Author: glenn.myers

The biggest failure in the Bible

Let’s hear it for King Saul

It’s a competitive field, but in the end I picked King Saul as the biggest failure in the Bible. This is my final extract from my forthcoming book ‘The Sandwich‘, about living sandwiched between God’s promises and the ambiguities, conflicts and disappointments of Planet Earth. Like the other chapters, as you may know by now, it started life as an article for a Singaporean magazine, and was written for the many new Christians in that growing Christian community.

(2014)

To be the biggest failure in the Bible you have to have a shot at being one of its greatest successes.   This rules out a lot of people, such as Trophimus the Ephesian. In just three verses, this unheralded character manages to (a) be the reason for the major riot in Jerusalem that put the apostle Paul in prison and (b) to fall sick in Miletus and not to be healed by that same great Apostle.

Trophimus, in other words, is forever getting in the way. But despite his high failure coefficient he is only a minor player in the grand story of redemption, so we strike him off our list.  We might rule out Judas Iscariot for similar reasons. No-one in the whole Bible got it more wrong. The frightful verdict on his life, courtesy of Jesus himself, is ‘it would be better for him if he had not been born’ (Mark 14:21). That’s certainly failure enough. May it never be said of us.

But Judas was only one of twelve apostles, and he was quickly replaced. The story went on without him. Let’s also give the Old Testament figure Samson the push. Samson was the prototype charismatic-leader-traffic-accident-waiting-to-happen, impressive gifts, unimpressive integrity. His life came literally crashing down but, still, Samson was a single judge, one of many in Israel, in a time when many were mucking things up. A sad example of a malfunctioning leader, yet not the Bible’s greatest failure.

Instead let’s try someone who could have been one of the leading figures in the whole history of redemption, a major player, who yet fell almost as far as it is possible to go. Our vote goes to Saul, first king of Israel.

‘Hapless’

The word ‘hapless’ could have been invented for Saul. The Oxford English Dictionary defines Hapless thus: ‘destitute of or lacking good fortune; unfortunate, unlucky. Hence also in later use: incompetent, clumsy.’  There is just something doomed about Saul. It’s made all the worse by his undoubted courage, good looks, and earnest efforts. Saul was a trier and had enough talent and potential to crash and burn while others had barely enough qualities to get off the runway.

Part of his haplessness was his capacity for public relations disasters. Saul strides onto the pages of the Bible not like David, fighting Goliath, nor like the Apostle Paul, helping kill the first Christian martyr (which at least demonstrated potential and commitment, albeit needing a little re-direction). No, Saul makes his entrance searching for donkeys, at which it is hard to look good. People who are looking for things are very irritating to people who are not looking for things, especially perhaps when those things are really big and furry and obviously not there.

Does Saul then redeem himself by demonstrating astonishing skills in tracking? He does not. Instead, it’s recorded that his dad started to worry about him, which since Saul was a tall and scary grown man, and only perhaps 20 miles from home, is again not a massive vote of confidence. 

It’s left to Saul’s servant to suggest they visit the prophet Samuel whose prophetic gifts may stretch to donkey-location services. Saul agrees, but, predictably, doesn’t have any money. Perhaps he left his credit cards at home, another winning trait in a would-be leader of men. The servant stumps up the cash, and, so far, looks a far better man for a crisis than Saul himself.

Saul the hero

Yet despite the inauspicious start, Saul becomes king and does well for a time, against very difficult odds. Israel was overrun with the Philistines, who had a properly organized standing army, unlike Israel. The Philistines had the technological mastery, controlling all the iron manufacture. Coming from the smallest tribe, Saul lacked a power base. Worse, he also had to combat the prophet Samuel who was grumpy about the whole idea of Israel having a king. They had not had one before. Samuel, it seemed, was only allowing it because God had told him to, not because he personally thought it was a good idea.

You didn’t mess with Samuel, he could summon earthquakes with prayer, but like many leaders he had a bit of a blind spot when it came to his own family. At the time of Saul’s election, Samuel’s sons were running the country — badly. So there was a ticklish issue for a new king’s in-tray. The old leader’s sons aren’t up to the job, political reform is needed, but the decrepit old boy in charge can’t face the facts. 

Yet Saul made a good fist of being king. He rescued the threatened city of Jabesh Gilead by personally calling and leading an army. Aided by his son Jonathan, he inflicted spectacular damage on the Philistines against fierce odds. He fought off other raiders, surrounded himself with good people, declined to be vindictive against his political enemies, and was personally modest in his kingly lifestyle.

Samuel went into retirement and no more was heard of his sons. Saul knew, if he obeyed God, his kingdom could last forever. We have to believe that it was at least conceivable that Saul could have been what David later became– the first king in a glorious, eternal line.  

Yet it all fell apart. The honest, modest king morphed into a depressed, paranoid monster. He resorted to using a medium — I think the only godly leader in the whole Bible who has sunk to consulting the spirits of the dead. And then he, his sons and his armourbearer all died in a decisive battle against the resurgent Philistines that set Israel’s cause back for a long time.

Saul’s fall

Saul got little credit for the good stuff but instead faced the full wrath of Samuel when he made two judgement calls in extremely pressed circumstances. It is, perhaps, another sign of the hapless: you get your appraisal done when you are having an extremely bad day. First, Samuel had told Saul to go to a mustering ground called Gilgal before a battle with the Philistines and wait seven days until Samuel arrived. Saul had done as asked, watching while the Philistine forces multiplied around them. Saul’s own army, just six hundred strong, was starting to desert. The seven days passed. The forthcoming battle looked terrible. Rather than wait any longer for Samuel, Saul himself made sacrifices to God — and then Samuel turned up and condemned him. Samuel didn’t apologize. Paraphrasing Tolkien’s Gandalf the Grey, Samuel might have said, ‘Late? A prophet is never late!’

The second time, Samuel ordered Saul to kill and destroy every living thing among the Amalekites, men, women, children, cattle — a brutal, rare and difficult ask for the king. Saul’s army did not seem overly troubled by hacking the heads off babies or slicing open pregnant women (this was a ruthless era, rather like our own), but they did object to seeing all that juicy beef going up in smoke uneaten. Steak won out over submission, and Saul didn’t stop his army’s ox-roast, and Samuel condemned him again, and removed his blessing.

You can say this is all a bit unfair. Saul was attempting to show leadership in terrible times. Things were going wrong all around him. Bloodshed was not far off. Who, in a war, gets all the decisions right? Desperate days require brave decisions. What would you do if your army was falling apart while you waited for a prophet to show up? How well would you fare when your hungry men wanted a well-earned barbecue and you were the only one blocking the way?

Anyway, didn’t other leaders in the Bible commit worse sins than Saul and not get deblessed, as Saul was? Abraham took things into his own hands when he fathered Ishmael rather than wait for Isaac. King David committed both murder and adultery. When in danger of their lives, the apostle Peter denied Jesus three times. Other apostles found they had urgent appointments elsewhere. Saul, by way of refreshing change, hardly ducked a fight in his life.

Saul’s problem

So how did he end up as the Bible’s biggest failure? First we note that it’s in the times of deepest stress that we reveal who we really are. It honestly isn’t all that hard to seem to be living a godly life when the seas are calm and the skies are blue. Only stress shows our true colours. So we shouldn’t be surprised that it took difficult days to expose Saul’s heart.

