Personal Application
PERSONAL APPLICATION
í. Is there a destination or familiar place that inspires you to worship? What is it about this setting that draws you toward God?
2. Read Psalm 104 and ask God to open your eyes to the majesty of His creation and providential care.
FROM PROXIMATE TO
PERSONAL Jesús answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water."
JOHN 4:13-15
orne time ago my wife, Margie, returned from an errand visibly shaken by a heartrending conversation she had experienced. She was about the very simple task of selecting a picture and a frame when a dialogue began with the owner of the shop. When Margie said she would like a scene with children in it, the woman quite casually asked if the people for whom the picture was being purchased had any children of their own. "No," replied my wife, "but that is not by their choice."
There was a momentary pause. Suddenly, like a hydrant uncorked, a question burst with unveiled hostility from the woman's lips: "Have you ever lost a child?"
Margie was somewhat taken aback and immediately sensed that a terrible tragedy lurked behind the abrupt question.
The conversation had obviously taken an unsettling turn. But even at that my wife was not prepared for the flood of emotion and anger that was to follow, from this one who was still a stranger. The sorry tale quickly unfolded. The woman proceeded to speak of the two children she had lost, each loss carrying a heartache all its own. "Now," she added, "I am watching my sister as she is about to lose her child." There was no masking of her bitterness and no hesitancy about where she ascribed the blame for these tragedies.
Unable to utter anything that would alleviate the pain of this gaping wound in the woman's heart, my wife began to say, "I am sorry" when she was interrupted with a stern rebuke, "Don't say anything!" She finally managed to say in parting,
"Til be praying for you through this difficult time." But even that brought a crisp rejoinder: "Don't bother."
Margie returned to her car and wept out of shock and longing to reach out to this broken life. Even more, ever since that conversation she has carried with her an unshakable mental picture of a woman's face in which every muscle contorted with anger and anguish—at once seeking a touch yet holding back, yearning for consolation but silencing anyone who sought to help, shoving at people along the way to get to God.
Strangely, this episode spawned a friendship, and we have had the wonderful privilege of getting cióse to this woman and praying with her in our home. We have even felt her embrace of gratitude as she has tried in numerous ways to say,
"Thank you." But through this all she has represented to us a symbol of smothered cries and of a search for answers that need time before anger is overeóme by trust and anguish gives way to contentment.
Likewise, as I have often said, every face is a reminder that behind every question, whether veiled or direct, is a questioner—and one must always seek to respond to the individual and not merely the question.
Of all the stories in the Scriptures, none so reflects those varied needs of humanity as the story of the woman at the well in her conversation with Jesús. In the fourth chapter of John's gospel, we read of the encounter Jesús had with the Samaritan woman. The disciples had left Him while they went into town to buy food. When they returned they were astounded to see Him talking to this
Samaritan woman, but they were afraid to ask why He would talk to her or to question what prompted this curious familiarity.
The woman represented all that was oppressed or rejected in that society. She was a woman, not a man. She was a Samaritan burdened with ethnic rejection.
She was discarded and broken from ñve different marriages. She identified God with a particular location, not having the faintest clue how to reach this God.
Was it possible to have any less self-esteem in her fragmented world?
Jesús began His tender yet determined task to dislodge her from the welldoctored and cosmetically dressed-up theological jargón she threw at Him, so she could voice the real cry of her heart. Almost as if He were peeling off the layers of an onion. He steadily moved her away from her own fears and prejudices, from her own schemes for self-preservation, from her own ploys for hiding her hurts, to the radiant and thrilling source of her greatest fulfillment,
Christ Himself. In short, He moved her from the abstract to the concrete, from the concrete to the proximate, from the proximate to the personal. She had come to find water for the thirst of her body. He fulfilled a greater thirst, that of her soul.
In the Psalms, David described himself as one wounded and crying in his bed at night. This same David spoke of the happiness that carne when he took his cry to the Lord. With these reminders from Scriptures, let us examine our own hearts.
