Day 36: Tuesday in Holy Week

So far in Holy Week, Jesus has ridden into Jerusalem the way a king would and allowed the crowds to welcome him as one, and then he went straight to the heart of the nation (the temple) and in the strongest words and actions possible, made clear that judgment was coming upon it. With those things having happened, one would not have had to be a prophet to  foresee confrontation coming. The morning after Jesus briefly–yet powerfully and symbolically–stopped all of the activity in the temple, he returned there. As expected, the confrontation came:

One day as Jesus was teaching the people in the temple courts and proclaiming the good news, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, together with the elders, came up to him. “Tell us by what authority you are doing these things,” they said. “Who gave you this authority?”

He replied, “I will also ask you a question. Tell me: John’s baptism—was it from heaven, or of human origin?”

They discussed it among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will ask, ‘Why didn’t you believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ all the people will stone us, because they are persuaded that John was a prophet.”

So they answered, “We don’t know where it was from.”

Jesus said, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.” (Luke 20:1-8, NIV)

The authorities' question to Jesus was a natural one. He had been acting like the person in charge–of the temple, of Jerusalem, and therefore of all Israel–but according to the system, he was a nobody. They were the ones who had the positions of power, not him. "By what authority are you doing these things?" is both a question and an accusation, similar to asking, "Just who in the world do you think you are?"

At first glance, Jesus' response about John the Baptist looks like a clever trick question, allowing both sides to avoid answering the other's question, but Jesus was actually providing a clear answer to them. When asked, "Who in the world do you think you are?" Jesus points them back to John the Baptist, whose claim to be the forerunner of the Messiah said plenty about who Jesus was–if John really was God's prophet. At another level, by referencing John, Jesus is pointing back to his own baptism at John's hand, when a voice came from heaven and said, "You are my son, whom I love. With you I am well pleased." Jesus was saying, "That is who I am, and where I get my authority."

If John the Baptist was a fake, so was Jesus, and the establishment would have the right to treat him as such. But if John  was the real thing, then Jesus clearly had more authority over the temple, Jerusalem, Israel–and the world–than any of the men questioning him.

So we could turn Jesus response into a statement rather than a question: "Who in the world do you think you are? What kind of authority do you think you have to do things like this?" "I am the one who came after John, with all that that means."

Jesus then went on teaching in the temple, continuing to say extremely provocative things about the temple and its leaders. He told stories (in which the parallels were not difficult to draw) about people in power mistreating, even killing, their master's servants. He pointed out their hypocrisy and injustice toward the innocent, and the price that others–like a poor widow giving all she had in an offering–paid for it.

Yes, the temple was beautiful, but if Israel continued to reject God's way, which was being perfectly embodied before them in Jesus, it was inevitable that the temple's destruction was coming. "Not one stone will be left on another."

Of course this was shocking. It was like taking all of our meaningful national sites which we assume will be around forever, and saying, "Every one of these will be turned into ruins–and it will happen while our generation is still here to see it."

The only way to describe something so tumultuous would be to use language that could communicate the earth-shattering nature of the events, like the old prophets did: "the sun will go dark, the moon won't give any light, the stars will fall out of the sky" (see Matthew 24).

Israel was headed on a course for destruction, and if they continued to refuse Jesus' message and change direction (repent), their doom was inevitable. (As we mentioned yesterday–it all happened about 40 years later, and it was indeed as horrible as Jesus described.)

I said yesterday that Jesus' fate was sealed after riding into the city as a king and saying/doing what he said/did in the temple. Now, after an extra day of saying such provocative things about the temple and its leadership, it was extra-sealed. The authorities would not allow this man to live.

Though those in Jesus' circle must have been aware of the tension and conflict, many of them still didn't grasp what it meant. Still thinking of Jesus as the kind of Messiah they had always expected, they couldn't foresee what was coming for him in a few more days.

At least one woman understood, though. She saw what was happening with clarity. After the intense day in the temple, Jesus and his group returned for the evening to Bethany. While guests in a home, eating dinner with the twelve, this woman came in, approached Jesus, and unreservedly poured very expensive perfume on him, as one would do to a corpse before burying it. She knew what Jesus knew–he was about to die.