Second, God is God and he has the right to deal with disobedience in his servants differently. Abraham took matters into his own hands. So did Saul. Different circumstances and capacities were on show, but it was the same sin at its root. So perhaps in a sense the Bible is harsh on Saul, or at least gentle on Abraham. May God be gentle on us too!

Yet, third, Saul’s fatal error really was a fatal error, and it set him apart in my view from Abraham and David and the apostles. Running through his life was a tendency, which wasn’t a technical mishap, or a minor misjudgement; it was, finally, a misunderstanding of everything important about how God and people relate.  Saul’s regular mistake was to think God wants us to sort things out for ourselves, cope as best we can. Saul was talented enough to make this work for a time. But that isn’t what God wants.   God wants us to trust him with our lives.

At Gilgal, the sacrifices honestly didn’t matter; trusting God did. So your army’s deserting while Samuel shows every sign of being caught in the traffic around Jericho? Trust God anyway. So your hungry army is mutinously eyeing up some fatted calves? Stand in their way. Trust and obey God. See if they’ll really kill a king, or, muttering darkly, obey God after all. 

Flawed like Saul

Haplessness haunted Saul. Worse, he then let jealousy gnaw at him unchecked and as an older man became paranoid and vindictive. But the truth is we are all like that. That isn’t Saul’s unique problem. We are all flawed like Saul, fatally flawed, each in our own way. Saul’s real problem was not that he was fatally flawed, but that he didn’t throw his fatally flawed self on the mercies and adequacies of God.

His real failure was a failure simply to trust and obey: ‘Samuel said. “You have not kept the command the Lord your God gave you; if you had, he would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time.”‘ (1 Sam 13:13) and ‘Saul died because he was unfaithful to the Lord; he did not keep the word of the Lord and even consulted a medium for guidance, and did not enquire of the Lord. So the Lord put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David son of Jesse.’ (1 Chron 10:13-14)

I feel for Saul. I think he was a put in a job too difficult for him, and certainly at first he tried his very best to make it work, earnest, brave, modest, sincere.  The problem was, that isn’t how it works between people and God. We are all in roles too difficult for us. We all have impossible jobs. ‘Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did’ says the first letter of John (1 John 2:6) How possible is that? It isn’t. 

The people who please God fall into the arms of the One who justifies the ungodly and the hapless and the useless. Through faith people conquer kingdoms. Through faith they live and die bravely. Through nakedly trusting God they take on armies. Through simple, trusting obedience they cheerfully face down the impossible. Better to die trusting God, they argue, rightly, than live relying on ourselves.

What can we learn from the Bible’s biggest failure? Don’t have fatal character weaknesses? No–we all do. Trust God with all your heart. Follow his commands rather than your own wisdom. Trust him unto death.  Quite a lesson.

The solution to all our problems

A new, best-in-class denomination

This blog started life as a magazine article when I was on the staff of a Singaporean magazine intended for the Christian community. Like my other blogs over the past few weeks, I’ve included it in my forthcoming book, ‘The Sandwich.’ One of the joys of working for interdenominational organizations is the exposure to the many different silos within which Christian tribes shelter, each of us believing we’re uniquely blessed and special.

Pixabay lucky11

(1994)

What we need is a new denomination.

I visited a Brethren church the other day, for the first time for about fifteen years. Things hadn’t changed much. 

The church building still displayed the minimum possible aesthetic sense, designed (it wasn’t hard to guess) by deacons, all male. They hadn’t quite suppressed every splash of colour — it’s hard to completely stamp out human, and especially feminine, creativity — but they were certainly subsisting on the bare minimum. The hall was 1930s hospital style: dull dark wood and magnolia. The most recent addition was a 1970s chipboard hymnbook cabinet with a balsa wood veneer (artificial). Brethren don’t waste resources on Art.

We sang hymns, though, great eighteenth-century affairs loaded with fine doctrine like plum puddings. The singing was concerted, massive, and rousing — marred only by a few sopranos warbling out of control, like opera divas tumbling into the orchestra pit or stuka bombers that can’t pull out of a fatal dive.

When the people on the platform addressed the Almighty, you rather got the impression of the serf, cap in hand, going to the landowner. These were Brethren. A people who know their place in the scheme of things.

I felt at home at once. Here were my roots. Plain but godly. 1930s decor and 1790s doggerel, sin and magnolia. Nothing changes here. Hardly anything, indeed, had changed, since I’d left these pastures for charismatic ones a decade and a half ago.

Singing solid hymns that fed the brain and spirit was a nice change from my current church, where — as a contrast — spiritual ecstasy is expected fifteen minutes into each service, whether or not you feel like it first thing in the morning and whether or not you’ve got a headache.

In our church, we do not all sing together. We play tag with the worship leader. You know the game. You’re all ready for the second verse but he’s jumped back to the middle of the chorus. Just when you think you’re catching him again, he’s onto a second lap with the first verse. The musicians and the ‘waa waa’ girls are not far behind, but he dodges them astutely when they start getting near. Finally he helps us by repeating the line ‘He is worthy’ seven straight times, until less charitable members of congregation want to knock him on the head to get the music into a different groove. We hit the seventh ‘He is worthy’ with a great bashing of drums, like a Taoist funeral, and then blast off into singing in tongues or a ‘clap offering.’

In my church, we are not so much serfs addressing the Lord of the Manor as people frantically cranking a Van de Graaf generator, hoping the sparks will crackle. I sometimes look round at the upturned faces and hands and wonder, am I the only person in the church not enjoying this? Is anybody else — like me — faking it?

Hmm. And yet the charismatics and Pentecostals are the most successful missionary movement in history: from a standing start in 1900 to 400 million plus today. God’s at work among us. Sometimes — despite everything — the sparks do crackle.

Perhaps no denomination has it all. But I have the perfect way forward for the future: The Singapore Post-Denominational Church. We’ll pick-and-mix from what the current denominations offer to produce an unforgettable ecclesiastical experience.

Here’s my suggestions: We’ll look to the Brethren for the art and aesthetics. Flexibility and ecumenism? Call in the Bible-Presbyterians. Theological rigour? Charismatic choruses are just the job. A due sense of tradition and history? The new independent churches will supply all we need.

I’ll be the pastor, of course, and will lovingly fix my salary at an average of the top four pastoral renumerations in Singapore. Tithes will be high, but at least you’ll know I’m safe from being headhunted and will be able to devote myself wholeheartedly to the Post-Denominational cause.

Singapore Post-Denominational Church. Come along next Sunday. I guarantee, after the experience, you’ll love your own worship tradition all the more.

Hype

I worked, as you may know by now, for a Singaporean magazine in the early 1990s. Its target market was the Christian community and as the only inter-denominational show in town, so far as magazines were concerned, that meant we were the target market for lots of press releases. All the quotes in the article, which I’ve anonymized to save blushes, were real. And dispiriting. This article will be a chapter in my forthcoming book The Sandwich about living sandwiched in the interstices between God’s promises and the mysterious life of our home planet.

Thanks to luckylife11 and Pixabay.

(1995)

Sometimes you wonder.

