Category: Prayer

Dying Dog On My Trunk

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I paced around the stores asking God to show me a family to help. It was a few days before Christmas, and I was hoping to recognize a family in financial need that I could bless with food or toys. “Please God, lead me to someone,” I prayed to myself. “Show me exactly the right people.” And so it was with disappointment that I left the last store of my shopping spree, not having sensed the Holy Spirit show me anyone for which to buy anything.

I started home in my car and approached a familiar three-way intersection. Just as I began to apply my brakes to stop at the sign, I watched a blue truck ease out of a stop directly opposite me in the intersection, coming toward me. Running beside the large, shiny pick-up truck was a cute dog, a beagle. The driver could not have possibly seen the dog running right alongside the passenger side front wheel, because the truck was so high from the ground.

As the dog continued running near the truck, I whispered to myself, “Get away, little dog. Move away.” My words were to no avail. As the truck sped up to go through the intersection, the dog ran directly under the vehicle and was run over. Every second of this horrific event unfolded before my eyes. When the dog was hit, I screamed. Immediately, I knew I had to stop, though I had no idea what I could do or how I would handle this dog that had been crushed through the middle.

I pulled over into a driveway as the dog writhed in pain in the middle of the road. A man raced to the dog and covered him with his coat. I stood with the man who gently put his hand on the dog and explained through tears and anger, “I am the dog’s owner. I saw him running by the truck, and I jumped out of my car to try to stop him, but it was too late.” The man cried as his pet continued to struggle.

A stranger threw a blanket toward us, and the dog’s owner wrapped it around the poor beagle and carried the animal to my car. He looked at someone else and said, “I don’t know whose car this is, but I want to lay my dog here.” I told him it was mine and he could surely let his pet rest on my trunk. So He did.

Within a few minutes, the dog stopped tossing and died. Right there on the trunk of my car, the beagle perished. Soon, the dog owner’s wife and step-son made their way to the scene, and the woman began to sob uncontrollably. As I put my hand on her shoulder to try to comfort her, she came to reveal a sad fact. At the moment of their dog’s accident, the family was on their way to the hospital to pick up her mother, who was coming home to die of cancer after a long battle. Unbelievable. They witnessed the death of their pet on the way to begin the journey of imminent death of a beloved family member. On top of all this, the elderly gentleman who was driving the truck that hit the dog arrived at the scene, unable to stop apologizing or hold back tears. He was obviously filled with grief about the accident, certainly wishing he could somehow “undo” what had happened.

As I stood in the driveway on this cold, bleak winter day with a dead dog on my trunk whose blood now began to drip down my tail light and a sobbing stranger at my side whose mother was dying, my heart came into focus. I realized God had answered my prayer and shown me a family – and a whole lot more.

We don’t really have to search for hurt; it’s everywhere. Every person we pass in the store is carrying some pain and facing some difficulty. No one escapes the heartbreak of sin’s effects. We drive down the road and meet death and suffering at the intersection, so to speak. The trunk of a car that usually bears the weight of groceries or shopping bags or picnic supplies can also bear the weight of destruction and death. No person, no animal, and no thing evades the clutches of sin’s curse. The devastation is real; do not deny the strength and ugliness of the results of rebellion against God. Know it. Then hate it. Fight against sinfulness wherever you find it. Begin in your own heart. Determine to do battle with sin and its icy cold grasp, for it is the source of all this misery.

That evening, as my husband and I packed up freshly baked cookies, a fruit basket, and a devotional book for the hurting family I had just met hours ago; I asked the Holy Spirit to deliver hope. When we arrived at the home, we were invited in for a few minutes by the family that was definitely shocked to see me again. I expressed my sympathy about the dog and my prayers for their mother who was now already at the house receiving hospice. I just wanted to take a taste of the kindness – the grace – of Jesus to that family. Perhaps the power of sin would be broken in one more little sphere of this world.

Later that evening, my own uncle succumbed to his battle with cancer. I sat with my extended family around his body and once again pondered the agony of the last enemy that Jesus will one day conquer – death. How hideous evil is. How gruesome its fallout.

As I went to sleep that night, I could not get my family, the dog, or the other family out of my head. But I realized that – as Christians – we all need reminded of the ultimate battle that is taking place. In a dark world, we must be shining the light of the hope of ultimate redemption. When I had taken a bucket of soapy water and flushed the remaining dog blood out of my taillight that afternoon, I was reminded of the truest sacrifice of all time – the blood of Jesus Christ. What blood we now see shed as a result of sin is really nothing compared to the blood of the sinless God-Man once dripping from the Cross as the cure for sin.