Again, as we mentioned yesterday, when we watch this story unfold, it is impossible to look at Jesus as a helpless victim. Rather, in the kind of way he described as "lose your life and you will find it," he seems to be in control of what was happening.

A Prayer for the Day:

O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.*

Click here for today's scripture readings.

*From The Book of Common Prayer

[This is part of 40 Days of Prayer: Daily Emails for Lent]

Day 35: Monday in Holy Week

We have come to the most widely-known eight days in all of human history, called Holy Week by Christians. It began yesterday, Palm Sunday, as we read the story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem to the crowds cheering as if they were welcoming a king, and it will continue on through Jesus' last night with his disciples, his arrest and mock trial, his crucifixion, death and burial. And then his resurrection will change everything, for everyone, forever. So we are familiar with Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday (or if not, you soon will be), but what about the other days? What took place on the day after Jesus' royal entry into Jerusalem? And on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday?

This week, we will try to walk day by day through the events of the corresponding days of Jesus' life. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not particularly concerned with telling their stories in a way that would allow us to put together a nice, exact historical reconstruction of exactly what happened at each point during the week. That’s fine because those aren’t the most important pieces. They were rightly more focused on getting their points about Jesus across than they were about trivia games we might like to play centuries later about what happened on which day. Nonetheless, we can still put together a plausible sequence of events for the week, and doing so is our goal as we continue in this journey of denying ourselves, taking up our crosses, and following our Lord.

So for today, Monday in Holy Week:

According to Mark’s telling, after Jesus entered Jerusalem to the shouts of the crowds, he went to the temple courts. Since it was already late in the day, he went to stay the night in Bethany with the twelve before returning to the temple the next morning (assumably, Monday).

On their way to the temple, Jesus approached a fig tree but did not find any fruit on it. Then came one of the scenes which I am sure I will never see painted on the wall of a children’s Sunday School class.

In the ways that we typically think of Jesus, we would be likely to expect his reaction to finding no fruit on the fig tree to be something like one of the following:

• Maybe he would look at the tree, have a tear well up in his eye while a bluebird comes and lands on his shoulder to tweet a song in a minor key over Jesus’ sadness that this tree had not been able to properly produce its fruit. Jesus could have meekly mourned over the sad tree.
• Or, of course, perhaps Jesus would just look intently at the tree, command it to produce some fruit, and it would instantly have jumbo, juicy figs for all of the disciples to share. Jesus could have powerfully, victoriously healed the unfruitful tree.

But Jesus did neither of those things. Instead of mourning over the tree or healing it, he cursed it: “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”

If I had been one of the twelve, I surely would have stood there thinking, “Ouch, Teacher. Hunger pangs make you a little crabby this morning?”

But, being as capable of a storyteller as Mark was, he didn't allow us to stay there, wondering about the stability of Jesus' emotional state. (If that was the point, and he was that crabby after missing breakfast, what would he have been like after fasting for forty days in the desert?) Instead, he gave us one of his story-sandwiches, where he began one story, moved to to another, then came back to the first in order to point out the links between the two.

In this story-sandwich, this incident with the poor little fig tree is the bread, while the meat is what Jesus did when he arrived in the temple.

On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’” (Mark 11:15-17, NIV)

(So we have two consecutive stories of Jesus that don't get painted on the walls of children's Sunday School rooms.) In order to understand what's happening here, we have to understand that Jesus was not staging of protest of the commercialization of people's worship in the temple. Perhaps, if Mark hadn't connected the temple story to the fig tree, we might be able to come away with that as the full meaning. Instead, since Jesus' encounter with the fig tree ended in a curse for the tree's failure to be and do what it was created for, Jesus then proceeded to do the same thing in the temple. The temple existed to symbolize God's dwelling with Israel for the sake of the world, but its leaders had turned it into a place to promote violence toward outsiders and injustice toward Israel's own people. So–just as Jesus' words to the tree stopped its natural processes, his brief but symbolic words and actions in the temple stopped the course of events in the place that was the center of Jewish life.

