9 Joining In
9 
Joining In
I will bless the LORD at all times;
his praise shall continually be in my mouth.
My soul makes its boast in the LORD;
let the humble hear and be glad.
Oh, magnify the LORD with me,
and let us exalt his name together!
Actors are cattle,” the great Alfred Hitchcock is reported to have once said, and it is well known that on the set he insisted on getting exactly what he wanted, even putting actors at risk in order to do so. J. I. locked horns with a Hitchcocky director one time when he was enlisted to do a spot for a video. The director thought the script J. I. had brought with him was flat and dull; dismissing it, therefore, he showed J. I. off the cuff what he wanted him to say and how he was to say it. J. I. meekly gave it a try, but to no satisfaction. The director’s words were not what he naturally would have said; they would not flow together on J. I.’s tongue, for the memory of his own script kept derailing them. Tension grew as he tried it again, and again and again, and again and again and again, till the moment when he had to leave to catch a plane. Whether any of his efforts were used he never found out; he only knows that the director disliked them all. “I don’t think you could have a career in films,” said the latter as they shook hands. J. I. assured him that no such career was planned, and they parted Christians, though hardly more. Whatever the director had known about J. I. in advance, he clearly had not known that, for better or for worse (J. I.’s friends differ sharply on this), in role play and communication J. I. only has it in him to be himself, and he gets stubborn and uptight if you try to push him into being anything different. The good man’s abstract notion of J. I. had not included this concrete fact.
The necessity of being oneself, J. I.’s stumbling block in that studio, is by contrast foundational to the Christian life. “Be what you are”; “live out what God has wrought within”; “express your new nature, which is now the real you”; “ ‘be holy’ means ‘be natural in Christ’”—all of these maxims express the basic principle on which all we have said so far about praying has rested. Praying, however hard in practice, is a natural, instinctive, authentically personal action on the part of all who are born again. We struggle to pray, not just because we know we should but because deep down we want to. The urge to pray is natural to every believer, and we are never more truly ourselves than when we are making the attempt.
So far in this book our focus has been almost entirely on individual prayer, the kind of praying that we do when we are alone, following Jesus’ admonition to “go to your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret” (Mt 6:6). This private communication between each of us and the Father has been the center of our attention, and in that solo setting we have looked at petition, which in Scripture is the heart of personal prayer; we have explored meditation, the contemplating of God and his glory; we have looked at the voicing of praise and of complaint, the expressing of urgency and pain as we ask God to help us; and in the previous chapter we have highlighted the importance of hanging on to God in persistent prayer that expresses persistent faith and persistent hope, because we know for certain that God is not going to abandon us, however grim things feel at this moment.
All of these modes of prayer develop our selfhood and individuality in Christ, which throughout our Christian lives is a work in progress, one dimension of our growing toward what we will be when our glorifying transformation is complete and we see Christ as he is. (In saying this we echo Paul and John; see 2 Cor 3:18 and 1 Jn 3:2.) The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ does continually individualize, making us more and more into real individual persons than we have been hitherto. It makes us realize that here we stand (one-by-one-by-one) in the presence of the God of creation, the God who runs this world, the God whose greatness is infinite, and each one of us has to deal with him individually; nobody can do it for us. The gospel teaches us to say to ourselves, I may not any more drift along with the crowd, even the Christian crowd, nor may I any more get absorbed in serving the great god Self; henceforth I must acknowledge that I live my life under God’s eye and must answer to him for whatever I do. I have to be the person who exercises faith in his Son, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, my personal Savior and Lord. Show me, then, Lord Jesus, how I am to be your disciple and please you in everything I do. That is God in Christ individualizing us, making us realize and develop our own individuality in his presence, thus making us serious, which is the way that evangelicals of two hundred years ago in Britain used to express the real-life quality of being a believer.
This emphasis on deepened personhood and intensified individuality is integral to understanding and living our life of faith and hope and love and prayer. But it is not the whole story, either about our praying or about our discipleship or about our identity in Christ or about our Christian existence as such. The idea of the life of fellowship with God as—to borrow a well-used phrase, “the flight of the alone to the Alone”—an entirely private affair in which others have no place, is a mistaken abstraction, leaving out one major aspect of reality, just as was the film director’s abstract idea of J. I. There is a further concrete fact to be taken account of, namely, the churchly quality of biblical Christian selfhood, which God forms through his Word and Spirit in all the regenerate. This is something that the thrust of this chapter requires us now to explain.
THE TOGETHERNESS OF THE CHURCH
Starting from where we are, there is some ground-clearing that must first be done. For many, the word church signifies just a building. William Ewart Gladstone, sometime prime minister of England, who dominated British politics through the second half of the nineteenth century, was a high Anglican, much exercised in mind over church questions. “What is the Church of England?” he once asked his cab driver. “It’s that big building on the corner, with the spire,” was the answer he got. To many today, a church is a small white (or in Britain, gray stone) building with a high steeple in a rural setting pictured on a Christmas card. They might be surprised to find that Scripture says virtually nothing about church buildings, speaking only of churches meeting in people’s houses (see Rom 16:5; 1 Cor 16:19; Col 4:15, Philem 2).