We might be surprised to know how much bottledup sentiment will be uncovered. When God speaks, we need not respond by saying, "Don't say a thing"; rather, we can rest in God's comfort, knowing that God listens to our cries and comes near in our need.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
í. Reflect upon "Some answers need time before anger is overeóme by trust" and "Behind every question is a questioner."
2. How did Jesús tenderly reveal the Samaritan woman's heart and allow her to see her deepest need?
PERSONAL APPLICATION
1. A wise counselor or trusted friend can help us to see ourselves as we truly are.
Do you have unresolved heartache or anger that needs to be brought to light so you can experience your heavenly Father's healing?
2. How might you be a "Margie" this week to someone in need of a listening ear and Christ's compassion and prayer?
A BIGGER STORY
Faith is conftdence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. . . . Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
HEBREWS 11:1-3, 6
he story is told of a man who was ñshing. Every time he caught a big ñsh, he threw it back into the water. Every little fish he caught went into his bag.
Another big one, back into the water; a tiny one, into his bag. Finally, a man who had been watching him and was very perplexed by his unorthodox manner of ñshing asked, "Can you please explain to me why you are throwing the big ones away?" The fisherman did not hesitate: "Because I only have an eight-inch frying pan, and anything bigger than eight inches does not ñt my pan!"
We may chuckle at someone who throws away a ñsh too big for a pan or someone else who just explains away anything that doesn't ñt his or her own prejudiced opinions. Yet we see this repeatedly: the naturalists who describe the origins of the universe as "unrepeatable" or "almost a miracle" or "mathematically impossible" but will simply fight off any possibility of agency or cause or the supernatural. The question that always demands an answer and that each one of us must pause to ask ourselves is whether our paradigm of the world matches reality. Does it ñt? Is there explanatory power for the unshakable questions of life? Is it coherent? Is it rationally livable?
But there is a rub. We must recognize that every worldview can leave us with questions that we cannot exhaustively resolve this side of eternity. Every worldview has gaps. The question is, Does my paradigm fit reality and have enough reason behind it to explain how these gaps might actually he filled and remain consistent?
What do I mean by gaps ? Let me borrow an illustration from Francis Schaeffer.
Suppose you were to leave a room with two glasses on the table, Glass A and Glass B. Glass A has two ounces of water in it, and Glass B is empty. When you return at the end of the day, Glass B now has water in it and Glass A is empty.
You could assume that someone took the water from Glass A and put it into Glass B. That, however, does not fully explain the situation, because you notice that Glass B now has four ounces of water in it, whereas Glass A had only two ounces in it when you left in the morning.
You are confronted with a problem that at best has only a partial explanation.
Whether the water from Glass A was poured into Glass B is debatable. But what is beyond debate is that all of the water in Glass B could not have come from Glass A. The additional two ounces had to have come from elsewhere.
The Christian worldview presents a powerful and unique explanation of these other "two ounces." Naturalism may be able to explain the two ounces in Glass
B. It cannot explain the four ounces in it. The theistic framework is not only credible but also far more adept than atheism or other worldviews in dealing with the real questions of life: questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. Whichever starting point we take—either the philosophical followed by the biblical or the biblical by itself, which for many is sufficient—the cogency and convincing power of the answers emerge very persuasively. The original
"two ounces," as well as the additional "two ounces," are best explained in a Christian theistic framework. The arguments range from the simple to the intricate, depending on the question and its context.
I will repeat what I've said before: God has put enough into the world to make faith in Him a most reasonable thing. But He has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason or observation alone. You will recall, for example, that the resurrection of Jesús caught even the disciples by surprise.
They did not believe at first that Jesús had risen from the dead. Their understanding of reality was foundationally challenged. All of life and destiny would now have to be reinterpreted. They thought that perhaps Jesús' resurrection was some fanciful story conjured up by hallucinating people. Their entire hope in Him was politically based—that Jesús would somehow overthrow
Rome. But a political victory would have been only a superficial solution, for Jesús carne to open the eyes of the blind and to transform hearts and minds. I wonder whether múltiple evidences that Jesús had risen from the dead would make any difference to modern-day atheists, or would they be tossed away
because of an "eight inch" measuring container?
