs] was given a white robe, and they were told to be patient a little while longer until the number was filled of their fellow servants and brothers who were going to be killed as they had been." God says to the martyrs, "Put up with the wicked a little longer. Suffer with me as I put up with them for just a little while longer." Now, you may object that God doesn't say exactly "suffer with me". To understand that that is what is going on, we have to read the Bible a bit more. See the book of Acts, when the Resurrected and Ascended Lord Jesus confronts Saul, "Saul, Saul! -- Why are you persecuting me! " Christ sees the suffering of His people as his own suffering. Strangely, He and us have become One, He the head, and we the body.

Pastor Mike, your thoughts?

Friday, November 2, 2007

Is It a Sin Not to Go to Church on Sundays?

Someone asked this question a while back, and I thought it would be a good question to kick off this blog with. The question is actually a lot more complicated than a simple yes or no. Technically, the answer is no. There is no place in Scripture that says “Thou shalt go to church on Sunday morning.” BUT, I would argue that not going to church on Sundays is, in most contexts, an indication of neglecting one’s faith and relationship with God, which is sin.

A few concepts to consider from Scripture:

1.) God calls us to Sabbath. Read the ten commandments in Exodus 5:6-21. In verses 12-15, you’ll see the command to observe the Sabbath. In those verses, the command is linked with remembering how God brought Israel out of Egypt. This is fleshed out more in Exodus 4:9-10. On the Sabbath, Israel gathered to remember what God had done for them, and to teach that to their children. The same is true of the Christian Sabbath. As the people of God, we gather to remember what God has done in the past, and to teach that history to others. That’s why we have the Sabbath on Sundays; we’re commemorating and celebrating the resurrection of our Lord, and looking forward to our future resurrection.

2.) Spiritual growth is communal, not just individual. Time for personal devotion in prayer and Scripture reading is important, but we don’t grow primarily alone. Paul describes growth in Ephesians in terms of the Church as a temple in Eph 2:19-22: “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophet, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the LORD. And in him you (plural) are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” Later in Ephesians (ch. 4) and also in Romans 12 and I Corinthians 12, Paul describes this building up in terms of Spiritual gifts. The Holy Sprit works in the midst of the community of believers. For us to grow into mature faith, we need to receive the gifts given to us and the rest of the church. We need to receive the benefit of the gift of preaching given through the pastor, and the gifts of encouragement, teaching, etc. given through the other members. On top of that, the spiritual growth of others depends on your presence; they need to receive the benefit of the gifts being given to the Church through you. Basically, Spiritual growth depends on us being in community with one another, and historically, Christians have come together on Sunday mornings.

3.) Worship is both individual and communal. A lot of people will say that they can worship God on their own in private. They can, but that’s not a balanced, biblical model. Throughout Scripture, there are examples of people worshiping as individuals. Many of the psalms are written in the first person singular point of view, for example. However, there are also countless examples of worship being done by the whole of God’s people together and in one voice. Revelation 7 is one of the best examples of this. The point is: we need both. We need time for us as individuals to worship God, that’s why we do QT’s. We also need to time to worship as a community; that’s why we come together to worship on Sundays.

4.) The Church will never be perfect in this lifetime. Someone brought up the point that some people choose not to go to Church because of the politics and problems that often come up in churches. It’s true that we need to be sensitive to people with this objection. A lot of them have good reasons for making this decision and have been genuinely hurt in a church experience. However, this will always be the case since the Church is composed of humans. Problems and scandals in the Church are nothing new. Just skim over I Corinthians and read some of the subheadings in the NIV version: On Divisions in the Church, Expel the Immoral Brother!, Lawsuits Among Believers, Sexual Immorality, and the list goes on. The church in Corinth had all kinds of problems, and I’m guessing a lot of people probably were jaded and hurt by what was going on. Paul, though, never denies that they are God’s people. In fact, Paul still thanks God for them in the opening chapter.

So, while it may not be a sin explicitly to go to church on Sunday, it is a sin to neglect the community of God’s people. When we’re a part of a church, we essentially make a covenant with the other members to meet together as a Christian community. In nearly all churches, the set meeting time is Sunday morning, as a way of celebrating the resurrection of Jesus.