For others the word church is a label for a denomination, that is, an association of congregations with a distinctive heritage and theology within the global Christian community: the Church of England or the Assemblies of God, for example. But this is not the biblical usage either, though the associations of congregations that we call denominations, just like the individual congregations that make them up, may and should embody the church as it is defined and displayed in Scripture. Scripture, we find, describes the church, whether local, global or cosmic, embodying saints in glory along with saints on earth, as people connected to each other in complex ways so as to become a single unit. The Bible uses various images to describe this collection of people. Together they become a building, a family, a temple, a planted field, a body, a flock, a branching vine. All of these images picture in different ways distinct and varied items linked up and firmly connected to each other as parts of a single whole, something more valuable than any of them could be on their own. A doorknob is useless unless attached to a lock on the door of a building. There, however, it becomes quite important. Single objects like a doorknob, a stone, a head of wheat, a toenail become valuable because of their connections as part of a building, a temple, a crop or a human body. Without this togetherness the single parts lack the significance they would otherwise have, and likewise the entity composed of them is not complete. So it is with the church. And we, God’s people, are within this unity.
The biblical images of the church reveal two kinds of connection within the same body: associational and organic, the latter implying that a single flow of life and energy is being shared. Clearly, the latter term goes deeper into this reality than the former, for while associations are, so to speak, horizontal, oriented to other people, the organic concept points vertically, as it were, to the life of the living Christ, which we share not only with him but with all others who, like ourselves, are alive in him. United inseparably to him, we are inseparably united to them too. We are each linked with every other Christian everywhere as intimately as conjoined twins are linked, yet not in any way to our disadvantage but entirely for our benefit. Two images stand out here, Christ’s picture of himself as the vine of which believers are branches (Jn 15:1-17) and Paul’s image of the body, of which Christ is both the head and the animating life, and each Christian is a functioning body part.
This powerful image of the church as a body is treated extensively in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4. In 1 Corinthians 12, we read:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. . . . If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? . . . The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ . . . Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. (1 Cor 12:12-14, 17, 21, 27)
So we are “members one of another” (Eph 4:25)—“all parts of the same body,” as the second edition of the NLT renders the phrase.
What does this mean? Let us illustrate Paul’s illustration. Think of a bicycle wheel. The spokes are joined both to the hub and to the outer rim. Each spoke gives strength to the rim, and extra strength comes from the fact that near the hub each spoke overlaps or crosses over another. Christ, our risen Lord, is like the hub, and we who believe are like the spokes, linked both to Christ and to the rim. The rim corresponds to the church’s organized outreaching life; it is the place where, metaphorically for the church and literally for the bicycle, the rubber hits the road. To this life each of us must ever be a contributor, a part that strengthens the wheel as a whole, and the precise crossover of each spoke should remind us that we are each providentially placed in Christ’s body to serve and strengthen, and to be served and strengthened by, other individuals whom the Lord will send our way.
Or think of how in the human body one eye or ear appears to take on extra duty to compensate when the other eye or ear is out of action, so that we seem to ourselves to see and hear almost as well as we would if both eyes and ears were working. Or again, think of how arm and shoulder muscles (under continuous use) grow hugely strong to serve their paraplegic owners, who must spend their days propelling a wheelchair. The point to be grasped is that within the body of Christ it belongs to our identity, first to be sharing a common life with Christ and in and through Christ with, quite literally, every other Christian that there is; and second, as a consequence, to be giving ourselves to love, serve and strengthen our fellow participants in Christ’s body. To duck out of this commitment is not an option. And not to see the reality of this given bond that links us not only with Christ but also with all Christians right from the start of our Christian lives is to be bedeviled (in the most literal sense) by an abstract individualistic notion of the Christian life that ignores an enormously significant, truly fundamental, elephant-size concrete fact.