You see, the problem with evidence is that it is very much limited to the moment and creates the demand for repeated intervention of some sort. I have seen this in my own life over and over. Today it may be a failing business that is in need of God's intervention. Tomorrow I may want to be healed from cáncer. The day after that, I may even want a loved one to be brought back from the dead. There is an insatiable hunger for the constancy of the miracle.
The gospel is true and beautiful and has enough of the miracle to ground it in sufficient reason. But it is also sometimes a hard road because of the intertwining of reason and faith.
When we come to those places in the road where we long for another "proof," I pray that we might know that rising beyond reason (to be sure, not violating it) is the constancy of trust in God, and we might sense His presence, for that is really the greater miracle within us. Only through exercising that trust can the moment be accepted and understood as a small portion of a bigger story. For some of us, that individual story may entail a long and arduous journey, but it will be accomplished one moment at a time, one day at a time, each moment and day undergirded by the strength of the indwelling presence of God.
Even Peter realized that the delight of the transfiguration had to be transcended by "a more sure word of prophecy" (2 Peter 1:19 kjv). He believed that Word even on the road to martyrdom, confident that his life was part of God's bigger story. This is the hope of gospel: "Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see."
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. How does the Christian worldview best make sense of the two ounces water in the illustration?
2. What is faith according to Hebrews 11?
PERSONAL APPLICATION
1. What is the "greater miracle within us," and how might this reality guide you today?
2. Even the disciples' paradigm of Jesús was challenged. Where do you need to grow in the constancy of trust in God?
ALL THINGS NEW
We regará no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The oíd has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.
2 CORINTHIANS 5:16-18
s the Christian faith intellectual nonsense? Does God really transform us?
Atheist Sam Harris declares, "Everything of valué that people get from religión can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufñcient evidence.
The rest is self-deception, set to music."
Richard Dawkins suggests that the idea of God is a virus, and we need to ñnd software to eradicate it. Somehow if we can expunge the virus that led us to think this way, we will be purified and rid of this bedeviling notion of God, good, and evil.- Along with a few others, these atheists cali for the banishment of all religious belief. "Away with this nonsense" is their battle cry. In return, they promise a world of new hope and unlimited horizons once we have shed this delusion of God.
I have news for them, however—news to the contrary. The reality is that the emptiness that results from the loss of the transcendent is stark and devastating, philosophically and existentially. Indeed, the denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsión to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil itself. In an attempt to escape what atheists cali the contradiction between a good God and a world of evil, they try to dance around the reality of a moral law (and henee, a moral Lawgiver) by introducing terms like
"evolutionary ethics." The one who raises the question against God in effect plays God while denying God exists.
Now one may wonder: Why do you actually need a moral Lawgiver if you have
a moral law? The answer is because the questioner and the issue he questions always involve the essential valué of a person. You can never talk of morality in abstraction. Persons are implicit to the question and the object of the question. In a nutshell, positing a moral law without a moral Lawgiver would be equivalent to raising the question of evil without a questioner. So you cannot have a moral law unless the moral law itself is intrinsically woven into personhood, which means it demands an intrinsically worthy person if the moral law itself is valued.
And that person can only be God.
In reality, our inability to alter what is actual frustrates our grandiose delusions of being sovereign over everything. Yet the truth is we cannot escape the existential rub by running from a moral law. Objective moral valúes exist only if God exists. Is it all right, for example, to mutilate babies for entertainment?
Every reasonable person will say no. We know that objective moral valúes do exist. Therefore, God must exist. Examining those premises and their validity presents a very strong argument.
The world does not understand what the absoluteness of the moral law is all about. Some get caught, some don't get caught. Yet who of us would like our hearts exposed on the front page of the newspaper today? Have there not been days and hours when, like the apostle Paul, you've struggled within yourself and said, "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what
I hate I do. . . . What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body .
