First Tuesday of Advent: Wait–Pray

First, all who desire the grace of God are to wait for it in the way of prayer. - John Wesley

I've noticed something about prayer over the past few years: sometimes we pray because we sincerely want to be in God's will, and at other times we pray because we sincerely want God to be in ours. I've done my share of each of these. There have been times when I have prayed with the deepest intention of being open to God and becoming more completely his. This isn't limited to praying about things going on in my own life, but can certainly include times when I pray for others. Though it isn't always the way we go about it, we can pray for others in a way that holds them before God, asking for his kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth in their lives, just as it is in heaven. Whether for myself or for others, the times when I have prayed in these ways could be described as seeking "God's will: nothing more, nothing less, nothing else."(1)

Then, of course, there have been plenty of other times when my praying has boiled down to trying really hard to convince God to give me something that I wanted (usually followed for a while by a lack of praying, because the request I had been making didn't come according to my terms). During these times, Richard Foster's words describe my prayer precisely: "Our needs, our wants, our concerns dominate our prayer experience. Our prayers are shot through with plenty of pride, conceit, vanity, pretentiousness, haughtiness, and general all-around egocentricity."(2)

I've heard people say that there is no bad way to pray, and generally I agree. So, despite how the previous paragraphs may appear, I do not mean to communicate that one of these kinds of prayer is good and the other one bad. Foster's point in describing the selfishness of our prayers is that we should lay them out before God without regard to their level of egocentricity, considering that we cannot go around selfish prayer, but that we must go through it in order to lay aside our own wills in favor of God's.

However, in light of the issue we discussed yesterday (that we don't like to wait, because we don't like to give up control), it's important for us to realize that while there may be no bad way to pray, some ways of praying are more helpful than others–particularly when it comes to how our aversion to waiting on God drives us to resist giving control to him. While we should indeed feel free to come to God honestly with our concerns without feeling any need to censor them, if we want to cultivate our ability to wait on God, we will need some practices that help us to intentionally surrender the illusion that we have total control over our lives and instead entrust ourselves to God and his kingdom.

For the remainder of this week, we will look at different practical ways that we can wait on God throughout the rest of Advent. While it may seem counter-intuitive to talk about waiting on God as doing things, much of Christian tradition insists on the wisdom of this approach. Waiting on God requires our intentional cooperation, and it's inevitable that if we don't decide now on some ways we will deliberately wait on God between now and Christmas, we will arrive on December 25th with souls prepared (or ill-prepared) to the same degree as they have been in the past.

So, for today's suggestion of how we might wait on God this Advent through prayer, I pass on a helpful approach from James Bryan Smith's great book, The Good and Beautiful Life, and you might want to try this at least once per week throughout the remainder of Advent(3):

• Set aside ten to fifteen minutes.
• Think about all of the things you might be anxious about.
• Write them down in your journal or a notebook.
• Ask what you can do to remedy each of these situations.
• Make a note to yourself to do the things you can do.
• Turn everything else over to God.
• Write your request to God, and be specific.

Much of the point of waiting on God through these kinds of practices is that doing them helps put our lives into contact with God's kingdom. When we pray in this way, we can realize that our actions do not need to be done in our own strength, but that the things that have been worrying us are no threats whatsoever to God's kingdom, and therefore we too can safely entrust ourselves to him.

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A Prayer for the Day:

O God, the author of peace and lover of concord, to know you is eternal life and to serve you is perfect freedom: Defend us, your humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in your defense, may not fear the power of any adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.*

A Prayer for the Week:

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.*

*From The Book of Common Prayer (1) Danny E. Morris and Charles M. Olsen, Discerning God's Will Together: A Spiritual Practice for the Church (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1997) Kindle Edition, Location 1273. (2) Richard J. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home (New York: HarperCollins, 1992) 9. (3) James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful Life: Putting on the Character of Christ (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2009) 183-184.