This cosmic conflict isn’t a game; this is real. Everything is at stake. Death and suffering have come to all because of sin. There is a real problem; there is a real answer. Jesus saves. Jesus delivers a hope that darkness cannot steal from us.

We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. – I John 5:19-20 (ESV)

You Need a Counselor with a Capital “C”

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Do you feel like you need a counselor? Is your heart heavy or confused? Can you picture yourself sitting in a comfortable chair as you attempt to respond to the suggestion, “Tell me all about yourself”?

How could you ever fully explain yourself to someone else? Even if we had an infinite amount of time to reveal what we know of our experiences from birth to present, we could not disclose everything about ourselves; for we do not know! Our memories are not comprehensive or perfect. Our understanding of the effects of life’s experiences on us is severely limited. We cannot possibly tie together the vast intricacies of our emotions, and the motivations of our hearts remain largely a mystery to our frail minds.

Jeremiah 17:9 (ESV) instructs us, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” Not only can no other human being – no matter how compassionate or educated – comprehend us, but we cannot understand ourselves. Our tainted hearts deceive us, as they are sick from sin. We need Someone greater to figure us out.

That is exactly where the famous Christmas verse comes into play. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; . . . and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor” (Isaiah 9:6, ESV). In the original Hebrew language, the word “wonderful” means “a wonder, a marvel, an extraordinary thing.” Jesus is the only Counselor who is more than ordinary – greater than human frailty and limitations. He is God the Counselor.

God the Counselor knows everything! Picture the human heart with all its cracks and fissures. Think of all the aspects of your being that you cannot fathom. Envision the hurts and confusion. Now picture God the Counselor knowing every part of your heart – pouring His love into every crevice and filling it with His healing salve.

When Jesus prepared to leave this earth, He said the Father would send us a Helper to be with us forever – the Holy Spirit (John 14:16-17). The Holy Spirit is fully God, the third Person of the triune Godhead. He is our Helper – or Counselor. You do not need to go to His office for help; He is with you now. When you sincerely pray, He will intercede for you, since you cannot possibly know how exactly to pray for every circumstance (Romans 8:26-27). He is your Advocate, bringing you closer to God and into His will. He is your Counselor, healing you in ways you cannot see. He drives everything about our personality into alignment with God’s will as we believe and ask Him to. In ways unknown and quite mysterious to us, the Holy Spirit is doing the repair work necessary for our well-being, our wholeness.

Ephesians 3:16-19 assures us that God’s love – through the Holy Spirit – descends deeper into our heart than human comprehension. While we calculate volume in our three-dimensional space as length times width times height, God tells us His love goes to a fourth dimension – a depth beyond our grasp. His healing goes infinitely far beyond the help of any human, to exactly the level we need.

Your proper understanding of our Wonderful Counselor is vital in order for you to act on the promise. Equipped with this truth about our Counselor, meet with Him now – wherever you are. Ask Him to fill in every crack and crevice of your heart . . . and to make you part of God’s unbroken, perfect will.

Unlike any human counselor who can only make suggestions based on severely limited comprehension, God gives commands. He can rightfully tell us exactly what to do, for His knowledge of us and our circumstances is perfect. Rejoice in His Word, the Bible, because its instructions are for your healing. It is the Word of the Counselor, with a capital “C.”

The Merging of Human and Divine Suffering

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Human misery abounds. We endure pain that comes in many shapes, sizes and ways. The heart aches, the body hurts, the mind is torn; and all the while life goes on. The questions beneath the surface are, “Does God understand?” and “Does God care?”

In teaching an adult class in Christian apologetics (a reasoned defense and articulation of the biblical faith), I was moved deeply in one moment of time as we recognized the profound message of God through one of the Psalms. We were studying the miraculous fulfillment of prophecy (against mathematical odds) as evidence of the Bible’s credibility. In particular, Psalm 22 is a psalm of David, written c. 1000 B.C. And yet, we find much of its content fulfilled in the suffering and death of Jesus Christ c. A.D. 30. God stays true to His Word over the span of a millennium. The Spirit of God worked through David’s life and mind as the words of Psalm 22 were written, and the same Holy Spirit was at the Cross of Calvary as Jesus suffered.