Mark wraps up the story-sandwich as the disciples return to the city the next morning and pass by the same tree, now withered from the roots. He wants us to get the point: Jesus' action in the temple was a warning that, if it continued failing to be and do what it was created for, the same fate awaited it that came to the tree. And to make sure we don't miss the lesson, Mark puts an exclamation point on his story-sandwich through Jesus' comments when Peter noticed that the fig tree Jesus cursed had withered:

“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

Again, remember that this is part of the sandwich, rather than a stand-alone teaching. Jesus isn't saying that Peter and the others could also learn to do cool things like wither fruit trees, make mountains move, or anything else that they decide on a prayer-whim. No, the point is still the meat of this story-sandwich: the temple. When Jesus says, "this mountain," I imagine that he also pointed a finger toward the temple mount. He's teaching the disciples to pray that God's new order would replace the old and that, inconceivable as it may have seemed to them, the temple was nearing a time when it would be no more.

Jesus' dire warnings about the temple came to pass in 70 AD when the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem, including the temple's destruction.

Also, just as important for our journey through Holy Week is to realize that because of this and Jesus' procession into Jerusalem as a king the previous day, his impending death was now inevitable. No one could ride into Jerusalem as a king and proceed to say and to the things toward the temple which Jesus said and did–and be allowed to live. When we read the story in this light, we begin to get the sense that Jesus was not a victim of Roman and Jewish injustice when he died on the cross; rather, he seems to be orchestrating the story exactly as he saw fit.

A Prayer for Monday in Holy Week:

Almighty God, whose dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other that the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.*

Click here for today's scripture readings.

*From The Book of Common Prayer

[This is part of 40 Days of Prayer: Daily Emails for Lent]

Palm Sunday

Readings for Palm Sunday:

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29 Luke 19:28-40

A Prayer for the Day:

O God, you make us glad with the weekly remembrance of the glorious resurrection of your Son our Lord: Give us this day such blessing through our worship of you, that the week to come may be spent in your favor; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.*

A Prayer for the Week:

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.*

*From The Book of Common Prayer

[This is part of 40 Days of Prayer: Daily Emails for Lent]

Day 34: Returning to God with Our Souls

This week's reflections have tried to form something of a roadmap for how we can return to God in a an authentic and thorough way, for the remainder of our lives. When all of these pieces (our minds, hearts/spirits/wills, bodies, and relationships) are headed in the same Godward direction together, our souls will also find their home in life as God intended it to be lived. We have immense trouble today acknowledging that we have souls, and even when we do–having any clue what they are or what to do about them. Since this week's framework has largely come from Dallas Willard's book, Renovation of the Heart, and his description of the soul is about the only one that has ever made much sense to me, allow me to quote a couple of paragraphs:

What is running your life at any given moment is your soul. Not external circumstances, or your thoughts, or your intentions, or even your feelings, but your soul. The soul is that aspect of your whole being that correlates, integrates, and enlivens everything going on in the various dimensions of the self. It is the life-center of the human being. It regulates whatever is occurring in each of those dimensions and how they interact with each other and respond to surrounding events in the overall governance of your life. The soul is "deep" in the sense of being basic or foundational and also in the sense that it lies almost totally beyond conscious awareness.

In the person with the "well-kept heart," the soul will be itself properly ordered under God and in harmony with reality. The outcome will be... "a person who is prepared for and capable of responding to the situations of life in ways that are good and right." For such a person, the human spirit will be in correct relationship to God. With his assisting grace, it will bring the soul into subjection to God and the mind (thoughts, feelings) into subjection to the soul. The social context and the body will then come into subjection to thoughts and feelings that are in agreement with truth and with God's intent and purposes for us. Any given event in our life would then proceed as it should, because our soul is functioning properly under God.(5)

In another place, Dallas compares the soul to something like the operating system on your computer. We never notice the large majority of what happens there, though it is the regulator of everything we experience. Our operating systems and our souls normally only get much attention when something goes badly wrong with them.