We get lots of mail in the Impact office. Some of it is promotional. Here are some quotes from material lying around the office:

Pastor X is one of the strongest church leaders in the world today.

A man with a strong apostolic and prophetic mantle, Pastor Y is impacting the world.

Dr Z is one of the most anointed Bible teachers in the world.

Here’s a longer one describing someone’s ministry in Japan and inviting funds for the school that trained him:

At first they came by the dozens.

Then, they came by the hundreds

And finally, they came by the thousands.

And they stream across the playing field of a 60,000 seat baseball stadium to commit their lives to Jesus Christ.

It gets better:

This is happening in the inscrutable orient — in Japan, the country some have called the ‘missionary graveyard’.

The report goes on:

Closed. Until now. What has changed?

Who is God using to lead thousands of Japanese to publicly turn their faces to the cross — and their backs on centuries of religious tradition?

Aw, you guessed. A Japanese evangelist trained by the school.

The report fails to mention that responses like that were the normal pattern in Japan after World War II, and they were mostly for cultural reasons rather than spiritual ones. Japan’s churches have remained small, less than 1% of the population, despite hundreds of thousands of responses in large evangelistic meetings. It is astonishing that the school didn’t train its evangelists to understand this, and even more astonishing that they should be boasting about their ignorance of both history and culture.

Hype. A late-twentieth century disease, entirely absent from the ministry of Jesus and the apostles. (Can you imagine it? ‘Let’s put our hands together and welcome Paul, acclaimed author of Romans, one today’s most anointed missionaries…’) Chillingly present among the rag-tag-and-bobtail heretics who so damaged the Early Church.

Hype. There must be better ways for honest leaders with genuine ministries to promote what they’re doing. Let us pray:

‘From good people, doing good things, badly, Good Lord, deliver us.’

The minds of small children

And what we can learn

Another article dredged from my archives, lest I am ever guilty of deliberately harbouring an unpublished thought. It is due to appear in my forthcoming book ‘The Sandwich‘ and was written for the Singaporean magazine for which I used to work. I am pleased to report that the children described in the article both ended up with Master’s degrees from Cambridge University, and that we all survived their childhood. Somehow.

Luckylife11 on Pixabay – many thanks

(1997)

Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it (Mark 10:15)

Christ said we must become as little children to enter the Kingdom of heaven. Dear God, this is too much. Have we got to become such idiots? (Protestant reformer Martin Luther, c. 1538)

Talking bananas

Our children normally have a banana for breakfast and I have got into the habit of ringing it up before we eat it.

‘do-dee-der-dee-der-der-der

‘-Ring-

‘Hello, are you a banana?

‘Yes

‘Would you like to be eaten today?

‘Oh, alright then.

‘OK Thanks! Bye’

Presumably this little game will one day cease to be entertaining for the kids in the morning. (I hope quite soon.)

However, I was doing this one morning recently when my five-year-old daughter suddenly spoke up.

‘It’s not the banana talking at all! It’s you!’

I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, Has she only just realized this? I thought. Has she thought all these months and years that you can ring bananas up? And that they talk back? I wondered what else was going on, unsuspected by me, between her ears.

‘You’re right’ I admitted. ‘It’s me.’

Wet and wild

I work from home, in an upstairs room overlooking our garden, so I sometimes get to watch our three-year-old playing on his own: tramping about in his red wellies (rubber boots), watering the plants, digging in the sandpit. He shovels out sand and heaps it into his tractor. He collects stones in a bucket. He stirs the sand round and round with a stick, all the time talking. ‘Mum, I’m a collector. I’m collecting things.’ ‘Mum, I’m baking a cake. It’s a chocolate cake. With lemons.’ His mind, I observe, seems like a home you’ve just moved into: all the furniture’s there, but it hasn’t been straightened out quite yet.

In his book Queen of Angels, science fiction writer Greg Bear writes about an age when psychotherapy and computer modelling are so advanced that therapists will be able to take computer-aided journeys round the landscape of people’s minds, investigating the country and solving deep traumas.

Brilliant and daring though he is, he never speculates on the insides of a child’s mind. I can imagine why: it’s too wild. Certainly my kids’ minds are like that, mad, happy tea-parties where disconnected ideas and talking bananas jostle together.

It can’t be true

A child’s mindset is interesting in the same way the roller-coaster ride called Space Mountain in Euro-Disney outside Paris is interesting: riding it you’re completely in the dark and you don’t know where you’re going to be thrown next.

But it’s also interesting because, as we know, a child’s mind is a holy thing, a thing we must emulate if we are to get in on the kingdom of God. A child’s mind is nearer to the kingdom of God than a grownup’s. How can this be? Here are two ideas:

Wonder. Children know about wonder; grownups have to relearn it. Remember the answer Jesus gave to John the Baptist’s question, ‘Are you the one that was sent?’: the Lord Jesus told the questioners ‘The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.’ (Luke 7:22). ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him,’ says the apostle Paul (1 Cor 2:9). ‘Dear friends, now we are children of God,’ adds John, ‘and what we will be has not yet been made known.’ (1 John 3:2).

According to the New Testament, we are seeing the first, outriding snowballs of goodness tumbling down heaven’s mountainside into our lives; an avalanche will follow. As Christians we have every reason to develop a childlike capacity for wonder. Outrageous, lovely things really do happen. The future will be rich with them.

Relationship. Children have the enviable ability to have their problems solved with a hug. As grownup Christians we think a hug is not enough. But it is enough. ‘Peace I leave with you,’ says the Lord Jesus, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid’ (John 14:27).  ‘Do not be anxious about anything,’ says Paul, shockingly; instead, ‘present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus’ (Phil 4: 6-7).

It is characteristic of Jesus that in the toughest times he does not explain things. Instead, he showers us with love and peace. It isn’t (rational, modern) explanation or (shrugging, post-modern) escapism we need; it is enough to be loved. Children know it; adults forget it.

At the heart of the Universe — we need to remember– is not a series of laws, nor something blind and chaotic, but a Good Person whom we do well to know (as children easily accept).  His normal speech is what we call the laws of universe; his special words of love are what we call signs and wonders; fail to see him and we miss everything.

Maybe we should not be so committed to edifices of adult thought. Maybe the foolish playfulness of God, the God of talking bananas, is a surer foundation. We need the playful mind of a child to keep up with the rampant gaiety of a good God. Try this song as a quick summary of all we need to know (though in our case sung to Jesus rather than to a lover):

‘I don’t believe in many things, but in You, I do, I do.’

Hearing wrongly from God

Just set your mind on it

Here’s another commissioned piece written for newish Christians in a Singapore-based magazine, an which is now a chapter in my new collection ‘The Sandwich‘ (yet to be published).

Thanks to Luckylife11 at Pixabay

(2007)

Hearing wrongly from God is easy and you hardly need any advice on it at all. Never mind that he is the Almighty and you are a half-pint. Never mind that he is bright-eyed with revelation, holding together the universe with his understanding, eager to breathe gentle words into your heart. You can hide from him, really you can.

Most people can be up and running, misunderstanding God consistently, in a matter of a few minutes. It’s harder for children, of course. But anyone from teenage years upwards can master one of the few simple techniques that I’m going to tell you about. With regular practice, these become as easy as breathing. Don’t believe the sceptics: you — yes, you — can insulate yourself totally against the Burning One, freeing yourself to worship what you truly love: your Blessed Self.