. . [of] death?" (Romans 7:15, 24). Each of us knows this tensión and conflict within if we are honest with ourselves.
In that spirit, we ought to take time to reflect seriously upon the questions. Has
God truly wrought a miracle in my Ufe? Is my own heart proof of the supernatural intervention of God? In the West where we go through seasons of newfangled theologies, the whole question of the "lordship" of Christ plagued our debates for some time as we asked, Is there such a thing as a minimalist view of conversión? That is, "We said the prayer and that's it." Yet how can there be a minimalist view of conversión when conversión itself is a maximal work of God's grace? Scripture declares that when we come to experience God's saving grace, "Oíd things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2
Corinthians 5:17 kjv). In a strange way we have minimized every sacred commitment and made it the lowest common denominator. What might my new birth mean to me? That is a question we seldom ask. Who was I before God's
work in me, and who am I now?
The first entailment of coming to know the God of transformation is the new hungers and new pursuits that are planted within the human will. I well recall that dramatic change in my own way of thinking. There were new longings, new hopes, new dreams, new fulfillments, but most noticeably a new will to do what was God's will. This new affection of heart—the love of God wrought in us through the Holy Spirit—expels all other oíd seductions and attractions. Those who know Jesús Christ begin to see that their own misguided hearts are impoverished and in need of constant submission to the will of the Lord— spiritual surrender.
The hallmark of conversión is to see one's own spiritual poverty. Arrogance and conceit ought to be inimical to the life of the believer. A deep awareness of one's own new hungers and longings is a convincing witness both to God and God's grace within.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. Why must the reality of evil be denied if we deny an objective moral law?
2. Why must there be a moral Lawgiver (God) if a moral law exists?
PERSONAL APPLICATION
í. Who was I before God's work in me, and who am I now?
2. How might you be a convincing witness to others this week?
DOES PRAYER MATTER?
"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will ftnd; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks ñnds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy
Spirit to those who ask him!"
LUKE 11:9-13
sat with a man in my car, talking about a series of heartbreaks he had experienced. "There were just a few things I had wanted in life," he said. "None of them have turned out the way I had prayed. I wanted my parents to live until I was at least able to stand on my own and they could watch my children grow up.
It didn't happen. I wanted my marriage to succeed, and it didn't. I wanted my children to grow up grateful for what God had given them. That didn't happen. I wanted my business to prosper, and it didn't. Not only have my prayers amounted to nothing; the exact opposite has happened. Don't even ask if you can pray for me. I am left with no trust of any kind in such things."
I felt two emotions rising up within me as I listened. The first was one of genuine sorrow. He felt that he had tried, that he had done his part, but that God hadn't lived up to His end of the deai. The second emotion was one of helplessness, as I wondered where to begin trying to help him.
These are the sharp edges of faith in a transcendent, all-powerful, personal God.
Most of us have a tendency to react with anger or withdrawal when we feel God has let us down by not giving us things we felt were legitimate requests. We may feel guilty that our expectations of God were too great. We may feel that God has not answered our prayers because of something lacking in ourselves. We may compare ourselves with others whose every wish seems to be granted by God and wonder why He hasn't come through for us in the same way. And sometimes we allow this disappointment in God to fester and eat away at our
faith in Him until the years go by and we find ourselves bereft of belief.
G. K. Chesterton surmised that when belief in God becomes difficult, the tendency is to turn away from Him—but, in heaven's ñame, to what? To the skeptic or the one who has been disappointed in his faith, the obvious answer may be to give up believing that there's somebody out there, take charge of your own life, and live it out to the best of your own ability.
But Chesterton also wrote, "The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, ñor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite."- He is right. Only so much about life can be understood by reason; so much falls far short of any reasonable explanation.
Prayer then becomes the irrepressible cry of the heart at the times we most need it. Prayer is far more complex than some make it out to be. There is much more involved than merely asking for something and receiving it. In this, as in other contexts, we too often succumb to believing that something is what it never was, even when we know it cannot be as simple as we would like to think it is.