So how do we direct them in our desire to return to God? We have to clear out space in our lives for God's grace to work at the soul level, deeper than our feelings. The two primary practices the church has hung on to through the ages for doing this are silence and solitude. We all need these, regardless of whether we are introverts or extroverts, because otherwise we will drown out anything that may be happening at that level–more often than not, with good things.

If we want our entire lives to return to God this Lent and beyond, we cannot do without time in quiet, apart from other people, for the simple purpose of being with God. Wesley urged his early Methodists to retire from the world at least each morning and evening to be alone with God, saying that if we spend an entire day in constant interactions with others, our souls will surely be damaged.

So now that we've come to the brink of Holy Week, how is your soul? Is it well-kept and prepared to follow Jesus through the next week? Or is it so accustomed to being ignored that you might avoid giving it any space to be with God, even during this most sacred of times?

A Prayer for the Day:

Almighty God, who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and sanctified a day of rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.*

A Prayer for the Week:

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.*

Click here for this week's scripture readings.

*From The Book of Common Prayer (5) See Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart

[This is part of 40 Days of Prayer: Daily Emails for Lent]

Day 33: Returning to God with Our Relationships

Though we have all probably heard to the contrary, there is nothing that is actually "just between you and God." Everything about our lives with God inevitably affects others. Plus, as inescapably social beings, our lives with God are always affected by others. So, in the context of this week's discussions, talking about returning to God with our relationships is a bit of a chicken-and-egg discussion. Our relationships play a huge role in shaping the quality of our life with God, and the quality of our life with God shapes every relationship we have. Let's look first at the way that our relationships impact our life with God: We do not become spiritually healthy people apart from spiritually healthy community. John Wesley was perhaps (in my biased opinion) as effective as any in Christian history at helping individuals grow, but he insisted that we do not progress in life with God on our own. He said, “'Holy solitaries' is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness."(3)

The application here is obnoxiously simple: if you want to be someone who has more of the character of Jesus, spend more time with more people who have more of the character of Jesus.

So what about the other side of it–thinking that things are just between me and God? Wesley again: "Christianity is essentially a social religion...to turn it into a solitary one is to destroy it."(4) Part of Jesus' point in saying that his hearers were a city on a hill that cannot be hidden is this inevitability of our lives affecting those around us. I would not want to try to hide New York. It is just as difficult to keep anything between just God and me.

Some considerations for each side of this:

• When I look back at the path of my Christian life, a major turning point was when, before my senior year of college, I sent a letter to my campus pastor. He was the most authentic disciple of Jesus I knew, and I wanted his kind of life with God. I had no idea what his schedule was like, but I asked if we could spend some time together. He invited me to be with him for an hour every week, and the course of my life changed. Think of someone whose life with God is of the kind that you desire to have. Invite them to a meal, send them an email, or give them a call. 
• Is there some area of your life where you'd prefer to think something was remaining between you and God and not affecting anyone else? If what I have said here is true, who might it be affecting without you having been aware? What do you need to do about it?

A Prayer for the Day:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.*

A Prayer for the Week:

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.*

Click here for this week's scripture readings.

*From The Book of Common Prayer (3) From Wesley's preface to his "Hymns and Sacred Poems" (4) From Wesley's sermon, "Upon Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount, Discourse 4"

[This is part of 40 Days of Prayer: Daily Emails for Lent]

Day 32: Returning to God with Our Bodies

When you and I look in the mirror, we see the primary tool that God has given us to know and serve him. We have covered some of this ground in previous weeks, but it is worth revisiting since, as Dallas Willard says, the role of the body in the spiritual life is "the least understood aspect of progress in Christlikeness."(2) Your body is not the enemy in your attempts to live life with God. Instead, it is a marvelous vehicle for loving God and loving others, and it is the only instrument God has given us to do so. But... you and I know our bodies well. We know that they fail us. Jesus' statement to Peter, James, and John on his last night with them sounds truer than what I wrote in the previous paragraph: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." We know too well the temptations that are ever present in our bodies, as they seem to unceasingly pull us toward gluttony, greed, lust, vanity, and all-around superficial living. Isn't the "spiritual" life about learning how to effectively tell our bodies to shut up so that we can get on with the really important things God wants of us? And, at the end of it all, isn't the point that we finally become free of these bodies, leave them behind, and go on to live the ultimate spiritual life forever with God in heaven?

