Page 3546 – Christianity Today (2024)

A woman named Mary Geegh lives in my town. Now in her nineties, she is bedridden in a nursing home. She wrote a wonderful little book called God Guides, telling of her experiences of hearing God’s voice during her long career as a missionary in India. I’ve read it many times. Her method, if one can call it that, was simple. When she needed to hear from the Lord about something—which was about every day—she would sit down with a pad and pencil, ask the Lord for his wisdom in the situation, listen quietly until he spoke, write down what she heard, and then do it.

Just like that.

If she didn’t hear anything, she wouldn’t do anything. Once when she was at odds with a fellow missionary and stumped over what to do to heal the breech, she listened for God’s wisdom and heard the Spirit say, “Give her an egg.” Perplexed, but obedient, she did what the Lord said to do, half apologizing to her colleague for what seemed to be a foolishly irrelevant act, given the tension between them. As it turned out, the gift of the egg had extraordinary significance for her alienated sister, since she needed exactly one more egg to feed her family that evening and had been wondering where she could find one. Mary’s act of obedience to what some call “the inner voice” showed her sister not only that she truly desired reconciliation but that God did too, powerfully so. To read her book is to read of a woman who had this kind of thing happen over and over again.

True, it’s a little odd the way she would almost routinely hear the voice of God. Or should I say, uncommon?

Most of us have not had her experience, but everyone I’ve known who has read of it has expressed a wistful longing to hear from God in the same simple and unaffected way. Prayer is a dialogue, a conversation with God, not a monologue or soliloquy. We need to learn to listen and hear his side of the conversation, and it should not be uncommon for us to hear him say something. He has promised in his word, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault” (James 1:5).

One morning recently, I woke up feeling heavy and depressed about a situation at the college. There had been a great deal of controversy over a theological stance my staff and I had taken; I had received a lot of criticism and personal attack. I was having second thoughts. It’s one thing to get hammered for doing the right thing, it’s another thing to get hammered for doing the wrong—or the stupid—thing.

I was inquiring of the Lord: Was I doing the right thing, seeing that it would stir up so much anger? Should I have taken a softer position, a more gentle approach? Was my timing off? I opened my Bible to the daily reading, and the psalm happened to be Psalm 130, which begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.…” That matched my mood perfectly! I prayed that verse again and again with deep feeling, grateful to God for the voice his Word gave to my emotions. Since the psalm is a penitential psalm, I wondered if God were indeed telling me that I should back off the position I had taken.

But as I prayed, my eyes wandered to the center of the page to a column of cross-references parallel to that verse. They related to the psalm I had read several days before, Psalm 129—yes, I had missed a few days of Bible reading.

It’s a psalm that begins with “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth … but they have not gained the victory over me.” Certainly a psalm of a different stripe, a psalm not of penitence but of resistance! It prays, in effect, “Lord, they have treated me terribly, but they haven’t gotten the better of me.” Years before, on another occasion of reading that psalm, I had highlighted the cross-references for those words. They were the cross-references my eyes fell upon that morning, the words that God spoke to Jeremiah: ” ‘Get yourself ready! Stand up and say to them whatever I command you. Do not be terrified by them, or I will terrify you before them. Today I have made you a fortified city, an iron pillar and a bronze wall to stand against the whole land.… They will fight against you but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you,’ says the Lord” (1:17-19).

Of course, I found the content and the timing of these words stunning, given my situation.

But I was wondering if I had fallen into a pit of subjectivity and self-justification when I met with my wife for our morning prayer time. Had I made the Bible a kind of Rorschach inkblot upon which to project my own perceptions and desires? I shared with her what I had experienced and read, and watched her eyes grow wide as she cold me the Jeremiah passage was the exact text she had been praying over that morning, line for line, as part of her daily reading. Since that morning it hasn’t become any more pleasant to take the stand I have taken, but it has been easier.

Sweet voice

The promise of God to give wisdom to those who ask for it has been vividly real to me as I have cultivated an attitude of quiet listening, of being open to hearing his end of the dialogue. I spend more time alone, in silence, than I used to—rising early to be in solitude and stillness. I joke with my friends that the chief spiritual danger in getting up so early is self-righteousness, the smugness that can creep into my soul when I know that as I am praying, others are sleeping. But in all honesty, I get up not to achieve an elite level of spiritual athleticism; I get up because it is so good and pleasant to do so. I can hardly call it a discipline anymore. It is so delicious, so ineffably sweet to hear the Lord, the Good Shepherd speak, or even to hope that he might. It isn’t so much that God speaks directly during those times; rather, the stillness prepares me to be alert to those whispers and nudges I might receive from him as I drive my car or walk across campus. Fernando Ortega sings a song that speaks of how desolate we are until God speaks, and how richly blessed we are when he does:

O Thou, in whose presence
my soul takes delight,
On whom in affliction I call,
My comfort by day
and my song in the night,
My hope, my salvation, my all!
Where dost Thou dear Shepherd,

resort with Thy sheep,
To feed them in pastures of love?
Say why in the valley of death
should I weep?
Or alone in this wilderness roam?
O why should I wander
an alien from Thee?
Or cry in the desert for bread?
Thy foes will rejoice
when my sorrows they see,
And smile at the tears I have shed.
He looks and ten thousands
of angels rejoice,
And myriads wait for His word.
He speaks, and eternity
filled with His voice,
Reechoes the praise of the Lord.
Dear Shepherd, I hear,
and will follow Thy call,
I know the sweet sound of Thy voice.
Restore and defend me,
for Thou art my all,
And in Thee I will ever rejoice!
1

The Paraclete

Thoughts like these are preposterous to postmodern sensibilities—only the arrogantly foolish could believe that almighty God would speak to a mere fallible, contingent human. But they are in perfect accord with what biblical revelation tells us of the God to whom we pray, who calls us each by name, numbers the hairs on our head, and even helps us to pray. The Bible says God gives us his Spirit to help us in our weakness since “we do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will” (Rom. 8:26-27).

Jesus called the Spirit the “Counselor” or “Comforter” or “Helper” or “Advocate,” depending on how the word he used is translated. The variety of words indicates the difficulty of finding an English word to match the Greek word used by Jesus. The word, parakletos, is a compound of two words, para, “alongside” and kletos, from kalein, “to call.” Parakletos was used by the Greeks to describe someone called to one’s side for help and encouragement. In its verb form, that is exactly what it means: to help and to encourage. Paul, for example, tells the Colossians that he is sending them his friend Tychicus so he may encourage, be a paraclete to their hearts. To the Corinthians, Paul describes God as the “Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles” (2 Cor. 1:3-4). Comfort is the word the translators of the NIV used for paraclete. What Jesus is saying is that just as he came alongside his disciples in their life’s journey, so he will continue to come alongside them in the paraclete, the Holy Spirit.

Surgeon Paul Brand tells a story that provides a gripping picture of the work of the paraclete.

He was a junior doctor in a London hospital when one day he came into the room of an eighty-one-year-old cancer patient named Mrs. Twigg. Her cancer was in her throat and, as he describes it, this “spry, courageous woman … had asked that we do all we could medically to prolong her life, and one of my professors removed her larynx and the malignant tissue around it.”

Brand received an urgent summons to her ward one day, and walked in to find her bleeding profusely from her mouth. He guessed immediately that an artery on the back of her throat had eroded. There was only one thing he knew to do to stop the bleeding: apply pressure. They had only to wait for the surgeon and the anesthetist to arrive. Looking into her terror-stricken eyes as she fought the urge to gag, he assured her that he would not remove his finger until it was absolutely safe to do so. He describes what happened:

We settled into position. My right arm crooked behind her head, supporting her. My left hand nearly disappeared inside her contorted mouth, allowing my index finger to apply pressure at the critical point. I knew from visits to the dentist how fatiguing and painful it must be for tiny Mrs. Twigg to stretch her mouth open wide enough to surround my entire hand. But I could see in her intense blue eyes a resolution to maintain that position for days if necessary. With her face a few inches from mine, I could sense her mortal fear. Even her breath smelled of blood. Her eyes pleaded mutely, “Don’t move—don’t let go!” She knew, as I did, if we relaxed our awkward posture, she would bleed to death.

We sat like that for nearly two hours. Her imploring eyes never left mine. Twice during the first hour, when muscle cramps painfully seized my hand, I tried to move to see if the bleeding had stopped. It had not, and as Mrs. Twigg felt the rush of warm liquid surge up her throat she gripped my shoulder anxiously.

I will never know how I lasted that second hour. My muscles cried out in agony. My fingertip grew totally numb. I thought of rock-climbers who have held their fallen partners for hours by a single rope. In this case the cramping four-inch length of my finger, so numb I could not even feel it, was the strand restraining life from falling away.

I, a junior doctor in my twenties, and this eighty-one-year-old woman clung to each other superhumanly because we had no choice—her survival demanded it.2

Finally the surgeon came, and they were wheeled into the operating room. There, as everyone stood poised with gleaming tools, he slowly removed his finger as her aged hand clutched his wrist. When his finger was totally removed, a smile spread across her bruised lips. The clot had held. She would be all right. With no larynx, only her eyes could express her gratitude.

“She knew how my muscles had suffered,” writes Brand. “I knew the depths of her fear. In those two hours in the slumberous hospital wing, we had become almost one person.”3

After telling this story, Dr. Brand made two comments: In all of his years as a physician, the thing that keeps coming back to him time and again from his patients is that when they are on their backs and at the very extremes of their ability to believe and to endure, only one kind of person can help. That person rarely has any answers to their questions, he seldom has a winsome and effervescent personality. It is always someone who does not judge or give advice but who will simply be there with them in their suffering, who will be present, perhaps to share tears, or a hug, or a lump in the throat.

Stated theologically, the most helpful person is a paraclete, one who comes alongside.

Brand’s other comment came by way of a quotation by John V. Taylor about the Holy Spirit. He said, “The Holy Spirit is the force in the straining muscles of an arm, the film of sweat between pressed cheeks, the mingled wetness on the back of soft clasped hands. He is as close and as unobtrusive as that, and as irresistibly strong.”4

That is the God of the Bible. He knit us together in our mother’s womb, knows each of our words before we speak them—and he speaks. Why should we find that surprising? Such a God is not only a spiritual reality, but an emotional necessity.

Psychologist Rollo May argued in his 1960s bestseller, Love and Will, that our age can be best characterized by the word apathy, meaning “a state of feelinglessness, the despairing possibility that nothing matters.” He said the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy—being uninvolved, detached, unrelated; the violence of our times, he said, is the direct result of ” affectionlessness as an attitude toward life.”5 In an age of mass communication, the average person is anonymous and alienated. Dozens of TV personalities come smiling into his living room each evening. He knows them all, but is himself completely unknown. He can spend years in a factory, a shop, an office, a family, even a church—without meeting anyone who takes the slightest interest in him as a person, in his intimate concerns, in his difficulties, in his secret aspirations.

When one cannot touch or be touched, violence then springs up as a kind of demonic need for contact. In this bizarre state of affairs, painful for anyone to bear, the mood of the unknown person becomes, “If I cannot affect or touch anybody, I can at least shock you into some feeling, force you into some passion through wounds and pain; I shall at least make sure we both feel something, and I shall force you to see me and know that I also am here.”6

Significantly, apathy comes from the Greek words apatheia, without, and pathos, feeling—the term used by first-century Greeks to describe God. They reasoned that God could not at the same time be God and feel for people, because God, by definition, is high above us and splendidly removed from the sweat and blood of human life. To be affected by us would be to make him less than us.

That was what made the gospel so scandalous to the Greek mind. It told of a God who entered human history in Jesus Christ, feeling all we feel and suffering all we suffer. The word became flesh and “moved into the neighborhood,” to use Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of John 1:14 (The message). That is, the God assumed in Christian prayer is personal, he knows us, he hears us, he listens, really listens, and he speaks.

In the film Oh, God!, George Burns portrays God as an approachable and likable person with a good sense of humor and a keen appreciation of the foibles of being a human being. When he first appears to the young man played by John Denver, he so impresses him with his miracles that the young man becomes attached to him and detached from his fellow human beings. To remedy this, God announces that he will put on no more miraculous displays and will disappear from sight. The young man is heartbroken: “But won’t I be able to talk to you anymore?” he cries. God smiles. “You talk,” he says, “I’ll listen.”

This was Hollywood’s lame attempt to make sense of the apparent silence of God in human affairs—to make him out as a kind of giant nondirective therapist in the sky, a cosmic Carl Rogers. God doesn’t say much, but he’s a good listener. But a good listener will say something. He’ll do more than just nod and smile, sphinxlike. A good listener gets involved. God is a good listener. In fact, he is so involved that we would never speak to him had he not first spoken to us. God is the great initiator.

In this sense, P. T. Forsyth was right when he said all our prayers are answers to God’s.

Eye opener

So God speaks. But how can we hear his voice?

By praying obediently, being willing to do what we hear if we hear it. When George MacDonald said, “Obedience is the opener of eyes,” I believe he was exegeting the words of Jesus to skeptics: “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own” (John 7:17, italics mine). We won’t know until we’re willing to obey. Obedience is the basis of biblical epistemology.

I first began to understand this the summer between my ninth- and tenth-grade years.

My next-door neighbor was two years ahead of me in school and a bright and argumentative nonbeliever. Many warm evenings we would argue about the existence of God until late at night. To a stalemate. It was so clear to me that God did exist, it was obvious to him that he didn’t, or so he argued.

One evening the insight came to me from the parable Jesus told about the rich man and the beggar, Lazarus. In the parable, Jesus told of how the rich man, after a life of callous selfishness, ended up burning in hell and watching from afar the bliss of Lazarus in heaven at Abraham’s side. The rich man begged for help. Would Abraham please dip his finger in water to cool his tongue? No, he couldn’t. Would he then send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his brothers who awaited the same fate if they did not change their ways? No, he wouldn’t. Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.”

The formerly rich man didn’t think that was enough. But if someone actually came back from the grave to warn them—perhaps like Marley to Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—then they would believe and repent, wouldn’t they? Abraham’s answer is instructive: “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:19-31). Even seeing won’t be believing if they aren’t willing to obey.

So I put the question to my friend: “If God appeared before us, right here, on the front porch of this house, and you knew beyond any doubt that it was actually God standing there, would you commit your life to him to obey all his laws?”

In a moment of unguarded candor, he said, “Well, I’d have to think about that.” His answer explained his inability to believe, to know. I’ve come to believe that I won’t hear from God unless I am first willing to act on what I’ve heard. God hides himself from those who refuse to obey, so that “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” (Mark 4:12).

Listening disciplines

Asking God to speak is subject to the same rule chat asking God to do anything else is.

Jesus said, “Ask whatever you wish and it will be given you.” The condition for that kind of answered prayer is in the line that precedes it: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you” (John 15:7). Remaining in Jesus is the condition. The Greek word for remaining means literally “to dwell” or “to take up residence.” This word, and what it conveys, was so important to Jesus that he used it eleven times in the first ten verses of John 15. He was saying that prayer must flow out of a relationship of fellowship and communion with him. Answered prayer comes from his living in us and our living in him. It is prayer that is patterned after the prayer life of Jesus himself. His whole life was lived in total and unbroken communion with God. There was absolutely no distinction between his will and his Father’s will. He could say to the Pharisees that “the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does” (John 5:19). In another place, Jesus told the crowd gathered to hear him preach, “The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him” (John 8:29). Before he commanded the dead man Lazarus to rise from the dead, he lifted his eyes to God and prayed, ” ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me’ ” (John 11:41-42).

Note that it was almost as though he need not even ask God to raise Lazarus, but only to say the word, because his will was so conformed to God’s will. This is prayer at its highest and deepest. It is prayer that is in communion with the risen Jesus, that lives and abides and dwells in him. “Keep close to the New Testament Christ,” writes P. T. Forsyth, “and then ask for anything you desire in that contact. Ask for everything you can ask in Christ’s name, i.e., everything desirable by a man who is in Christ’s kingdom of God, by a man who lives for it at heart, everything in tune with the purpose and work of the kingdom in Christ.”7 In that kind of obedient praying, it is the most natural of events to hear the voice of the living God speak.

There are some ways, discipline if you will, to learn to pray obediently.

One way is to pray Scripture. Naturally the great prayers of Scripture, of Jesus, of the prophets and apostles, lend themselves to this. Almost any text can be meditated on and formed into a prayer. The value of praying Scripture is that it can train us to feel what it expresses, to think God’s thoughts after him, and thus to tune our hearts to hear God’s voice in other ways. The same can be said of some of the prayers of godly saints through the ages, such as the prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” These represent the distilled wisdom of God’s people and can train our hearts in obedient prayer. My own practice has been to pray through the Psalter each month, five psalms a day. I have also memorized all of the prayers of St. Paul, praying them over and over until they become my own. I believe this discipline has trained my heart and my ears to hear the Lord.

Another discipline is to take some minor risks in prayer—to respond to nudges of the Holy Spirit. Most of us have felt moved from time to time in prayer to make a telephone call or write a note to someone. For years I regarded those thoughts as distractions. Now I see them as possible nudges from the Lord to do something he wants done. I have often been amazed and delighted at what happens when I follow those promptings. I have often been the beneficiary of those who did.

One spring day in 1993, I was so discouraged I didn’t know how I could go on with my work. I prayed with my wife over my anguish and went outside for a long walk, hoping that the physical activity would renew my spirits. It didn’t. I walked back into the house and heard the telephone ringing; the last thing I wanted to do was pick up the telephone. I usually screen my calls by listening to the voice on the other end of the line coming through the answering machine. The voice was that of a woman who was new to the church. She was apologizing for calling at home, but felt there was something I needed to know. Against my normal impulses, I picked up the telephone. She apologized again and said, “I hope you don’t think I’m crazy, but as I was praying this morning you came to mind, along with a Bible reference I did not know. I looked it up and have no idea if it would mean anything to you, but I felt that somehow I would be disobedient to God if I didn’t give it to you.”

She apologized again and then gave me the passage. It was Hebrews 10:35-39. She apologized once more, said good-bye, and hung up. The passage read:

So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so chat when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. For in just a very little while, “He who is coming will come and will not delay. But my righteous one will live by faith. And if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him.” But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved.

Need I say that those words were meaningful to me? I have since had them written in calligraphy and framed as a memorial to God’s faithfulness to speak when I needed a word from him and to a woman’s faithfulness to risk in obedience to God, to act on a nudge. Sometimes I wonder in frustration why God doesn’t speak to me. Does God wonder in frustration why it is that he has spoken, and I haven’t listened—because I have been too busy or rationalistic or timid to obey?

Grammar of existence

Closely allied to praying obediently is praying humbly. That means keeping clear on what philosopher Peter Kreeft calls the “grammar of existence” and remembering that God is God and we are not. God reserves the right to speak when and what and how he desires. We may place no demands on him. We may pray the prayer of Mary before and after God speaks: “I am the Lord’s servant, may it be to me as you have said.” Sometimes God will answer our question with another question.

A friend went to his church on a Saturday night to lead a small prayer gathering. He waited, but no one showed up. He was alone in an empty church, sitting in that peculiar sort of Saturday-night deadness churches can have, feeling the acute kind of disappointment only a pastor knows when no one shows up to pray. At first he thought, What a waste of time. Lord. Then he decided to sit and be still— and he realized he was, as he described it, “listening in silence.” He listened and he heard a question from God: “Will you honor me?” It was a deep and probing question, one that has stuck with him and that he is trying to apply to other areas of his life. It’s much harder to hear a good question than an obvious directive. A question requires more of us—the humility to engage God on the level he chooses. He who asks the questions sets the agenda.

We should be suspicious of those telling us prayer taps into a divine power source. The image is of a utility line, which we can switch on or off—whenever we wish. It’s there when we need it and waiting to be used when we don’t need it. This view of prayer, however, betrays our hubris and consumerism. It makes God a handyman we can hire out from time to time for various projects. There is power in prayer, all right, as Virginia Stem Owens writes, “It is fearsome to the last degree. It is not a power that can be harnessed. The images from the Bible shatter us with their uncontrollable force. A dove descends. Tongues of fire flame out. An angel appears. A bush burns. A mountain trembles. A whirlwind answers. God invades.”8

Owens recounts how she decided that after she had laid out her requests before God in her evening prayers, she would then listen for God to say something back to her. She waited in the darkness for something to come, but heard nothing. Finally, tired and dissatisfied, she went to sleep. The night passed, but in the early morning hours, just before dawn, she found herself awake and weeping. There was in her mind the memory of a spinster aunt who had come to live with her family when Owens was a young adolescent. Her family had just moved, and she had been promised a room of her own in the move. But with her aunt’s arrival, it was her brother who got the new room and Owens who got a roommate, a semi-invalid aunt who had been forced to live with relatives her whole life. Over the weeks and months that followed, Owens barely concealed her bitterness at this injustice, showing it in a thousand subtle and caustic ways. She had carried the grudge her whole life:

But now, in this early morning light, I was feeling for the first time the scalding shame this elderly woman must have felt. Moving from house to house, never having one of her own. Totally dependent on the good graces of nieces and nephews for the very necessities of life. Never in all my years at home, or indeed until now, had I given a single thought to how she felt in the situation. But now I was getting a full dose of it—the pride that had to be swallowed daily in a galling gulp. It was more bitter than I could bear.9

The next evening she repeated the same exercise, offering her petitions to God and then listening awhile before drifting off to sleep. The same kind of thing happened the next morning over another incident from her past, again with the same shattering results. She wasn’t quite so sure she wanted to hear from God anymore!

