Praying in Accordance with God's Will

The quotation by Thomas Murphy in today's reading from GPTG pg. 157 really struck me. His reasoning resonates with me and helps me understand more clearly the relationship between the Word of God and our prayers. Here is his quotation:

"The prayer of the sanctuary should be thoroughly saturated with scriptural thought and expression. The language of the Bible is that which the Spirit prompted, and which must therefore be most in accordance with the mind of God. For the same reason it must be Bible language which is best calculated to express those devotional feelings which are the work of the Spirit in the heart."

In addition to guiding the believer to express the correct feelings (affections) toward God, the Bible helps us to know how to pray for God's will. How can our prayers be filled with "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" if we do not look to his word to seek that for which we should be praying? As the writer of this section points out, we may pray something that we know to be God's will, but there is an added comfort in couching that prayer in the language of the Scriptures.

I attend a church whose pastor purposefully fills his pastoral prayers with Scripture as he seeks to pray according to God's will and to edify his flock. I have been immeasurably blessed by it. I hope this reading will give us all a desire to know God's Word in a way that will allow us to pray it back to him, both in public and private prayers.

"Seeker-Sensitive", But Seeking What?

Often we hear the term seeker sensitive applied to a church, a church service, etc. I do not care to discuss at the moment the positive or negative connotations of such language; rather, I desire to emphasize the ineptitude of "preaching" that aims to make the outsider "comfortable."

My inspiration in writing this is Mark Dever's commentary on pages 136-137 of Give Praise to God. Dever challenges, "We must go into our pulpits not trying to win our non-Christian friends' approval, but their souls." I concur that too often preachers are overly concerned about how they are viewed by those outside of the church. Should pastors desire a good standing in the community? Sure, Paul states as much as a requirement in I Timothy 3:7. But that verse speaks of how they are viewed in regard to their lifestyle, their reputation as a person and then as a pastor. When declaring God's truth, no overseer is to compromise the message for the sake of his reputation. Being "well thought of" (I Timothy 3:7) and being liked may very well be different traits.

Ultimately, proclaiming the gospel must start with proclaiming God's holiness and man's sinfulness. This, in itself, is not a popular subject in postmodernity. Many will despise this message. Many will not like the one who gives it. To risk sounding flippant, why does it matter? If one thinks you an enemy when you work for his good, will that change your desire to work for his good? Likewise, if one thinks you a friend when you work for his downfall, will that make you any more his friend? The point is this, the best you can do for another is aid his soul. As Dr. Ryrie said this morning (and I paraphrase), what is best is for God to be shown through a person. Your desire for God's glory and your love for your friend compel you to preach the gospel, unadulterated and without apology, to your friend.

Dever sites a Greek proverb: "The opposite of a friend is not an enemy, it is a flatterer." Do preachers today believe this. If so, we must concern ourselves less with comfort and more with confrontation. Not confrontation between us and them, but between their souls (their sinful souls) and the gospel. "How are they to believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?" Preaching not comfort for sinners, but atonement for sin. Preaching not contentment in damnation, but death (and life) in Christ.

Pride, The Enemy Of The Gospel

As Christians, we need to be careful not to exclude God from every aspect of our lives. I find that so often in the things that we feel weak, we humbly trust God to get us through but in areas of our lives where we feel confident, we fail to give God the glory and ask for his strength do so. But this should not be so. In our ignorance we may have temporary success in man's eyes, but we are only creating mere habits of pride in our lives. God must be in control of our entire lives but, in our fleshly pride, we so often fall before the idol of ourselves. And this idol of self sufficiency, based in pride is an enemy of the Gospel. Pride tells us that we can make it on our own. We can have salvation through ourselves and we are stronger than any of God's power. While we know that we are weak, pride deceives us into worshipping our own strength. But on the contrary, the Gospel shows us who we are and cuts us down to humbly acknowledge our weaknesses and the all-sufficient grace of God which is applied to our lives. So the root of the problem of God not being in all we do is that we fail to have a true sense and appreciation for the Gospel in our lives. Therefore, as Christians, we must always have a keen awareness of the Gospel's truth and power in all that we do whether we feel physically confident and capable or weak and helpless. The Gospel must prevail in our lives!