This organic connection with one another in Christ goes far beyond Sunday morning worship, though it should powerfully affect that worship, requiring us every time to run a thorough check on our thoughts, motives and movements. It is important to ask such questions as “Am I avoiding sitting near David in row five, and making eye contact with him, because I secretly wish that he was not here?” Yet David is a member of Christ’s body along with me, as I am along with him. Christian love regularly requires of us good will to persons we do not particularly like. More positively, if Janet and Arthur have announced their intended marriage, am I almost as joyful as they? If sent an invitation, will I attend their wedding as a visual support of their vows? If Rosemary and I have a major disagreement about church policy or about the color of the roses on the altar, for that matter, do I quickly seek her out and make peace as Matthew 18:15 directs and as Matthew 5:23-25 confirms, and thereby protect our church from being infected with our division? If I learn that John is engaged in an unfair business practice, do I humbly confront him about his sin and ask that he return to honesty—even if that conversation is uncomfortable (Jas 5:19-20)? Do I invite to my home Sue the single mom and Pete the college student and Mario the businessman and Grandma Francis who uses a wheelchair and Edgar who seems homeless and Anna whose husband is sick with cancer and Julie who makes me laugh and Audrey who is so terribly awkward in social settings and Gino who speaks another language; do I invite all of these people into my home? Why should I? Because we, all of us, belong together shaping a single body and that body has one head: my Savior and theirs, Jesus Christ (Eph 4:15). We are all connected to him and thus cemented to each other by his grace in a body whose visible shape is “church.” This is the only kind of behavior that befits those who really believe they are members one of another, forming together the body of Christ. And we need each other! God has called us together to be this body on earth, and that means that by our very relationship with each other, we are to testify to his redeeming power. How? By the togetherness that we seek to unpack in this chapter.
Self-sufficiency, like self-absorption, is a no-no in the body of Christ; God will not prosper the pride of those who think they can get along without other Christians’ help. Spiritual isolationism is in his eyes not a virtue but a vice; only through mutuality of dependence, ministry and pastoral care do Christians really grow and churches really go forward. The New Testament concept, plain in Paul but implicit everywhere, is that the one universal church is manifested in miniature whenever and wherever people band together to be the church—that is, to do the things that the church does: learn the faith from Scripture; praise, adore and pray to the Father and the Son through the Spirit; maintain the sacraments of the gospel; establish pastoral leadership; and practice care, correction and encouragement of each other, deploying all the endowments for service that the Holy Spirit gives. These are the essentials of local church life. Even beyond the local church, this sense of belonging to one another (though less intense) extends to others of like faith within the denominations and even in principle to all Christian believers throughout the world.
The togetherness of the church, particularly the church at prayer, can wonderfully attract those who need to know the love of Jesus. Society’s emphasis on individuality has created a vast emptiness, a loneliness that hungers for genuine connection. Clubs, committees and social networks based on common interests no doubt go some way toward filling the gap, but it takes Christ’s love, expressed by and experienced through Christians, and specifically Christians in the fellowship of local churches, to achieve connections that satisfy the lonely heart. It is no accident that Paul’s great teaching in 1 Corinthians 12 on the church as body of Christ is immediately followed by the famous love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13. Only to the extent that we teach and preach and sing and pray and live the love of Jesus, both toward each other and toward those who do not yet know him, will the church fulfill its mission to draw others to Christ. But loving connectedness within the church sends a powerful invitation as, for a moment, we drop our linked hands with each other to draw someone else into our circle of belonging—belonging, that is, to each other, just because we all belong to Jesus Christ. Within the arms of the church this unbeliever can hear in Scripture, in song, in sermon, in prayer and most importantly in the love-shaped lives and words of welcome and witness on the part of the Lord’s people, that Jesus loves this person and is inviting this sinner into the fellowship of the body, where he or she too can find and celebrate salvation.
Much of our praying is solo work—direct conversation between each of us and God. But in the church we unite our hearts and our voices in what we may call joined praying. Scripture repeatedly emphasizes that God places great value on these prayers from godly people whose hearts unite with each other in seeking common goals. Most of what happens in Christian worship is a form of prayer. Hymns, songs, prayers from a prayer book, extemporaneous prayers of the pastor and the people, guided prayers, many Scriptures recited, invocations, confessions, intercessions, benedictions—all address God. As the people of God at worship together, we join our hearts and often our voices in all of these, with God as our target audience. Ideally the church at worship is diverse individuals purposely and conscientiously uniting to express shared thoughts and desires for the glory of God and for the good of each other, their joined voices revealing a unity in fellowship and focus that only God can create. A thousand years before the formation of the Christian church, David the psalmist pictured something of the unity that God’s people can experience within the church.
Behold, how good and pleasant it is
when brothers dwell in unity!
It is like the precious oil on the head, . . .
of Aaron. . . .
It is like the dew of Hermon
which falls on the mountains of Zion!
For there the LORD has commanded the blessing,
life forevermore. (Ps 133)
All churches are flawed, but even through those flaws, God uses the church to sand off the rough edges of our characters, to reveal his love through the diversity of his bonded people, to teach us about himself through Scripture read and preached, to energize us as we each develop our unique skills in his service, to purify us through the vulnerability of confession, to inspire us through those who have walked God’s path further than we, to spur us toward love and good works, and to draw us closer to himself and each other through our united prayers, all of this for the praise of his own glory, which he displays in and through the togetherness of his church.
This chapter will examine in close-up the topic of “joining in.” Using what we have just said about Christ, the Christian and the church as our launch pad, we will develop the togetherness aspect of prayer by a threefold emphasis: God wills togetherness in prayer; God uses togetherness in prayer; God helps us to learn and even love togetherness in prayer.