Such has been the experience of the Jeremiahs and Pauls and other great men and women of prayer down through the centuries. They pray for God to change things in their world, and he begins by changing them. They tell God what is on their minds and he tells them what is on his mind: them!

“Awful things happen to people who pray,” says Owens. “Their plans are frequently disrupted. They end up in strange places.… The well-worn phrase, ‘Prayer changes things,’ often meant to comfort, is as tricky as any Greek oracle.”10

It takes humility to listen to God, because it may be humbling to hear from him.

Constant prayer is another way to cultivate an ear to hear the voice of God. Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). He is the sole source of our life. Branches receive no life-giving sap unless they remain in constant contact with the vine. We receive no life unless we stay in constant contact with Christ. Thankfully, our contact with him is not dependent on our resolve to hold on to him but on his resolve to hold on to us. He wants us to live and dwell in him more than we want to live and dwell in him. But because God wills communion with us, we are therefore exhorted to have communion with him, as branches in a vine.

That was the secret of Jesus’ life: his constant contact with God.

For the sake of the whole

Early in my Christian life I had impressed on me the critical importance of a daily quiet time, of time set aside to be alone with God. Over the years I have learned chat lesson well. My favorite time of the day is the time I spend, usually early in the morning, alone with God. But I have begun to realize that I can treat that time like a physical workout: once I have done it, I’m done with it until the next day. I don’t give God much thought the rest of the day. I was disdainful of those who told me they didn’t have time to spend an hour in prayer each day, so they prayed in their car on the way to work and throughout the day as the opportunity presented itself.

I now repent of my disdain. But it’s not either/or—either I pray for an hour in the morning or I pray through the day. It’s both/and.

The purpose of setting apart an hour in the morning is so that all the other hours may be God’s as well. Theologian Stephen Winward opened me up to this insight: We sanctify a part not so we may forget about the whole, but for the sake of the whole. We dedicate an hour to the Lord, so all our hours may be his.

Well known is that practice to the medieval monk Brother Lawrence, who “practiced the presence of God” as he went about his daily duties in the monastery. His daily duties consisted chiefly of scrubbing pots and pans in the kitchen. But as he scrubbed, he might comment to Jesus on how dirty a pan was. As he stacked the dishes high, he would thank the Lord for how well he had provided for him and his brother monks. This was not all his prayer, for there were also the high and holy moments in the quietness of his room and the sanctuary when he prayed on his knees. But that was of one piece with the low, but no less holy, moments when he scrubbed dishes and spoke with Jesus about the scrubbing.

I read about how Ronda Chervin, a housewife and associate professor of philosophy at Marymount University, has found ways to pray throughout her day. She prays while ironing, for the person whose clothing she is working on. She prays while walking down the street, for each person she meets. She prays when unable to see a friend, “wrapping my love with a prayer and sending it through the Lord.”11 She prays when thinking of her old friends, remembering their needs before God. She prays upon entering each new phase of the day or when facing a difficult situation, speaking to the Lord and thanking him that she is not alone and that he makes all things work together for the good.

Apricot pie a la mode?

Maybe the last and best thing to be said about listening for God’s voice is that it can be such a joy, such fun, and so funny. God really is more interested in being heard than we are to hear him. It delights him to speak to his children and for them to hear. Even in the seriousness of the matters that concern us, we can be delighted, too.

As I mentioned earlier, after fourteen years of pastoring a church in Irvine, California, I was extended a call to pastor a church in New Providence, New Jersey. To accept the church’s invitation would mean going from a church that I had founded to a church that was over two hundred and fifty years old. I would be its twenty-ninth pastor. It would mean a Southern California boy moving his family to the northeastern United States, two regions separated by much more than miles.

So Lauretta and I went away for two days to pray for the essence of the Southern California I loved. For two days we walked the beaches and prayed and talked. But we heard nothing from God. The last evening we were there, we were having dessert at a Marie Callender’s restaurant on the island. I was eating my favorite, apricot pie a la mode, as Lauretta and I discussed the situation. Then God spoke. It was as if, as I talked, I detached from my head and was hovering about two feet above me and slightly to my right. God was standing at my side.

He said, “You’re resisting me, Ben.”

I said, “I know.”

He said, “It’s because you don’t want to go through the pain of saying good-bye to your friends.”

I said, “That’s true.”

Then he said, “But that’s not a good enough reason to say no to me.”

I interrupted Lauretta and said, “God is calling us to go to New Jersey.”

She said, “I know.”

We both burst into tears. Some of mine fell into the pie.

What a ride it has been since then—desperately difficult, incredibly interesting, and, yes, hilarious—I mean, apricot pie a la mode? The Steven Curds Chapman song says it all for Lauretta and me: “There’s no better place to be than on the road to heaven, with Jesus by our side, our paraclete, whispering in our ears, leading us on.”12

“O Thou, in Whose Presence,” sung by Fernando Ortega, This Bright Hour, Myrrh Records, 1997; Words: Joseph Swaim, Music: Freeman Lewis, Arrangement: Fernando Ortega and John Andrew Schreiner.

Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), 202.

Ibid., 203

Ibid., 193.

Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Norton, 1969), 30.

Ibid., 31.

P. T. Forsyth, 66.

Virgima Stem Owens, Christianity Today, November 19, 1976: 17-21.

Ibid., 13.

Ibid., 21.

Source unknown.

“No Better Place,” sung by Steven Curtis Chapman, For the Sake of the Call, Sparrow Song, 1990; words by Steven Curtis Chapman.

Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson

GEORGE MUELLER, the great Victorian Christian and social reformer, tells a story of persistent prayer in his diary:

In November 1844, I began to pray for the conversion of five individuals. I prayed every day without a single intermission, whether sick or in health, on the land, on the sea, and whatever the pressure of my engagements might be. Eighteen months elapsed before the first of the five was converted. I thanked God and prayed on for the others. Five years elapsed, and then the second was converted. I thanked God for the second, and prayed on for the other three. Day by day, I continued to pray for them, and six years passed before the third was converted. I thanked God for the three, and went on praying for the other two. These two remained unconverted.
1

Thirty-six years later he wrote that the other two, sons of one of Mueller’s friends, were still not converted. He wrote, “But I hope in God, I pray on, and look for the answer. They are not converted yet, but they will be.” 2 In 1897, fifty-two years after he began to pray daily, without interruption, for these two men, they were finally converted—but after he died! Mueller understood what Luke meant when he introduced a parable Jesus told about prayer, saying, “Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1).

It’s surprising to discover, given the importance Jesus attached to prayer, how little he actually said about how to pray. He gives no techniques, no methods to prayer, only a brief summary of what to pray about, the Lord’s Prayer, and an urging for us to doggedly keep at it, to hang in with it, to persist and insist in prayer. In Luke 18, he encourages us to copy a widow who badgers a corrupt judge into giving her justice. In Luke 11, the chapter containing the Lord’s Prayer, he tells another story of importunity, this time of a man banging away at his neighbor’s door in the middle of the night until the sleepy fellow gets up and gives him food. Then Jesus says of prayer, ” ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened’ ” (Luke 11:9-10).

The sense of the Greek in each instance is to keep on keeping on; to repeatedly ask, seek, and knock.

Why persist?

Most of us, however, are not like Mueller or the widow. Products of a culture of instant gratification, we give up if we don’t see a fairly quick response to our prayers. But praying, like so many matters of the kingdom of God, is like farming. Imagine a farmer turning the soil, adding fertilizer, planting seeds, sprinkling a little water—then standing over the spot for a few hours, waiting for something to happen, and when no shoot comes up, walking away, shaking his head and saying, “Well, I guess that didn’t work.” Farmers know better. Crops take persistent cultivation and time to yield a harvest. Like good farming, good praying demands of us a quality of character Fried-rich Nietzsche called “a long obedience in the same direction.”

In the two parables on prayer I just alluded to, Jesus gives a very good reason why it is worth our while to persist in prayer. Remember how parables work—the Greek word is parabola, which means “to lay alongside.” Parables are stories, usually with one point, made either by comparison or contrast. In other words, Jesus explains a spiritual reality by taking a story from everyday life, laying it beside that truth, and then saying, in effect, “It’s like this,” or “it’s not like this at all.” In both parables on prayer, Jesus uses contrast. In the scory of the widow and the callous judge (Luke 18:1-8), Jesus is saying that even someone as bad as this judge can be pressured into doing the right thing. God isn’t a bit like that judge, so how much more can we expect him to answer our persistent prayers? It’s the same in the story of the man hammering away on his neighbor’s door in the middle of the night (Luke 11:5-8). God isn’t a bit like the sleepy neighbor who doesn’t want to get up to help his neighbor. So, how much more can we expect him to answer us when we come to him repeatedly with our requests?

We have a very good reason to persist in prayer.

My friend Pete Nelson is the best salesman I know. He simply will not be turned away. Once he called on a potential client who wanted nothing to do with him. The man cursed when he saw Pete walk in the door, and shouted, “Get out of here, you (multiple expletives deleted), and don’t let me ever see you walk through that front door again!” Pete went outside and analyzed what the man had said. He had said to never walk in the front door again. So my enterprising friend went around to the back of the business and walked in the back door. When the man saw him walk in, he exploded.

“Can’t you hear? I told you to get the (expletive deleted) out of here and never to come back again.”

“No, you didn’t,” Pete answered. “You said never to come in the front door again. I came in the back door.”

The man started to rebut, but he couldn’t help himself. He started to laugh, and then invited Pete into his office. Pete closed the deal soon afterward.

God is not like the client! He is not like that judge! He’s like a father—or rather, a good father is something like God.

“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 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 the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:11-13, italics mine).

God is like a good father. Or like a good friend. Dr. Leslie Weatherhead liked to tell the story of an old Scot who was quite ill and near death. His pastor came to call on him one morning. When he entered the bedroom and sat down beside him, he noticed another chair opposite him, placed next to the other side of the bed.

The pastor remarked, “Well, Donald, I see I’m not your first visitor today.”

The old man looked puzzled and then smiled and said, “Oh, the chair. Years ago, I was having difficulty praying. I asked a friend for advice, and he suggested that I set a chair across from me when I pray, imagine God sitting in it, and talk to him as I would a good friend. It worked so well, that I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Later that afternoon, the pastor received a call from the man’s daughter. She was weeping. Between sobs she told him that her father had just died. The pastor went immediately back to the old man’s house. As he spoke with the daughter, she expressed her surprise that he had died so suddenly.

“He seemed to be doing so well, I decided to take a nap,” she said. “When I came back in the room he was gone. There is something I don’t understand: his hand was resting on that empty chair beside his bed. Isn’t that strange?”

The pastor said, “No, it’s not so strange. I understand.”

We have every reason to keep coming back, again and again, our whole lives, to pray to a God like that. However long he takes to answer, we know he cares, so much so that our prayers may influence what he does. That is the fundamental premise of Christian prayer, the chief reason Jesus assures us that it is worth our while to persist in it. That raises a question. Which is crazier: a widow pestering a callous judge for justice (a man who Jesus says has no fear of God or regard for man) or Christians, who have been given every assurance chat God cares deeply for them and the world, but who do not pester him for the very things he has promised to those who persist?

Infinite opportunist

For many, the notion of prayer as something that can actually affect the will of God is sheer nonsense. They reason: God knows all and is in control of all. He’s infinitely smarter than the brightest human being. It is therefore foolish for mere mortals to think that our desires could have any bearing on what he will do. Rousseau thought this way:

I bless God for his gifts, but I do not pray to him. Why should I ask him to change for me the course of things, to work miracles on my behalf? I who ought to love above all the order established by his wisdom and maintained by his providence.
3

In a similar vein, Immanuel Kant scorned the biblical view of prayer as primitive mythology, calling it a “superstitious illusion … for it is no more than a stated wish directed to a Being who needs no such information regarding the inner disposition of the wisher; therefore nothing is accomplished by it, and it discharges none of the duties to which, as commands of God we are obligated; hence God is not really served.”4

The god they speak of is not the living God of the Bible, the God Jesus said to come to repeatedly and importunately with our requests. The Bible is clear there is nothing we can do to change his ultimate will for our lives and for the world. The final outcome of history, that God’s name be hallowed and his kingdom come and will be done are fait accompli, fixed and sure, right now. But how God may choose to go about achieving his goals for us and others is open to change. His means are flexible. When it comes to the steps in the process he may use us to bring about his purpose. Theologian P. T. Forsyth called God an “infinite opportunist.” In prayer, God invites us to enter into partnership with him in the working out of his immutable will in our lives and the lives of others, giving us what Pascal called the “dignity of causality.”

In the mystery of the interaction between divine sovereignty and human freedom, there are some things God won’t do until we ask.

Holy resistance

The mystery goes deeper. P. T. Forsyth says that not only may persistent prayer change what God will do; it may, in a sense, take the form of actually resisting what his will is in a particular instance. To resist his will can actually be to do his will. What this means is chat in prayer we may sometimes resist what God wills only to be temporary and intermediary—and therefore to be transcended.

For example, I was born into a poor and relatively uneducated family. No one, on either side of my family, had ever gone to college. There were no books in my home when I was a child. That, I believe, was God’s will for me. But was it also his will that I passively accept that as my fate, my foreordained situation in life? Or was it his will that I resist that circ*mstance and find a way to go to college, to find books and delight in them? I think it was. His lower, initial will was to be resisted in favor of his higher, more ultimate will.

At any given moment in our lives, it may be God’s will that we face great pain and disappointment and loss. But it may also be his will that we resist his will in that moment, in favor of his higher and greater will. Sometimes we may beg and beg and hear him refuse, as he did Paul, and say, “My grace is enough. It’s all you need” (2 Cor. 12:9, paraphrase). But other times we may come away as did the blind man Bartimaeus, who would not take no for an answer, and finally got yes from Jesus (cf. Mark 10:46-52). Or it may be for us as it was with a Gentile woman from Syro-Phoenicia. She came to seek her daughter’s deliverance from a demon. What she initially got from Jesus was a stiff retort. Using a figure that Jews commonly used of Gentiles, an insult, he called both her and her people “dogs”: “First let the children eat all they want … for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”

That may have turned me away, but not her. She jumped right into the fray and jabbed back, saying, “Yes, Lord … but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Jesus loved it! He answered, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter” (Mark 7:24-30).

We may obey God as much when we push our case and plead our cause as we do when we accept his decision and say, “Yet not what I will, but what you will.” But don’t forget, Jesus said those words to his father after he had fallen to the ground and begged that it be otherwise, not before (Mark 14:32-46). How much have we missed in our lives simply because we were too frightened or too lazy or too theologically fastidious to press our case?

There’s a moving scene in the television adaptation of the drama The Miracle Worker. It’s the story of two remarkable women: a deaf and blind girl named Helen Keller, and Annie Sullivan, the person determined to teach Helen to be a human being. Helen’s brother James is trying to get Annie to give up on Helen as all the others have. But Annie won’t hear of it. She remembers too vividly the way her brother Jimmie had given up and died in a mental hospital. James presses her: “You don’t let go of things easily, do you?”

Annie: “No. That’s the original sin.”

James: “What?”

Annie: “Giving up. Jimmie gave up.”

James: “Perhaps Helen will teach you.”

Annie: “What?”

James: “That there is such a thing as defeat. And no hope.”

(Annie’s face sets.)

James: “And giving up. Sooner or later, we do. Then maybe you’ll have some pity on—all the Jimmies. And Helen, for being what she is. And even yourself.”

(Annie sits for a moment, and then gets up silently and turns and walks away from James. She paces for a few minutes in the semi-dark room and then walks over to the bed where Helen is sleeping. She drops to her knees at the bedside. The camera takes us up to their two faces: the sleeping child and the determined teacher.)

Annie: “No, I won’t let you be. No pity, I won’t have it. On either of us. If God didn’t mean you to have eyes, I do. We’re dead a long time. The world is not something to be missed: I know. And I won’t let you be till I show you it. Till I put it in your head.”5

The trouble with our prayer lives is that we cling to God only in our weakness, when he would have us cling to him also with our strength. We’re like Abraham who, planting himself in the Lord’s path down to Sodom, said, “Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you!” And then in language that points to Jesus’ parable on prayer in Luke 18, he says, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25, italics mine). Holy impertinence! When’s the last time you said something like that to God? Or have you ever prayed in the way Moses told Israel to love God? “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:4-5, italics mine).

We tend to want our prayers to be therapeutic, to leave us relaxed. More often than we wish, God would have them leave us stirred up. No wonder we get bored with prayer! No wonder we experience prayer in the same way director Billy Wilder said he experienced a film once. “The film started at 8 p.m. I looked at my watch at midnight and it was only 8:15.”6 What would happen to us if we really believed that we may affect the way God does his work, and that with holy impertinence we may actually resist him— with his blessing?

Perhaps you have seen the famous picture of the praying hands by the German painter and wood engraver Albrecht Durer. The two hands are lifted before God with their palms together. When the great Scottish preacher and theologian P. T. Forsyth first saw a photograph of the woodcut hanging in the home of a friend, he said he wished he could have attached to it a line from John Milton that described prayer as “the great two-handed engine at our door.” In Milton’s time, an engine was an instrument or machine of war, used in a siege to bring down walls. Prayer, the great two-handed engine—not hands folded in resignation or passivity, but hands folded that work may be done and mountains moved.

This form of persistence spills naturally into the whole concept of actually wrestling with God in prayer, which we will discuss further in the next chapter. It is always worth our while to persist in prayer, because of who God is—not an unjust judge or a sleepy neighbor, but our Father. He works on us by his grace, drawing us into prayer, and then allows us to work on him through our faith. It’s a marvelous arrangement.

Relationship, reputation, promises

What things may we persist for in prayer? Moses’ prayer after the golden calf debacle in Exodus 32 provides some exciting clues. God was very, very upset with Israel. After he had led them out of Egypt into freedom, they were trying out another god, in the form of a golden calf or bull. They couldn’t say they weren’t warned about that sort of thing. In the Ten Commandments, God had told them that he was as jealous for their undivided love as a husband was for his wife’s, and that he would not let that kind of sin go unpunished. They knew better, but they-went ahead and did it anyway. And now God wanted to destroy them. What followed was astounding. Moses persisted in prayer on their behalf, God relented, and Moses went on to gain quite a reputation as a man of prayer. Later, on more than one occasion, it would be only his prayers that saved the people from well-deserved extinction—he even told the Lord to destroy him, too, if he was going to destroy Israel.

For this, Moses is spoken of in Scripture as a man with whom God could speak face to face, as with a friend. Moses, the great man of prayer, persisted in prayer over three things: God’s self-chosen relationship to his people, his reputation in the world, and his promises.

It’s quite funny how God drew Moses into this kind of praying.

When God first told Moses of the people’s sin, he said, ” ‘Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt.’ ” Note that for God it was no longer my people, but Moses’ people who were sinning! Then he said, ” ‘Leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.’ ” In other words, “Get out of my way, I’m going to wipe them out.” After seeing all God did to the Egyptians when he was angry, if I were Moses I would have tripped over myself to get out of his way. But Moses didn’t. He was upset with God’s “redefinition” of his relationship with his people. So he said, ” ‘O Lord … why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?’ ” (Ex. 32:7-11, italics mine).

Moses reminded God, “These are your people, Lord, don’t wipe them out! You’re the one who started the relationship; it was your idea, not ours. Don’t end it now.”

Next comes God’s reputation. Warming to his line of argument, Moses continued, ” ‘Why should the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that he (Yahweh) brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth”?’ ” (Ex. 32:12). That is a vivid Hebrew way of saying, “Think of your reputation, Lord. Spare your people and be glorified. Let the nations know that you are a faithful and merciful God!”

Then come God’s promises. Moses rested his case with these words: ” ‘Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever” ‘ ” (Ex. 32:13). In short, Moses invoked the Law of Noncontradiction and asked how God could both wipe the people out and keep his promises to the patriarchs to make of them a great nation. I like the way Luther described Moses’ prayer: He flung the sack of God’s promises at his feet, and he couldn’t step over them!

In his name

Jesus said we can ask of God anything we want and it will be given to us—as long as it is in his name. So, think of God’s self-chosen relationship to us. Think of God’s glory. Think of God’s promises. Then ask anything! Within those parameters is a universe of desires and delights that we may bring to God in prayer—and persist over. By them our own desires and delights are purified and refined.

Jesus was telling his disciples to pray this way when he said, “When you pray, say this: Our Father …” It’s all contained in that simple opening and in the phrases that follow—our relationship to him as Father, with all the promises that go with it, and an earnest desire for his glory. When we pray, we speak to one who is our Father, whose name is to be reverenced and whose kingdom we are to desire. The Heidelberg Catechism asks, “Why hath Christ commanded us to address God thus, ‘Our Father’?”7 Its answer is, “That immediately, in the very beginning of our prayer, he might excite in us a childlike reverence for, and confidence in, God, which are the foundation of our prayer.…” This is also the very foundation of persistent prayer.

Like Moses, we should persist in prayer within the context of these things. That is the way of the Psalms. Read them and note how brief the petitions are, but how extensive their meditations on God’s love and majesty are. They are model prayers: state briefly your desires, but dwell on who God is. Consciously connect what you are asking with his character, for “Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance,” writes Archbishop Trench, “it is laying hold of his highest willingness.”8

The first song I learned in church was “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so; Little ones to him belong, they are weak, but He is strong.” In 1949, when Mao Tse Tung declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the country was closed to missionaries, and all Western Christians were forced to leave the mainland. The church has had a very difficult time since. For years little was known about how it was doing. What news did leak out had to be discreet. One message did get out in 1972. It was brief, and to the Chinese authorities, innocuous. It said, “The This I Know People are well.” A vivid and powerful word to Christians, worldwide. That was who they were—the people loved by Jesus—and that has been how and why they have persisted in prayer over years of suppression and persecution.