The Desperate Need for Clarity in Preaching

In Albert Mohler's essay on expository preaching, his quotation from John MacArthur really brings us to the heart of the preacher's task: "I want people who listen to me to understand exactly what God's Word demands of them when I am through" (GPTG pg. 114). This is the job of a minister of the Word, and he must not shirk from it. In Joshua 24, we see Joshua himself doing this exact thing when he delivers an ultimatum to Israel: you must choose either God or your idols. A preacher must not leave his people mentally sitting on the fence, not knowing what God requires of them. He must speak with clarity and seek to deliver a message that leaves no doubt in anyone's mind what their duty is before God and man.

As I pondered this, I remembered what I have been reading in "The Courage to Be Protestant", as well what we had read at the beginning of Mohler's essay last week. Wells has written about the postmodern approach to Christianity and its deemphasis on the objectivity of truth and an accompanying lack of clarity in postmodern teaching. Actually, in many cases it is an intentional ambiguity that in part leaves the actual meaning up to the reader himself. The problem with this indistinct language and the deemphasis on the knowability of truth is that it is incompatible with Christianity. Christianity is all about objectivity and concrete facts. When we remove this, we lose the knowledge of what exactly God requires of us.
In 1 John, we see a strong emphasis on knowing things that pertain to the faith: our salvation, the truth, the presence of the last days, etc. Jesus himself said "and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (Jn. 8:32). If there is not a dedication to the objective truth of the Word in its exposition, there will be foundationless churches that really have no message for the world. This is what Paul spoke of in Ephesians 4 when he said: "And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes."

Since some of us may end up being pastors in the future, the points that Mohler and Wells make are incredibly important. One of the tasks of a pastor is to equip the saints towards the attainment of the knowledge of the Son of God. That is why we need to look to the Bible as the objective, revealed truth of God and preach it as such.

How Deep?

We are often reminded in song of how deep God's love for us is. Paul stood in awe of this as he wrote the Ephesians, and we rightfully should as well. However, I'm afraid that our love for God is often more like a "kiddie pool" than an ocean. Mohler's careful assessment of the situation through the eyes of Michael Green intrigues me (Give Praise to God 110.) Sermonettes, he says, lead to Christianettes. Shallow, hollow, messages, lead to shallow, hollow people. As churches have bought into the entertainment mindset of today's culture, truth and consentrated thought have been relegated for the sake of fast-paced, "enjoyable," programs and performances. The Gospel (which alone can save the lost) has been sacrificed on the altar of "reaching the lost." This is disheartening, not to mention self-defeating.
But thank God that He is still sovereign, and this "trend" is not all-consuming.

A Congregation of Me

For the past week, I have been thinking a lot about the mindset of those who come to a worship service. One thing I notice many people saying during my church’s recent search for a pastor was that we needed to be unified as a church. It was not until recently that I began to think about what that meant. Our world tells us to “look out for #1”, to be an individual, to look different, think differently, and act differently than everyone else. Then, all these individuals come to church, and expect to be unified. I believe that this is having a major impact on the way churches worship.

In 1 Corinthians 1:10, Paul urges the church to have the “same mind and the same judgment.” In 1 Corinthians we see a church who is very divisive. Like so many of our churches, there is unrepentant sin, and fights and quarrels. Paul reminds this body of believers that the only reason they can have fellowship is Christ (1:9).

We come to church so often with consumer mindsets, where we are looking to be ministered to, but this is not what church is about. As Paul says in Philippians 2, another passage where he calls the church to be likeminded, we are to look to the interests of others. If we come to church seeking what I can get out of it, or how I can be ministered to the church will just be a congregation of “me” instead of a church worshiping together in their hearts to the Lord.