First Monday of Advent: Why Waiting Isn't One of My Specialties

I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. (Psalm 130:5-6, NIV)

Suggesting that Advent is about waiting––that it is a period of time for us to recognize the ways that the people of God have waited on God through the centuries, and for us to follow their lead and wait on God ourselves––is likely to raise our defenses in some ways. In conversation with others, I have never heard anyone respond to a question about what kind of things they like to do with an answer along the lines of, "One of my favorite hobbies is just...waiting on things." We view waiting as an interruption into our plans of how things should go. Our attitude toward waiting reminds me of a comment from my son when he was about three years old. He was playing with some toys in his room when I asked him to help me clean up some of the clothes he had scattered around on his floor. Without looking up from his toys, he said, "Sorry, that's not one of my specialties."

It's easy for us to react that way when we talk about waiting on God. Better to leave that kind of thing to the professionals, we think. Then, throw into the mix that this series of Advent devotionals has waiting as its theme, and I would be surprised if some of us have not already subconsciously decided that we may keep reading, but probably won't actually do anything that gets suggested as a way of waiting on God. Ruth Haley Barton observes, "Most of us are not very good at waiting. We want what we want, and we want it yesterday. We want it on our own terms, just like we envisioned it....When there is something we need, having to wait for it puts us in a position where we are not in control....This is a necessary and yet very humbling aspect of ordinary life and of the spiritual life."(1)

I think there's also another reason why none of us is eager to develop waiting as one of our specialties: when we talk about waiting on God, we may initially nod our heads in agreement while at the same time only having a hazy idea of how anyone might attempt it. We wonder, what exactly is it that we're supposed to do?

Fortunately, there is a specific, practical answer to that question, and we will spend the remainder of this week exploring it. My hope is that doing so will give each of us a concrete idea of how we could go about waiting on God, and hopefully even make a plan to do so for the rest of Advent. We'll get into some specifics over the next few days, but for now, this question might point us in a helpful direction:

If I were to shape the next twenty-four hours of my life in a way that fosters my love for God and for other people, what would I do?

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A Prayer for the Day:

O God, the King eternal, whose light divides the day from the night and turns the shadow of death into the morning: Drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to keep your law, and guide our feet into the way of peace; that, having done your will with cheerfulness while it was day, we may, when night comes, rejoice to give you thanks; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.*

A Prayer for the Week:

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.*

*From The Book of Common Prayer (1) Ruth Haley Barton, 2013 Advent Reflections.

First Sunday of Advent: Wait

What would it be like to awaken on Christmas morning and feel like your soul has been sufficiently prepared to celebrate the incarnation of the Son of God?

I can't say I know what that feels like yet. I've been better prepared some years than others, but overall, I've experienced the opposite of that well-preparedness too many times. Once most Christmases have come and gone, even though I've been mindful that an inescapable reminder of Jesus' birth is at the core of all of the hubbub, I've still had a sense that I missed the point of it all. More than once, I've felt like all of the parties, presents, decorations, movies, and cookies have ended up being kind of like hosting a celebration for someone and then forgetting to ever speak to the honoree at the actual event. Sometime during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, I end up wanting to utter a prayer along the lines of, "Sorry I missed you at the party we threw for you last week." Today I am realizing that if go about my preparation in the same way as usual this year, I will end up needing to say that prayer again.

I want this year to be different. By the time that we sing "Silent Night" in church on Christmas Eve, I want to be able to let the events of that holy night take their full intended effect upon how I choose to live each day. I want to look at my preschool-age children differently and marvel at the fact that God saw it fit to become one of them. I want to be attentive to God and those around me, staying calm and quiet enough to be able to block out the excess noise and distractions in order to love well anyone with whom I come into contact.

I guess what I want most of all is joy. I can look back at the way I have celebrated Christmas in the past, and while things have been fun, this year I'm less interested in more of the same and more interested in cultivating joy, a pervasive sense of well-being(1), because of the fact that the Lord has come and he indeed does rule the world with truth and grace.

I want to be better prepared for Christmas this year, but according to Christian tradition there's a very counter-cultural irony here: we will be better prepared for the Christmas season if we have the discipline to wait until it arrives, and it isn't here yet. It will be an aid to anyone's faith to realize that we have another way of marking time. We've been given a calendar by centuries of people who have sought to follow Christ closely, and for the purpose of developing our lives with God, I've come to find it to be a much more trustworthy way of looking at the year than unconsciously judging the beginning and end of Christmas by what happens in the stores and on TV. In contrast to the culture around us (where I saw Christmas items on display in early October and the season will be over by December 26, at the latest), this traditional Christian calendar insists: It isn't yet Christmas. It's Advent.