GOD WILLS OUR TOGETHERNESS
We “serious Christians” constantly stress individuality of discipleship. We don’t always stress in the same way our unity with fellow believers, which, well-experienced, is a foretaste of (even as we ventured earlier, a rehearsal for) the togetherness of heaven. In Hebrews 12, at the end of a long exposition of the supremacy and glory of the Lord Jesus Christ as our Redeemer King, our great High Priest and the founder and perfecter of our faith, the writer speaks of faithfulness and hope in our discipleship to him, and among other things he says:
You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. (Heb 12:22-24)
Here is defined for us our ultimate togetherness in a great company that includes countless angels, the gathering of the firstborn (Christians now departed?), God the Father, spirits of the righteous made perfect (Old Testament saints?) and Jesus himself. The verb is “you have come.” Obviously we who are at this moment writing or reading are not yet in heaven in the full sense. But we do in some way already participate in the togetherness of that final gathering through our corporate worship. “With Angels and Archangels, and all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name,” says the Anglican Prayer Book.
The book of Revelation consists of seven letters of encouragement from the living Lord to seven churches, followed by a long visionary appendix from chapter 4 to the end of the book. The appendix reinforces God’s summons to faithfulness and his promise that those who overcome as they face life’s pain and grief and discouragement and evil powers and circumstances and all kinds of pressure to throw in the towel will enjoy great and unimaginable glory in consequence. That glory will essentially be a matter of togetherness around the throne of God in praise and adoration, a supreme joy for all who are there. Punctuating the nightmare visions of dreadfulness in this world, all through this appendix, we see shafts of sunlight, visions of the final glory of heaven, and hear throughout a drumbeat of emphasis on togetherness. Read, preferably aloud, the passages that follow.
I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and glory and honor and might forever and ever!” (Rev 5:11-13)
I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever.” (Rev 7:9-12)
I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven like the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, and they were singing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. (Rev 14:1-3)
I saw . . . those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands. And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying,
“Great and amazing are your deeds,
O Lord God the Almighty!” (Rev 15:2-4)
After this I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out,
“Hallelujah!
Salvation and glory and power belong to our God,
for his judgments are true and just.” . . .
Once more they cried out,
“Hallelujah! . . .
And the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God who was seated on the throne, saying, “Amen. Hallelujah!” And from the throne came a voice saying,
“Praise our God,
all you His servants,
you who fear him,
small and great.” (Rev 19:1-5)
The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. (Rev 21:23-26)
The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. (Rev 22:3-5)
How many images and sounds of togetherness appear in these scenes of gathered praise in John’s revelation? Too many to absorb! After reading these visions of heaven and its worship, we cannot doubt that the togetherness of all unfallen angels with all godly humans, uniting in praise before God’s throne, is central in God’s purpose. This is, perhaps, the surest thing we know about heaven. Heaven is the goal of our earthly pilgrimage, the destination where through the mercy of Christ every single one of God’s people will spend eternity. Heaven is a place, a state, a condition and an experience of togetherness. What will heaven look like? The silence of Scripture on the details allows our imagination the pleasure of whimsy.
Three summers ago I (Carolyn) was hiking in the woods of southern Wisconsin with a group of high school students. We tramped the bottom of a ravine, crisscrossed a sparkling creek on wet stones (a few soggy feet here), threaded our way up a path tracing the side of cliff walls, while misty sunlight etched lacy shadows on mossy tree trunks. It was an “off” day. The cliffs were too slippery for our planned rock climbing with ropes, so we hiked. Moss, stream, birdcalls, scuttering furry things in the brush, cool rain-washed air: not surprisingly, we began to speak of heaven. I declared that “my heaven” was just this kind of place. Right here was as perfect as I could imagine. Amanda, who is fine with rural hiking but much prefers the noise and activity of city life, insisted that “her heaven” was a city—and besides that’s the way the Bible describes it. Liz, who thinks of herself as “the typical compromising middle child” said she liked both me and Amanda, and would like to spend her eternity in both of our heavens, perhaps alternating weekends. We all laughed at our silly attempts to picture what is indescribable and to schedule what is timeless. Conversations about heaven tend to end that way, joyfully so.
In the time of the Roman Empire, cities were thought of as places of safety, refuge and prosperity. In today’s society, urban blight, poverty and crime can trigger a different feeling about cities. Is heaven a literal city? It seems clear that God used the term city in the book of Revelation to picture, within the limits of human language, the safety and opportunity and richness that our eternity with him will provide. And at the minimum Revelation’s description of heaven as a city illustrates an all-encompassing joining in of God’s people.
Of this, then, we can be certain: heaven will be an unending enjoyment of togetherness in worship, where every person present joins in. And this will be the full realization of an ideal that God is already working toward here on earth. The heart of God’s prescription for the life of his people, right from the time of the exodus onward, has been their regular togetherness, as an assembly of people coming together to worship their common Lord. That is why every gathering of believers on earth for worship (whether in Old or New Testament times, or this very week) may properly be thought of as a rehearsal for the glory that is to come.