Separation only to be restorated

"Seemeth it but a small thing unto you that God of Israel hath separated you from the congregation of Israel to bring you near to Himself?" One thing is a fact in today's Church, there is less disciplining going on within her. One reason for this is because of the wrong use of Scripture. "Judge not, lest ye be judged. Matthew 7:1 has likely eclipsed John 3:16 as the most oft-quoted verse in all the Bible. Now en vogue among moral relativists is to invoke the maxim in order to slip out from under even the most biblically sound rebuke or admonition. It is in this context that the historic practice of church discipline has gradually come to be regarded as antiquated. But is church discipline so irrelevant to the well-being of the local assembly?"- Mark Dever "Nine marks of a healthy Church"
What might we be missing in its absence? Pastor Mark Dever goes on to say,"Membership in the local church is that church's public affirmation of a person's salvation, as far as the leadership of the church is able to affirm it on the basis of good visible fruit.
When we refuse to discipline serious sin committed by members, we deceive people into thinking that the church can happily affirm, by uninterrupted membership, the salvation of someone whose unrepentant sin contradicts their verbal profession.
In other words, neglecting church discipline tacitly affirms the lie that verbal profession of Christ is saving even when unaccompanied by a lifestyle of genuine repentance and progress in practical holiness. It gives false assurance to people who have no biblical reason at all to feel sure about their salvation.
It is in this way that the church contributes to the self-deception of a seriously sinning member. The complacence of pastors and leaders with unrepentant sin in members' lives leads unrepentant members to indulge that same complacence, all the while enjoying the church's public affirmation of their salvation in the witness of membership!" Pastor Dever goes on to say that the reason for Church discipline is only for
"Restoration - Brethren, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness (Gal 6:1).
Salvation - …so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus (1Cor 5:5).
Teaching - Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan so that they may be taught not to blaspheme (1Tim 5:20)." This is the same call that Paul called the Church of Corinth in (1 Cor 5). This separation is only to have the sinner come back closer to Christ. If you have not read this book, it is a must read brother and sister Saint's. "O Church arise and put your armour on. Hear the calling of Christ our Captain."-In Christ Alone: Modern Hymns Of Worship by:Bethany Dillon & Matt Hammitt
You can go and read more on this and the other "9marks of a Healthy Church" @http://marks.9marks.org/Mark7

Drawing Me Nearer

Just like Josh, I had some real thoughts going on in Burroughs writings on pages 47 to 50ish. The passage "Deuteronomy 4:17" which actually was quoted from 4:7, shows just how awesome it can be to be a people, a person, who has God near to them. If your familiar with Chris Folson and his praise song, "I walk by faith", he has the same idea of the power of God with Him when he sings "if my God is for me, then who can stand against me". By that same power is evil judged, the righteous rewarded and the universe sustained. And God, the source of this amazing power, has chosen to allow his creation to come along side him? Simply awesome. How can i really understand the goodness of Him? But that was exactly what Burroughs was saying. Pg 48, top paragraph "You who are near to him... This is your privilege, and you should count it a great honor" Just as the nation of God could draw near to Him, as individuals through the Gospel we can draw near to God. This choice to come along side with God is a vital step, overlooked by many members of God's congregation, to being able to truly worship. To first reconcile with Him and then worship Him.

Worshipping the True God Ignorantly

Something unnerving in the church today is how often we are caught "worshipping" without stirring our hearts and minds about the object of our worship. We are so easily pulled into music and lyric that we believe we have raised our affections and later upon thought of what we have sung or meditated on, we realize that maybe it was not Biblical. I think specifically of the example brought up in class of the song "Above All". How many times do we come unprepared into worship and blindly regurgitate words on a screen because it is what we ought to do? Sooner than the pre-chourus hits there are hands in the air and emotions are stirred. What is it if not the knowledge of the Holy that brings us to that point.
Sam Storms identifies affections as vigorous exercises of the heart. So, if we are not vigorously exercising our hearts during worship but are coming to similar effects what is it that we are worshipping?

Familiar Yet Reverent

Burroughs emphasizes (pp. 47-48) the importance of becoming familiar with God. He makes the statement, "One great reason why God suffers you to fall into afflictions so much is that you may come running to Him." I believe Burroughs' statement to be profound in its simplicity. God really does want us to come to Him and to know Him as He is. What a beautiful thought! What a comforting thought! When we worship God, says Burroughs, "there will grow a sweet and blessed familiarity..." between us and God. I do not know one Christian who would deny that he or she desires this familiarity.

If God wants us, then, to become familiar with Him, certainly this familiarity is attainable. That said, a question arises in my mind: how can one come to meet God on familiar terms and still come with the reverence due His holy Name? Humanly speaking, when I am familiar with someone, then I come to that person in a much more relaxed, real, open, vulnerable way. I come without a doubt of rejection (regardless of my own failures) and with expectation of mutual encouragement. Perhaps this is what God desires. But the opening words of Ecclesiastes 5 remind me that when a person comes into God's Presence he should be careful in what he says because "God is in heaven and you are on earth." Acknowledging the larger context of vows, I still observe a principle in those Verses? "God is high exalted above what we can even comprehend from this lowly state; therefore, come before Him with reverence." The Old Testament could hardly emphasize this point more. And Christ did not hesitate to condemn those who came proudly before God and took liberty with the Law He had decreed (the Pharisees). More Texts and examples could be given, but I will let those suffice. The point remains that God deserves, desires, and demands reverence when His creation comes into His Presence.