Here’s how you do it.

Thanks to Sponchia at Pixabay

1 Never surrender

This is the key to the whole thing. Remember Churchill’s advice to the boys of his old school during the Second World War: ‘Gentlemen! Never give up! Never give up! Never, never, never give up!’ Don’t yield an inch. Resist God and he will, eventually, shuffle off and go bothering someone else. He won’t strive with you for ever. There is an end to it.

Of course, God is quite a subtle foe in these matters. He will try to sneak in. We live with yearnings and aches: to love; to share our lives with others; to know the mysterious Essence beyond ourselves. A sunset, a face, a smile, they can seem like windows to heaven. They are not. Get a grip. Don’t yearn. Don’t be thankful. Don’t seek God (have some sense!). Don’t think. Take yourself in hand. Fulfil some pressing bodily need, put the TV on, gorge on some chocolate, go shopping, do something earthly to shake off these heavenly yearnings. You’ll soon be fine again.

Or sometimes God tries to speak when you’re going through a hard time. Really, he has no scruples. In tough times — he knows and you know — that you are inclined to panic. Grown men have been known to pray in toilets. Our advice remains the same. Remember Churchill, and never give up. In times of trouble say to yourself, ‘at least I’m not tempted to try religion! I’m not a weakling! I can handle this!’ You can fend God off pretty well with this sort of routine.

It is a basic rule: those who humble themselves, who strip themselves of vain arguments, who wait in silence for him, who surrender themselves absolutely and finally to his will: it’s those he goes for. The rest of us are pretty safe. Keep fighting and there’s always hope for you.

2 Be holistic

Of course, even if he can’t get at your heart right away, God will still try to influence you. He does it by subverting your ideas of goodness. But don’t worry, it’s easily prevented.

You want to be a good person, of course. God wants you to be a good person too  — there’s the danger.

The way to avoid any possible trap here is to maintain a steady focus. You don’t want to be just any sort of good person. You want to be a good person on your own terms. You want to mix and match God’s ideas about goodness with your own. Ours is a consumer society and so this a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

For example, keep an eye on trends. You want to be good, but not poor, austere, sacrificial, wholehearted. You want to be holistically good: admired by all, certainly, breaking hearts with the sheer wonderfulness of your nature, having girls sighing in their rooms at the thought of your intrinsic nobility, but you also want to be sexy, stylish, funny, rich and fulfilled. James Bond good. A rough diamond. Hot, not cold. Buttoned down, not buttoned-up. So mix up all your desires indiscriminately with whatever you fancy you may be hearing from God and you’ll be just fine. He won’t get a word in at all.

3 Accept no feedback

A patient, humble, teachable spirit is a dangerous thing.

Our minds are neural networks. They get things right only after much feedback and reinforcement: that’s as true for hearing from God as it is in learning how to write your name neatly. You try, you show it to an adult, they praise you and correct you gently, and finally, after hundreds of iterations, you get it right.

So it is with Hearing From God. People who hear consistently from God mull things over. Impressions waft into their minds, they pray over them, compare them with scripture, think them through, ask trusted advisers, wait on God for more revelation. They keep bringing a thing to God until it somehow holds together, the neural network is programmed with the right pattern, and a quiet peace settles on their hearts.

Knowing this, you can quickly see how you can mishear God almost 100% of the time. Be impulsive. Follow your gut. Then, be stubborn. Snatch at things. Cultivate prejudices. Don’t ask advice. Only allow your Bible study to reinforce what you already know. Think the same way you always have. Follow your tribe. Be unteachable: after all, you already know all you need to know. Don’t give houseroom to uncertainty, perplexity, ambiguity, hesitancy, diffidence. Tell yourself, ‘tentative’ or ‘provisional’ or ‘subject to revision’ is just another way of saying ‘weak’.

I hope that’s all clear. To sum up: if you want to keep your life clear of God’s kindly revelation:

Be proud!

Strain after all the good things in life!

Be wise in your own eyes!

And you’ll be just fine.

Healing: finding the gold in the straw

Having unexpectedly emerged alive from a four-week-long coma–in 2013–and with our church having held a 36-hour prayer vigil for us at the most critical point, and having had some kind of disability all my life, I’ve thought at lot about healing. This is another piece from my forthcoming book called (maybe) ‘The Sandwich.’ Like the others in the collection, it was commissioned by a Singaporean magazine and intended for newcomiers to the Christian faith.

Sandwiches
Luckylife11 on Pixabay

(2015)

How do we know when to stop asking and simply accept? What’s the difference between surrender and giving up hope?‘

We are treading on a tender spot here. Because we all know people who have been struck down inside a good healthy life.  Some dreadful disease snaffles them and everything inside of us cries out, ‘No! This is wrong.’ So we pray for healing.

Worse (in a sense), we know that God is a healing God. In the person of Christ he walked on the earth and did not view suffering with a Roman stoicism or a Jewish shrug. He wept over it, climbed into the problems, and healed. The lame walking, the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, the dead being raised are signs of his Kingdom. These are the gifts he scatters as he walks among us. Jesus our King is full of compassion, fully engaged, and mighty to heal and save. Sin, evil, suffering, demons, death: he detests them all and went to the cross to purge all of them out of his lovely Universe.

We all know what is coming next: yet so many are not healed. I would be very surprised if in the circle of people you know and care about, there are not some for whom you are praying but who are not getting better. Others stay sick and in pain for a long time. What do we do? How do we pray?

*

I joined a community choir recently. I am a musical illiterate, but I am learning that some songs include a key-change. You are singing along happily enough, you think you’re getting the hang of this, but then the composer introduces a key-change and often it takes the song to a whole new level. For example, the South African National Anthem includes five languages and a key change, because Nelson Mandela wanted to incorporate both the African National Congress anthem and the old white South Africa anthem, and five of South Africa’s eleven languages, into one song. It makes the total experience a powerful statement of unity in a divided land. Without the key-change, it only would be half a song.

As we pray on for the unhealed, we must listen for God’s key-change. Most of us who fall sick only want one thing: to get back to how we were. But with very many sicknesses and afflictions there is no going back. There is only going forward. Hence the need for the key-change. We just want to go home, but God is changing the landscape around us. In his terrible love, God is taking the evil and forging something good in us. This is why I suggest we let God lift our juvenile, confused, panicking prayers to another level. Of course it is not our prayers he is taking to another level: it is we ourselves. Then the song will be complete in us.

Here are some of the elements, so it seems to me, of God’s key-change.