God implants in all regenerate hearts an instinctive urge toward the togetherness in fellowship that is his goal. So the psalmist cries: “Oh, magnify the LORD with me, / and let us exalt His name together!” (Ps 34:3). When on Pentecost morning the Spirit came down and a new human community was formed, the Acts narrative tells us that all of these people were together in very intense and joyful worship and service of the Lord. Writes Luke:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. . . . And all who believed were together. . . . And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. (Acts 2:42, 44, 46-47, emphasis added)
When they heard that their leaders Peter and John had been arrested and told to stop their preaching:
They lifted their voices together to God, and said, “Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit,
‘Why do the Gentiles rage,
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves . . .
against the Lord and against his Anointed’—
for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel.” (Acts 4:24-27)
They were saying in effect, “Yes, Lord, your word has been fulfilled. We invoke you as the God who predicted what happened in the death and the resurrection of Jesus, and what is happening now in the opposition being shown to us who are servants of Jesus.” And then, still very much together, they asked for help. Most of us would have begged for protection and peace. Not them; they were too mission-minded for that; they prayed in line with what God had already designated as their own future work. “Now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness” (Acts 4:29). Their petition was corporate; they addressed God as members one of another; they were all praying in these courageous terms together. They joined in prayer. And God used their joined prayers to continue his work of protecting and empowering the spread of Christianity throughout the known world in a single generation—as the remainder of the book of Acts indicates.
In Hebrews 10:25 the writer tells his readers how to prepare for eternity: Don’t neglect “to meet together, as is the habit of some.” Failure to gather together, or nonattendance at the announced meetings, might seem the wise course when persecutors are targeting Christ’s people, as was apparently the case here, but it is not a good move. The writer warns us that attempts at solo faith, undercover and unnoticed, are the wrong way to go. Togetherness, in one form or another must remain the essence of our practice of discipleship, come hell or high water. This is the will of God, and the one highway of spiritual well-being. It is by our togetherness in worship here, foreshadowing our togetherness hereafter, that we are to express the reality of being members one of another in Christ.
GOD USES OUR TOGETHERNESS
The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit work to draw all Christians into active habitual togetherness, not only because this expresses the truth of our oneness in Christ but also because the divine plan is to use our togetherness as a means of our mutual blessing, as we each share what we have received through Christ. Think of the triune God as an artist and the world as a studio and display area, and the perfecting of the church through the perfecting of all who belong to it as the complex artwork that is continually on the go there: a vast enterprise, no doubt, but one that is not beyond the artist’s power. In Ephesians 4 Paul analyzes what is involved. Through persons and leadership gifts for evangelism and nurture, he says, God works
to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, . . . to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. . . . [S]peaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Eph 4:12-16)
There are three things in particular to notice here. First, “speaking the truth” is an unavoidable undertranslation, for the Greek word means expressing and living out the truth in every way possible, and there is no single English word for that. John Stott, following some older commentators, gave “truthing it” as a rendering, coining a new verb to catch this breadth of meaning.
Second, “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” is a single corporate destiny in which all Christians will share, rather than an individual transformation that will be reproduced in millions of other separate lives. The word fullness is the key. No one of us can embody and exhibit so much. The fullness of Christ will not be actualized until all the millions of the Lord’s people are all together in glory, each with our own story of how the Lord has shown us mercy, each as the personal evidence of the re-creating and transforming power of God that has been working in our lives ever since we became believers through the artistry of our heavenly Father and our Savior and the Holy Spirit doing this terrific job of individual renewal for each of us. That state of glorified togetherness will constitute “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” of which we will one day be part. Such is the corporate destiny within which all of us “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” We are each one a work in progress by the grace of God, but the Bible looks ahead to this transcendent reality of united togetherness with each other in, with, facing and alongside Jesus our Lord, and therefore tells us in no uncertain terms that joining together with other believers should be our continued aim and priority throughout life. Togetherness should be our goal here because we know that it will be our ultimate fulfillment in glory. We should live, then, in Christian fellowship conscious that in our togetherness we are preparing for heaven and being prepared for heaven. All of our prayers to God, whether on our own or in company with others, should be made with that future clear in our minds.
As alliterations to aid our memory, we may properly say that God uses our togetherness here and now for enlightenment, for enlargement and for encouragement. We can learn this from Psalm 107, which begins:
Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,
his steadfast love endures forever!
Let the redeemed of the LORD say so,
whom he has redeemed from trouble
and gathered in from the lands,
from the east and from the west,
from the north and from the south. (Ps 107:1-3)
After this comprehensive invitation to all recipients of saving mercy to give thanks, the psalm continues with a series of testimonies. We can catch the rhythms of a pattern (trouble, prayer, rescue, thanks) as one by one the people of God testify of his great goodness toward them.