That has been a prevalent Christian viewpoint for a long time, but scripture and the best of Christian tradition answer with a resounding "no." Our bodies are the height of God's good creation, and if our lives with God in this age are ever to make sense, we must come to the essential role they play in becoming the kind of people that God wants us to be–forever.

Though the importance and worth of our bodies is communicated throughout the Bible, it is nowhere stated more emphatically than in the passages dealing with Jesus' resurrection. To see how well your theology on this issue matches up with what the Bible says, notice your reaction to this statement: Jesus never left his body behind. We know that the story says his tomb was empty, but–after that–he never left his body behind. What this means is that there is still an embodied Jesus ruling as the anointed King of the world. What happened to him (being raised in his own real body–though it was different in some ways) will also happen to everyone. Our bodies really matter, and they always will, as the future that awaits us is just as embodied as the life we know now (only–in some good sense–more so).

So, in the context of this Lent and our discussion this week about returning to God, what difference does that make for the lives that we are really living in these bodies today? Willard again:

Our part in this transformation, in addition to constant faith and hope in Christ, is purposeful, strategic use of our bodies in ways which will retrain them, replacing "the motions of sin in our members" with the motions of Christ. This is how we take up our cross daily. It is how we submit our bodies a living sacrifice, how we "offer the parts of our body to him as instruments of righteousness." (Rom 6:13)(2)

In other words, those pulls away from God that we are all aware of in our bodies are not just in our imaginations, but they are real, ingrained, bodily habits that need to be dealt with. More than dealt with–they need to be "killed off," "crucified with Christ," as we replace them with habits that are conducive to God's life in us rather than opposed to it.

It is progress for us to realize that the things that block God's life in us are always bodily, whether in an obvious case like sexual lust, or in a less obvious example such as gossip. (How many times has your mouth said something before you realized what you were doing?) Yet even when we accept that, how do we deal with those things? If a main bodily stumbling block for me is overeating and finding my comfort in food rather than in God, how do I employ my body in the opposite direction?

The answer has to do with something we can call indirection. We don't defeat greed by trying really hard not to be greedy. We don't kill off the embodied habits that cut us off from God's life by just trying to do their opposites. No, we put other bodily habits in place (such as giving, praying, and fasting–or others like reflecting on the scriptures, solitude, worship, fellowship, etc.) which open us up, piece by piece, to God's grace. There is more grace than we can imagine and when we open ourselves to it through these means that have been passed down to us, our bodies become places where God dwells, and he deals with the sinful habits over time.

In light of what we've already said this week, this can only happen over the long haul when,

• first–our minds have been filled with the things that lead us to think about God as he really is, then our emotions become characterized by love, joy, and peace rather than hurry and worry;
• then–that part of us that chooses, the heart/spirit/will, naturally–even easily–chooses things that lead us in a Godward direction;
• and then–naturally, every one of those choices will be empowered by these bodies that we live in. This is true regardless of how they look, how old or young they are, and what medical issues they might be facing.

So, what is one way that you already know to "present your body to God as a living sacrifice" today?

A Prayer for the Day:

Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life we may not forget you, but may remember that we are ever walking in your sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.*

A Prayer for the Week:

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.*

Click here for this week's scripture readings.

*From The Book of Common Prayer (2) See Willard's Article, "The Human Body and Spiritual Growth"

[This is part of 40 Days of Prayer: Daily Emails for Lent]

Day 31: Returning to God with Our Hearts

What I'm about to say may not make me popular with some, but here goes: I'll admit that I'm a bit gun-shy when we talk in church about doing anything with our "hearts." I think the term gets used far too often, and–perhaps because of nothing more mature than trying to be macho–I always have my radar up for things that are going to require me to do something "touchy-feely." Whenever something shows up as a blip on that radar, I usually try to avoid it, and one of the primary indicators to me that I might want to avoid something in church is if its title includes the word "heart." (If, in addition to the word, there is also any sort of heart clip art, I will almost certainly steer clear.) I'm not proud of this, and I realize that it's not a particularly holy tendency, but at least I'm being honest.