Striking me in our class that one particular day, were the beauty and comfort of the merging of the affliction of both man and God. You see, David was a mere human. He was a brave shepherd who became a king, but he was also a person who committed adultery and murder. David was a man of flesh and bone. He knew success and he knew failure. He prospered at times, but he also endured great loss. Hated and pursued by King Saul, having watched his baby with Bathsheba die, betrayed by his own son, and regretting deeply His sin; David was a human who knew anguish. That anguish pours from his pen in Psalm 22.

Hear David’s first lament in verse one, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?” (Psalm 22:1, ESV) Have you ever felt this way? Forsaken by God? As if God is distant and not hearing your groans? Perhaps we perceive a distance because our distress is so great, or because our sins against God are so palpable. In either case, we at times feel that the Lord has thoroughly forgotten us. We understand David’s grieving.

Ah, but do we understand God’s grieving? Do we recognize that for however intensely we sink into sorrow, God sinks even deeper? Though David asked and recorded these dark questions 1,000 years before Jesus came to earth, the Son of God Himself uttered the same words as He languished on the Cross. Yes, I at times feel like God has abandoned me. The sinfulness of me and the whole world has shattered the framework of peace and right as originally intended. That invasion of brokenness as the result of sin leads us to sense that we have somehow been deserted. Though the feeling is very real to us, the truth is that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, was actually isolated as His Father substituted Him as the offering for our sin in the grueling moments of the Cross. Jesus did, in fact, endure the unimaginable darkness of being abandoned by the Father. With incredible determination, Jesus willingly took the hit of “being forsaken.” We hear Him call out loudly from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, ESV)

Would you look to the dovetailing here of human and divine misery? What David feels, God fulfills. The hurt we humans face is met directly by our Creator. His love is so profound that He dives even lower into the hurt than we can go. Never believe that God does not understand. Place one finger in your Bible at Psalm 22 and another in Matthew 27, and then ask God to comfort your heart with His immeasurable and tangible understanding of your pain.

The entirety of Psalm 22 is filled with allusions to Christ’s suffering. Amazingly, God parallels the hurt of Jesus with the feelings of David. David cries, “My heart is like wax, it is melted within my breast” (Psalm 22:14b, ESV). We know that misery. We have experienced our heart “melting” in despair. Incredibly, this outpouring of David by God’s Spirit is surrounded by words we again can tie directly to God’s Son: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death” (Psalm 22:14-15, ESV). Jesus’ body was hanging on a cross – bones out of joint – but not broken. He suffered unbelievable thirst. Ultimately, God laid His Son in the dust of death, as no human took His life. Following the death of Jesus, water and blood poured from His side at the strike of the Roman spear. All these details correspond to the feelings and prophecy of David’s Psalm. Do you see the merging of how we sometimes and temporarily feel with the actuality of God’s suffering?

Take comfort! The last verses of the psalm confirm the glorious end result of God’s work in the midst of greatest distress. God was in control even as Jesus died. God raised Him up! God accomplished His goal; the suffering had purpose! So does yours. “For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him” (Psalm 22:24, ESV).

God knows. Your greatest misery merges – just as David’s – with the suffering of God. He did not have to, but God chose to enter into pain more profoundly than we can imagine. When you pray, He understands.

Are Christians Praying Humanist Prayers?

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Paradigm shifts. They are often necessary. In the case of much prayer within the church, it is time for a paradigm shift. Our consumer-driven, self-absorbed culture has pushed prayer into a veritable humanist corner. Humanism claims that the reasoning of humans is to be valued above any divine thinking or supposed supernatural working. Although most Christians do not intend to function from a worldview antithetical to biblical Christianity, we may be doing so by default. As with any practice, prayer must be measured against God’s holy Word. We must do what Romans 12:2 commands us and ensure that our patterns of thinking do not simply flow with the culture at large, but rather press upstream against ungodly currents.

While recently teaching a Bible class, I was suddenly struck with a reality to which I had not previously paid much attention. We were considering the words of the Apostle Paul in Philippians 2:7 (ESV) about Jesus’ amazing condescension from Heaven to earth two thousand years ago, “But [Jesus] made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” We honed in on the fact that Jesus made a willful decision to serve His Father even though Jesus is Himself fully God. Jesus chose not to grasp at His own rights (Philippians 2:6), but He elected rather to do the Father’s will . . . no matter the cost. In doing so, He demonstrates to us the proper attitude for genuine Christian living (Philippians 2:5).