Better than the request

What happens when we persist in prayer within this context? In the long term, we will see God’s good and perfect will done. Or we may see our prayers answered better than we prayed them. We pray for silver, Luther wrote, but God often gives us gold. Other wonderful things happen, too. Our prayers get kicked up a notch. We are expanded as we ask repeatedly in Christ’s name. In so doing we begin to see things more clearly, as we learn to see things through his eyes. Prayer then becomes what Emerson called “the contemplation of life from the highest point of view.”9

Persistent prayer over a long time can leave us feeling tired and helpless. That’s good! It can force us to confront our weakness and rely more on God’s strength.

Three ministers were discussing the relative values of the various postures of prayer as a telephone repairman worked on the telephone system. One pastor insisted that the folding of the hands was the key to good prayer. Another maintained that praying on one’s knees was the essential. The third recommended praying flat on one’s face as the most powerful prayer posture. The repairman couldn’t resist: “I have found the most powerful prayer I ever prayed was upside down, hanging by my heels from a power pole, forty feet above the ground.”

Most important, when we pray persistently we get to be with God. What happens to us while we pray is at least as important as the thing we pray for. The praying is often better than the thing asked. I chink that is the answer to the question that was often in my mind as a young man: Why does God wait so long to answer my prayers? Wouldn’t it be more efficient, even a greater sign of his love, to answer immediately? I’ve come to see that it is precisely his love that makes me wait and keep coming to him. He is more precious than anything I desire.

Aeronautics of persistent prayer

But it is hard to keep up this long obedience in the same direction. That’s why it is essential to hold on to the big picture, to keep the farmer’s perspective that the kingdom of God is a matter of sowing and reaping, and that between the two there is a wait.

In 1988 another pastor and I began to meet weekly to pray for revival in our churches and in the wider community of Irvine, California. We also agreed to hold monthly prayer meetings in our individual congregations to pray for the same thing. We started with a keen sense of anticipation. The church meetings were packed, and our individual meetings were stimulating. Even though he and I continued to experience a sense of God’s pleasure in our times together, soon attendance at the church meetings dwindled dramatically. After a year we both were called to other churches! We’ve often laughed that when we prayed for revival in our churches, God chose to move us out.

Maybe there’s something to that.

But what was clear as we prayed was that the people weren’t embracing the vision for spiritual awakening that we felt so keenly God had put in our hearts. The next four years spent in New Providence, New Jersey, saw a similar scenario develop.

I’ve been dean of the chapel at Hope College for five years now, and what we have seen is the very thing I prayed would happen in Irvine and in New Providence, but which has not happened there—yet. These past five years I’ve discovered there have been scores, even hundreds of people, who have prayed for a spiritual awakening for Hope College for decades. My staff and I are reaping where others have sown. I still pray for Irvine and New Providence, as do their current pastors and many others. I believe someone will one day reap in these places a spiritual harvest where others have sown.

Keeping a journal has helped me to persist. Keeping a record of God’s past faithfulness gives me the means to read about what I may have forgotten in the doldrums of waiting. I pray daily for my children. They’re great kids, and I couldn’t be more blessed or pleased with who they are. But I want it all for them; I want them to be “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). Sometimes I see results, most of the time I don’t.

One morning I was praying for my son, Dan, and I felt yon. My tendency is to scramble up the rocks of life’s canyons and just sit there and stew. But in persistent prayer, I can completely throw myself on God’s mercy and pray until God acts and I am borne aloft on his power. In the meantime, I am coming to know him better and my strength is renewed.

Basil Miller, George Mueller, Man of faith and Miracles (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1983), 145.

Ibid., 146.

Quoted in Donald Bloesch, The Struggle of Prayer (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 73.

Ibid., 73.

Source unknown.

Quoted in Parables, Etc. (Saratoga, Calif.: Saratoga Press, Nov. 1982), 7.

Heidelberg Catechism, Question 120, 626.

Ibid., Donald Bloesch, 73.

Source unknown.

Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson

IMAGINE THE MYSTERY and delight of not only hearing but seeing the story of Jesus for the first time, almost as an eyewitness.

That’s what happened to a primitive tribe in the jungles of East Asia, when missionaries showed them the Jesus film. Not only had these people never heard of Jesus, they had never seen a motion picture. Then, all at once, on one unforgettable evening, they saw it all—the gospel in their own language, visible and real.

Imagine again, then, how it would feel to see for the first time this good man Jesus, who healed the sick and was adored by children, held without trial and beaten by jeering soldiers. As they watched this, the people came unglued. They stood up and began to shout at the cruel men on the screen, demanding this outrage stop. When nothing happened, they attacked the missionary running the projector. Perhaps he was responsible for this injustice! He was forced to stop the film and explain that the story wasn’t over yet, chat there was more. So they settled back onto the ground, holding their emotions in tenuous check.

Then came the Crucifixion. Again, the people could not hold back. They began to weep and wail with such loud grief that once again the film had to be stopped. Again the missionary tried to calm them, explaining that the story still wasn’t over yet, that there was more. So once again they composed themselves and sat down to see what happened next.

Then came the Resurrection. Pandemonium broke out this time, but for a different reason. The gathering had spontaneously erupted into a party. The noise now was of jubilation, and it was deafening. The people were dancing and slapping each other on the back. The missionary again had to shut off the projector. But this time he didn’t tell them to calm down and wait for what was next. In a sense, all that was supposed to happen—in the story and in their lives—was happening.

Alive and enlivened

Imagine a worship service in which the liturgy was periodically interrupted because the people were overcome with the enormity and emotion, the sheer weight of the gospel story; and in which the joy and sadness, the adoration, appropriate to such an event would simply take over. Like the primitives they would be fulfilling the purpose for which God made us: which is, according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

These two go together, to glorify and enjoy. They are nearly one and the same because as C. S. Lewis observes, “Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”1 Wonderful things happen to us when we do this.

“God’s mirth,” says Theodore Jennings, “roars in our veins and we are alive and enlivened.”2 It’s true, God is never more glorified than when a human being comes fully alive. It’s not in sunsets and oceans. It’s not in mountain grandeur and stellar blaze. It’s in people.

One evening I was sitting on the edge of my favorite place on earth, the Grand Canyon, watching the sun go down. It’s a magnificent sight; the changing of the light, the continual slow-motion movement of the shadows is like a visual fugue. One of my sons was with me, and we were rhapsodizing about the majesty, the glory of God manifest in that place, when I noticed his face outlined against the canyon and the sunset. My dear son, my beloved son, I thought. Then it struck me: “You know,” I said to him, “there’s something here that is even more glorious and godlike than this canyon.” He looked at me with a frown of disbelief, and said, “What could chat possibly be?” I grinned and said, “You.”

More than even the Grand Canyon, he showed the glory of God, because it’s not of canyons, but only of humans, that God says, “I made them in my image, like me.”

So, of course, God is most glorified when those he made in his image become fully alive, all they were created to be. This can happen but one way: through the vision of God. Paul says, “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). God is glorified as we come alive, his mirth roaring in our veins, as we awaken to the vision of God.

Given, not gotten

There was a time when all those commands of God for us to thank and praise him seemed to me to be a little odd. Did he need them to feel better about himself? Was he like the kid I knew in junior high who stood around with his hands in his pockets fishing for compliments? No, God doesn’t need our praise—we need to give it. For to praise God is to sharpen our soul’s vision of his greatness and goodness, and thus to increase our soul’s greatness and goodness. God doesn’t need our thanks and praise to feel better about himself, we need to thank and praise him to be better ourselves. It is a gift to us to give God thanks and praise.

That’s why both are so important.

Consider the power of simple thanksgiving. Its genius is its prerequisite: humility, which is essential to a proper relationship to God. Paul asks, “What do you have that you did not receive?” The answer is nada, nothing—absolutely nothing whatsoever. Everything we have is a given, not a gotten. We enter the world naked, we exit the world naked. All we have in between is on loan. It’s humiliating! Precisely. Then the apostle asks, “And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” (1 Cor. 4:7). In other words, what grounds do you have for pride? Same answer: nada, nothing—absolutely nothing whatsoever. So “gratitude is a species of justice,” writes Samuel Johnson, meaning that when we genuinely say thanks to God, we are seeing things as they actually are, and humbly giving credit where credit is due.

To be ungrateful is to see things as they are not, to have a perspective that is fundamentally and fatally distorted. Such is the view of the proud, who see all they have and are as a gotten, not a given. That, says C. S. Lewis, is a “completely anti-God state of mind.” God is implacably against the proud, utterly hidden from their sight. The logic is simple: “A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”3

If pride is the complete anti-God state of mind, grateful prayer is the complete anti-pride state of mind. It’s good, very good for the soul.

Indefatigable, defiant joy

Grateful prayer is also a vigorous exercise, producing an indefatigable, even defiant perseverance and joy. Grounded as it is in humility, it is not stymied when circ*mstances turn sour. It says, “Who am I to complain when I suffer loss, since whatever I lost was never mine to begin with?” Job is Exhibit A in the Bible of what this looks like in practice. When he loses everything he owns and loves, how does he respond? As one who knew all along that what he had was a given, not a gotten. His first act is to worship God!

Then he fell to the ground in worship and said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s
womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has
taken away;
may the name of the Lord
be praised”
(Job 1:20-21).

True gratitude is unstoppable.

One of the great hymns of gratitude was written by another man with this kind of defiant humility: Martin Rinkart (1586-1649), a pastor in the city of Elenberg in Saxony, during the Thirty Years War. During that horrible time, all the other pastors in the city left, leaving him with 4,500 funerals to conduct, among them his wife’s. As the war drew to a close, the city was overrun by the Austrians once and the Swedes twice. The Swedish general levied a heavy tax on the beleaguered people. Rinkart and his congregation pleaded for the general to show mercy, but he refused. Rinkart then turned to his people and said, “Come, my children; we can find no mercy with man—let us take refuge in God.” There, before the general, they knelt in prayer.

The general was so moved by what he saw that he relented and lowered the tax to one-twentieth of what it had been.

Martin Rinkart, the man who saw so much grief and endured so much loss, could still say gratitude’s defiant “nevertheless,” and write the great, “Now Thank We All Our God”:

Now thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms,
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.
All praise and thanks to God

The Father now be given,
The Son and Holy Ghost,
Supreme in highest heaven;
The one eternal God,
Whom earth and heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.
4

The power of humble gratitude to produce such a defiant joy lies in its insight into the nature of things. Only the humble can see the ultimate goodness and joy that lies at the core of creation, the Father’s heart that beats beneath the worst of circ*mstances. Frederick Buechner discovered this one cold, rainy night in Anniston, Alabama.

On an infantry training bivouac, he was in the last place on earth he wanted to be. That year an uncle had committed suicide, revealing a family darkness no one knew what to do with. Buechner had no idea where he really belonged, all he knew was where he didn’t want to be: there—eating his supper out of a mess kit. But the grace of gratitude gave him a new vision of things:

There was a cold drizzle of rain, and everything was mud. The sun had gone down. I was still hungry when I finished and noticed that a man nearby had something left over that he was not going to eat. It was a turnip, and when I asked him if I could have it, he tossed it over to me. I missed the catch, the turnip fell to the ground, but I wanted it so badly that I picked it up and started eating it, mud and all. And then, as I ate it, time deepened and slowed down again. With a lurch of the heart chat is real to me still, I saw it suddenly, almost as if from beyond time all together, that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good too, even the drizzle and the cold were good, even the Army that I had dreaded for months. Sitting there in the cold Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.5

Thank therapy

One year when I was on vacation in Minnesota, I dreaded the day when I would have to go back to my church to work. The problems seemed endless and insoluble. I was suffering, my children were suffering, and my wife was worried about us all. When the day came to leave, I loaded everybody up in my van, set my jaw, gritted my teeth, and headed home, grimly determined to obey the will of God. That is exactly what I did the first few days I was home. I did something I’ve since come to think of as an oxymoron: I grimly obeyed the will of God. Then one evening in a prayer meeting, the Lord spoke to me.

He said, “Ben, I don’t need this. If you can’t obey me with anything more than grim determination, you’ll just make yourself and everyone else miserable as you bravely (italics for sarcasm) do the will of God. If you can’t serve me with joy, forget it. Go get a real job somewhere.”

There can be no such thing as grim obedience with God.

It was then I realized chat joy was a choice. It’s a choice that comes when we choose to give thanks in all things. There is even a linguistic illustration of how this works spiritually. In the Greek language, the words for grace, gratitude, and joy; charis, eucharistia, and chara, respectively, all have the same root, char. It’s a word that has to do with health and well-being. Here’s how it works spiritually: grace, charis, naturally produces gratitude, eucharistia. Theologian Karl Barth says the two belong together like heaven and earth, that grace evokes gratitude like the voice of an echo, that gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning.

What then is joy? It is the subjective experience of gratitude and grace! All three are organically connected like the parts of a delicious fruit of the Holy Spirit.

That’s why Paul says we can—no, he commands that we must—”be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circ*mstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess. 5:16-18). The pray-and-give-thanks part I understood long before the joy part. I could see how we could be commanded to pray and give thanks. But to be joyful? I had for most of my life adopted a passive stance toward joy.

Since it was a gift of the Holy Spirit, I said, in effect, “Anytime you’re ready, Lord, lay it on me.” Then I waited for something magical to happen. Nothing did.

But that night I came to understand that while I couldn’t generate joy, I could choose it by choosing to obey God’s command to pray continually and give thanks in all circ*mstances. Someone has called that “thank therapy.” I can testify to its power. The vision of God is thus made sharp and clear, his mirth begins to roar in our veins, and God is glorified as we come fully alive.

You are wonderful

Like grace, gratitude, and joy, thanks and praise are organically related to each other, closely connected but separate. In thanksgiving we list God’s benefits, in praise he is the benefit. Thanksgiving is like a child opening a gift from a parent, a new doll or a baseball mitt, and throwing her arms around her mom and dad and saying, “Thank you, thank you! It’s just what I wanted. It’s wonderful!” Praise is what happens when that child can pause and look up from the gift into her folks’ eyes and say, “You are wonderful.” There is, I think, in prayer and worship, a kind of ascendancy that moves from thanks to praise to wonder to awe and silence—and then back again to thanks to praise to wonder to awe to silence. Praise seems to be the singular activity of heaven. Like thanks, praise is God’s due, a “species of justice.” But it also does great things for us.

Praise is itself a fertile source of joy.

When our church in Irvine moved into its first building in 1982, it was a joyful occasion. We had been meeting in a school for seven years. It happened that Ken Medema, the gifted singer-songwriter-musician, was in the area, so we invited him to give a celebratory concert in our new meeting place. It was a spectacular performance, and we were grateful for what he had given us. When he finished, we rose to our feet in thunderous applause.

Later, as I reflected on the experience, it occurred to me that two things had happened: one was that in that standing ovation we had moved in our appreciation beyond his piano virtuosity to Medema himself. What he gave on the piano was spectacular. But so was he! It was more than thanks we were giving, it was praise. We had gone beyond what he had done to he himself. The second was that the praise not only let the joy inside us out, it actually fulfilled it and created yet more joy in the expression. Praising Me-dema together gave us more joy. To choose not to give praise, or to somehow be ordered to keep silent, would have been to abort the joy. It would have hurt.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumphal procession, the crowds went wild with praise and joy. They were doing more than they knew. Jesus’ religious opponents urged him to tell the crowd to keep silent. When he answered, “If they don’t praise me, the stones will,” he was saying there is a joy so great that it will not be squelched. Even inanimate creation would not be able to sit still in the presence of the Glorious One.

How can we?

Tuning our instruments

Praise also enlarges us. It is an exercise in our glorification. Augustine asks the question that should be in the heart of any who would call upon God:

How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, since in truth when I call upon him I call him into myself? Is there any place within me where my God can dwell? How can God come into me, God who made heaven and earth? O Lord my God, is there any place in me that can contain you?6

Is there any place in us that can contain God? Of course, the answer is no. Something new, something radical, must happen to us for that to happen. We must somehow be expanded.

I have a large yellow Labrador retriever named Sonja. She’s everything I like about dogs: exuberantly earnest about all she does, always glad to see me, even if I’ve been gone for only five minutes, and tirelessly forgiving of my faults. As sweet as she is, she’s but a dog—her world is a world of sounds and smells, especially smells. Her favorite organ is her nose. So if I were to try to read her one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, her first response would be to sniff the book to see whether it was edible and then lose all interest in it. But what would it mean if, as I read Shakespeare, she sat up, perked up her ears, and barked her approval? It could mean but one thing: something miraculous had happened in her central nervous system, and she had been marvelously expanded in her capacity to appreciate the good, the true, and the right.

Would Shakespeare be any better because my dog liked him? No. But would she be any better? Yes!

Seeing is becoming. “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.”7 When we praise God, we adjust our vision to gaze upon the One who transforms and expands us in the gazing. “We know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). In praise, we anticipate Christ’s appearing, and by faith, see him as he is. But we are, nevertheless, participating now in what will be. C. S. Lewis borrows an image from John Donne, describing praise as “tuning our instruments”:

The tuning of the orchestra can be itself delightful, but only to those who can, in some measure, however little, anticipate the symphony … even our most sacred rites, as they occur in human experience, are, like tuning, promise, not performance. Hence, like the tuning, they have in them much duty and little delight; or none. But the duty exists for the delight. When we carry out our “religious” duties we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that, when at last the water comes, it may find them ready. I mean, for the most part. There are happy moments, even now, when a trickle creeps along the dry beds; and happy souls to whom this happens often.8

When poet George Herbert was thinking of the life-giving, soul-expanding power of praise, he described prayer as “God’s breath in man, returning to his birth, the soul in paraphrase … the soul’s blood.”9 The very breath of God that gave us life comes back into us as we breathe it out in praise. Genuine praise is God’s mirth roaring in our veins—and lungs expanding and enlivening us.

“Acting as though …”

Praise is a great impetus to faith. There is a profoundly important reason for this: unbelief is first a failure at adoration. In his analysis of the human condition, Paul probes into the heart of our darkness and finds this at its root: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom. 1:21). Note the order: First comes the refusal to honor and give thanks to God, then follows mental darkness and futility. The reason is not hard to understand. We see what we look for; we see most clearly what we most dearly adore.

Two men were pushing their way through the crowds in New York City’s Times Square. They had to shout to each other to be heard above the din. One man was a native of New York, the other was a Native American from Oklahoma.

The Native American stopped suddenly and said to his friend, “Listen! Can you hear the cricket?”

His friend thought it was a joke. “Are you kidding?” he laughed. “How could anyone hear a cricket in this bedlam? You just think you heard it.”

“No, I’m not kidding,” he said. “Come over here.”

He walked over to a planter that was holding a large shrub and pointed at the dead leaves in the bottom. To his amazement, the New Yorker saw a cricket.

“You must have extraordinary ears,” the New Yorker exclaimed.

“No better than yours,” said the Native American. “It all depends on what you’re listening for. Watch this.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of nickels, dimes, and quarters. Then he dropped them on the sidewalk. People from as far as two blocks away stopped and turned to see where that sound had come from.

“See what I mean?” he said. “It all depends on what you’re listening for.”

To listen for the right thing takes faith. Some of the best advice I ever got about how to deal with a faith crisis was something attributed to Blaise Pascal. Reportedly, he told reluctant unbelievers and others who were in some way struggling with their faith to act as though they believed, whether or not they did. Pascal believed that even something as meager as that—acting as though—would qualify as the mustard seed of faith Jesus promised would move mountains. The spirit bears a kind of internal witness to those who go only this far in faith and obedience. That advice has helped me immensely as I have time and again found myself barren in my spirit, unsure of what I believe but choosing nevertheless to praise God as though I believed. To praise God is to practice the opposite of the thing chat brings unbelief in the first place.

Peek outside the cave

Praise is also an act of hope, a participation in the future, the eternal—and therefore a reality check. Plato’s famous cave analogy has helped me to think about this:

Suppose a man is born in a cave and spends his entire life tied to a post, facing the wall at the rear of the cave. He cannot look to the right or the left, only forward. The light from the outside shines from behind him on the wall he faces. Occasionally people and animals walk by the cave’s entrance and, as they do, their shadows are cast on the wall. These shadows and the dim light on the wall are all he ever knows of reality. To him they are reality. To speak of a world outside the cave, made of color and three dimensions, would be incomprehensible and unbelievable to him. But what would it mean if a mirror were held up to him, in which he could get a glimpse of the world outside the cave? Everything would change! He would then see the shadows in the context of a larger and deeper reality of depth and color.

To praise God is to gaze into a mirror and get a peek at the world outside the cave.