So I admit that machismo rather than maturity is mostly to blame for my anti-heart reaction, but I think there's also another level to it: usually we have very little sense of what we're talking about in church when we talk about doing things with the heart. Most of our associations with it have to do with our feelings or emotions (which explains my avoidance of anything pointing in that direction), so any suggestion that we should do things such as praying with our hearts, or reading the Bible with our hearts, or even loving God with our hearts meet my initial defenses.

Again, thanks to Dallas Willard's work in Renovation of the Heart, I've come to see that loving, reading, and praying with our hearts are all things that should have a very concrete, practical meaning. In the book, Dallas proposes that–according to the images in the scriptures–talking about doing something with our hearts isn't actually talking about our feelings or emotions, but rather about our wills (to which the macho me heaves a sigh of relief).

Dallas makes the case that references in the scriptures to the heart, the spirit, and the will are all referring to the same part of us, essentially the part of us that chooses. Regardless of whether or not you share my disinclinations toward the touchy-feely, this is actually very good news for all of us. I'll see if I can explain why.

Think for a moment of someone who, in your estimation, is "world-class" at something, perhaps a professional athlete, musician, or some other kind of performer. We normally think of such people as not only being talented, but also having tremendous willpower. They have made the difficult decisions, day after day and year after year, which have resulted in their world-class abilities.

But what if I told you that I know something surprising about whichever great performer you have in mind: that, rather than having tremendous willpower, they actually have none at all? What if I told you that neither do I, and neither do you?

This makes sense if, instead of thinking of the heart as something indefinite but related to our feelings, we think of the heart in the context of a human life as we're considering it this week (again, thanks to Dallas). If we look at the heart, spirit, will as the part of us that chooses, and we understand the ground we covered yesterday about the role that our minds play in shaping everything about who we are, we can let ourselves off the hook about not having enough willpower to do certain things, because we'll realize that the will actually has no power. Instead, it is pointed in some direction(s), and makes decisions accordingly.

Back to your world-class performer: It's undeniably true that they indeed have made the tough decisions over years and decades to refine their talents into world-class abilities. But if what I'm saying is true, they didn't make those decisions based on tremendous willpower. Rather, they put the right things into their minds, and directed their minds to dwell on those things, so that whenever big or small decisions were presented to them, their hearts/wills/spirits chose accordingly, and all of those choices added up over time to turn into remarkable abilities.

So here comes the good news: the ability we are after is the ability to live our lives according to God's desires for us, namely that we would be people with the character of Jesus who participate in his kingdom in our everyday lives. This does not rest on our willpower. More concretely: your ability (or lack thereof) to actually live without anger, lust, deception, vanity, greed, and worry–to bless those who curse you and be completely free of the need to judge others–does not depend upon you having a world-class amount of willpower. No one does. We're all off the willpower hook.

What does matter, tremendously, if we seriously want to return to God with our hearts, is that we do the things that will naturally–over the course of months, years, and decades–point our hearts/wills/spirits to choose in the direction of that kind of life.

So, if you want to live a life completely in God's will five years from now, the question is not whether you have a five-year strategic plan to get you there. The question is whether, today, you are putting the things in your mind that will shape your thoughts and feelings in such a way that, when decision times come over the next five years, you will consistently choose in that Godward direction. And–the biggest surprise is–rather than requiring tremendous willpower, it won't even be difficult. (See Matthew 11:28-29.)

A Prayer for the Day:

Lord God, almighty and everlasting Father, you have brought us in safety to this new day: Preserve us with your mighty power, that we may not fall into sin, nor be overcome by adversity; and in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.*

A Prayer for the Week:

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.*

Click here for this week's scripture readings.

*From The Book of Common Prayer

[This is part of 40 Days of Prayer: Daily Emails for Lent]