  1. Mystery. In the gospels Jesus walked through a large collection of sick people at the pool of Bethesda and healed just one person (John 5:2-9). He stood in a cemetery full of dead people and called just Lazarus back to life (John 11:38-44). He must have seen a number of funeral processions but he interrupted only one, that of the widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7:11-15). Why should some be singled out for instant healing and others not? It does not seem fair, nor can we explain why. It is a mystery. Mystery is like a cloud passing between us and the certainty of the living, loving Christ. We know the Lord is still there, but for the moment all we can see is the cloud.
  2. Eternity. I guarantee you have nothing wrong with you that the resurrection will not put right. When a person passes from this land of the dying to the land of the living with peace on their face, bags packed, ready for eternity, surely that’s a healing, that’s the great healing, even if for us who are left it is a separation and loss. And even if the timing feels all wrong. So real, full healing is guaranteed for all who come to Christ, in eternity.
  3. The present moment. Sometimes in our panic and fear we forget the importance of the present moment. Yes, let us ask God that a person’s dreadful illness is totally healed. But let us not forget the now. ‘God’, we can pray, ‘turn their anxiety into peace today. Make their soul happy today. Set a table for them in the midst of their enemies today.’ In my limited experience of these things, a visit, a word, something, can make your heart almost burst with joy, even if you are lying paralysed in bed and connected up to quite a lot of tubes. People might argue that that’s not the same as a proper healing. I am not so sure. It certainly feels pretty good at the time.  
  4. Seeing what the Father is doing. Someone once told me, prayer is not forcing God’s arm; it is taking what is offered in his hand. Somehow we need to walk with the Holy Spirit through the winding paths of prayer and let him guide our prayers so that as we pray, we feel full of peace and confidence. If we feel led to pray for a glorious sunset to a good life, so be it. If it means praying the person with ulcers will feel secure in God so that he doesn’t have to be a workaholic, that’s fine too. I’m not a fan at all of sharing these insights with the patient; they have enough to cope with. I would suggest asking for God’s leading, but then keeping the leading for your own domestic use.
  5. A meeting. Some scriptures teach that everyone who came to Christ for healing was healed. See Mark 6:36, for example: ‘wherever he went – into villages, towns or countryside – they placed those who were ill in the market-places. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched it were healed.’ I believe these scriptures. Yet many today do not experience instant physical healing. How do we square this circle? Here’s how it works for me. I believe that everyone I might pray for can and should meet God. When the person meets God, in a sense, I can leave the two of them to it. The healing has begun. What goes on between them—instant healing; a long process of healing; abundant life amid continuing physical infirmity; healing fulfilled in eternity; or anything else—is between that person and God. Meeting God is the first and main thing. The core of healing is not getting physically better for a season until something else strikes us down. It’s meeting Jesus. I think I can pray for any sick person that they will meet Christ, they will touch the edge of his robe, and the healing will begin. I use that prayer a lot and I really like it.
  6. The glory. Hospitals, and let us be honest, sometimes a group of pray-ers, can make the patient feel like little more than a useless lump of meat. The sick person themself can start to believe that. But a sick person is not someone who has been suddenly shunted from a fruitful life to a non-fruitful one. He or she is not out of work, certainly not out of God’s work. They may not be on the path they would choose, but they are still on a path. They can glorify God. In the Old Testament Joseph named one of his children ‘Ephraim’ which apparently sounds like the Hebrew for ‘twice fruitful’ and he explained why. It was because ‘God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering’ (Genesis 41:52). That’s a mighty prayer to pray for a sick person. ‘God make her fruitful in the land of her suffering.’ This is not a get-out if physical healing doesn’t happen. It is about people meeting God–Almighty God, that one, the Almighty one–and not emerging unshaken.

Back to the question we were set: How do we know when to stop asking and simply accept? What’s the difference between surrender and giving up hope?

I think I’m arguing that there’s a third option between simply praying for physical healing and simply surrendering the person to God.  I’ve called it God’s key-change, and it’s praying that respects mystery and eternity, treasures the present moment, tries to listen to God, believes that healing starts when people meet Christ, and asks for fruitfulness even in their place of suffering.

It’s worth a try.

About the tangle of free will and love, and the weakness of God

One of the nice things about writing to commission is that you have try to think about things that you don’t know much about. Below is another article I wrote for the Singaporean Christian magazine Impact, which probably demonstrates clearly why I don’t get paid as a philosopher. It’s extracted from my forthcoming book The Sandwich.

Luckylife11 on Pixabay

(2020)

Many of the world’s problems are blamed on God giving us ‘free will’. I’m not sure that God would be as heartless as that.

Does God force us to do things? If so, does he bypass us, or squash us to get his way? Does that show a lack of respect? Does it contravene ‘free will’?

Before we go any further, let’s not talk any more about ‘free will’, as if we were all independent actors with plenty of access to information, not influenced by our peers, able to make good choices on our own with our own resources.

I don’t believe it. I’ve yet to meet anyone like that. We peer at life through a soup of prejudice that distorts what we see. We are influenced by the networks of people around us, the tribes we belong to. Once we’ve made up our minds on something, we tend to defend our turf, accepting facts that bolster our view and rejecting the facts that don’t. Arguably our tendency to rebel against the light of God and choose our own dark corner makes us still more half-witted. We humans are dim. We don’t get it. Free choice would be spoilt on us. 

All sorts of things can make us a bit less slow of mind and thick of head. We could listen to others; admit we might be mistaken; test our ideas against evidence or logic. Perhaps when we are younger, and know less, and the world is open to us, our brains are more plastic and we are more open to learning. But still.

Then imagine you are God. OK, it’s probably unimaginable but imagine yourself with perfect knowledge, in perfect light, looking down on these bumbling toilers on earth, blundering, grumbling, bumping into one another. Their bodies are extensively wired to feel pain and you watch their neural systems light up as they injure themselves and each other, and then go back and do it again. To God, it seems, we look ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’, and he has compassion on us (see Matthew 9:36).

I don’t think God’s biggest problem looking down on this scene, if we can so speak, is a lofty analysis of freedom of choice or free will or the rights of humans. It is about how to get stuff done, among these creatures whom you cannot not love and whom you want the best for.

So for example if God arranges for you to meet that girl at that event at that time and she gives you that shy smile and he knows you are that sort of person and she is that sort of person and you then fall in love and create a happy life together, did he force you? Or was he just smart and kind?

Or if he quickens your torpid soul with life, unblocks your ears, restores your spiritual sight, and you see Jesus for the first time not as some historical artefact but as the Living One and a friend and redeemer; if God unwraps your graveclothes and you stand before him blinking in the sunlight, where in all that was your freedom and choice? Something greater than freedom and choice was here.

I was in a coma for a month once and it took my family and the doctors two weeks to wake me up – two weeks of my family talking to me, reading my books to me, of doctors changing the meds. I had no choice in the matter: I was hallucinating about a three-country trip to Africa (which honestly still lingers in the memory though it never happened). In a sense, the love and care of those around me superseded any issues of freedom of choice. They knew I wanted to live again and love again and they fought for me when I couldn’t fight for myself. I wonder if that principle ever crosses God’s mind and ever governs his behaviour?

The Biblical data is fascinating. Jesus, God’s selfie on earth, showed respect and restraint to those around him, often at cost to himself. He wasn’t coercive or controlling. He gave instructions that were disobeyed but he didn’t sulk. ‘See that you don’t tell this to anyone,’ he said to the healed leper, ‘but go, show yourself to the priests…’ Get the medical and judicial proof that you are not infectious so you can rejoin your community. ‘Instead [the man] went about freely, spreading the news. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places’ (Mark 1:45-46). The ex-patient’s folly caused Jesus problems, which Jesus had to manage. At no point did he fell the man with a fiery dart. (‘I told you – go see the priest! Bam!’) Fevers, illnesses, demons, wind and waves all obeyed Christ’s words but people didn’t — and at a certain level the Lord seemed OK with that.