The cave is the “world” that St. John speaks of in his gospel and three epistles. By “world,” John does not mean the creation—made by God and good, deserving our love and care. By “world,” he means the evil world system of false values and pride, ruled by Satan and implacably hostile to God. Since Satan is the Father of Lies (John 8:44), his dominion is a cave of deception and falsehood, made up of “the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does” (1 John 2:16). The “world cave” is illusory and fading, but it exerts enormous power over our hearts and minds. According to the New Testament, it is a bitter and formidable rival of God. To be redeemed by Christ is to live no longer in darkness, but to be given the “light of life” (John 8:12). It is to begin to see things as they really are. In the praise of God we begin to see ourselves with the tens of thousands of angels in heaven, where God is visibly supreme, throughout eternity, worshiping him “who was, and is, and is to come” (Rev. 4:8).

Earthly good

To praise God is to hope in the world to come and is therefore the most practical act in this world. Occasionally I hear something like this said after a great service of worship: “That was wonderful! Too bad we have to go back to the ‘real world’ now.”

The assumption seems to be that what happened in worship was a pleasant and therapeutic diversion, and that the real thing is out there in the rough and tumble of the world. It’s the other way around! What was seen and felt in worship is the real thing. The secret is to remember what we saw and felt when we go back into the world of deception and lies.

G. K. Chesterton said the unbeliever is like a man born upside down, standing on his head, his feet “dancing upward in idle ecstasies, while his brain is in the abyss.”10 Christianity sets a man right side up. His head is placed in heaven, where it belongs, and his feet on the earth, where they belong. Now he can walk the earth and see where he is going. The saying “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good” is false. The only way to be any earthly good is to be heavenly minded! In prayer, all our work is put into a different mode, heaven in the ordinary.

Praise is also the ground of obedience. Dante paints a compelling picture of this in The Divine Comedy. At the very end, when he has passed through the levels of Hell and Purgatory, ascending through Heaven until he finally stands looking into the Godhead, he describes the effect gazing into the face of God has on him. Words leave him, for no mere human language can describe such a sight. But as speech departs, something remarkable is added to his desire and will: “But now my desire and will were revolved, like a wheel which is moved evenly, by the love that moves the sun and other stars.”11 The impact of looking at the unfiltered glory of God is to have his desires, his affections, his will transformed and moved by the same powerful love that makes stars and constellations, quasars and nebulae move together through this vast universe in complete harmony.

Think of your struggles with sin and temptation, of your weak will and halfhearted desire. What if these could be empowered by Dante’s vision of the immeasurable glory and worth of God? They can! I return to the words of the apostle Paul: “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).

What Paul and Dante were describing is the promise made through the prophets of God’s new covenant with humankind, and fulfilled in Jesus Christ: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws” (Ezek. 36:26-27).

Obedience follows praise. We follow most nearly what we most dearly love:

May I know you more clearly,
Love you more dearly,
And follow you more nearly
Day by day.
12

Am I worthy?

Helen Roseveare is a short, no-nonsense Irish doctor, with steely blue eyes and a wry wit. When I met her in 1994, she was a spry seventy and reminded me of a favorite elderly aunt or a grandmother. Just looking at her, one would not guess that she had spent the better part of her life serving Christ as a medical missionary in Zaire—or that she had been beaten and raped repeatedly by rebels during the Simba Rebellion of the early ’60s. Despite her incredible suffering and subsequent emotional breakdown, she managed to come back to her work and accomplish amazing things for Christ in the jungles of that land.

I was in Kenya interviewing her for a radio program. As she spoke of her horrible experience with the rebels, a thunderstorm passed overhead and rain pounded on the tin roof of the cottage. When she was finished, she said, “I’ll have nightmares tonight from this.”

I said, “I would never have asked you for an interview if I had known it would have this effect on you.”

She dismissed my remark with a short wave of her hand: “No, no. The Lord told me that if I’m going to tell this story, I can’t be like a phonograph record. I’ll have to feel it each time I tell it.”

Then she said something incredible: “People would ask me, ‘Was it worth all the suffering—what you accomplished there?’ And I’d tell them, no, it’s been too costly. All I got done doesn’t offset what I paid for personally.

“But then the Lord spoke to me. He said, ‘Helen, that’s the wrong question. The question is not, Was it worth it? The question is, Am I worthy?’ And I said, ‘Of course you are, Lord. You are worthy.’ “

I was talking that day with a woman set right side up, her head in heaven and her feet planted firmly on the earth. Remarkable things happen to our heads and feet and hands when that happens. Because of what we have seen of heaven, we go places and do things we would never have dreamed of.

Chesterton wondered if tragedy was not something we are permitted on this earth as a kind of “merciful comedy.” Why? Maybe it was because the joy and glory of heaven is too much for us now, that unmediated by the pain and struggle of this life, “the frantic energy of driving things would knock us down like a drunken farce,” and we would be consumed by the “tremendous levities of the angels.”13

Perhaps. But this much is sure: with our heads in heaven, and something of the infinite worth of God in our eyes, his praise on our lips, we are empowered and made new. God’s mirth roars in our veins, a loving abandon grips us, and we find ourselves compelled by the vision expressed by Augustine: “Lord, hast thou declared that no man shall see Thy face and live?—Then let me die, that I may see Thee.”14

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964), 97.

Theodore Jennings, Life As Worship: Prayer and Praise in Jesus’ Name (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 90. The church father Irenaeus put it this way: “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.”Ireneaus, quoted by William Willimon, The Service of God (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 64.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), 110-11.

Martin Rinkart, “Now Thank We All Our God,” Hymns II (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1976), 148.

Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 85.

Augustine, The Confessions (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 1.

Irenaeus, Ibid., William Willimon, 64.

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964), 97.

“George Herbert, “The Pulley,” 183.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 365.

Dante, The Divine Comedy, Canto 33, The Great Books (Chicago: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1952), 157.

St. Richard of Chichester. Used in various musical productions.

Ibid., G. K. Chesterton, 365.

Quoted in Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 95.

Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson

I HATE TO FLY. But since I fly a lot, I have developed several techniques to steel myself against the cramped seating, the stale air, and the terrors of turbulence. Escapist reading material and a tape player with a headset do nicely. The overall desired effect is to implode into myself until I get off the plane. For this reason I rarely engage in conversation in flight. Besides, the effort involved in looking at a seatmate gives me a crick in my neck. If I want to ward off a gregarious fellow traveler, I open my Bible in my lap.

Such was my mood as I sat awaiting a flight in the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California. So I was dimly aware of the well-dressed couple standing in front of me. Each was shouldering a large leather attache bag, fumbling with papers and tickets inside and chattering to the other. I guessed them to be attorneys. Maybe it was the tasseled loafers the man was wearing.

In the middle of the conversation, a strange thing happened. The woman puckered her lips and moved to kiss the man. She came within mere inches of his face, only to realize that he wasn’t aware of her intentions. He just kept on fumbling with the contents of his bag, talking to her but not looking at her as he did. She unpuckered and withdrew to her bag and chatter.

They had my attention. I laid my book aside and took off my headset to watch this little drama. Then something even stranger happened. The man stopped fumbling in his bag, puckered up his lips and moved to kiss her, came to within inches of her face, only to discover chat she didn’t notice what he was attempting. He chickened out. It was now his turn to go back to his bag and chatter.

I was on the edge of my seat mentally as the dance became stranger still. She again puckered, moved to kiss him, came within a breath of his face, saw that he was oblivious to her intentions, and withdrew again. Then he did the same thing, again! I was on the verge of getting up and offering my services as a pastoral counselor, when one of the flights was called and they parted.

It occurred to me then, and still does, that whatever else they may have accomplished that day, they had already missed the most important thing they could have done. They may have negotiated multimillion dollar deals, but no matter—they hadn’t kissed. The day had already been wasted.

I take this story as a parable of the gift of prayer—and our struggle with that gift.

How personal is God?

Hold that picture in mind, and hear the desire of Christ. He says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20). Almighty God, the Lord of Eternity, wants to be intimate with us, to draw near and spend time with us. He holds out a tender, wonderful, incredible offering. But we, like the couple at the airport, are so blind, so preoccupied, that we miss the invitation. Not only does God command us to pray, he permits us to pray. Prayer is both a must and a may, an obligation and a gift. Why would any of us ignore the God of the universe, bending low to offer us the pleasure of his company?

One reason may be simple ignorance—we do not really understand just how personal this God is. We have the intellectuals, among others, to thank for this. These are the folks who gave us god as the “Principle of Concretion” (Alfred North Whitehead); or the “Integrating Factor in Experience” (Henry Nelson Wieman); or “The Ground of All Being” (Paul Tillich). Entertainers, too, have served up this vapid deity, as in George Lucas’s “the force” in the Star Wars films. The God they describe is an elitist deity; so distant he cannot be approached unless you think you’re smart enough to understand whatever a principle of concretion is.

That may be the point of these false gods—to keep them distant. Have you heard the one about the theologian who, given the choice between going to heaven or hearing a lecture about heaven, chose the lecture? Confine God to the cerebral cortex and he won’t be able to mess up your plans. The more abstract and impersonal you can make him, the less demanding he will be. Thus intellectual profundity becomes a spiritual avoidance tactic.

Safe, boring, and shrunken

But the God Jesus tells us to pray to is not the God of the philosophers and pantheists. In a brilliant section in his book Miracles, C. S. Lewis exposed the bogus appeal of the impersonal God:

Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured him as man but because it pictured him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at his glance. If he were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed.

It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. “Look out!” we cry, “it’s alive.” And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An “impersonal God”—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vase power which we can tap—best of all. But God himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, King, husband—that is quite another matter. Here comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“man’s search for God”) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing he had found us?1

The less demanding and personal God is, the more boring he will be. One doesn’t pray to a God like that, one meditates; except for an elite few, one loses interest and falls asleep. An abstract, boring God is finally a shrunken God, too big and therefore too busy, we think, to get involved with people. But the God Jesus told us to pray to can both run the cosmos and knit a baby together in his mother’s womb. He can number both subatomic particles and the hairs on your head. Anything less, and he is shrunk to the size of the senator Julia Ward Howe invited to her home. She wanted him to meet the up-and-coming actor Edwin Booth, but he declined, explaining loftily, “The truth is, I have got beyond taking an interest in individuals.” She later commented sarcastically on his remark in her diary: “God Almighty has not got so far.”

Indeed, George Buttrick was right when he said, “The field of second-rate religion is strewn with the corpses of abstract nouns.” A second-rate God will elicit a second-rate, boring prayer life.

Fire!

Blaise Pascal had a kind of born again experience the night of November 23, 1654. A brilliant scientist and intellectual, Pascal met God, as it were, face to face, and wrote what he saw and felt, as it was happening to him. He recorded on a piece of parchment, “From about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight.”

A scientist would want to remember the exact time. The piece of parchment was sewn in his coat and found after his death. It seems that he carried it with him continually. The first word he used to describe the experience was simply “fire.” That alone set the personal God he met apart from the impersonal god of mere intellect and ideas. The next sentence is more celling: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars” (italics mine). His experience is a model of what it means to pray to the personal God of the Bible. His prayer is not Scripture, but it is scriptural in its stream-of-consciousness fervor.

Certainty, certainty,
heartfelt, joy, peace.
of Jesus Christ.
God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
“Thy God shall be my God.”
The world forgotten,
and everything except God.
He can only be found by ways
taught in the Gospels.
Greatness of the human soul.
“O righteous Father,
the world has not known thee,

but I have known thee.”
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have cut myself off from him.
They have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters.
My God, wilt thou forsake me?
Let me not be cut off from him forever!
“And this is life eternal,
that they may know thee,
the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”
Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ
I have cut myself off from him,
shunned him, denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be cut off from him!
He can only be kept
by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Sweet and total renunciation.
Total submission to Jesus Christ
and my director.
Everlasting joy
in return for one day’s effort
on earth.
I will not forget thy word.
Amen.
2

We all long to meet an awesome and personal God like that in prayer.

In fear of Abba

Jesus said to address this awesome God as Abba, Aramaic for “dear Father,” or “Daddy.” He said if you can understand how a good human father operates, then you will understand a little of what God is like. “Which of you [fathers], if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 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!” (Matt. 7:9-11).

Call God Abba. Pray to him as Daddy. That alone can make your prayers burst into significance. The Heidelberg Catechism asks, “Why has Christ commanded us to address God as ‘Our Father’?” It answers, “That immediately, at the beginning of our prayer, he might excite in us a childlike reverence for, and confidence in, God, which are the foundations of prayer” (italics mine).3 St. Teresa of Avila confessed that she found it hard to get beyond the first words in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father.” For her they were like a lovely land she never wanted to leave.

But my experience has often been that the very words that should excite such reverence and delight in prayer can produce the opposite effect. “Father” can become a household word in the sense of pots and pans and dull, unconscious routines. We can begin to speak it as we would at the dinner table: “Hey, Dad, pass the salt.” Or use it as punctuation, not much more than a comma, on our prayers: “Father, we just want you to bless us, Father, because, Father, you know our needs, Father.”

Before that word “Father” can ignite in us all the wonder and adoration Jesus meant it to, we must first appreciate something else about God, something many of us think to be at odds with addressing him as Father. It is that our Father God is awesome and holy, terrible in power, breathtaking in wisdom. He is one to be feared. The Bible is full of this fear language, commanding it, even celebrating it.

Serve the Lord with fear
and rejoice with trembling.
(Ps. 2:11)

Let all the earth fear the Lord;
let all the people of the world
revere him.
(Ps. 33:8)

The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of knowledge.
(Prov. 1:7)

Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his
commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
(Eccles. 12:13, italics mine)

Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord,
we try to persuade men. (2 Cor. 5:11)

Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
(Phil. 2:12)

What does it mean to fear God? Does it mean to fear him as we would a poisonous snake or a blood transfusion tainted with the HIV virus? We know it doesn’t, but we’re not sure why.

The words the Bible uses mean literally “to fear.” Translators try alternatives, words like awe, respect, reverence, but none quite captures the raw strength of the word fear. The key to what the Bible means lies, I think, in what happens to our consciousness when we fear something. As I said earlier, someone once said that standing before a firing squad marvelously focuses one’s mind. The idea is that the experience of being brought right up to the point of death, and then given a reprieve, brings focus. That’s the key: What we fear marvelously focuses us. The fear of God is respect and awe and reverence. But it is these things, to a degree, that are like terror in their intensity.

Therefore, the Bible sees no conflict between fearing God and loving and trusting him. Amazingly, when Jesus wants to calm our fears, he tells us to first fear God!

” ‘I tell you, my friends, do not. be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him’ ” (Luke 12:4-5).

That’s God he’s talking about, the one who can throw us into hell, and the one we are to address in prayer as Abba, Daddy. Then, without even a break or segue in thought, he says we should relax: ” ‘Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows’ ” (v. 7). His message: You are worth everything to the One who is to be feared. Fear God and you’ll fear nothing else!

Later, in the same chapter, Jesus utters some of my favorite words: ” ‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom’ ” (Luke 12:32).

Jabba the Butt

What one most deeply loves, one most deeply fears. My wife, Lauretta, is the dearest person I know, and apart from Jesus, the clearest, most incontrovertible evidence of God’s grace to me. At its best, my love for her is like terror in its intensity. Oh, the fear I have of hurting her! Her worth is staggering in its weight.

Then there are my children. On the night our first child was born, I remember washing up to go into the delivery room to accompany Lauretta in his birth. I say “accompany,” the Lamaze teacher said it was to “assist.” But after watching the holy ordeal of childbirth, I decided I could be of no real assistance. As I washed, a terror came over me. This was it. Things were going to change for me for the rest of my life. The fear and joy of who was about to arrive nearly bowled me over. Could I care for him adequately? Could I really be a father? Somehow I had a fear of holding him and dropping him. And then, minutes later, there I stood in the gleaming room holding him, trembling with love and fear. Though less than eight pounds, his worth was staggering in its weight.

Later, when more children came, and they got old enough to wrestle with me, we would play a game we called “Jabba the Butt.” The name came from a large, disgusting evil character in the Star Wars trilogy called Jabba the Hutt. We changed the surname for the sake of humor. I would play Jabba and roar around the room as the kids would shoot their laser guns at me and cry co wrestle me to the floor. Sometimes I would get into the role too much and their little imaginations would slip into stark terror. They would feel my great strength and hear my booming voice, and Daddy would be transformed into Jabba. The game would stop, and I would hold them tenderly and remind them that I was their daddy. The juxtaposition of great, overwhelming strength and power with tender love is as hard for a child to hold together as it is for an adult. My love for them was staggering when they coupled it with my power.

Addressing God as Father can become electrifying, if we can put these two together in our minds: combining infinite love and tenderness with infinite holiness and power. It can become the source of our greatest seriousness and our deepest joy, that one of such might can be called Father, and that our Father can be one with such might! He is not like Jabba in evil, but he is in strength. Fear and love go together. To paraphrase Peter Kreeft, the wonder of praying to God as Father can come only when we have learned what seems to be its opposite, that he is the totally Other, the transcendent Creator of time and space, fierce in holiness, awesome in power. If the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, then filial intimacy is its fulfillment.

“My God, How Wonderful Thou Art”

In hymnody, one of the best treatments of this glorious and holy tension is Frederick Paber’s “My God, How Wonderful Thou Art.” The hymn begins with a series of exclamations on the fearful worth of God, the brightness of his majesty, the fire of his light, his unbearable beauty. Even the best and brightest of all creation can do no more than fall down before him.

My God, how wonderful Thou art,
Thy majesty how bright!
How beautiful Thy mercy seat,
In depths of burning light!
How dread are Thine eternal years,
O everlasting Lord,
By prostrate spirits day and night
Incessantly adored!

What can one do when confronted with such a God, but become marvelously focused? It is the most inexorable of spiritual reflexes. There is really no choice but to be afraid, to experience an awe that is like terror in its intensity.

O how I fear Thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears.
And worship Thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!

But then wonder piles upon wonder when a God such as this offers us the pleasure of his company. He wants communion with us. He calls us to prayer! Can it be? Can it really be?

Yet I may love Thee, too,
O Lord, Almighty as Thou art,
For Thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.
4

Pastors can never be too smitten by this. Sometimes I think our hands are cauterized by too much handling of holy things. Our hearts get calluses. Liturgical traditions are susceptible to the liturgist who declares the burning realities in a singsong voice. I’ve heard the Te Deum read like a recipe for chocolate cake. So-called nonliturgical traditions fall prey to the trite and the garrulous. I think it must have been something like that that led humorist Roy Blount to wonder if anyone is concerned that they may be boring God. No character in the Bible found anything approaching a face-to-face encounter with God anything less than shattering. We clergy must learn to act and think as people who are amazed that our proximity to holy things has not left us vaporized. We must pray that God will cultivate in our spirits fresh awareness of his majesty and goodness, and that we not confuse his goodness with his being safe. Like the lion Asian in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, “He isn’t safe. But he’s good.” God being God, Annie Dillard playfully suggested that along with our Bibles and vestments we should wear crash helmets when we worship.

I have taken to reading these lines from Ecclesiastes before I preach:

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God.

Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.

Do not be quick with your mouth,
do not be hasty in your heart
to utter anything before God.
God is in heaven
and you are on earth,
so let your words be few.
As a dream comes when there are
many cares,
so the speech of a fool when there are
many words.…
Therefore stand in awe of God.
(Eccles. 5:1-3, 7)

Yada, yada, yada

We may pray because God is personal; he wants to be known. There is another, equally transforming side to this breathtaking reality: we may pray because he knows us. His knowledge is not the knowledge of an immense, passive intellect, but of intimate, transforming contact, as in when “Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived” (Gen. 4:1 NRSV). The Hebrew word for this knowledge, yada, can mean the knowledge of transformation or of understanding, depending on its context. But it is commonly used of the kind of intimate, sexual knowledge that Adam clearly had of Eve when she became pregnant.

Yada, to know—it’s surprising the Bible uses a word like this to speak of something that we typically describe more clinically as “having sex,” or perhaps more euphemistically as “having relations.” Modern translations render this verse with such words as “lay” (New International Version), “had relations” (New American Standard), “slept” (New Living Translation), “had intercourse” (Jerusalem Bible). But the Hebrew text says Adam knew Eve, and she conceived a child, a new life.

God’s knowledge of us is like that. That is not to say that his knowledge of us is sexual, but sexual knowledge is something like his knowledge of us. It is deeply intimate, life-creating, in-fleshed, and therefore transforming. Thomas Howard calls this a “piquant irony”:

[Here] we are, with all of our high notions of ourselves as intellectual and spiritual beings, and the most profound form of knowledge for us is a plain business of skin on skin. It is humiliating. When two members of this godlike, cerebral species approach the heights of communion between themselves, what do they do? Think? Speculate? Meditate? No, they take off their clothes. Do they want to get their brains together? No. It is the most appalling of ironies: their search for union takes them quite literally in a direction away from where their brains are.5

Howard asks, what is the meaning of all this? It has to do with the fact that true knowledge of the other is much more than amassing data about that person. It must be increasingly synonymous with Love, that is, with self-giving, mutuality, and union, as we press further and further in cowards the center.

Naturally King David is amazed and impregnated, as it were, with hope and delight, when he realizes that he is known by God:

O Lord, you have searched me
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my
lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O Lord.…
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my
mother’s womb.

(Ps. 139:1-4, 13)

To know something is good, even great. To be known is transforming.

I was in college the first time I truly felt known and loved by God. I was walking back to my dorm, and suddenly it came to me that God knew me intimately. It was a shattering, wonderful feeling. God knows me, I thought. He really loves me. At the time I had a great roommate, and he and a bunch of other guys and I would sit around until all hours of the night calking. It would get late, and we would get just tired enough to let our guard come down. Then one of us would lee slip some revelation about his innermost self. He would feel embarrassed, until someone looked at him and said, “You coo?” He knew—and he was known. Somehow, being in that position of vulnerability and sympathetic intimacy opened me up to the sense of God’s deep and close knowing of me. In those late night conversations I was impregnated with a new life chat has grown in me ever since. It’s wonderful to know. It is more wonderful to be known.