For every person who feels that prayer has not "worked" for him and has therefore abandoned God, there is someone else for whom prayer remains a vital part of her life, sustaining her even when her prayers have gone unanswered, because her belief and trust are not only in the power of prayer but in the character and wisdom of God. When God is the focus of our prayer, I believe He sustains and preserves our faith.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. What does Luke 11 tell us about both prayer and about the character of God?
2. Prayer remains a vital part of our lives when what elements of belief are in focus?
PERSONAL APPLICATION
1. How have you handled disappointment in prayer?
2. Are there areas of your life awaiting God's healing touch? Do you know someone who needs to be encouraged in prayer and reminded of God's goodness?
THE SPIRIT OF PRAYER
"Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your ñame, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one."
MATTHEW 6:9-13
arly church father John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople in the fourth century, wrote this about the power of prayer:
Prayer is an all-efñcient panoply, a treasure undiminished, a mine which is never exhausted, a sky unobscured by the clouds, a heaven unruffled by the storm. It is the root, the fountain, the mother of a thousand blessings. . . . The potency of prayer hath subdued the strength of fire, it hath bridled the rage of lions, hushed anarchy to rest; extinguished wars, appeased the elements, expelled demons, burst the chains of death, expanded the gates of heaven, assuaged diseases, repelled frauds, rescued cities from destruction, stayed the sun in its course, and arrested the progress of the thunderbolt.
Who can read that and not be tempted to exclaim, What rhetoric! No, not so.
Each of the instances referred to by Chrysostom is drawn right out of the Scriptures.
In all of its expressions, whether halting and short or flowing in beautiful, wellstructured phrases, prayer is simply a conversation with God. If we turn prayer into a monologue, or use it as a way to showcase our gift with words, or as a venue for informing or instructing others who may be listening, we defeat the very purpose of prayer. The Bible makes it clear that prayer is intended as the line of connection from the heart of the praying person directly to the heart of God. Jesús Himself practiced a lifestyle of prayer and urged His disciples to imitate Him by making it part of their daily existence. His prayers represented prayer at its best and most sincere.
I marvel at the impact of praying with a hurting person. I have prayed many times with someone who has claimed to be a skeptic and is living in a manner that supports that claim, only to finish my prayer and open my eyes to see tears in his eyes. Although prayer remains a mystery to all of us but especially to one who lives apart from God, I have observed again and again that even the hardened heart retains a longing for the possibility of communicating with God.
It is not my intention to deny the great disappointments of unanswered prayer, but let us look at what God intends prayer to be. The most definitive passage is what is often called the Lord's Prayer or, as some scholars like to cali it, the Disciples' Prayer. The highly signiñcant first words carry the weight of all of prayer: "Our Father in heaven." This is a uniquely Christian utterance. In these two words alone—"Our Father"—we recognize, at least implicitly, two truths: the nearness of God as heavenly Father, and the sovereignty of God as the One who Controls everything. As soon as you cry out in prayer, "Heavenly
Father," you are recognizing His presence in your life.
After the Lord's Prayer and as His conclusión to it, Jesús told us that God would give the Holy Spirit, His indwelling presence, to those who ask for it (Luke
11:13). It is not spoken in the form of a question—it ends with an exclamation point! God will give the gift of the indwelling presence of the holy God to any who ask for it—this is an absolute certainty! You can count on it!
Sadly, we hear so little of this today. We have turned prayer into a means to our ends and seldom wait on God's response long enough to think about what He wants for us in that very moment. By reducing the evidence of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to one particular gift, we have robbed people of the Holy
Presence that prompts us in prayer, prays for us when we don't have the words to pray for ourselves, and comforts us in our times of need.
The paramount need today is the indwelling presence of God. In this incredible twist, the indwelling presence of God, the Holy Spirit, makes God both the Enabler of our prayers and the Provider of answers to those prayers. More than anything else, this is what prayer is about.