Yet at other times, God appears rather more forceful. Jonah is ordered to Nineveh to preach repentance. Nineveh was Israel’s enemy and God wanted to bring them light. Jonah buys a ticket for the opposite direction. God interrupts the journey with a storm. Jonah is then conveyed by various transport modes back to the shores around Nineveh: first, a short flight (he is thrown into the sea), then a longer trip by sea-creature (carried in the hold). He does not like this, but he does repent. When he finally walks into Nineveh, the repentant preacher preaches repentance and to his great disgust his preaching stops Nineveh being destroyed by God’s wrath. God gets his way. Nineveh turns to the light. But even then (according to the Book of Jonah at least) God is still concerned with Jonah and his continuing grumbles.

God was also quite forceful when he manoeuvred things so that the gospel burst from its Jewish flowerhead and seeded around the world. The book of Acts, chapter 10, tells how the apostle Peter fell into a trance, lost an argument with God, had a timely meeting, made a journey to some pre-prepared Gentiles, preached a short and perhaps tactless sermon, but it was enough for the Gentiles to have their own Pentecost at Cornelius’ place. Along with plenty of other actions God made the light go global – which was a win. Along the way, Peter and others changed their minds about whether non-Jews should get grace: another win. Letting Peter argue had helped.

Consider these various examples. They share a common thread. God appears to have largely got his way. But there is a weakness in God’s strength. Or to put it another way, God’s strength is made perfect through God’s ‘weakness’. What did the storm achieve in Jonah? Repentance. What did the trance and the events at Cornelius’ house achieve in Peter? Repentance, a fresh turning to God and a willingness to believe God for new and greater things. What did Jesus seek from giving people on earth a liberty to obey him or not – a liberty he didn’t give demons, fevers or storms? He provided space for repentance and often people took the offer up.

From our limited perspective, then, it seems that many of God’s actions, and many of what seem like his lack of actions, focus on winning the person as well as winning the day, rather than either philosophical high-mindedness or the need to control. We aren’t told what happened to the healed leper. We don’t know if sometime afterward, perhaps years later, he reflected on Jesus’ treatment of him, the power and the meekness, and turned to the Risen Christ in love and wonder. Perhaps he did; perhaps he didn’t; but he wasn’t short of data, or insight, or opportunity.

What shall we say then? God’s foolishness is wiser than our wisdom and his weakness is stronger than our strength. His patient tread is faster than our hurry. One day, says Ephesians, everything will be brought to complete unity in Christ: the whole created order will be renewed, humanity along with it. When we read that along with the rest of the Bible we are brought to conclude that many, many individual humans will repent and unite their ways with God’s ways, become fully human and (as other passages teach) others will not repent and will finally lose all their footholds in life and love.  Meanwhile we are in the hands of One whose patience achieves more than human impatience; whose grace promotes deeper obedience than human laws. God is not like the government, passing laws and issuing fines. His kindness unclenches our fists and is an ointment to our sore eyes. God’s action among us is still a mystery. But the glimpses tell us he is extraordinary in his character and that shows in the way he uses his power.

‘God’s not fair’

About riding forth for justice on a very small horse. From my forthcoming book which might be called ‘The Sandwich’.

Sandwiches
Luckylife11 on Pixabay

Here’s another article that I wrote for the Singaporean magazine Impact, aimed at the many thousands in that island nation–where we used to live–who were joining the churches for the first time. I’ve collected my favourites into a forthcoming book that may well be called ‘The Sandwich‘, because it is for those of us squeezed by the sublime one side and by the whole world on the other.

(2016)

Ask anyone with a younger brother. Life is not fair.

We know that no two people are born equally favoured. We aren’t given equal chances along the way. Here’s the tip of the iceberg:

  • Younger brothers don’t get told off; we do.
  • Some people blab on their phone all the time while driving and are never caught. Someone else uses the phone once, with the car stationary, in a family emergency, and has to pay a fine.
  • Babies born in Singapore can expect to live 83 years; others choose parents from Sierra Leone and may only average 50 years.

Worse, in a sense: God, we believe, is fair. Nor does he think justice is merely an aspiration, a campaign promise, something to be put in place when he has sorted out a few other things first. God loves justice (as Isaiah 61:1 says). He does justice: ‘the Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed’ (Psalm 103:6). He commands his people to do justice: ‘You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality … Justice, and only justice, you shall follow’ (Dt 16: 19-20).

God is just; life isn’t. Yet God is all-powerful. So why isn’t life fair? Below are a few thoughts. 

We inhabit a wrinkle in eternity

We inhabit a wrinkle in eternity. It helps to realize this.

Eternity is forever–and it is filled with God and his kindness and fairness.  Evil and suffering are temporary and are perhaps the equivalent of an attack of hiccups in this great grand goodness. In the big picture, all is thriving and bright. So far, so true. But let’s zoom in on the wrinkle.

God is at work in history

God is working in the wrinkle. This is a central Christian teaching, and it is comforting but it doesn’t make our question any easier. A God who set things up and then headed off for the evening, leaving us to it, would at least mean we could understand injustice. But that isn’t an alternative the Bible offers. Instead, the Bible portrays God, like a master chef with hands in the baking bowl, up to his elbows in justice work every day. Here are some things he does:

God brings things to an end in his own time. This current world has mortality built in. People, cultures, empires grow, ripen, rot. Everything passes. This is part of his architecture of history: extremely sad for those we love but rather helpful in the case of evil people and empires. If they lived forever, it would be a nightmare, Genghis Khan or someone would still be in charge. But in an evil world, universal mortality is almost a kind of mercy, certainly a way of capping off evil. ‘In just a little while, the wicked will be no more; though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there. But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace’ (Psalm 37: 10-11).

God works on behalf of the needy. I once sat in the recovery area of an eye-surgery ward. People recovering from cataract operations were saying things like ‘I’ll be able to drive again!’ ‘I can read this now! I couldn’t read it before!’

It was just an ordinary day for this ward, but I felt like I’d fallen into a page of the New Testament. The blind see! God works for the needy. Every little thing that is done to relieve human suffering has its first impulse in the heart of God. On average, today, by the measures of extreme poverty, the world is getting better, God’s justice is spreading. Through humans—many of them, his own people—he is putting right what is wrong for the poor.

God works on his own timescale. Here is a very humbling thought. His forbearance is meant to bring us to repentance (Romans 2:4). He is patient with us, not wanting any to perish (2 Peter 3:9) Imagine this! The all-powerful God of love and justice at times lets great suffering happen. He hears the cries of the oppressed and he sits on his hands. Why? Sometimes he judges it good to wait.

I always find it remarkable that the only things that didn’t obey Jesus on earth were humans. At the Master’s command, waves collapsed, demons fled, limbs grew, bread multiplied. But humans? He told them what to do and they did something else. There is something incredible about what God will put up with from humans, what disobedience he will face, what injustice he will sit out, in order to win them finally. God waits, and often gets in hot water for it.