In April 1995, we experienced a student revival on our campus chat dramatically illustrated the power of feeling known by God. In a chapel service, students began to spontaneously confess their sins in public! Students streamed up to the microphone, openly speaking of their sins and struggles. Short of murder, I can’t think of a sin that wasn’t confessed or a struggle that wasn’t shared. Rape, incest, drug abuse, eating disorders—all were aired in front of hundreds of people. Each student would speak, walk away from the microphone, and be surrounded by friends. Hugs, tears, and prayers of encouragement and healing would follow. This went on for several nights.

These young people had been cold a lie their whole lives, a lie that said, “You’re alone in your struggles. No one knows you.” That’s a terrible feeling with which to live. They longed to be known—don’t we all?—but at the same time, it’s terrifying to lay oneself bare before others. The Spirit moved among those students to give them the gift of being known. He empowered them to discover, finally, that to be completely transparent and to feel completely loved is to come closer to the heart of God. So it is for all of us. The gift of prayer is that we can lay all that we are before God, who won’t be surprised or shocked at anything we say.

A week after these experiences at Hope College, I went to Chicago to attend a National Day of Prayer event. Different pastors spoke on what God was doing in their communities. One of them, a pastor from Texas, had a ministry with street gangs, which in itself was amazing, because he didn’t look like the kind of man one would think would have that kind of outreach. But he had led the leaders of rival gangs to Christ, and told us a story about baptizing one of the boys. The pastor was going to sprinkle him in church, but the kid wanted to be baptized in the river. He had probably committed murder, and he wanted to do it all the way.

The pastor said that when he looked at the kid’s face under the water, he could see his broken nose. When he lifted the boy out of the water, the kid clung to him and wept and wept and wept. After he finally regained his composure, he said to the pastor, “This is only the second time in my life I’ve ever cried. The first time was the night my dad broke my nose.”

Then the pastor said to us, “I baptized him in water, and he baptized me in his tears. And they washed away all that church stuff.”

Jump in the river

God invites us to jump into that river and let him cleanse all that “stuff” from our souls, whether it’s church stuff or the numbness of isolation and loneliness. The river is the pleasure of his company, the knowledge of God, his of us and ours of him. It is God’s “river of delights” (Ps. 36:8). It is the place where we can stand in his presence and know the joy of his presence, the “eternal pleasures” that are at his right hand (Ps. 16:11).

Go back with me to chat scene at the airport. See the couple run off to something, empty inside, not knowing why. Now contrast that with the words of Bernard of Clairvaux:

Jesus, Thou joy of loving hearts,
Thou fount of life, Thou light of men,
From the best bliss that life imparts
We turn unfilled to thee again.
6

What no bliss in life can impart is what is given in prayer. It is the pleasure of his company.

C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 124-25.

Blaise Pascal, Pensees, A. J. Krailsheimer, trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).

Heidelberg Catechism, Question 120 (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, reproduction of the Second American Edition, printed in Columbus, Ohio, 1852), 626

Frederick Faber, “My God, How Wonderful Thou Art,” Hymns of the Christian Life (Harrisburg, Pa.: Christian Publications, Inc., 1962), No. 17.

Thomas Howard, Hallowed by This House (San Francisco: Ignarius Press, 1979), 115-17.

Bernard of Clairvaux, “Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts,” trans. Ray Palmer (Chicago: InterVarsity Press, 1965), 163.

Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson

I WAS ON MY WAY TO EAT at a friend’s house, a gourmet cook of the nouvelle cuisine persuasion—she made exquisitely great food, beautifully presented, but usually not enough for my appetite. Those delicious little servings mocked me. I had missed lunch that day and was ravenous as I made my way to her new address. There was something missing in the directions and I was having a hard time finding her house.

As I drove around, famished and lost, I kept driving by a fast-food restaurant that specialized in hot dogs. The aroma emanating from the drive-thru food trough was having the same effect the sirens of the Greek myth had on the hapless sailors who sailed into their waters. I don’t merely want a hot dog, I need a hot dog, I reasoned. She never serves enough food anyway. Why not have just a little snack to hold me over until I find her house?

I stopped to order a snack. But what to order? The menu was huge. After a panicky exchange with the disembodied voice from the speaker in the drive-thru, I settled on a regular hot dog, a kraut dog, and a chili dog. The hot dogs really aren’t very big. And what’s a hot dog without French fries?—a day without the sun, oatmeal raisin cookies without cold milk! So I ordered a large fries to cover the demands of the three hot dogs. Fries are salty and hot dogs are spicy, so I added a large soft drink to wash all this down. I felt much better.

When I finally found her house, she had prepared a wonderful meal. It was probably the best meal I didn’t enjoy. I was so full, I even left food on the little plates.

A parable of prayer, this silly but true story. Or rather, a parable of prayerlessness. Why don’t we pray? We don’t pray for the same reason I couldn’t enjoy that gourmet meal; we’re stuffed in our spirits, full, over-loaded, packed, soul-crammed—not with the Bread of Life, but with spiritual junk food. Before it is anything else, lack of prayer is a lack of hunger for God.

Too easily pleased

Does God think we want too much or too little out of life? What is his chief complaint with us? Let’s look at what C. S. Lewis has to say about it:

[If] we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.1

That last line is the answer: “We are far too easily pleased.” Our desires are not too strong, they’re too weak. That, I believe, is God’s chief complaint with his people. To add insult to injury, it seems that most Christians tend to think the opposite of God. They see him as a kind of nouvelle cuisine chef, pretty good but stingy.

Just how upset is the Lord about all this? He says it is cause for even the heavens to ” ‘be appalled … and shudder with great horror.’ ” As he describes it to Jeremiah, ” ‘My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water’ ” (2:12-13). They prefer no water to living water, less over more. Mere drink, sex, and ambition outdraw infinite joy! Go figure.

Filling our bellies

Broken cisterns are idols, God-substitutes. They are the spiritual hot dogs we ingest on the way to God’s banquet. They dull and eventually kill our appetite for the deep and nourishing richness of his holy fare. Like the Turkish delight the witch gives to Edmund in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, they are insatiably unsatisfying.2

Broken cisterns can even be legitimate hungers, like the craving for food of people who are genuinely hungry. After Jesus miraculously fed the multitudes by the lake, they wanted to make him king. So he escaped to the other side of the lake. They followed him there, too. When they found him, he confronted them with words that one doesn’t speak lightly to folks living in what we would today call a Third World country. He said, ” ‘I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you’ ” (John 6:26-27). Jesus speaks harshly, for the Greek word translated “had your fill” is a word that is used of animals filling their bellies. He takes a dim view even of a legitimate appetite if it dulls one’s hunger for more important things.

Contrast their appetite with King David’s, who was in a real desert and was really hungry and really thirsty. But he knew his physical hunger pointed to something eternal and deeper than mere food. It was a signpost to God. He wrote:

O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.…
Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
My soul will be satisfied as with the
richest of foods.

(Ps. 63:1, 3-5)

We can fill our bellies with things other than mere drink, sex, and ambition. They could be mere work or entertainment. Or mere church. It happens when we let the pressures of maintaining a religious organization crowd out living and longing for the kingdom and glory of God. The disappointment and exhaustion of ecclesiastical exertions—of endless meetings and gatherings and committees and programs—can dull our appetite for God. Quietly, imperceptibly, we begin to expect less of him, and end up being satisfied with that. Perhaps at the beginning of our ministry we wondered, Why was it that wherever Paul went people rioted, but wherever we go they serve tea?

But over time, we sigh with the chap who wrote, “My cry used to be, ‘Win the world for Christ. ‘Now it’s Try not to lose too many.’ ” The church can be so very, very dull and dulling. And those who serve it can become the same.

Not that there is anything wrong with the dull. Brother Lawrence spied the glory and presence of God amid the dirty pots and pans of a monastery kitchen. That is the point. He wasn’t satisfied with the dull. He was still hungry and thirsty for righteousness. He insisted on looking for glory in the dull, on serving God in the mundane. So he prayed as he scrubbed and scrubbed as he prayed, believing with Irenaeus that the “glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.” He would settle for no less than to meet face-to-face with the living God, even if it was over a kitchen sink. If he could search for God and find him amid pots and pans, is it too much to pray that we do the same in the dulling routines of church life in our time?

We must pray that God will give us the same holy hunger and greed for God! We must look for his glory in the mundane of mere “churchness.” We must demand that we find it. We must wrestle with God, as Jacob wrestled with the angel, refusing to let go of him until he blesses us.

Restoring the hunger

Two things have helped me restore my spiritual hunger. The first is simply to memorize some of the hungry, ravenous, visionary prayers of Scripture. Paul’s prayers are especially good for this. Take, for example, his prayer for the Ephesians, that “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints” (1:18). Or, “that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (3:19).

The thought of memorizing prayers seems an artificial and stilted way to restore something as vital as spiritual hunger. But consider what Rabbi Abraham Heschel said to the members of his synagogue who complained that the words of the liturgy did not express what they felt. He told them that it was not that the liturgy should express what they feel, but that they should learn to feel what the liturgy expressed. Recited faithfully, great thoughts put into great words can do that for us. True, God’s way to change us is to first change our hearts, working from the inside out. But paradoxically, sometimes the route he takes to our hearts can be to work from the outside in. Memorization can be to our hunger for God what practicing a musical instrument is for performance. It can be the singing of the scales of the soul.

So learn these prayers, these hungry, visionary prayers of Scripture and the great saints—the distilled wisdom of the church. Say them as you step into a board meeting or face a pile of unanswered correspondence. Recite them as you go through your telephone messages and as you drive to the hospital. And if the prayers don’t express what you feel, pray them until you feel what they express. Settle for nothing less than the measure of all the fullness of God.

Another way to restore your hunger for God is to choose hunger of another kind—to engage in the ancient practice of fasting. I have only recently, and with great reluctance, walked on this path toward spiritual hunger— actually, stumbled onto it is a better way to describe it. I’d like to tell you about it.

Someone said the prospect of standing before a firing squad marvelously focuses one’s mind. Other things can have the same effect: for instance, the telephone call from a friend of mine last March in which he told me he thought perhaps the Lord was leading us to fast for forty days. Us? I hate to fast. My previous experience of fasting had left me feeling like the man my dad joked about who hit himself over the head with a hammer because it felt so good when he stopped. Even liver and onions would have hit the spot when I broke the fast.

But I don’t think chat’s what the Lord Jesus was shooting for when he set out on his forty-day experience in the wilderness.

The benefits and meaning of fasting had eluded me. I’d tried it before, but instead of insights I got irritable. No, I got nasty. When Bill Bright reported on his forty-day fast, I held him in awe, but with the same detached awe I have for a man who can run a mile under four minutes. It’s amazing that he can do it, but it would be futile for me to even try.

So my friend’s call got my attention. I trust him, so if he thinks the Lord may be saying something to him about what we should do, I’ll give it serious consideration. I did, and as I prayed about it, the unwelcome conviction grew in me that a forty-day fast was precisely what God was asking of us. So we covenanted together with about thirty or forty other people to do this for the forty days leading up to Pentecost Sunday. The purpose would be to fast and pray for the two things Jonathan Edwards urged the churches of eighteenth-century New England to pray for: the spiritual awakening of the church in our town and beyond, and the spread of the kingdom of God worldwide. The mode of the fast would vary from person to person. Some would take only juices. My wife and I would do a “Daniel” fast and eat only fruits, vegetables, and grains— no meats, fats, or sugar. From time to time during the fast, as the Lord led, we too would have a day of juice only. Also, whenever possible, all of us who had covenanted to fast would meet for an hour of prayer on Friday mornings.

From command to permission

The fast ended, I lost about twenty-five pounds, and while it remains to be seen exactly what our prayer and fasting will mean for the wider kingdom of God, my mind has been marvelously focused in a few important ways. The first is what a slave I can be to food. Food and its consumption is omnipresent in my life. It is the all-purpose elixir. Am I sad? Eat. Am I happy? Eat. Tired? Eat. Angry, depressed, bored? Eat, eat, eat. Do we have a social occasion? We must eat. Do we have a meeting to discuss business? We should eat. And on and on and on. I must have food. My life can be a parody of 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18. “Be [eating] always, [eat] continually; [eat] in all circ*mstances.” I’m exaggerating, but I can see possibilities for the enjoyment of food at every turn.

Your food may be your addiction to work or to sex or to entertainment. I am convinced that for much of the church in North America, it is our addiction to the busyness of programs and church activities.

I was surprised, then exhilarated, at how free I was during the fast. To my delight, I discovered that what I decided I must not do for a season was also something that I may not do. What began as a command quickly became a permission. The permission? Not to have to live on the level of my appetites. We muse eat to live, God made us that way. But he made us for more than food, he made us for himself. And if we glom on to his gifts so that we lose sight of the Giver, we become not only idolaters but slaves, and we starve spiritually.

That brings us back to those broken cisterns—the God-substitutes, the craving for salt of a man dying of thirst. It’s what Jesus said to the hungry crowd: “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you” (John 6:27). The saying “You are what you eat” is true in more ways than one.

Because of this, it soon became apparent to me that ending the fast would be as important as beginning it. For as the fast came to an end, I actually became a little nervous, almost afraid to go back to eating normally, for fear I might lose the new freedom I had gained—lose it with the freedom to eat more varieties of food.

Second, my mind was marvelously focused on the fact that gluttony is about more than mere volume of food. It can also express itself as an inordinate interest in the experience of food, making taste buds promiscuous and stomachs ravenous for novelty and variety. I eat out often, and one of my occupational hazards comes through the increasingly voluminous pages of menus I open in restaurants. Some read like travelogues, describing the exotic, even spiritual experiences I will have if I order this item or that. I’ve seen chocolate desserts described as “pure sin” and roast beef and mashed potatoes as “comfort.”

The fast focused my mind on the simple goodness of God’s creation. At first, the foods I restricted myself to made the prospect of a meal seem a boring event. Beans again? Another salad? But soon I rediscovered just how good a mere carrot can taste. A carrot, nothing more. Or a plain slice of bread, or a crisp apple. With simplicity comes gratitude and joy.

Blessed are the hungry

The third and most marvelous focus the fast brought to my mind was that food is ultimately not about food but about God. This is also true with all other appetites and longings, be they ambition or companionship or success or sex. The meaning of hunger, indeed of all desire, is to point us to God. It can be a good thing to be hungry. We shouldn’t be too quick to make it go away, for it can teach us much about our frailty, need, and ultimate emptiness and despair apart from God. Dissatisfaction and discontent, longing and restlessness can be marvelous tutors.

The seventeenth-century pastor and poet George Herbert pictured God pouring every blessing into his human creature—beauty, wisdom, honor, pleasure—but stopping when it came to the blessing of rest or satisfaction. Herbert reasoned that if God bestowed rest along with all his other blessings, man would remember God’s gifts instead of God himself:

He would adore My gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature.…3

God decided it would be better for us to be rich, yet weary and hungry:

If goodness leade him not, yet weariness
May tosse him to My breast.4

A full stomach can be cause for deep gratitude, or as it has so often been the case for me, cause for spiritual dullness and torpor. A little hunger never hurt anyone, but its absence might. We are more than our stomach, much, much more. We may never know this until we let it ache.

Perfect Host

What’s your image of God? The Bible portrays him as King, Warrior, Husband, and above all, as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Have you ever thought of him as a host? When the Prodigal Son came home, his father threw a big barbecue to celebrate his return. Jesus said God is like that. Can you picture him dressed in black pinstripe pants and a red brocade vest, face beaming with delight as he fills the glasses of his guests?

He showed himself that way to the prophet Isaiah:

“Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what
does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat
what is good,
and your soul will delight
in the richest of fare.
Give ear and come to me;
hear me, that your soul may live”

(Isa. 55:1-3).

There’s pleading in those words. God wants us to come and eat and be satisfied in him. Can you see him humbling himself, even leaving the party, and going outside to plead with the son who won’t feast? Begging him to come inside and eat and be joyful in the joy of his father? He’s still doing that with his prayerless people.

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), 1-2.

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). The more we eat, the less we like what we eat, but the more we want to eat it. So Frederick Buechner defines gluttony as raiding the refrigerator to cure a case of spiritual malnutrition; and lust as the craving for salt of a man dying of thirst.Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 31, 54.

George Herbert, “The Pulley,” (New York: AMS Press, The Fuller Worthies Library, 1874), 183.

Ibid., 184.

Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson

ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE plants in nature is the Ibervillea sonorae. It can exist for seemingly indefinite periods without soil or even water. As Annie Dillard tells the story, one was kept in a display case at the New York Botanical Garden for seven years without soil or water. For seven springs it sent out little anticipatory shoots looking for water. Finding none, it simply dried up again, hoping for better luck next year.

Now that’s what I call perseverance: hanging on, keeping on when it’s not easy.

But perseverance has its limits, even for the Ibervillea sonorae. In its eighth year of no water, the rather sad*stic scientists at the New York Botanical Gardens had a dead plant on their hands.

Most of us know what it’s like to find ourselves past our seventh season, bereft of water, thirsty, and waiting for the eighth spring. No more energy and barely enough hope to send out one more pathetic little shoot. And it happens to us more like seven or eight times a year. Would that we could last like that tough little desert plant.

Sometimes it’s simple fatigue that finally takes its toll. Too much work, a lingering illness, or poor diet come singly or in combination, and we find ourselves desperately in need of a good night’s sleep, a day off, a walk in the park, or an antibiotic. That’s all there is to it. Simple fatigue, simple treatment, and we snap back like a rubber band.

Deeper meaning

But there may be a deeper meaning to our thirst and fatigue. John Sanford paints a picture of this in his description of an old well that stood outside the front door of a family farmhouse in New Hampshire. The water from the well was remarkably pure and cold. No matter how hot the summer or how severe the drought, the well was always a source of refreshment and joy. The faithful old well was a big part of his memories of summer vacations at the farmhouse.

The years passed and eventually the farmhouse was modernized. Wiring brought electric lights, and indoor plumbing brought hot and cold running water. The old well was no longer needed, so it was sealed for use in possible future emergencies.

But one day, years later, Sanford had a hankering for the cold, pure water of his youth. So he unsealed the well and lowered a bucket for a nostalgic taste of the delightful refreshment he remembered. He was shocked to discover that the well that once had survived the severest droughts was bone dry! Perplexed, he began to ask questions of the locals who knew about these kinds of things. He learned that wells of that sort were fed by hundreds of tiny underground rivulets which seep a steady flow of water. As long as the water is drawn out of the well, new water will flow in through the rivulets, keeping them open for more to flow. But when the water stops flowing, the rivulets clog with mud and close up. The well dried up not because it was used too much, but because it wasn’t used enough!

Sanford observed that our souls are like that well.1 If we do not draw on the living water that Jesus promised would well up in us like a spring (John 7:38), our hearts close and dry up, and we find ourselves in our “eighth season.” The consequence for not drinking deeply of God is to eventually lose the ability to drink at all. Prayerlessness is its own punishment, both its disease and its cause. That’s the deeper meaning to our fatigue in the ministry.

Acedia

So like people dying of thirst in the desert, we stagger exhausted and aimless through our days. Preaching, teaching, training, counseling, and administrating become intolerably burdensome because we have somehow forgotten why we are doing them. This weariness comes close to what medieval theologians called the deadly sin of sloth or acedia. Simple fatigue says, “I know I should be doing this, but I just can’t seem co generate the energy.” Acedia says, “Why? What difference does it make?”

“Acedia is all of Friday consumed in getting out the Sunday bulletin,” says Richard John Neuhaus in Freedom for Ministry. “Acedia is three hours dawdled away on Time magazine, which is then guiltily chalked up to ‘study.’ Acedia is evenings without number obliterated by television, evenings neither of entertainment nor of education, but of narcotized defense against time and duty. Above all, acedia is apathy, the refusal to engage the pathos of other lives and of God’s life with them.”2

A physician friend gave me an article from the Journal of Internal Medicine that dealt with the psychological state conducive to illness called the “giving up, given up complex.” It is found in people who lose the reasons for living; who are saying of their existence, “Why? What difference does it make?”

Acedia can make bodies vulnerable to disease and pastors terminally tired of the ministry.

Hyperactivity

Curiously, spiritual fatigue can produce what appears to be the opposite of sloth or acedia: hyperactivity. But in reality, it is just another dimension of the same thirst and sense of “why” that saps us of our ability to do the “what” of ministry. “Hyperactivity and sloth are twin sins,”3 says Neuhaus, and rightly so. The only real difference is the anxious, frenetic shape hyperactivity takes. Too tired to pray, or too busy to pray: both are flip sides of the same coin. Either we stagger through our days exhausted and aimless like people dying of thirst in the desert; or like children lost in the woods, the more lost we feel, the faster we run.

Driving is the word that describes the schedules of so many of us who are no longer motivated to do the real work of the ministry. Hyperactivity is to authentic motivation as junk food is to a nourishing diet. It gives us the feeling of satisfaction while starving us to death. In the New Testament it is the Ephesian syndrome described in Revelation 2:1-7. The first love is gone, and now all that is left is the form and the trappings. This may be the malady most preyed upon by the innumerable seminars offered today on the techniques of church leadership. When we forget “why” we become obsessed with “how.” Where once there was creativity and the tenderness born of deep love, there is now only the sex manual.