What hit me the hardest was Jesus’ approach to His Father’s will; Jesus always submitted Himself to the Father’s plan and glory. Though fully God, Christ worked the blueprint of the Father in order that the perfect will of the blessed Trinity be accomplished. Most notably, we remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane on the eve of His arrest as He contemplates the degree of suffering He is facing. Jesus prayed, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39, ESV).

Wow! Jesus was God in the flesh, and He actually says that He would rather have the Father’s will accomplished than gain what the humanity of Him desired – to escape suffering. Hence, the dramatic difference between Jesus’ prayer and Peter’s “prayer.” Peter had not wanted Jesus to suffer either, but he allowed no room for God’s mysterious will and thus boldly declared about Jesus’ explanation of His own future crucifixion, “God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to You” (Matthew 16:22, NASB). No sooner had Peter uttered His disgust with the plan of God than Jesus turned to Peter and proclaimed, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Matthew 16:23, ESV).

Notice the underlying similarity but weighty and stark difference between the petition of Peter and Jesus. Both Peter and Jesus were troubled by the thought of the Son of God suffering so horrendously. However, the difference is critical. While Peter acted completely out of human flesh and thinking without giving room for God’s unfathomable will, Jesus submitted His pain and reluctance to His Father in order that God would get His way – which is the best way by infinite measure!

When I thought about the prayer of Jesus in the Garden, I pondered my own prayer life. So often we Christians begin prayers like this, “Dear God, I ask you to . . .” And then follows a list of items we present to God – things or circumstances we desire. We often give no thought to whether these things are God’s will, sometimes even foolishly believing God intends to spare us from all pain. We ask for relief as we see it and expect it. Instead, we ought to express our sorrow and anxious thoughts to God, and then we need to ask God to dominate any plan of ours with His perfect and mysterious will. If the Son of God prayed that God’s plan would override the desires of His humanity when the two were in disagreement, then we certainly should as well!

When Jesus instructed His disciples on prayer, He expressed at the outset in definitive terms that three things are priority for sure: God’s name is great above all and to be held in highest honor, God’s eternal kingdom is to come and take priority over human plans, and God’s will is to be done on this earth where our feet tread each day (see Matthew 6:9-10). We are not taught by Jesus to pray for human passions unless these longings glorify God’s name and press His kingdom forward in a world of much darkness. Prioritized over all is the ongoing will of God.

We must ask ourselves a difficult but essential question, “Am I praying for the glory and will of God or for the avoidance of anything my flesh deems difficult? Humanists place people above any supernatural being. Humanists trust in the thinking of people to solve our every dilemma. Christians place God above the will of humans. Christians trust in God’s sovereign plan to make life what it should be – even when pain is part of the picture. So I ask myself, “Am I praying as a humanist? Or as a Christian?”

The Theology Behind a Cell Phone in the Toilet

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Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. – Isaiah 59:1-2 (NIV)

It happened. Out of my pocket and into the toilet it fell. My cell phone made a huge splash in the forbidden place – the depths of the porcelain bowl. And without one thought, I reached directly into the waters of the commode to retrieve the cherished item, my supposed lifeline to humanity. My arm lunged to rescue my phone from the toilet as quickly as I would act in any true emergency. I even let out a scream when I saw the shiny, metallic blue piece of technology hit the water and roll over. So distraught was I, and I don’t even have a touch screen phone!

As soon as I had pulled the phone from the toilet, I ran to my blow-dryer and began my feeble attempt to save my phone from death. Carefully extracting tiny screws, I dried the inner parts and surfaces; but I did so to no avail. My cell phone recovered only slightly and remained inoperable.

After replacing the phone the next day at the store, I quietly asked myself, “Why all the fuss?” I knew the answer. Cell phones have become a critical part of communication. How would I stay in touch with “my people”? What about calls and the esteemed texts? Without my cell phone, I would feel cut off from society as we have come to know it.

Then my mind went to a chapter of the Bible on which I had preached many years before, Isaiah 59. My seemingly desperate experience with the submerged phone directed me to ponder a truly desperate situation – that in which we cannot communicate rightly with God. The prophet proclaims in Isaiah 59:1-2 (NIV), “Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (emphasis mine). Just as the commode water stole from me a source of my communication with family and friends, so does my sin swipe my intimacy with my God.