Other times God seems even to let things move too quickly; the person looking for a happy retirement is struck down too soon. We cannot do anything about this beyond seeking God and trusting him. He is good, he loves mercy and hates injustice, but he lingers around or presses forward according to his own internal clock, not ours. There is a saying in the court system: ‘justice delayed is justice denied.’ But that is not true in God. He is an eternal being, and so are we.  Mortality is delayed in some and hastened in others; it’s not fair; but it will be; and beyond understanding God we are called to walk with him: protesting perhaps, but also surrendering, trusting, praising.

There is a day coming. Years ago I drove past a horse and carriage on our roads, a rare sight. The horse was being whipped to trot faster. Its eyes were wide, it was foaming at the mouth, and it was shiny with sweat.  Every time I drive on that road I think of that horse. But that was many years ago, and whatever cruelties it suffered are over now. In the same way, we believe there is a day coming when injustice will end for good. The wrinkle has a limit. Peace and justice will be universal. A day is coming.

God has entered our pain. In Jesus, God moved himself from the realm of mere academic speculation about fairness and made the argument personal. He has tasted injustice from the inside out. He knows what it is to be sentenced to death by a baying mob, abandoned by a cowardly judge. He knows what it is to be flogged like an animal. God in Jesus is many things, Saviour above all of them, but he is also God’s eloquent way of telling us to ‘shut up already about injustice.’

What do we do about this?

So what do we do about this?

A stream flows through the Universe and we glimpse it in the Bible.

One picture of it is ‘the river of the water of life’ flowing from the temple in the closing chapters of the book of Revelation. The same stream appears in the book of Ezekiel, bubbling from the renewed temple, making the salty land sweet. An explanation of it comes from Jesus: ‘ Whoever believes in me … “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water”’ (John 7:38) and ‘the water that I will give [you] will become … a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (John 4:4).

The stream is God’s mercy. It is intended to flow into us–the Church, the new temple–and then out from us into the world. From us it’s supposed to broaden into a river delta, so that the whole earth is irrigated. I think it is the main part of the answer to the protest, God isn’t fair.

The static question has a dynamic answer

While dry argument has its place, I suspect God isn’t at his happiest debating lesser beings about justice. He’d rather be out there doing it. That has to be our vision too. The words ‘righteousness’ and ‘justice’ are interchangeable in the Greek, I understand, so it’s OK to translate Christ’s sayings in the Beatitudes like this:

‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied’ (Matthew 5:6)

and

‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for justice’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 5:10).

Is God fair? A stream of mercy pours through the heavens. Those who drench themselves in it themselves become sources of mercy and justice. They set the world back on its feet. The static question has a dynamic answer, one that can catch us up in it and occupy all our creativity and energies. Is God fair? ‘There is a river … come behold the works of the Lord’ (Psalm 46: 4,8).

Prayerlessness

All about capturing the moment, and squashing it. From my forthcoming book ‘The Sandwich’

About catching the moment

(2018)

Here’s another piece I wrote for the Singaporean magazine for newish Christians and which is destined for my forthcoming book The Sandwich.

Luckylife11 on Pixabay

Prayerlessness requires real effort on our part.

When the Holy Spirit brushes against your soul, you need to brush him off. When you see a need, you should suppress the desire to bring it to God. When you sense a flame rising in your heart for God or eternity, you must douse it.

Practice, of course, helps. With dedication you can coat your heart with a solid shell that resists most holy urges. But even so, if we are Christians, every day we are buffeted by any number of nudges, longings, sorrows, questions and needs that prompt us to go and find God. It’s hard work to dodge them all.

The root cause

I think the reason for our prayerlessness is mostly the same reason that we don’t eat a proper diet, read improving books, make that call to a friend, or learn the piano. It’s that in the moment, we decide to play on our phone or flick through our social networks instead. We say no to prayer when we should be saying yes, or yes to some attractive thing when we should be saying no to it, and the accumulation of thousands of those moments eventually hardens and forms us into what we are and will be: I didn’t learn the piano, I didn’t look after my body, and I’ve just declined my millionth invitation to meet Jesus in prayer.

Should be an improving book here somewhere

Yes, we are urged to pray

Do we need to pray? Er, yes:

‘Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people’ (Eph 6:18). ‘Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God’ (Phil 4:6). ‘Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful‘ (Col 4:2). ‘Pray continually‘ (1 Thess 5:17). ‘I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people’ (I Tim 2:1). ‘Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed’ (James 5:16).

Then we notice that Jesus was quite happy to live as a human being, but he did not seem to manage life as a prayerless human being. Sometimes he stayed up late to pray. Sometimes he got up early. Sometimes his disciples just caught him praying. Ministry decisions? He prayed. Healing? Ditto. Feeding thousands? Ditto ditto. Personal crises? In the desert, in the garden, didn’t matter. He called on God. He called on God until he was satisfied. You would say there was something of a pattern there.

What if you’re too busy?

Perhaps you are too busy?

I refuse to believe anyone is too busy to pray. To my way of thinking, the busiest people most of us ever meet are parents with young children. Babies poop, cry, need comfort, get hungry, get mad and never hesitate to get in touch. They tend not to be all that patient either. Parents of such creatures, especially when not helped by others, are busier than a general fighting a war. Show me a young mum doing most of the caring of two small children and I will show you a sleep-deprived zombie who is too busy to finish a sentence, let alone a meal, and for whom a bathroom break is a triumph of battlefield planning.

And yet she has time to pray. When the kid is sleeping, or plugged onto her breast, or being wheeled up and down a corridor in the pit of night, she has time to reach out to God. Her prayers may not be coherent, but that doesn’t matter. Coherence can be overdone. She’s slurping an energy-drink at the spiritual ringside, ready for another round.

Honestly, you’re not too busy to pray.

So what is the cure?

Is there a cure? There is.

First. Understand you can be more fluent in the things of God and prayer. Look around your church. Some people have mastered it. Some people know God and walk with him every day. There are even some people–plenty of people actually—who are quiet and hesitant in social settings, but when they are switched over to prayer-mode they turn confident and eloquent. When they start to pray these people are like an academic walking into a library or an alcoholic opening a bottle of Scotch. They’re home. Heaven is their happy place, even while they keep one foot on earth. You can be a bit more like them.

Second. Understand what happens when you pray and what happens when you don’t. To turn to God in prayer is to access a secret, invisible world where you can pull levers that change things on earth and where you can come face to face with Christ.

Missing out on prayer, on the other hand, means that part of us lies forever fallow. Part of us that could be fruitful, colourful, playful, remains unploughed, unsown, and the butterflies must flutter elsewhere. All of us have areas of our life like that: but our prayer life never needs to be one of them.

More than that, if you don’t pray you’re mostly stuck with earthly solutions to everything. This is not great.

Third. There are a million possible solutions to the issue of prayerlessness. I suggest they all flow from a single principle. Combatting prayerlessness requires some mixture of discipline and spontaneity. This is the same way we become fluent in other areas of life, such as keeping fit or learning a musical instrument.

We need to build in some regular habits, but we also have to remind ourselves that keeping up the habit is not the aim. Enjoying God and being with him is the aim. It’s like practising the piano. We don’t practise so that we can say ‘I practised’. We practise so that we can make music.