Some wandered in desert wastes,
finding no way to a city to dwell in;
hungry and thirsty,
their soul fainted within them.
They cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them out of their distress. . . .
Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,
for his wondrous works to the children of men! (Ps 107:4-6, 8)
Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death,
prisoners in affliction and in irons,
for they had rebelled against the words of God. . . .
Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress. . . .
Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,
for his wondrous works to the children of men! (Ps 107:10-11, 13, 15)
Some were fools through their sinful ways,
and because of their iniquities suffered affliction; . . .
Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress. . . .
Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,
for his wondrous works to the children of men! (Ps 107:17, 19, 21)
Some went down to the sea in ships,
doing business on the great waters; . . .
[God] commanded and raised the stormy wind,
which lifted up the waves of the sea. . . .
Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress. . . .
Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,
for his wondrous works to the children of men! (Ps 107:23, 25, 28, 31)
These vignettes of God’s mercy toward forlorn and undeserving folk whose very enterprise has landed them in trouble—fainting, hopeless, foolish, endangered souls—leads to closing generalizations about the lost, the just and the wise.
[God] raises up the needy out of affliction
and makes their families like flocks.
The upright see it and are glad, . . .
Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things;
let them consider the steadfast love of the LORD. (Ps 107:41-42)
The psalm shows us that testimonies like these yield enlightenment. Wise people learn from the experience of other believers how rich, varied and inexhaustible are God’s resources of rescuing love, which he deploys when those in trouble, little as they merit mercy and much as they realize that, humble themselves before him and cry out for help. God, who is faithful to his promises, heeds their praying and comes to save them accordingly. The sharing of such experiences in fellowship today has the same happy effect of making the wise wiser in their understanding of God’s steadfast divine love.
From psalms like this the godly also gain enlargement, as their hearts
are drawn out to join in the thanks and praise of those who have been thus blessed. The effect of testimonies such as those contained in Psalm 107 is to deepen our realization of how good and great the Lord is, and hereby again and again he shows us how God works in us and what he pulls out of us in a way that we could not have envisioned until it happens. Then comes a measure of joy, delight, praise and energy for his service that focuses our heart on him, fills our heart with him and anchors our heart in him with quite a new intensity. The psalmist in Psalm 119:32 pictures this energized state as running: “I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart!” This enlarged heart is not a case for the cardiologist, but a spiritual process at the core of our being whereby we gain energy to serve God and lose our inhibitions and restraints about doing so. The sharing of experiences of God’s goodness, other things being equal, will have a similar enlivening effect in our circles of fellowship today and tomorrow.
That encouragement is received as we read or hear stories of people in extremity whom God in mercy rescued from final disaster is obvious, too obvious to need discussing. What may need discussing is whether what we call our fellowship with other Christians, both in the flesh and in our reading, is bringing such stories our way. But that is a question that we, the writers, and each of our readers, must answer for ourselves.
RELUCTANT JOINERS: LEARNING AND LOVING TOGETHERNESS
This is a book about praying, and this chapter bears the title “Joining In,” and its theme is making the most of prayer together—and our readers may by now be wondering whether their authors have gone off track. But no; what we have been trying to do is to prepare our readers to get the message on our topic at the proper deep level. Our reason for writing about our given togetherness in Christ’s body and our ideal of regular sought-out fellowship with each other is that we all need to be fully aware that these are integral elements in God’s plan for us, the second being dictated by the first. We are squaring up to a state of affairs that we think is widespread and that if not challenged and transcended will keep us from seeing our togetherness as the deep-level necessity that it is, and also from embracing it as the deep-level benefit that it is; and that, we think, is something that will keep us from practicing prayer together the way God wills. Our pages so far have had as their aim the raising of consciousness about this; we want to induce an awareness that will correct an imbalance and clear a blind spot, so that we may adjust our mindset to God’s full purpose for us in Christ.
The personal lopsidedness that we want to challenge is sometimes labeled pietism—an unfair use of a noble word. True pietism is piety, godliness and devotion anchored in the truth that my individual relationship with God is the most important thing in my life, and so must ever be my top priority. The popular form of pietism that we now face, found among evangelicals as well as others, is this priority of “personal relationship with God” pulled out of shape by this modern, secular, Enlightenment-bred type of individualism that teaches us to see ourselves as distinct from, if not actually against, all existing forms of society (family, school, political consensus, cultural consensus, church, whatever). In secular contexts this individualism glorifies the rebel; in Christian contexts it makes recognition of churchly identity as part of our Christian identity difficult, even when we have learned to distinguish between the one universal church that God sees and knows and the many local, denominational, building-housed or home-based churches that we see and know. The popular pietist way is to value church services and parachurch gatherings as we value gas stations and parties and maybe college lectures too: we show up in order (in one sense or another) to fill up and then go on our way without any sense of continuing commitment to the source of the filling.