I was instantly convicted of a great truth: I should be immeasurably more horrified by my heart’s plunge into sin than my cell phone’s nose-dive into the toilet! A submerged phone is a temporary glitch in one of the flows of human communication, but my heart’s sinfulness breaks my honest talking with God Almighty. My sin stops God from answering my prayer. Though His ear is not “too dull to hear,” my iniquity causes Him to refuse to hear. While stained with guilt, there remains a block between me and my Lord.

The question, then, becomes, “How quickly do I jump to remove myself from the waters of sinfulness?” I wonder if we are more outraged at the flood of wrong we have fallen into than the plunging of a piece of sensitive technology into water. How apt am I to quickly repent? Does my sin against God cause my spirit to shriek with disgust? Do I genuinely fear lost communication with God? How much does a block in my fellowship with Him bother me? Rightly, God’s refusal to hear us while we willfully sin against Him should spur us to resolve the matter. Much more than I need humans to hear me, I need God to intervene on my behalf.

Have you lately felt a terrible distance between you and God? Do you go through the motions of prayer, but God is not answering? Perhaps we must heed the warning that “[Our] sins have hidden his face from [us]” (Isaiah 59:2, NIV). And in observing this warning we will find a solution much better than vainly blow-drying a thoroughly soaked cell phone. Yes, the heart can be dried of sin by God Himself. When our Lord sees us lying there in the mess of sin, He decides to wash us when we simply and honestly repent. Isaiah 59:16 (NIV) declares, “[God] saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm worked salvation for him.” God knows we are hopeless when it comes to “drying” ourselves of sin. So He takes matters into His own hands. By His own sacrifice and His own blood He saves us! Jesus is God in the flesh, having appeared to “work salvation” for us. All we need do is repent. “The Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who repent of their sins” (Isaiah 59:20, NIV, emphasis mine).

Do you see your fellowship with God submerged in the waters of your sin? What is it in your life that is displeasing Him? React quickly. Tell Him you want to be right and do right. Tell Him you want communication to flow once again. He will then listen, for “His ear is [not] to dull to hear” (Isaiah 59:1, NIV). Get that divine cell phone out of the depths; talk to God again!

The Operative Word

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Christian, do you pray as much as you should? Are there situations left untouched and quandaries floating about because you refuse to pray as God desires? Prayer is necessary. God works mightily through prayer. For the child of God, prayer is not an option or a task resorted to when things look bleak. Prayer is powerful, delivering answers derived in a world currently unseen to us.

Luke, the disciple, was a physician in his day. He clearly understood, however, that health of spirit, emotion, and body comes ultimately through God. In Luke 18:1 (NASB), he instructs, “Now [Jesus] was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart.” Luke reminds us that God is unequivocal in His demand that we pray. In a culture of “quick fixes,” shallow relationships, and mitigated perseverance; God desires that we press into His heart by prayer. How does that sit with you? Does your heart respond, “Yes! I know the experience and wonder of pouring myself into prayer!” Or, does your heart answer, “No. I am not there. My prayer life is quite flat, and I realize my need to heed the call.”

The apostle James proclaims in James 5:16 (NASB), “The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.” The Greek root here behind the words effective and accomplish is a word that means “to be operative.” It is the same Greek root behind the word works in this glorious verse, “Also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will” (Ephesians 1:11, NASB). Imagine, the power of God working in our prayer life is related to the power of God working everything in the universe for His purpose! When we truly pour ourselves into seeking and petitioning our Lord, God operates on our behalf. He accomplishes things. No longer dormant lie the possibilities. Prayer is the “operative word”!

Unique about prayer is the inherent relationship between the physical and spiritual realms. When I speak to God with my voice (using the physical body and brain He has given me), I am functioning in the spiritual realm with God. He, in turn, may produce results back in the physical world. It is the intersection of Heaven and Earth, if you will. Prayer is the place where we are instructed to lay hold of heavenly things and blessed to see outcomes of both a spiritual and material nature.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego prayed to God in Heaven, and God answered by protecting their physical bodies from seemingly inevitable consumption by fire. Prayer wrought tangible results. Of course! This is God’s will – that His children pray! Do you set aside with marked intention minutes and hours of your days for intense seeking of your God? Is your heart rising to Him on a regular, deliberate, and serious basis? Is He hearing you petitions? There is not shortcut to the effects only prayer can bring. It is God’s will. We must pray.