With that point in mind, I return to my original question: how do familiarity and reverence mix? It does seem that God wants us to come to Him in the real, open, vulnerable way in which we would go to a familiar friend. He does offer consistency, love, and the hope of mutual encouragement. However, the relaxed (perhaps presumptuous) way in which we approach each other seems hopelessly irreverent in our communion with God. Even those we view as very familiar with God treated Him with reverence (i.e. Moses, David, John, etc.). We must be careful not to allow our (hopefully) increasing familiarity with God to lead to flippancy. He deserves better. In fact, I would venture to say that instead of taking our familiarity with God down to the level of our human interactions, we should instead raise the level of respect amongst those we are closest to here without losing the openness, love, and vulnerability that come with familiarity. But that is another topic. For now, as we grow ever more familiar with God, may our reverence and respect for Him increase as well.

Are we Daily Drawing Nigh to God?

As a Christian it is our duty to draw nigh to God and strive to know him better. It is not merely enough to say that "I am saved and I go to church Sunday morning and evening and Wednesday night." There must be a personal striving to build ones relationship with the Almighty God. This is not an easy task. It is easy to give way to our flesh and say, "I am too tired, too busy, or just plainly don't feel like it." and we forsake our God and scream, "I hate you!" to His face. And when we give way to our flesh once and do not repent and draw nigh to God once again, we allow ourselves to be more calloused to the death that sin brings and we make more decisions based on our fleshly selfishness. And the more times that we allow sin to take hold of our lives the further we stray from God and peregrinate from his amazing grace. And if we continue down this path, we will continue to make our decisions based on our selfishness until we eventually either stray from God or we make a decision that we regret (because of the consequences and that our habitually sinful state is revealed to other people). But though we regret this decision in order to ultimately change from our sinful ways, we must repent from our sinful actions and draw nigh to our God who is running to us in love because he see his prodigal son coming home to Him. So in order for us to prevent ourselves from denying our God traveling down a sinful path, we must humbly repent from our sins and beseech God for strength to draw nigh to Him. We must daily study and meditate on the Scriptures and spend our days filled with prayer and fellowship with the body of Christ. As Christians, we must beat and train our bodies as an athlete as to guard our lives from ever forsaking God and listening to the sinful whispers of our flesh and so to draw nigh to God and the knowledge of His holiness.

Prayer: Seeking God's Will

What is prayer? The Westminster Shorter Catechism defines it this way: "Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies" (Q98). In today's Christianity, this view of prayer often seems to be the exception, rather than the norm. Some Christians today need to recover a biblical sense of prayer, especially in regards to praying things "agreeable to [God's] will".

The third petition of the Lord's Prayer directs us to pray "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven". Unfortunately, in both my private prayers and in public prayers the attitude sometimes seems to be "My will be done", even if not stated quite so blatantly. This, obviously, is opposite of the way it ought to be. Prayer is to be a response to God revealing himself through the Word. Therefore our prayers should be guided by what we know about God and his will from his Word. Oh, may we recover a sense of what it means to ask things according to God's will!

Additionally, I sometimes hear people say "Let's just have a quick word of prayer". While there is obviously nothing wrong with praying a short prayer, sometimes I feel that the attitude is one of flippancy and carelessness. When we come to prayer, we need to understand exactly what we are doing. We are approaching God. God has allowed us to present our desires to him for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ. Prayer is not something that we tack on in order to make something Christian. It is a God-given privilege to approach him, and we must not treat it lightly. On the other hand, we must remember the command in Ephesians 6 to pray at all times in the Spirit. Do not neglect prayer because you are so privileged to have it; use it for seeking God's will and the advancement of his kingdom, all to his glory!

Does Worship Change Us?