I crashed emotionally when I was twenty-six years old. I had dried up inside, and I was lost and running. Let’s see if I can remember all I was doing: I was a full-time seminary student, head resident in the men’s dorm at a local Christian college—that was full time, too—and I was working part time as the area director for Young Life in a nearby city. I was also on retainer as a speaker for a Christian conference center. In addition, my personal life was a contradiction to much of what I was preaching.

I came back to my room at the dorm one evening so tired I went straight to bed at eleven o’clock. That’s early for a student living in a resident hall. Immediately I fell asleep and had a terrible nightmare. In the dream, I was backed into a corner by pale, ghoulish creatures who were plucking and tearing at my flesh, taking large chunks with each lunge. I awoke with a jerk and laid there for a while doing what I always do when I have a nightmare: I tried to talk myself back to reality. But I couldn’t, because the dream was reality. I finally had to get up, get dressed, and walk around the dorm for a while just to get over the terror I felt. Only then could I go back to bed and go to sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, I felt like I had a hangover. (At that time in my life, I knew what a hangover felt like.) But I hadn’t drunk anything the night before. To clear my head, I decided to walk over to the college track and go for a run. But when I got there, the gate was locked. I had climbed over the eight-foot fence many times, but this time it was just too much for me. If you would have seen me there that day you would have seen a young man bawling like a baby. The thought of one more thing to do was overwhelming.

When I stopped crying, I managed to climb over the fence and run for a while. My head a bit clearer, on my walk back to my room, I admitted to myself that I was in big trouble. The well was dry. I hadn’t taken a drink of God in only he knew how long. I quit almost everything I was doing, got some help, made some fundamental changes in my outlook, and got on the road to health. One could say that for the next season of my life I took a pick and shovel and dug down deep to where the water had once flowed. It took a lot of sweat and work and coming to terms with no small amount of regrets, deep pain, and frustration. That’s the way it usually is with repentance. But I thank God that I came to the point sooner rather than later; at twenty-six, instead of forty-six. For us in ministry, the stakes can only get higher as we get older and acquire more responsibilities.

Has the well gotten dry since? Never as bad as then. But it still does sometimes, and the way it usually shows itself is with hyperactivity. I know it’s happening again when I go off to a quiet place for a day of prayer—and sleep all day, instead of pray. I’m so tired. It’s a sign that it’s been too long since I truly drank living water. With prayer, it can be like the so-called quality time I used to promise my spouse or children. It’s a way I excuse myself from doing what I most need, but often least want, to do. As with my loved ones, so with prayer: there is no quality without quantity. No day of prayer can atone for weeks without prayer.

Hubris

The twin sins of acedia and hyperactivity can be expanded into triplets with the addition of a third: hubris. The Greeks used the word hubris, or pride, to speak of presumption, the folly of trying to be like the gods. This vice, rather than stemming from spiritual thirst and fatigue, is their essence. For the Christian, hubris is anything we do to try to save ourselves. For those in the ministry, it is anything we do to cry to save the church or our ministry: clerical works-righteousness.

Hubris is bad enough by itself, but it also sets us up for acedia and hyperactivity. The greatest crisis I faced in my first church as a senior pastor came early, and it concerned the thing I most loved to do—preach. A pattern had developed in my weekly routine. Sunday afternoon through Monday morning I would be mildly to greatly depressed. Monday afternoon through Wednesday evening I would feel fine. Thursday I would begin to be a little irritable. The irritability would build on Friday, and on Saturday I would be very hard to live with. Then, voila! On Sunday morning I would be transformed into the caring, engaging, and totally charming person everyone but my wife knew as Pastor Ben. Then, on Sunday afternoon, I would drop back into exhaustion and depression.

Week after week this cycle repeated itself. After a few months, I found myself vacillating between frenetic activity and paralyzing sloth—sometimes within the same day. I was bipolar spiritually and emotionally. I never doubted that God had called me to preach, but I was beginning to hate what I loved. Was this the way it was going to be the rest of my life? Living to do what I couldn’t live with? Something had to change.

The insight came to me one day as I sat at my desk in my study. In the bookshelves directly across from me were the collected sermons of the preachers I revered: Spurgeon, Maclaren, Thielicke, bound in leather for posterity to read and to admire. Each week as I prepared, to preach, it was as though they sat there in critical silence, measuring me and my words like a Ph.D. dissertation committee. I wanted so to please them—and to join them! I was trying each week to preach the world’s greatest sermon; I wanted my sermons to be bound one day in leather for posterity to read and admire, too. That, I submit, is a terrible reason to preach. Instead of playing before an audience of one, God, I was playing before many: my people, my mentors, possible publishers, and generations to come. Superstar-dom escaped me each week, and the depression I felt each Sunday afternoon grew out of the disparity between what I sought and what I actually got. My sermonizing was clerical works-righteousness. Hubris had led me to shoot for fame instead of faithfulness. And it had me worn out and dry inside.

Prayer would be of inestimable value if it did nothing more than remind us of who we are before God. Unless the Lord builds the house, our work is useless (Psalm 127:1). Apart from him we can do nothing (John 15:5). Prayer is a reality check. It is impossible to both pray and be filled with hubris.

Remember why

Acedia, hyperactivity, hubris—all are forms of forget-fulness, of losing touch with the “why” and the “who” of ministry, of being cut off from the Vine, whose branches we are, and then keeping busy enough or noisy enough or narcotized enough not to have to face up to the fundamental disjointedness of our lives.

There is only one antidote to forgetfulness, and that is remembrance. In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrims were leaving the Delectable Mountains after the shepherds warned them to beware of traversing the Enchanted Ground. The overwhelming desire there would be to fall asleep, never again to awake. And it was just as the shepherds told them it would be: the drowsiness there became nearly unbearable. Hopeful pleaded for a nap, just one little rest. But Christian made him talk. He asked him the question, “By what means were you led to go on this pilgrimage?” In other words, he asked, “Why are you on this journey? Why are you doing this?” By telling the story, and thus remembering why he was on the pilgrimage, Hopeful kept talking and kept walking.

It is remembrance that keeps us awake; it is significant that the supreme act of Christian worship, the Lord’s Supper, draws us into fellowship with Christ by calling us to remember his mercy and love for us. It is a love feast spread out upon a redeemed and quickened memory. To pray is also to remember. It is to look into the face of the One who came to our side and saved us when we were lost and then called us into his service. It is to nourish the tender first love that Christ so passionately wants us to remember (Rev. 2:5). To pray is to connect again with the love that compelled us to declare the Good News to the world. To pray is to remember why we are doing this thing called ministry.

The trouble is, the more we need to remember why, the less we feel like remembering why. The more we need to pray, the less we want to. Not to pray is to lose the desire to pray, for prayerlessness is its own punishment. But pray we must. We cannot sit and wait for the desire to pray to suddenly come upon us like the tongues of fire at Pentecost. Just do it. The choices we make when we are not motivated are the most critical of our Christian walk. C. S. Lewis touched on this when he had the devil Screwtape advise his nephew Wormwood chat God sometimes overwhelms us with a sense of his presence early in our Christian experience, but that he never allows that to happen for too long. His goal is to get us to stand on our own two legs, “to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.” Screwtape observes that during such “tough periods, much more than during the peak periods,” we are growing into the creature God wants us to be.4

I cannot stress this too strongly: Just do it. You remember by remembering. You learn to pray like you learned to swim—not by talking about it but by getting in the water and splashing around. You relearn prayer the same way. Prayer is a discipline before it is a joy, and remains a discipline even after it becomes a joy. A friend, a champion wrestler, keeps a poster on the wall of his basem*nt where he works out with weights. It shows a man straining to lift a weight, sweat fairly bursting from a grimacing face, veins bulging on his neck. The caption reads: “There are two kinds of pain: the pain of discipline, and the pain of regret.”

How like life—and the life of prayer. To be alive is to hurt. The choice is not whether to hurt, but how. That you can choose. You can choose the discomfort of the discipline of praying when you don’t feel like it, or the desolation and terminal fatigue of life and ministry without prayer.

Remember who

There’s only one thing better than remembering why you’re serving Christ; it’s remembering who he is. It is he who says to the weary and worn out, to the too-pooped-to-pray, “Come to me … and I will give you rest … and you will find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:28-29). He knows how hard it is to do the work of the kingdom. He understands our exhaustion. He sympathizes with us even in our prayerlessness. Just to be with him is enough. There is no other one, no other place to go. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

Luke has a marvelous line in his account of Peter and John’s appearance before the Sanhedrin. He says the rulers, elders, and teachers of the law who sat in that august chamber were astonished at the courage of these unschooled and ordinary men. The greatest thing we have to offer our people is not our education. It is not our good ideas. It isn’t even our gifts and abilities. It is the fruit of the time we have spent with the Savior, the utterly unique and unparalleled thing that happens to us when we are simply in his presence.

The career road of ministry is littered with the bodies of fatigued and spent religious professionals. That’s because the ministry is not a career, nor are we who serve in it professionals. The ministry is a calling. The distinction between the two—calling and career—is pivotal if we are to understand the central place of prayer in our work.

The word career gives itself away. It comes from the French carriere, meaning a road, or a highway. The picture is of a course on which one sets out, road map in hand, goal in sight, stops marked along the way for food, lodging, and fuel. Looking back, we can speak of one’s career as the road one took in life. But more often we speak of it looking forward, as the path one chooses and plans to travel professionally, an itinerary charted and scheduled. The destination is primary. The roads are well marked. The rest is up to the traveler.

Organ of faith

A call, on the other hand, has no maps, no itinerary to follow, because a call depends on hearing a Voice. The organ of faith is the ear, not the eye; we walk by faith, not by sight. First and last, a call is something one listens for. Everything depends on the relationship of the listener to the One who calls.

It’s like the tale of a father and a son on a journey to a distant city. There were no maps. The trip would be long and hard, fraught with danger. Only the wisdom and experience of the father would get them safely to their destination. Along the way the boy grew curious about his surroundings. What was on the other side of the forest? What would he see if he stood on that distant ridge? Could he run over there and look? His father said yes.

But the boy was a little nervous. “What if I wander too far from you, Father? What if I get lost?”

The father said, “Every few minutes I will call your name and wait for your answer. Listen for my voice, my son. When you can no longer hear me you will know you’ve gone too far.”

Everything depends on the relationship of the listener to the One who calls. God called Abraham to go to a land that “I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Why didn’t God just tell Abraham where he wanted him to go, give him what he needed to get there, and be done with it, then and there? Why this “I will show you” business? It’s so frustrating! But God knows us too well. He knows that if we had the plan and the place, we’d try to get there without him. Just ask Abraham. And we need God far more than we need the plan and the place. Though severe, it’s a mercy when he lets us grow weary and dry up inside. For then we come back to him. Just ask Abraham.

That’s why we pray. And that’s why we get so exhausted when we don’t. For when we lose him who is the Way we lose the way.

What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear;
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer.
Are we weak and heavy laden,
Cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge;
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do thy friends despise, forsake thee?
Take it to the Lord in prayer;
In His arms he’ll take and shield thee,
Thou wilt find a solace there.
5

Amen.

John A. Sanford, The Kingdom Within (Philadelphia and New York: J. P. Lippincott Company, 1970), 15-16.

Richard John Neuhaus, Freedom for Ministry, revised edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 227.

Neuhaus, Ibid., 228.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944), 46-47.

Joseph Scriven, Charles C. Converse, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” in Hymns, Paul Beckwith, ed. (Chicago: InterVarsity Press, 1952), No. 111.

Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson

GREAT BASEBALL CATCHER Yogi Berra played a game in which the score was tied with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. The batter from the opposing team stepped into the batting box and made the sign of the cross on home plate with his bat. Berra was a Catholic, too, but he wiped out the plate with his glove and said to the pious batter, “Why don’t we let God just watch this game?”

Letting God just watch. That’s good theology when applied to the outcome of a baseball game. It’s terrible theology when applied to the way we live our lives and carry out the work of the church. Worse than that, it’s fatal.

But too often that is precisely the outlook we bring to our vocation as Christian elders, deacons, and pastors. God attends the game, but only as an honored spectator. Our prayers are merely ceremonial functions, like asking the President of the United States to throw out the first baseball at the beginning of baseball season, they are tips of the hat, verbal recognition over the loudspeaker between innings. He may even be in the dugout, but he rarely, if ever, gets on the playing field.

Are my words too strong? Not if I am to believe half of what I hear from my colleagues about the weight and frequency assigned to the role of prayer in their work. Prayer is always getting nudged aside, neglected, or perfunctorily performed as more pressing concerns cake center stage. Many of us feel we just have too much to do to have time to pray. That’s the problem. We don’t believe we are really doing anything when we pray—other than saying the words, chat is.

That attitude is one of the most subtle and pernicious forms of worldliness infecting the church today. Why don’t we believe we’re getting anything done when we pray? Two reasons: the world’s view and the world’s pace.

All there is?

The world’s view is basically a philosophical issue. It’s the view of secularism; the notion that the material world is all there is; chat reality is limited to what we can caste, touch, hear, smell, and see; and that we therefore live within a closed system of cause and effect, with nothing outside to influence what goes on inside. Such a world-view is suffocatingly claustrophobic. It is what sociologist Peter Berger called a “world without windows.” G. K. Chesterton said it feels spiritually like what middle-aged businessmen feel after a big lunch. There can be no prayer in that kind of world, only spiritual slumber.

Of course, no Christian can be a secularist. But she can, however, be secularized. Secularism is a formal philosophical system. Secularization is a sociological reality. According co Os Guinness, it is a process by which religious ideas, institutions, and interpretations are losing practical social significance.

That last phrase is the operative one. For instance, it is fine to pray in your support group; it builds intimacy and warmth. But when we need to get something done in the church? That calls for practical things: committees, not prayer calls; talking, writing, telephoning, spending, budgeting, mobilizing, organizing, and mailing. And those kinds of things cake time. So prayer gets preempted. It’s a pleasant luxury that would be wonderful to spend more time on, if only we had the time to spend. But necessity presses in. After all, we have the budget to complete, the policies to formulate, and the proposals from the fellowship committee to act upon.

Not all there is

God’s view couldn’t be more opposed to that fatuous perspective. Our battle is not with these so-called necessities, but “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12). We therefore fight a spiritual battle wearing spiritual armor and wielding spiritual weapons: the shield of faith, the breast-place of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, the belt of truth, the shoes of the gospel of peace, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. (See Ephesians 6:13-17.)

Prayer plays a critical role in all of these. For how do we put on this armor? And how do we wield this sword? By praying “in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Eph. 6:18). We put on the armor with prayer. We wield the Spirit’s sword with prayer.

What if every church business meeting began with a reading of that passage from Paul? What if pastors, elders, and deacons really believed we were in the midst of a raging spiritual battle in which the stakes, the territory being fought over, is none other than ourselves and our people? What confidence would we place then in our organizational charts, lines of accountability and authority, budget reports, and plans for the Labor Day picnic? My hunch is that we’d all be too frightened not to pray. We’d all become foxhole Christians. Can there be any other kind?

It isn’t that those business items are trivial; they are to be included in the responsibilities of Christian leaders. They are, however, trivial in comparison to our vocation to be men and women of prayer. To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge’s famous remark about the business of America being business, the business of the church is to pray.

The hard and the soft

God’s view is that there is one reality, but two dimensions: one seen, the other unseen (Col. 1:16.). But of the two, it is the unseen that is the larger and the more determinative. In fact, the seen is usually the arena in which the drama of unseen realities is being played out. It is the unseen that gives meaning to the seen. Rather than negating the seen, the unseen frames it and gives it a reference point. So Paul writes of his often difficult and discouraging work as an apostle in the realm of the seen, as being defined by the unseen:

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16-18)

When I was in college, we used to speak of so-called hard courses and soft courses. The hard courses were the sciences, things like physics and biology, chemistry and math. The soft courses were things like philosophy and English, history and art. Hard meant fixed, solid, unchanging. Soft meant shifting, unsubstantial, ephemeral. But if change in the sciences has demonstrated anything in the last thirty years, it has shown just how changing these hard things are and how timeless the soft things are. Indeed, without the soft things, the hard things lose their meaning. So it is with the seen and the unseen.

When we lose God’s view of things we lose perspective on everything else, too. Distinctions between the good, the better, and the best—even good and evil—grow fuzzy. A kind of radical egalitarianism takes over our responsibilities and activities, with anything and everything screaming for equal attention, equal time. Henry Zylstra was writing about life in the ’60s, but what he said is truer now than it was then. If the proverbial anthropologist from Mars were to return from Earth to report to his planet on the religious culture of North America:

[He] could do worse than take a copy of Time magazine with him, point to its table of contents, and say that what he had seen down here was a lot of people interested in: Art, Books, Cinema, Education, Medicine, Music, People, Personality, Press, Radio, Religion, Sports, Theatre … and the rest. If he were then asked whether the item called Religion, tucked in there between Radio and Sports, were the governing thing here … he would have to say that he thought it was not. He would have to say that Religion was operating alongside of those other things rather than in them and through them.… Presumably the man from Mars would have to report that religion, so far as serving as the leaven which keeps the body of the national life from crumbling is itself one of the fragments.1

In this regard, the church has become a reflection of the culture, a thermometer instead of a thermostat. When prayer is moved to the periphery of the church, it can only mean that God has, too, and life becomes fragmented and very, very busy. For the world’s view leads inevitably to the world’s pace. The logic of secularization is busyness.

There is a sign on the Alaskan Highway that reads, “Choose your rut carefully. You’ll be in it for the next 200 miles.” The view that sees the material as all there is, or all that is of any practical value, creates a pace that is frantic at times, monotonous at others.

I read an article that, at the time, created a great deal of anxiety in me: “If You Are 35, You Have 500 Days to Live.” Subtract the time you will spend sleeping, working, and tending to personal matters such as hygiene, odd chores, eating, and traveling. In the next 36 years you have 500 days of leisure. If this world is all there is, then none of us should waste our time praying. We should literally be grabbing for all the gusto we can get.

We see precisely that all around us. Yet, as leisure time increases, so do the problems of emptiness, boredom, and restlessness. We have, as a culture, a frantic determination to relax, unwind, and have fun. Where an earlier generation may have been compulsive about work, we are compulsive about what we do with our leisure time. We have made an idol of activity. Goethe’s Faust is in many ways the quintessential modern. When he was trying to re-translate John 1:1, he searched for a more suitable equivalent to the Greek logos than “word.” He settled on act. Thus: “In the beginning was the Act, and the Act was with God, and the Act was God.”

God’s pace

God’s pace is different. He says to us, ” ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.’ ” But even as he says this, he knows how slow we are to believe it. He adds, ” ‘But you would have none of it.’ ” It’s true, too true.

God parodies our solutions to our busyness: ” ‘You said, “No, we will flee on horses.” Therefore you will flee! You said, “We will ride off on swift horses.” Therefore your pursuers will be swift'” (Isa. 30:15-16). How do we try to solve our busyness? Why, we get busier! God’s judgment is to hand us over to the logic of our choices. The faster we run, the faster our anxieties will run. Until, perhaps, we fall exhausted and let God be God.

Theologian Hans Kung wrote On Being a Christian, a 602-page theology of the Christian life, without a word about prayer. He was asked why, and he answered, in effect, “I forgot.” There was the publisher’s deadline, and the harassment he was receiving from the Vatican, and he overlooked prayer. Precisely. Prayer is always the first thing to go when we get caught up in the world’s pace. And only prayer can deliver us from that pace.

Contrast that with Jesus. One day he is approached by a distraught father, a leader in the local synagogue, Jairus by name. His twelve-year-old daughter is dying. Would Jesus please come and help his little girl? If ever there was a. 9-1-1 emergency, that was one.

So Jesus walks to his house. I had a friend remind me one busy day that Jesus walked just about everywhere he went. When he brought this to my attention, I said, “Of course he walked. He lived in the first century.” But my friend smiled triumphantly and said, “Couldn’t he have been born now, when he wouldn’t have to walk everywhere? Wouldn’t that have made so much more sense for the fulfilling of his mission on earth—to be born when he could have had a cellular telephone, a fax machine, and a word processor, access to air travel and the media? But doesn’t the Bible say that he was born in the fullness of time, at the best possible moment in history? (Gal. 4:4). Clearly, he thought it was sufficient to come at a time when all he could do to get the message out was to walk places.” Jesus didn’t appear to be in nearly as big a hurry as I was.

On his way to Jairus’s home, the crowd following him through the village street presses up against Jesus. Among them is a woman who has been suffering from a hemorrhage for years. She has it in her mind that if she can just touch Jesus’ clothes, she’ll get well. So she leans through the mass of bodies surrounding him and touches the hem of his robe. And the bleeding stops.

Jesus also stops. He looks around and says, “Who touched me?” His thoroughly secularized disciples say, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.” But Jesus insists: “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me” (Luke 8:43-46). And the woman crawls trembling to his feet and explains everything. One gets the impression reading this story that Jesus actually chats with her awhile.

Have you ever wondered what Jairus was doing while Jesus was taking care of this woman? I have. Was he out of his mind with grief and impatience, gesturing silently for Jesus to get a move on? I think so. The woman can wait, his daughter can’t. And, in fact, his girl does die.

But then Jesus walks to her and heals her, too.