How do we practise prayer? It surely varies with each individual and each season of life. It’s good to find out from other people what does and doesn’t work for them. Then see what works for you. Here’s my list; your friends will have other lists. 

  1. Schedule a regular time- either a part of a day or a number of minutes in the day. You might start small: ten minutes. Then you might get more ambitious. I have a friend who as a young Christian decided to tithe his waking hours. A tithe of sixteen waking hours is 96 minutes. For some years he aimed, and mostly kept, to the plan of either studying his Bible or praying for 96 minutes a day. Things changed, I am told, when he got married; but it was a good discipline for a long time.
  2. If you’re married, get into the habit of praying together every day. My wife and I do this every night. We didn’t always. But it’s a good habit.
  3. Decide that you are going to pray even when the situation is non-optimal. It isn’t perfect to pray in the corridor at work as you walk to the toilet; but it’s not a bad moment to turn over whatever’s on your mind before God.
  4. If you can’t get alone, write or type your prayers. People will think you are just fooling with your phone.
  5. Reclaim your insomnia. Can’t sleep? Pray. Stay in bed if you like. So your mind drifts? Well, steer it back. Non-optimal, half-sleepy prayer is better than no prayer at all, like a sleepy kiss is better than no kiss at all. Stop waiting for everything to be perfect.
  6. Don’t always use words. It’s OK just to be in God’s presence. Sometimes you don’t have words.
  7. Alternatively, it’s OK to speak words if that helps and it’s OK just to pray in your heart if that helps.
  8. Sign up for some regular prayer food. This can help broaden your horizons. I recently started working with the Operation World prayer ministry. They have an app that you can access every day and thus pray for the world over a year. Many groups have similar initiatives.
  9. Try things. Pray through the alphabet – pray for something beginning with A, then something beginning with B, and so on. Pray through the psalms. Use the Lord’s prayer as a set of headings.
  10. Try a total immersion method. If your church has 24-7 prayer room, or prayer event, sign up for an hour and see what happens.

You get the idea.

Bonus material: my scientist friend Ruth Bancewich has also been blogging (and experimenting) on prayer. Here‘s her helpful thoughts.

‘I never knew you’

About not living on fumes: being an extract from my new book which might be called ‘The Sandwich’.

Luckylife11 on Pixabay

Here’s a new extract from my new book, ‘The Sandwich’, originally written for a magazine in Singapore that is aimed at young adults taking early steps of faith.

(2019)

Two passages in the New Testament record people’s shock when they are shut out of the Kingdom of God at the last day. They can’t believe it. In one passage, people complain, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets!’ (Luke 13:22-30). In the other, they go even further: ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?‘ (Matthew 7:15-23).

‘I don’t know where you are from,’ Jesus says to those who lived in his neighbourhood. ‘I never knew you’, he says to those who worked spectacular miracles in his name. What does he mean?

In both these examples, things look fine on the surface, but underneath, there’s nothing.

More of the same

Plenty of other places in the Bible talk about situations where people looked good for a time, or even worked miracles in Christ’s name, but shared the same deep lack. They were running on fumes, not on steady supplies of fuel.

  • The parable of the Sower talks about seeds that sprout and quickly grow, but never come to harvest.
  • Judas Iscariot went with the other disciples on preaching tours, healing and driving out demons. He looked just like a proper apostle but was always a thief and was found out in the end.
  • In Ephesus, some Jewish exorcists tried casting out demons in the name of Jesus. It worked until one day they were mauled by a demonized person and barely managed to escape alive.
  • In the Old Testament a prophet for hire named Balaam prophesied accurately about the people of God, but money rather than God owned his heart. The New Testament warns us several times of Christian-era Balaams (see 2 Peter 2:15 and Jude 11).

Frequently, the Bible warns us against people who look good but are in fact, bad. ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.’ (Matthew 7:15). Beware ‘false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ’ (2 Corinthians 11:13). ‘They are blots and blemishes, revelling in their deceptions, while they feast with you’ (2 Peter 2:13).

Knowing and being known

Jesus says to all these surprised people, who looked so good, ‘I never knew you.’ What does he mean? And does he mean us?

  1. It can’t mean that there is anything God doesn’t know about us. He is God. He’s measured our shoe size, counted the hairs on our head, heard every word of our self-talk. He knows when we meant well. He knows when we say we meant well but really didn’t. He knows everything about us and judges it with an utter fairness. Every good point we might want him to consider – he will already have listed it. Everything we’d rather he hadn’t seen – he will have seen that too. We are entirely exposed to him, even if we would wish to cover some bits up.
  2. Yet there is another sort of knowing. If you fell in love with someone from afar, you might over time learn a lot about him or her. Stalkers, who turn this kind of behaviour into criminal obsession, may learn a lot more, all the facts – creepily so. But all that is nothing compared with the knowledge of actually knowing that person as your boyfriend or girlfriend. It’s that heart-to-heart knowledge, that relational knowledge, that openness to each other, that Jesus seems to mean when he says, ‘I never knew you.’ I never knew you like that.

This personal, heart-to-heart knowing is a two-way thing. Paul puts it like this to the Galatians, ‘Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again? (Galatians 4:8-9). Jesus says simply, ‘I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me’ (John 10:14).

Pride makes us stupid, but humility lets us see and know.

This opening of the heart to the Other, to God, is what some of us so strenuously avoid. I can go along with the Christian crowd. I can even get involved in all kinds of spiritual fireworks, impressing everyone with the show, just don’t let me face him heart to heart, naked and unarmed. Let me keep busy in his name instead. Or let me just gingerly tread around him and his call, keeping a respectful distance: ‘Oh yes, I know him well, I’m quite familiar with the teaching.’

This is such a huge theme of the Bible. Adam hides behind a tree, not a brilliant strategy when the one looking for you is All-Seeing.  ‘These people worship me with their mouths but their hearts are far from me’ says Isaiah, quoted later by Jesus, and identifying a later group of Adams sheltering behind a tree of religiosity (Mark 7:6).

‘Here I am!’ Jesus says to the smug and all-knowing Christians of Laodicea. ‘I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me’ (Revelation 3:20 NIVUK). Don’t hold me at a distance, cool and sardonic and flip. Face me. Meet me.

Knowing is trusting is following

This heart-to-heart knowing, this relational knowledge, is bound up with trusting. If you are emerging from your hiding place, laying down your weapons, taking off your headphones, and facing God defenceless, argument-less and alone, then necessarily you are trusting him to deal with you kindly and well.

Necessarily you are also committing yourself to do what he says. So another way of looking at ‘knowing’ is ‘trusting and obeying’. This is God’s ‘firm foundation’: ‘But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: “The Lord knows those who are his”, and, “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity”’ (2 Timothy 2:19).

It is a surrender. That is why it is so simple and so terrible. It is why (I think) the biggest barrier between anyone knowing God and being known by him is not ignorance but pride. God can take a humble person a long way even if they have just a few sandwiches in their mental lunchbox; a proud genius with all the world’s information on a smartphone will still be blundering in the dark. Pride makes us stupid, but humility lets us see and know. But when you surrender, when you trust and follow, knowing him and being known, there is healing for your wounds, rest for your tired bones, comfort for your sorrows, forgiveness for your rebellions and stubbornness, energy for your serving, and quietness and happiness and glory.