Thinking this way, evangelicals, with a whole smorgasbord of Biblebased Protestant worship places to choose from, often become inveterate church-hoppers, not settling anywhere. Roman Catholics and Orthodox of similar bent move around less, but failure to realize that maintaining the deepest possible togetherness with fellow believers is integral to maintaining the deepest possible faith fellowship with Christ is widespread among them as well. These spiritual individualists appreciate the good sermons, good pastoral care and good friendship that organized churches offer, but they do not appreciate that full commitment to Christ’s church body is integral to full commitment to Christ the Head himself. Not until we get past this blockage point in our too-individualistic view of discipleship will we be able to join in prayer with other Christians as we should.
Healthy Christian togetherness does not usurp the place of our individuality; instead our togetherness is the frame for expression of that individuality. John Wesley with great wisdom said somewhere, “There is nothing more unchristian than the solitary Christian.” Persons who practice what may be called “Lone Ranger Christianity” cannot share in the fellowship of Christian brothers and sisters where real spiritual growth takes place. Their kind of Christianity is inevitably stunted; it is, indeed, more than a little perverse. We grow in the sense of our own individual identity with the Lord as we grow in realization and expression of our brotherhood and sisterhood with all the rest of the saints who are also marching to Zion as we are. As we cultivate personal fellowship with the Savior, so we must cultivate, as a matter of conscience, this full-scale kind of togetherness with his people, who with us are his body. This is the churchliness of faithful discipleship.
Acting out that churchliness is far easier for some than for others. Some of us are naturally gregarious people, happiest in a roomful of talkers or at least with two or three good friends. We bare our souls with relative ease. Others of us are intensely private people who love solitude and for whom the most casual conversation is a strain, if not actually a pain. Yet God calls us all to grow as we learn to pray and to worship together. Those who find this kind of togetherness a natural joy must exercise sensitivity toward brothers and sisters who find it difficult. Conversely, Christians for whom it is difficult should see this building of connection with kindred souls as a spiritual discipline at which they must exert themselves both for their own spiritual well-being and that of others as well as for the sake of worshiping God as he desires. They can find camaraderie with C. S. Lewis, a spiritual giant, who (though he enjoyed spiritual friendships) never found public worship to his liking, as we have already noticed. Still, he disciplined himself to attend and participate as regularly as the church door opened and closed, and so must we.
Our claim is that all Christians can love togetherness in praise and prayer, and that all Christians are called to learn the practice of that togetherness, which is more than just being alongside each other when God is addressed. But some of us, if we opened our hearts with perfect honesty, would have to admit that we do this with an inner detachment that is instinctive to us, not by reason of our cultural conditioning but because, fundamentally, we are loners, even at prayer, and we are never happier than when we are out on our own with the Lord. In the rest of life’s tasks we find that loneliness is comfortable, and the idea of togetherness is something of a threat. Most of us have a measure of this in our makeup, at least during certain periods of our lives. How then will we respond to this inner reserve, whether it is an every hour, every day condition or one that comes upon us during times of, for instance, grief or loss or strain or insecurity?
A day or two of self-indulgence will not hurt us in this area. A week of solitude and privacy—call it a retreat—is all to the good, particularly if part of that time is spent deliberately communicating with God. But if isolation and privacy becomes a pattern of life, spiritual growth in critical areas is all but impossible—and we deprive the community of faith of all that God could give them through our presence. Worst of all, we stifle expression of our oneness in Christ and thereby displease God. Those of us who are naturally inclined loners may need to grab ourselves by the shirt collar and give ourselves a stern scolding, something along the line of: My true identity before God is marred if I indulge this attitude of emotional withdrawal and keeping my relational distance. It does not allow me to be fulfilled; I am not growing in grace as long as I indulge myself in inner detachment in this way; my children and friends are not benefiting as they should from my example of shared faith. My call from God as one of his people is to be transparently close to others in fellowship, ready to open my heart to share my own testimony, just as I need to receive the testimony of others, and I should be as ready to pray with them as they are to pray with me. This kind of self-given shoulder-shaking lecture from time to time can help us to accept our God-given responsibility of joining with others in praise and prayer to God, and (perhaps) eventually even to enjoy it.
Polite reserve, so commonly viewed as a virtue among those of us bred north of the fortieth parallel, has got to be overcome—for our own spiritual health and for the glory of God. The Scriptures speak of Christian believing as corporate, Christian worship as corporate and Christian growth as corporate. Christianity, as is often said, is body life, and body life is life together in the intimacy and trust of open sharing of ourselves with the good of others always in view. None of us may contract out of that.
Nor may what we see as some Christians’ personal quirks hold us back. A Peanuts cartoon character once declared: “I love the human race. It’s people I can’t stand.” We are called to grow past the “can’t stand” view of people and begin to grow alongside our flawed brothers and sisters in Christ. Our readers may know this well-worn anonymous ditty:
To live above with the saints we love,
Oh, that will be glory!