Now, it would be a complete misreading of this story to conclude: “Sure, Jesus can take his time. It’s easy for him. He can raise the dead. He can miraculously do what didn’t get done. But I can’t.” But the point of the story is not that Jesus can fix whatever got broken while he was distracted. The point is he never got distracted—and therefore he could take his time, because Jesus, the man of prayer, was perfectly in touch with his Father’s will. He marched to the proverbial beat of a different drummer. He saw the seen through the perfect lens of the unseen.

And when he came to the end of his life, he could say to his Father with perfect calm and conviction, “I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4). He got it all done! When was the last time you went to bed and looked back over a single day, feeling you could say you did all you were supposed to do? But there is always enough time to do what God wants us to do. The problem is we don’t know what he wants because we’re too busy doing what we think he might want done. It really wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask him what he wants, would it? And then to listen?

Ora Labora

We would do well to take our clues from St. Benedict of Nursia. I first became aware of the Benedictines while driving across North Dakota one summer. Bored with the monotony of the Northern Plains, when my wife and I saw a church spire on the horizon, we turned off the interstate to see to whom it belonged. It was a Benedictine monastery. One of the brothers graciously gave us a tour. As we walked through the grounds and the buildings, I kept seeing the words Ora Labora. For all I knew, it was a kind of mouthwash. I was embarrassed at my ignorance, having gone to seminary and taken church history.

It took me a while to gee up the courage to ask. What I heard has changed my life.

Benedict founded his Benedictine order as a reaction to the worldliness of the sixth-century church. His slogan was Ora Labora, from the Latin ora, “pray,” and labora, “work.” He taught his followers that to pray was to work, and to work was to pray. Following chat rule, the Benedictine order broke down the artificial dichotomy between work and prayer. From there they also bridged the gap between the manual arts and the liberal arts, the physical and the intellectual, and the empirical and the speculative. A great tradition developed in which learning, science, agriculture, architecture, and art flourished. Much of what is considered beautiful “nature” in Europe today, particularly in France, was created by the Benedictine monks who drained swamps and cleared forests.

We must learn that prayer is our chief work. Only then can our work become prayer: real service, real satisfaction. This simple truth alone explains why so many workers in the church find themselves exhausted, stretched to the breaking point, and burned out.

How often has our telling someone we’ll pray for them been a cop-out? Meaning we won’t do anything that really matters, anything concrete; or meaning we want to maintain a safe distance from them and their need.

Our prayer is our work! Only when that is true for us will our work be prayer: real worship, praise, adoration, and sacrifice. The classical postures of prayer, arms stretched out and hands open, or head bowed and hands folded, are gestures of openness and submission to God. They express perhaps the greatest paradox of prayer: that only when we give up on our human efforts can God’s work begin and, mysteriously, human effort can come to fulfillment. As Ole Hallesby puts it in his book Prayer, “Wherever we touch his Almighty arm, some of his omnipotence streams in upon us, into our souls and into our bodies. And not only that, but, through us, it streams out to others.”2

Ora Labora.

Henry Zylstra, A Testament of Vision (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961), 181-82.

Ole Hallesby, Prayer (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1963), 63.

Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson

HE WAS A SEASONED VETERAN of the Christian ministry, my first boss in the church, a respected mentor, and a dear friend. I had asked him what he had to say to younger pastors like me as he approached his retirement. It was one of those what-would-you-do-if-you-had-it-to-do-over-again questions. His answer came quickly: “Don’t take it personally.”

“Don’t take what personally?” was my next question. He told me not to take it personally when things get tough in the church, when I am attacked or tired or depressed. Things like that go with the territory. We’re in a spiritual battle. When a soldier is shot at, he isn’t shocked. His feelings aren’t hurt. He doesn’t peer over his foxhole at his adversary and shout, “Was it something I said?” He expects it, he plans on it.

That’s spiritual realism. That’s what impelled Paul to write the Ephesians that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12). Note that the apostle assumes his readers already know that the work of the kingdom is a struggle. He doesn’t need to argue the point. The question is not whether we’re in a battle, but what kind. The battle is spiritual. So we don’t take it personally, we don’t get hurt feelings when things get hard. We are spiritual realists.

Hunting lions with a squirt gun

And realists that we are, we do something else. We pray. Paul urges us to remember this when he tells us to put on the full armor of God, to wear such things as truth for a belt, righteousness for a breastplate, the gospel of peace for shoes, faith for a shield, and salvation for a helmet. The sword is also of the Spirit—the Word of God. Prayer plays a pivotal and unique role in all of this. For how does one put on the armor or wield the sword? By praying “in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Eph. 6:18).

The command to pray is one of the few truly central and radical things God has called us to do in this spiritual warfare. It is central because it stands at the hub, the heart of our struggle. It’s not all we are to be about, for there are many other wonderful and critical things to do in this spiritual warfare, such as preach the gospel, cast out demons, feed the hungry, care for the poor. But these great things are to prayer what the spokes of a wheel are to the hub. When the hub weakens, the rest of the wheel collapses. “You can do more than pray, after you have prayed,” wrote A. J. Gordon, “but you can never do more than pray until you have prayed.”1It is a divinely ordered sequence. When Jesus called the Twelve, he called them so that they might do three things. The first was simply to “be with him.” With that in place, and from that place, he sent them out to do the rest: “to preach and to have authority to drive out demons” (Mark 3:14-15). All the work of the kingdom of God begins with simply being with Jesus. If it doesn’t start there, it doesn’t start at all.

The elders of the first church in Jerusalem understood this when they got so busy feeding widows and orphans that they weren’t praying as they should (Acts 6:1-7). So they reorganized the church and delegated the feeding program to others, not because it was beneath them, but because it was so important. If prayer was crowded out of its central place in the church, so too would be the widows one day.

Bambi vs. Godzilla

To pray is also to engage in radical warfare. Merely human action touches only the surface of things, but prayer gets past the veneer, past mere appearances to the root of the matter. To make this point and to encourage us therefore to persist in prayer, Jesus told the story of a confrontation between a desperate widow and a heartless judge, opposites in a world in which relationships are calibrated according to power ratios (Luke 18:1-8.) The widow is raw weakness. The judge is raw and callous power. She needs his help against a ruthless oppressor. He won’t give it, for he neither fears God nor cares about people.

What happens in this world when raw weakness meets raw power?

In the ’60s there was a popular cartoon short called “Bambi Meets Godzilla.” It opened with a cute little baby deer grazing in a flowery meadow. Pastoral music played in the background. Then a shadow came across the screen. It was the monster Godzilla! The little deer looked up innocently at the beast. The monster glared back as its giant foot came down and crushed him. End of cartoon. That’s the way it is in the world. When weakness meets raw, callous power, it’s Bambi meets Godzilla. Children are abused, whole peoples are enslaved and marginalized, senseless wars are fought, hatred is passed from generation to generation. The evil is endless and inexorable.

But Jesus’ story has a surprise ending. The widow persistently pleads her case and finally gets justice, despite the judge’s callousness. A victory is won! That’s what prayer does, says the Lord. It’s radical, it goes down deep beneath the surface to uproot evil and upset the status quo. History and the future belong to the intercessors.2 That’s because the real struggle is spiritual, not physical. Those who know this are the true subversives, guerrillas of the Spirit, moving kingdoms and creation from their knees.

Whose work it is

So we pray—we must pray—because we are in a spiritual struggle—that we must take personally. We must pray for another reason: the work of the church is God’s work, not ours. Jesus made that fact clear from the very inception of the church. He asked his disciples who people were saying he was. They gave the report: some were saying he was John the Baptist, others were saying he perhaps was Jeremiah or Elijah or another one of the prophets. Then he asked the biggest question God ever asks anyone: “But what about you? Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter shot his hand up to answer that one. He said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Pay close attention to what Jesus said in response to this first confession of faith in him. He first clarified how Peter came upon this momentous discovery. He let him know that it was not a conclusion that Peter arrived at on his own. He didn’t figure it out because he had spent so much time with Jesus, listening to what he said, watching his miracles. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven” (italics mine). Merely to have spent a lot of time with Jesus, up close and personal, as great as that must have been, was not sufficient for Peter to apprehend who Jesus was. It required a supernatural event, a divine revelation. God’s work begins with God, not humankind.

And so his work continues, for Jesus added, “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:13-18, italics mine). Of course we must pray! If God is the builder and we are his servants in the building of his church, it is presumptuous to build without prayer.

And completely ineffective. Jesus came down the Mount of Transfiguration to an argument his disciples were having with the teachers of the law. They were unable to heal a demonized boy, a pathetic child who was periodically seized by an evil spirit and thrown to the ground, foaming at the mouth. When Jesus was told what the brouhaha was about, he said something he must often feel when he looks at his prayerless church: “O unbelieving generation … how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy to me” (Mark 9:19). Then he healed the boy.

When the excitement died down enough for them to ask the question, his disciples said, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” Jesus’ answer is as devastating as it is brief. He said, “This kind can come out only by prayer” (Mark 9:29). They had to pray to drive the demon out! What on earth were they doing before Jesus walked up? Whatever it was, clearly they weren’t praying. They were trying to cast out demons without prayer!

Reversed thunder

Churches can run without prayer. Whole denominations can run without prayer. The question is: Is what they’re doing worth doing if they can do it without prayer? I don’t think so. Jesus commissioned his church to storm the gates of hell. The world is still full of the “this kind” that Jesus confronted in the story of the demonized boy. Evil and darkness are as intractable and entrenched as they were in the first century. Do we really believe that programs and committees and ecclesiastical exertions and pronouncements are going to change that? Jesus doesn’t. I think that when he’s not bored with them, he’s as angry as he was that day with his disciples. Nor should we believe in them. “This kind” will come out only by the power of God—that is, by prayer!

So we must pray, because the work of the church is God’s work, not ours! We must also pray because prayer actually gets God’s work done. That’s the way prayer-is seen in heaven. Ponder this scene in the throne room of heaven: An angel stands before God holding a golden censer, burning incense that is mixed with the prayers of the saints on earth. These prayers go up before God, and then are mixed with fire from the altar and hurled back down on earth. The amazing result is cataclysm on earth, “peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake” (Rev. 8:5).

Now picture the saints on earth, huddled in their prayer meetings. If their experience of prayer is anything like mine can be, they may often feel their prayers are barely making it to the ceiling, or are dribbling out and rustling across the floor like dry leaves. Prayer doesn’t frequently bring with it the sensation of cosmic power unleashed, what poet George Herbert called “reversed thunder.” But that is exactly what is happening! The whole creation is shaken by the prayers of the saints. Something is happening as they pray. Work is being done, whether they see it or not.

Or consider the words of Paul to Timothy in his first letter:

I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. (1 Tim. 2:1-2)

As first priority, Timothy’s congregation is to pray for public officials that they make public policy decisions favorable to the church. Paul doesn’t tell Timothy to pray that they be converted, although I’m sure he would be in favor of that kind of prayer too. He simply says to pray that these officials do the will of God, whether they know they are doing his will or not! This takes on even greater weight when we realize that the emperor at that time was the cruel madman Nero. Could a man like that actually do the will of God against his will? Paul tells Timothy to pray that he will. Clearly Paul believes prayer gets God’s work done.

Harder work than doing

My favorite text in this regard is Paul’s greeting at the end of his Colossian letter. He commends to his readers their pastor Epaphras, who is visiting Paul, and who is “always wrestling in prayer for you, that you may stand firm in all the will of God, mature and fully assured.” Then he adds, “I vouch for him that he is working hard for you and for all those at Laodicea and Hierapolis” (Col. 4:12-13). What hard work could Epaphras possibly be doing for these people, while he is away from them? His wrestling in prayer for them is hard work. Prayer actually gees God’s work done.

Mary Slessor was a missionary to West Africa in the nineteenth century. Her work among orphans there was nothing short of remarkable. Single and an activist, her days were long and arduous and at times lonely. She did the work of ten “normal” people in her lifetime. But she named prayer, not mere “doing,” as the real dynamic of her accomplishments. In letters home to her friends she wrote:

My life is one long, daily, hourly record of answered prayer. For physical health, for mental overstrain, for guidance given marvelously, for enmity to the gospel subdued, for food provided at the exact hour needed, for everything else that goes to make up life and my poor service.… I can testify with a full and often wonder-stricken awe that I … know God answers prayer.… Prayer is the greatest power God has put into our hands for service. Praying is harder work than doing … but the dynamic lies that way to advance the kingdom. I have no idea how and why God has carried me over so many hard places, and made these hordes submit to me … except in answer to prayer at home for me. It is all beyond my comprehension. The only way I can explain it is on the ground that I have been prayed for more than most. Pray on—power lies that way.3

“Praying is harder work than doing.” If Mary Slessor, the busy activist, could say that, it must be true. It is harder to pray than to simply “do.” That’s why Eugene Peterson says that the pastor who claims to be too busy to pray is really a lazy person. In busyness, he or she is procrastinating, avoiding the real work of prayer.

Why does God tell us to pray for the things he has promised to do anyway? For instance, he tells us to pray that his name will be hallowed and his kingdom come, things he has assured us he will bring to pass, anyway. After all, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess one day that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2:10-11). French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal suggests that God does it to give us the dignity of causality. When my children were young, they would “help” me mow the lawn. The grass was too thick and the mower too heavy for them to push. So I stood over them, hands on the mower handle with theirs, my body bent slightly forward, and pushed as they “pushed” it through the grass. I could have done the job better and more easily alone, but I wanted the pleasure of their company. I also wanted them to have something to do that mattered, to have the dignity of causality. I think God commands us to pray for much the same reasons.

God’s method

So we must pray, for prayer actually gets God’s work done. We must also pray because prayer allows God to work on us. A great prayer text is 2 Corinthians 3:18: “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory.”

To stand in the presence of God is, as it was with Moses’ shining face, to reflect his glory. Not only that, but it is to absorb his glory, to be transformed into his likeness. Like film in a camera, when the shutter opens to the light, we bear the likeness of the One who shines his light on us when we pray.

Perhaps one reason God delays his answers to our prayers is because he knows we need to be with him far more than we need the things we ask of him. I include myself among those who have prayed for years for someone or something with no apparent answer or resolution. But we can say that as we prayed long and hard, we found something we may not have been looking for when we began to pray, something better than the thing we asked of God. We found his incomparable presence. The praying can often be greater than the things we pray for.

Peter and John dazzled and scandalized the Sanhedrin with their courage when they were hauled before it to give an explanation for their wonder-working and preaching. After all, they hadn’t been to seminary (“they were unschooled”). They weren’t qualified to speak thus. Luke comments that the Sanhedrin “took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13, italics mine).

That’s it! That’s all we will ever really need to do the work of Jesus. The best thing we have to offer the world is not a seminary degree, not the preaching classes we have taken, not the books of theology we have read, not the management and leadership seminars we have attended, but the fruit of our walk with the Lord—what is borne in us from the time we have spent with him. As helpful as these things can be, they are at best spokes in the wheel—but never the hub. That’s why Dwight L. Moody said he would rather learn how to pray than how to preach. For Jesus’ disciples never asked him to teach them how to preach, but how to pray. Beware the preacher, the theologian, the professor who does not pray.

Where did we get the silly idea that a graduate degree in theology qualifies one to pastor the church of Christ? The clergy of the North American church is perhaps the best educated clergy in history. The church itself has more money, more books, more media tools than the church in any other place on earth. Yet with all this, the church overall is shrinking, not gaining in numbers. One has to go to the poor and uneducated countries of the earth, to places like East Africa and Latin America, to find a growing church. True, they need and desire leaders who are better educated. But in all this God seems to be saying to us something like the thing Jesus said to Martha, “You are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed” (Luke 10:41-42, italics mine). The one absolutely essential, nonnegotiable thing is to be with Jesus as Mary was. The church grows when its people attend to the one thing needed, not when it is preoccupied with the many things not needed.

That’s because people are God’s method, not techniques and programs. And people become usable to God only as they swell in his glorious presence. Emerson McKendree Bounds was alarmed at certain tendencies he saw in his denomination at the end of the nineteenth century. He would despair if he saw how what he then called a “trend of the day” has now become the order of the day:

We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God’s plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God’s method. The church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men…. What the church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Spirit can use—men of prayer, mighty in prayer. The Holy Spirit does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men— men of prayer.4

So, we must pray! I recently went back to preach in the first church in which I worked, the place where I worked under my first boss, the man who told me not to take it personally, to remember the nature of the battle we are in. As I walked to the church on that Sunday morning, my mind was awash in memories, most of them embarrassing. Arrogant and foolish, I said and did many things there I wish I hadn’t. But somehow God did some wonderful things both in and through me back then. Tears of gratitude and joy welled up in me. I said out loud to the Lord, “I was in over my head, wasn’t I? You have been so faithful.” I felt his smile with his rebuke as he answered, “So what makes you think you’re in your depth now?”

I’m still in over my head. So are you. So we must pray.

Source unknown.

To borrow a phrase of Berkhof Hedrikus in his book Christ and the Powers (Herald Press, 1977).

Basil Miller, 130, 138.

E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer, in The Complete Works of E. M. Bounds on Prayer (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1990), 447.

Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson

Our family is learning a lot about lacrosse these days. It’s a relatively new sport in our part of the country, but our younger son plays it. We’re learning the various techniques for handling the ball, attacking the opponent, scoring goals, and defending one’s net.

In a recent game as I watched our son play his position, I was confused by the movements he was making on the field. After the game I asked, “What were those moves you were making out there when your opponent was guarding you?” He replied, somewhat sheepishly, “Oh, I was just trying to avoid letting that big guy crush me!”

I laughed with him: “It’s always a good idea to know how to keep from getting crushed!”

I have had to learn a similar strategy in ministry: There are times when the best way to deal with conflict is to avoid it in the first place.

When I was a boy trying to get along with kids in the schoolyard, my father used to tell me, “The easiest fights to win are the ones you stay out of.” He was right, of course. But that’s easier said than done. I have a cartoon on the side of my filing cabinet that shows the pastor behind the pulpit on Sunday morning saying, “I interrupt this sermon to inform you that the fourth-grade boys are now in complete control of their Sunday school class. And they are holding Miss Mosby hostage at this very moment.” That’s a light way of talking about a painful truth: church conflicts can be nasty and bruising affairs, hazardous to the health of both the pastor and the church.

How do we stay out of a hostage situation? It’s not something discussed in seminary, or if it was, I was gone that day. I’ve learned the hard way, through years of mistakes caused by a brash style of leadership that alienated those who did not share my take-no-prisoners approach. I thought I was doing the work of God with passion and zeal. I accepted nothing less than total commitment from myself—the problem was I had the same rigid expectations of others. I believed that conflict was the natural companion of devoted service to Christ.

In time and in pain, I learned otherwise. God showed me that to avoid conflict is not to be lukewarm or unspiritual; on the contrary, Scripture pronounces a specific blessing on those who excel in the art of peacemaking. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God” (Matt. 5:9). I have learned to extend more grace to others and build more lasting relationships through mutual ministry. I now know that while no pastorate will be conflict-free, neither should conflict be shrugged off as an occupational hazard a pastor has to live with.

Effective ministry does not have to be carried out in a hostile environment.

Battle choosing

It was a great revelation to me to discover that not every battle is worth waging and not all conflict is worthy of my engagement. Some incendiary issues simply need to be avoided. When Nehemiah was leading the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem, he had plenty of opportunities for conflict. I am continually amazed at his skill in deciding which conflicts were worthy of his response and which were to be ignored so the work could continue.

After repeated attempts from Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem to thwart Nehemiah’s efforts, they concocted a scheme to get rid of him once and for all (Neh. 6). Their ploy was to lure him to the peace table so they could ambush him. Rather than confronting this trio of trouble head on, Nehemiah sidestepped their trap. He simply sent his regrets: “I am carrying on a great project and cannot go down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and go down to you?” (Neh. 6:4).

While writing this chapter, I had an opportunity to practice some of what I’d learned from Nehemiah. Normally I receive from our worship team the service plan two weeks in advance. However, due to spring break for our school district, a number of the team leaders were out of town, and so I didn’t get the worship service plan until the Monday before. There were a couple of significant problems with the service that I felt would adversely affect the flow of worship. I called our lay worship leader and talked to him about the changes I thought were necessary to allow for a better worship flow and build a stronger worship experience.

Somewhat reluctantly, he agreed to make the changes.

Then on Saturday evening I received an e-mail from him informing me that he had reconsidered, and he now wanted to stick to the original service plan. He said he was “sure I’d understand.”

There was a time in my ministry when I would have been on the phone two minutes later, demanding an explanation. In a diplomatic but direct way, I would have reminded him that the proper way to handle something like this is through personal conversation, not by e-mail, and that since I was the one ultimately responsible for the worship services, we would do it the way I proposed.

This time I took a deep breath, prayed that God would bless the service, and asked him to help me be gracious and affirming toward our worship leader and the worship team on Sunday morning. I then put the matter to rest for the remainder of the evening. On Sunday morning I acknowledged to our worship leader that I had received his e-mail, thanked him for thinking the situation through, and affirmed his decision to proceed with the service as originally planned. Nothing more was said about any changes to the service.

That response settled the issue.

The service proceeded as planned. While, in my humble opinion, the flow felt slightly disjointed during the early part of the worship, no one seemed to notice. Afterward I thanked God for his wisdom in teaching me how to choose my battles carefully.