"Evangelicals do think that worship matters, but they also often view worship as a means to some other end than that of the glorification and enjoyment of God." (Give Praise to God page 25) So many times I've read or heard people say that we are changed in worship. Worship changes us. It is when we enter into worship that God works in our lives and we leave having become different people than the ones we were when we came in. I've always had a problem with that. My belief is that worship is a response to God's revelation. "To worship God, therefore, is to assign him his supreme worth, acknowledging him to be the creator and redeemer revealed in the Scriptures." (Give Praise to God page 6) As Doc says so often to us, we cannot worship a God we do not know. And it is through God's Word that we know him. What happens when you say that we are changed in worship is that the Bible no longer becomes the standard for truth, but experience becomes the standard. Instead of saying that we are changed in worship, we should say that we are changed and then we worship.

Who Are We Worshipping?

As a church and a body of Christ, do we really worship Christ in our worship services. I think that pastors have good intentions of trying to motivate their congregation for worship, but that that trying has led to the superstitious worship of man. Pastors begin trusting their methods of ministry rather than in the Almighty God and who He shows Himself to be in Scripture. The congregation begins to worship the feelings and the band and the preacher and trusting what the authorities tell them rather than the Creator and their Savior and God's Word. So they go to church wanting to feel stimulated but their stimulation is entirely man centered and not based upon the Scriptures. The church is in love with itself instead of God. This problem will always be a struggle among churches but our goal should be to keep worship on God and not on man. By keeping the Scriptures at the basis for all of worship and as an active part of the worship service, the church can slowly bring itself out of the horrible pit of man-centered worship that it has fallen into.

Who (or What) is Exalted?

Worship divides. That one word can take a local church and make it two local churches. I would say, however, that division is not even close to what God intended when He commanded worship. That which God institutes is good, and its purpose is good. Mankind, however, has changed the very command of God, the institution of God, to something that it was never meant to be. If I can restate my original statement as “worship” divides, perhaps that will make it a bit clearer. The church has redefined worship to the point that the outcome of it is counterproductive to its original intention.
The church has made worship about sound, feeling, and performance. God intended it to be about truth, Christ, and perspective. It is a time of realizing who we are, not by focusing on ourselves and our preferences, but by focusing on our Creator and His perfection. True worship may involve any number of things, whether singing, praying, preaching, reading, serving, etc. But true worship binds the body of Christ in exaltation of the Head. It does not divide the body in glorification of the parts. The arm is not more important than the foot; neither is the arm’s favorite musical style (or the foot’s favorite translation). The list may continue.
Fights (figurative of course) do nothing but divide the body and draw attention to those involved. To state the obvious, Jesus Christ is not one of those involved in the fights. He does not receive the attention, but people do. He is not praised, but the “winning” side is. That’s not worship, regardless of whether you are singing your heart out every Sunday. If you harbor hatred, anger, or ill-feeling against your brother (or he against you), Christ does not want your offering (Matthew 5:23-24). It is not worship to Jesus. His body is torn apart by superstition. As our author would say, the church has raised an avenue of worship to worship itself, and Christ’s reputation has suffered for it. We are to be known by our love, not our musical style. What does it say of Christ when His followers are able to set aside personal preferences because they want to join together to worship their King? That is worship: God’s people following God’s commands for God’s glory.

A Sizable Superstition

Picture this imaginary scene: sitting at a large round table are a few men, neither filling the whole table, nor sitting all together. They are anxiously awaiting the beginning of the such and such pastor's conference when Pastor B.G. Deal approaches and pulls up a seat between two of them. Introductory conversation begins, "Hi, I'm Bed Deal, I'm pastor up in/at __name of the local mega-church__. What's your name?" he says to the man on his left. "I'm Pastor John." and what is the next question asked of poor pastor Jon? "How big is your church?"

Unfortunately there is a pervading superstition in our churches that attendance and membership numbers mean Biblical success. Somehow, we have come to associate the two intrinsically. One of the biggest reasons for the popularity of such churches (and i am not condemning or promoting any such church or church movement. that is for a different discussion.) is 'oh, I can just really worship so much more here.' Really? Where is the drawing near to God and the sanctifying of His name in that? No, don't just leave it at that. Tell me how and why it is true (that you are able to worship more here) and then you will have my attentive ear.

Worst of all, this size syndrome has been bought into by many pastors and church leaders. In the scene described above, there is suddenly a hierarchy created at the table by the size of each man's congregation, which some feeling inferior and/or unqualified to participate in further discussion among such heavy hitters as Pastor B.G. Deal.

Have we elevated to the level of spirituality the factor of congregational size? I fear perhaps so.