But to live below with the saints we know?
Now that’s a different story!
But we can and often must love people (that is, seek their good) without, at first anyway, being able to like them; to stand apart from a needy or exasperating believer on the ground that we do not like them is simply sinful.
Thus—at last!—we reach the point where we can speak directly about joining in praise and prayer with others who are in Christ with us, and with whom by the grace of God we who believe are already one. The blockage we have to transcend is that of being alongside others physically while not entering into full togetherness with them spiritually—a sin of omission that is very easy indeed to commit. As a clergyman I (J. I.) face congregations during hymns, and it is not hard to see who is not singing. (There are always some, usually men. Why? I can guess, though I do not really know.) When the congregation is praying, however, only God can tell who is not joining in, for all hunch or kneel with eyes shut in the same way, and many suppose that by simply being there and listening to prayers, they are actually joining in when in fact they are not. Some guidance is needed here.
There are two distinct modes of corporate prayer, and we all need to learn to join in both. The first is the informal, unscripted type of prayer that is natural and usual in the family, between friends and in the prayer meetings that take place both in and outside the organized life of churches. The second is prayer in the church service, whether liturgical in the sense that it follows a set text or extempore in the sense that the leader addresses God as spokesperson for the congregation in words that are partially, perhaps wholly, unwritten and, to use an old word, conceived at the moment of speaking. This puts leading in prayer at a service and at a prayer meeting essentially on a par. When another person is praying aloud, the temptation is to do no more than passively listen, but the proper task is actively to think and pray in our heart along with the leader, making the petitions our own as we hear them spoken. To form and maintain this habit takes effort, but we are not joining in according to the will of God, save as we labor to do this.
We would add that all who lead in prayer, whether liturgical or extempore, should strive to be clear and orderly in what they say, to make this participatory thinking and desiring as straightforward as possible. It should be recognized that neither rhapsodic incoherence in “conceived” prayer nor dreary unexpressive droning when reading “set” prayers is ordinarily a sign of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
As, in Richard Baxter’s words, God in conversion “breaketh not all Men’s hearts alike,” so in teaching us the togetherness dimension of Christian living God does not always work the same way but adapts to each person’s temperament. He teaches some, who naturally warm to public gatherings, properly to value public worship and rallies and prayer meetings by using these events to enrich their personal alone times with God, giving them songs, insights and models of devotion to animate what previously seemed to them a barren routine. And he teaches others, who temperamentally find any form of joining in hard, properly to value these gatherings by thinking of their personal prayer (where they are much more comfortable) as preparation of heart for the corporate reality of praise and prayer in company and as part of that company.
Carol Wimber said of the early Vineyard days, “We learned that what happens when we are alone with the Lord determines how intimate and deep the worship will be when we come together.” Since the Lord wills that worship should truly be intimate and deep when we come together, we who belong to the cool, withdrawn, shy and introverted brigade, who by instinct prefer privacy to intimacy and distance to close relationships, might well begin by adding a hymnal or book of Christian songs to our regular private prayers. We need not be skilled singers to do this. Many songs and hymns are really prayers for people together to address to God. Other songs are confessions of faith and expressions of God’s greatness that we can readily adopt as our own prayers of commitment. During our times alone with God we can read these words as part of our communication with him, even when we cannot bring ourselves actually to sing them. Weeks later, perhaps, when those same songs come into our public worship, we will have already voiced them alone to God and so will be better able to unselfconsciously join other believers singing them in church. We will, after all, have practiced them at home.
Similarly, all of us may well draw on last Sunday’s printed order of worship or the prayer book used in our faith tradition as we practice our alone time with God. We can pray the prayers aloud to God, read the set Scriptures and reflect on them, and remind ourselves of their truths throughout the day. Gradually the regular patterns of worship and the nuances of liturgical prayers and responses will become a natural part of our ongoing conversation with God. As we invite God’s Spirit to teach us, small phrases will become loaded for us with significance we had never before discerned. In this way our private time with God will gain deeper meaning—and we will bring that meaning with us when we gather for corporate worship.
The bottom line for us all is: Choose togetherness, the radical togetherness of those who know they are inseparably and eternally one in Christ and whose relationship is rooted in praise and prayer together. Choose not to be held back by shyness, embarrassment, social convention or any form of personal inhibition (attitudes anchored not in concern for dignity and good taste, as some make themselves believe, but in a panicky fear of vulnerability). Choose to give and receive love on a basis of humble and mutual openness. Choose to commit yourself to a congregation long term, to identify as fully as you can with its goals and members, to open your life and your home to your fellow believers, and to give help wherever help is needed. In short, choose togetherness, and choose wholehearted, closely bound involvement in the congregation’s worshiping life of prayer and praise as the central element of that togetherness. For this and nothing less than this is the will of God.