When to go to the mat

In deciding which issues are significant enough to confront and run the risk of conflict, I usually ask myself three questions:

1. Does the situation involve something that is contrary to our mission as a church? If the issue before me does not conflict with our church’s mission of helping people discover a personal relationship with God and become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ, then I begin to think of it as something that ought to be left alone or dealt with in a nonconfrontational manner.

The leader of our worship team does a fine job leading worship, but he struggles to communicate with the worship team and staff. One team member recently told me, “We would work well together if we just didn’t have to communicate.”

It is not that the worship leader does not communicate; it is the way he communicates. He prefers not to speak face-to-face with people; he uses faxes, voice mail, e-mail, or memos. Seldom does he speak face-to-face with someone for more than thirty seconds.

Rather than making his style of communication into a huge issue, I’ve told people to be willing to adapt to his methods. In addition, I’ve suggested to the team to take the initiative in setting up meetings with him, with every member of the team present. As the leader has heard from the team how much they appreciate personal interaction with him, he is becoming more receptive to adapting his style of communication.

2. Does the issue cause us to compromise our commitment to being and building faithful followers of Christ? A problem arose with our adult-class leadership teams, which were not adequately preparing for their Sunday morning classes. This was hindering our efforts to model and teach the principle that we offer our best to God in serving him, so I decided that we needed to address the issue directly with the class leaders. I attended the monthly leadership team meeting for one of the classes and asked if I could speak to them about the issue. I explained, “This issue is not just about what day of the week you prepare your lesson or the amount of time it takes you to prepare for it. It is about us in leadership providing a model for the church body about the cost of serving Christ.

“If we are willing to pay that price in the small things, then God can entrust us with much larger responsibilities and give greater blessing to our service.”

There was nothing but graciousness in the reply of the leaders. They committed to strengthen that area. One leader replied lightheartedly, “If you call me on any Saturday this month and my lesson is not already 80 percent prepared, then I promise I’ll eat the coffee grounds in front of the class on Sunday morning!”

3. In one year will it make a difference in our church whether we dealt with this issue? If it seems to me that the situation is not going to make a difference in the church that anyone will remember or recognize in a year, then I am inclined to leave it alone or at least not deal with it in a confrontational way.

It’s amazing how few issues will be significant or even remembered in a year. What makes many of them significant or remembered is not the issues themselves but the degree of conflict they needlessly caused. I try to evaluate the “one-year significance” of potentially volatile issues and use that as an indicator of whether a situation should be avoided or addressed.

One challenge in our congregation is to get people in our Christian education ministries to arrive early enough to set up their classes by the time class is supposed to start. I’m often told that “for years our church has been ‘flexible’ with the time the Sunday morning Bible Discovery Hour begins.” In essence, that means a couple classes start at 9:15 A.M., the scheduled start time, but others begin at 9:30 or even 9:45.

No one got too worked up about that—except me!

I was tempted to attend the Christian education leadership meeting and announce that we would no longer have a delayed start on Sunday mornings. But then I asked myself, Is having all the classes start on time really going to make a significant difference in the church next year?

Since the education ministry was growing and had not been starting on time for years before I arrived, I had to answer no. I left the issue alone and labeled it “one of the quirks of our church.” There was no confrontation and thus no conflict.

If I answer no to all three questions, that tells me the issue is not worth risking conflict.

Integrity slide

A family in our church recently had their basem*nt finished by a contractor. The process ended up being one of those construction nightmare stories. I knew both parties in the debacle and somehow got myself in the middle of the dispute.

As the conflict became more ugly, I received calls from both sides; each party tried to use me to reinforce their case. Such conversations turned negative quickly. The homeowner once told me, “And not only does he [the contractor] do shoddy work, but I’ve heard stories about how unethical he has been in paying former employees.”

The contractor was guilty of the same low blows as the conflict escalated.

Eventually, I found myself succumbing to the temptation of letting my knowledge of the other party leak out in conversations with each side. It wasn’t until too late that I caught myself and moved back to a neutral position. But by then I had already said too much. One party confronted me about my loose tongue. I had to admit my error and then I went back to the other party and did the same. In the end, my error turned out to be a lesson for all three of us; the two parties admitted they had made the same mistake.

Conflict has a way of growing from a small snowslide into a full-scale avalanche, and on its way downhill it can sweep victims into its wake. A conflict has the potential to mar the integrity of combatants on both sides. That happens as each side seeks to garner support for its position—making exaggerated statements, shading the truth, impugning the motives of others.

How can we guard against this? One important step is to refuse to discuss the relevant issues with anyone other than those directly involved. We need to be truthful in citing the facts of a situation and not exaggerate the details. When we maintain our integrity, not only are we exhibiting Christlike behavior, but also we don’t risk losing our credibility with others—including those who may be on the other side of the argument.

A good friend of mine recently resigned from his church after more than a year of unrelenting conflict. The vast majority of people in the church were shocked to hear of his resignation. Most had no idea there was even a problem brewing in the church.

I asked him how that could be when the conflict was so severe. His response spoke volumes about his integrity throughout the ordeal. He said, “I never spoke about the problems with anyone in the church who was not directly involved. And those on the other side of the issue only spoke to each other with whom they were in agreement.”

Just because our adversaries may use a certain battle plan does not justify our following suit if it calls us to compromise our integrity. As Oswald Chambers once wrote, “To see that my adversary gives me my rights is natural; but from our Lord’s standpoint it does not matter if I am defrauded or not; what does matter is that I do not defraud.”

My friend’s response to the conflict in his church was a powerful example of what I call incarnational leadership. It’s the kind of leadership that Jesus would exhibit in the church—a leadership that refuses to win the battle at any cost. The victory won at the expense of our integrity is no victory at all.

Ounce of prevention

The sparse instruction I received in seminary on dealing with people and issues in the church could be put on a single piece of paper. However, there was one bit of counsel that was given among those limited lessons that could have saved me volumes of anguished journal entries. A pastor who was an adjunct professor said, “Work harder at maintaining relationships in the church than you do at solving problems in the church.”

His point was that if we focus on building and maintaining healthy, redemptive relationships with people, we will have far fewer problems to solve—and fewer problems means less conflict.

It was a wise statement, one that I wish I would have heeded more often in my early years of ministry. I wish I’d asked myself two questions: (1) Is this battle worth the cost of a broken relationship? (2) Is there another way of dealing with the conflict that won’t damage relationships?

A leader in one church I served was forever confronting me with ways in which I didn’t measure up to his expectations. It seemed my suggestions were seldom accepted, and my best efforts were usually not good enough. The strain on our relationship was so great that we seldom spoke to each other. We didn’t have a heated argument; we simply shut the other out.

After months of cold war, one Sunday he confronted me about a worship issue. I had felt convicted that our relationship wasn’t what it should be and was praying that God would provide a way for us to reconcile.

Several minutes after the confrontation, I walked back to where this man was standing and asked if we could talk. I told him I didn’t want the conflict between us to continue. I sincerely apologized to him for my wrong attitude and actions, and asked for his forgiveness. He granted it immediately and then threw his arms around me. In my ear, he whispered, “I’ve so needed to hear you say that, more than you’ll ever know. I only hope I can do the same one of these days.”

I knew what he meant. People who knew him were aware he seldom if ever admitted he was wrong about something. I didn’t expect I would hear an apology from him, but at least I had taken care of my shortcomings.

To make sure he knew I wanted a fresh start, I invited him to be my prayer partner two weeks later. I pray with someone from the church every Tuesday, and on his first Tuesday to pray, he arrived a little early. We talked a bit and then moved to my office to pray. Just before we finished praying, he stopped and said, “I want you to know that I am sorry for the way I treated you the past year. It was wrong, and I need your forgiveness just like you asked for mine.”

That confession melted away the last bit of hurt from the protracted conflict with him. Again, we embraced, and both of us acknowledged our new friendship was more important than any issue we had or would face. Since then we have built on that commitment to the point that we are becoming good friends.

In my recreational reading, I enjoy books on the history of various wars the United States has waged. I’ve learned a lot from studying Abraham Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War. Near the end of the war, when the scalawags were busy lording it over their Southern countrymen, a hot-blooded contingency of diehard Confederate rebels gained an audience with the president to address the issue. Lincoln’s gentle, friendly manner with the group soon thawed the ice and the Southerners left with a new respect for their old foe. A Northern congressman approached the president and criticized him for befriending the enemy. Instead, he said, Lincoln should have had them shot for the traitors they were. Lincoln smiled and replied, “Am I not destroying my enemies by making them my friends?”

Copyright © 1998 Gary D. Preston

I had just gotten off the phone with a man on the church board. He had called to warn me that my leading antagonist, also a member of the board, was going to confront me that evening at the board meeting. He was going to recommend the board reverse its previous decisions affirming the direction and mission of the church.

Without warning, my blood pressure went through the roof and I yelled, “I don’t believe this is happening. This means war!” My secretary came running into my office and asked what was going on. I told her, “We’re about to have the battle of this church’s life at tonight’s board meeting.”

Over the next few minutes, I turned into an infantry commander as I stormed through the office barking out orders to the staff. I wanted to gather damaging information about this board member, and I knew exactly where he was most vulnerable—his giving record. I asked the financial secretary to give me a printout of the man’s contributions over the past two years. The report reinforced my suspicions: this wealthy individual had given only $300 to the church during that time. I planned to take that report to the meeting, throw it on the table at the appropriate time, and say, “Gentlemen, do we want to hear more criticism and vitriol from someone who has invested so little in our church?”

If that didn’t put him in his place, nothing would.

Fortunately, I didn’t carry through with my plan, even though it seemed like the right tactic to silence my opposition for good. Now I’m a little embarrassed about it.

One of my favorite features in magazines and newspapers is the “Where Are They Now?” type of segment that focuses on the lives of well-known people from a then-and-now perspective. It’s interesting to discover the direction someone’s life has taken since he or she was in the public eye. I find value in that kind of reflection in my own life as well, especially as it relates to events that were significant in some way. Writing this book gave me a then-and-now look at my life since I left the church I described in the opening chapter. I can now see from this side of the conflict that God used my experience to deepen me—as a pastor and as a person.

Most of the lessons I’ve learned are woven into the previous pages of this book, but as I reflect on years of journal writing, I realize that through ministry conflict, God has helped me discover what kind of good he brings out of pain.

Hurt that refines

When I was in seminary I heard a speaker make a statement that at the time I scarcely believed. Quoting A. W. Tozer, the speaker said, “God cannot use a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply.” Around the same time I read a similar observation by Alan Redpath: “When God wants to do an impossible task, he takes an impossible person and crushes him.”

Could that possibly be true? I wondered. Does God ever bring hurt to our lives—even for the purpose of refining us or increasing our usefulness?

Many years and many hurts later, I’ve come to learn that there are lessons in life that can only be learned through God’s curriculum of pain. That’s part of what Jesus was getting at in John 15:2 when he told his disciples that “every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”

For example, pain has taught me to be more empathetic with people who are in need. At a pastor/spouse retreat, I remember hearing a friend tell of the difficulties he had experienced in his church that past year. He talked of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and harsh accusations that had erupted in the church. Several key leadership families had left, and he and his wife were feeling whipped and beaten.

I wasn’t prepared for the rush of emotion that came over me. Suddenly I could feel the pain he felt as though it were my own. I had felt that pain only a year and a half earlier. When he finished, I embraced him and his wife. Several others joined the circle, and our prayers for them issued from hearts knit together by our mutual experiences of pain.

Another way God has used pain in my life is to make me more relaxed and patient with people. My ideas and desires for the church are no longer so important that they have to be accepted right away, if at all. I acknowledge now that God may use someone else’s idea to accomplish his work in our church. I’ve also learned to concede the fact that people don’t always perform as I’d like. I realize that healthy relationships are more important than merely getting the job done. Even as I write this, these lessons seem so obvious, so basic to pastoral work. But they were murder to learn.

Not long ago I was working with our elder board to hire a new staff member. I felt the process was not moving along as quickly as I thought it should. A couple of elders had not completed their assigned tasks as scheduled, and because of this we couldn’t make any final decisions. A few years ago I might have gotten angry or impatient. Now I said, “What’s more important than getting this new position finalized is what’s going on in your lives. Obviously there are some things happening there that God is using to revise our schedule for this decision. Let’s relax and follow God’s lead in this issue.”

I wasn’t excusing someone’s inattention or irresponsibility. I had, however, learned to be more sensitive to someone else’s life—the struggles that may have affected his work.

All in the waiting

I remember my first roller coaster ride as a kid. It happened at a later age for me than it did for most of my friends. Even my younger brother had ridden a roller coaster before I had. But I was cautious, even fearful. Finally, with the urging of my older brother and my father—and feeling embarrassed that my younger brother had taken the plunge first—I screwed up enough courage and allowed my dad to take me on the coaster.

My father kept assuring me that everything would be okay. His last words were, “If it gets too scary, just tuck your head under my arm, and I’ll hang on to you.” From the moment the roller coaster crested the first hill until we rolled to a stop, my head was buried in his armpit. I knew that my dad would never intentionally try to hurt me or put me at risk. If he said I’d be safe, I’d be safe. That didn’t take the fear out of the ride for me, but it did allow me to stay close to him during the ride. In a similar way, the pain of being forced out of a church led me to trust God in a way that I had never done before. Although I had no understanding of what God was doing or why, I discovered that he could be trusted completely to bring me through the ordeal. I believed and would discover again that God had not been caught off guard. He wasn’t wringing his hands and wondering, What am I going to do with Preston now? Pain was part of God’s curriculum for my life, and I needed to learn to trust him through it.

I don’t know what prompted me to trust God. The trust was just there. Perhaps it was the deposit of years of Bible study, preaching, and teaching. What I knew in my head was now being called into service. During the first few days after my resignation, I recalled God’s curriculum for Moses’ life. According to Exodus 2, Moses ended up at the well in Midian, where he sat down, probably with his face buried in his hands, feeling like a failure. He would remain in the desert of Midian for the next forty years, tending the flock of sheep owned by his father-in-law, Jethro. Moses was there because he had killed the Egyptian. But rather than blaming God or carping at him for not preventing his situation, Moses waited and hoped and trusted. Moses trusted that somehow God was still in control and hoped that someday he would again call Moses to serve him.

That trust was well placed, for eventually God remembered his covenant with his people and went looking for Moses on the far side of the desert near Horeb. The moving story of how God appeared to Moses from the flames of a burning bush and called him once again to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt is familiar. But hidden in the great truth of God’s faithfulness is the lesson of Moses’ faith in God that enabled him to stay the course for forty years in the wilderness while he waited for God.

Trusting God allowed me to relax in terms of what I was to do next in ministry. I felt little compulsion to follow my natural instinct to begin networking to find a new ministry and source of income. However, God gave me a strong sense of certainty that he would provide for us in another way. The next few weeks after my resignation, I was amazed at the number of unsolicited phone calls and letters I received from friends and acquaintances. All offered prayer, and many gave suggestions or proffered assistance with making contacts for a ministry position. God had reassured us that, like Moses, we were not forgotten.

I learned anew that God’s responsibility is to meet our every need, while our responsibility is to trust him. That’s not to say that the way God provides will be the same in every situation. Trusting God may have led someone else to begin making phone calls and writing letters. In our case it was just the opposite. I would have preferred to take some action, but God said, “Wait and trust, and watch what I will do.”

No one is blameless

In marriage counseling I often find it necessary to play the role of judge or mediator in disputes between husband and wife. I point out to couples that they both bear responsibility for their problems. Often it’s hard for a couple to hear that, but until they do there isn’t much hope for getting the marriage back on track.

The same was true for me. In the months that followed my resignation, I began to recognize the role I had played in the debacle. It was easy to lay everything at the doorstep of my opposition—to blame the failures of the board or the silence of the staff or the lack of support from the congregation. But it didn’t help me work through the pain. It wasn’t until a friend made the offhanded comment “I guess by now you’ve figured out what you did wrong in all of this, too” that I began to look inward.

I thought about his casual remark for the rest of our lunch hour. I knew I had to think about what my role had been in the mess.

The Holy Spirit began to bring to mind several areas where I had failed; the few families who had engineered my departure weren’t alone in their failures. I had a few of my own.

For example, God showed me that I had not done all I could to care for one of the antagonistic families when their son went through a serious accident. I hadn’t handled a budget crisis well. I shouldn’t have been so quick to express my opinions about issues that were largely inconsequential. My list of failures continued to grow as the Holy Spirit worked in my heart. None of the mistakes on the list were grave in themselves. But taken together, they began to tell a story I could not deny—I had contributed to the situation. I had to come to terms with those failures. Acknowledgment and confession allowed me to experience God’s forgiveness, which in turn set me free to begin the process of forgiving others.

Deeper compassion

Suffering has a way of helping us deepen our compassion for others who suffer. Jesus is the only person who ever lived who didn’t need to grow in his ability to be compassionate to those in need. To him it came naturally and in full measure. That has not been so in my life.

I have become more sensitive to others who are hurting. When someone tells me of pain and hurt in her life, I often find my eyes filling with tears. Narrating a story of someone’s brokenness in a sermon can also bring tears to my eyes.

While preaching a series on the life of David, I discovered this same process had occurred in David’s life as a result of his broken relationship with his son Absalom. In Leap Over a Wall, Eugene Peterson writes, “The worst rejection of his life precipitated the most wonderful love—love for Absalom.” Through the pain of estrangement from Absalom, David “recovered his extraordinary capacity to love.”1

David’s newfound compassion must have startled everyone. Who expected him to respond to Absalom’s coup by mustering the troops and sending them into battle with the warning to his commanders that they were not to kill Absalom? David cautioned them, “Be gentle with the young man Absalom for my sake” (2 Sam. 18:5).

Was this an irrationally sentimental command? Or was it the result of God’s extraordinary work in that man’s heart, giving him a greater capacity for compassion? The Scripture leaves little doubt that the king’s lament for his fallen son Absalom was an authentic expression of compassion, learned through the pain of his son’s rebellion. Listen to David’s lament: “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you—O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Sam. 18:33).

Richard DeHaan tells the story of a man who was listening to others share their favorite Scripture passage with the congregation. Most of the verses spoke of salvation, assurance, or God’s provision. Finally, an elderly man stood up to take his turn. He said that his favorite words in the Bible were “It came to pass.” He explained, “When sickness strikes, it encourages me to know that it will pass. When I find myself in trouble, I know it won’t last forever. I’ll soon be able to say, ‘It came to pass.’ “

Although this man had inferred a different meaning from those words than the writers of Scripture intended, he saw in them an important truth that is found in the Bible: no matter how unending a trial may seem or how intense the pain we experience, the day will come when it will no longer be a burden or a source of distress. In fact, it will seem like nothing in the light of eternity. Second Corinthians 4:17 speaks of our “light and momentary troubles … achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”

Years after the most intense pain of my ministry, I can now look back and say with the apostle Paul that I was “struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Cor. 4:9-10).

A couple of years ago a particular family started attending our church. The wife told me, “We’re here to recover from the battles my husband has had with fellow missionaries.” I listened to the couple’s stories of conflict with the co-workers they thought were their friends. The couple felt misunderstood and hurt. They needed a place to heal from their wounds.

I must admit their presence in the church caught me off guard. Not long after that conversation, an executive from their mission headquarters called me, asking, “Would your church be willing to work with us to develop a plan to help this family recover?”

The memory of how one church had cared for me and my family after my being forced out of a church several years earlier came rushing back. I am still in the pastorate because of the compassion of that church. Its pastor, although he knew of our situation, didn’t publicly welcome us or rush us to get involved. He gave us anonymity. I needed that. I needed emotional space from the pounding our family had taken. He didn’t even ask me to tell him what happened.

Within a short time after our family began attending the church, several small groups invited us to join. It was a gracious, low-key way for people in the church to let us know they cared. I explained to the small group leaders that Suzanne and I weren’t ready for that level of intimacy. Two leaders said they would check back with me periodically. They offered to take the initiative. I appreciated that, for I didn’t have much initiative left in me.

After several months I began to want to serve again. One Sunday I mentioned this to the pastor, and the next Wednesday the associate pastor called and asked if I wanted to substitute-teach for an adult Bible class on Sunday morning. I did.

Then, not long after that, a church elder, whom I had known before coming to the church, invited me to lunch. He surprised me by asking if I would consider joining the staff at the church as an associate pastor. Exactly thirty days after that lunch, I sat in a staff meeting as pastor of adult ministries. I had been frank with the senior pastor, saying, “I’m interested in the position, but I don’t see myself as an associate pastor long-term.”

“Whether it’s six months or six years,” the pastor said, “my goal is to see God bring you back into ministry.”

I spent two years on staff at that church, and when I left, I prayed that God would give me the chance to do for someone what that church did for me.

When the hurting missionary family arrived at our church, I had my chance. That family joined our church and the husband ended up coming on staff for a year. When he left, he said, “Thank you for letting me experience what healthy relationships can be like.”

The church, which has so much potential for inflicting pain on a pastor and his family, also has great potential for being an instrument of healing, for restoring vision for ministry. If nothing else, the suffering I’ve experienced at the hands of churches has forced me to think of others. The character forged from conflict, in the end, isn’t about handling better my pain; it’s about taking on the suffering of others.

Gary Preston is pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Boulder, Colorado. He has written for Leadership and Discipleship Journal. Gary and his wife, Suzanne, enjoy a Colorado outdoor lifestyle along with their two teenage sons, Nate and Tim.

Eugene H. Peterson, Leap Over a Wall (New York; HarperCollins, 1998).

Copyright © 1998 Gary D. Preston