I believe that the more attention we pay to that, the better chance we give ourselves to have the kind of deeply good Christmas we really want. In other words, if I want to sing "Silent Night" and "Joy to the World" for all their worth in church on Christmas Eve, I would be wise to spend the weeks between now and then letting "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus" fill my mind.

As it did to me several years ago, it may come as a surprise to you that according to this traditional Christian way of marking the year, Advent isn't Christmas. Advent prepares us for Christmas (all twelve days of it–not just one–from December 25 until January 5), but it does so indirectly. It prepares us by not yet focusing on the angels, shepherds, and the manger in Bethlehem. Instead, our attention is directed toward Israel's past longing for the Messiah to come, Christians' future hope that Christ will come again, and the implications of both of these on how we live today in light of Jesus' teaching that he will come to us and make his home in us.

Advent is characterized by words like waiting, longing, standing firm, watching, readiness, and staying awake. It puts us among the centuries of God's people who have cried, "How long, O Lord?" If we can remain in this ready, longing, watchful waiting, we will be prepared to recognize and celebrate Christ's coming.

During the coming weeks, we'll seek to prepare our souls for the joy of Christmas by waiting in expectant anticipation. Tomorrow, we'll look at what it means to wait on God, and how we go about doing so.

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A Note on the Prayers: Each day's reflection will include traditional Christian prayers. Normally, there will be two: a prayer for the day and a prayer for the week. The cycle of the prayers for the day will repeat each week, and part of the goodness of them is that they help us to enter into a weekly rhythm–for example, by being mindful of the resurrection on each Sunday. The prayers for the week emphasize the themes of the traditional scripture passages for that week of Advent. These are intentionally repetitive–by the third or fourth time that we pray them, we're likely to be more engaged with God through what they say than if we had only scanned over them one time.

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 God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.*

*From The Book of Common Prayer, Public Domain (1) Dallas Willard's definition of joy

A Meaningful and Non-Awkward Way to Give Thanks

I thought the following was a fantastic idea from J.D. Walt at Seedbed, good enough that I thought I needed to repost it here. A lot of us sincerely want to give thanks in a meaningful way with our families on Thanksgiving, but our efforts to do so are often less meaningful than we had hoped. This is absolutely worth a shot:

Six Steps to a Great Thanksgiving Gathering Prayer

Posted on November 25, 2013 by J.D. Walt

The Thanksgiving holiday often produces a sense of awkwardness when it comes to actually giving thanks before the big family feast. The “standard meal prayer” just doesn’t seem to do justice to the occasion.  And the “let’s all say what we are thankful for” routine tends to peter out after the more extroverted family members take their turns. Then there’s that MSP in every family (“Most Spiritual Person”) who likes to get the stage on these occasions to further demonstrate their spiritual prowess, often with some kind of pre-prayer reading from the latest Chicken Soup for the Soul release. A final common approach is to just turn to the designated family patriarch to offer the “standard meal prayer on steroids.” (see Phil on Duck Dynasty). And we won’t mention the infamous Ricky-Bobby Prayer.

Despite our best and most sincere intentions, whatever we choose to do to mark the occasion can easily turn out to be a more obligatory formality than anything else. Then it’s on to the annual ritual of overeating and not actually watching a Dallas Cowboys football game. It’s fascinating how a holiday designed to invite profound giving of gratitude to God so easily degenerates into ritualized consumption. Then there’s “Black Friday,” or Thursday is the new Black Friday!”

This Thanksgiving holiday, our family is going to try an experiment in biblical thanksgiving. Psalm 136provides an ancient format that can inspire spontaneous individual expressions of thanksgiving while also enabling others to participate in a more hearty yet less conspicuous corporate response. You remember Psalm 139- it’s the one that says, “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good.” And then the group response, “His love endures forever.” The Psalm gives us some prescribed things to remember and give thanks for while at the same time giving us a framework or pattern to offer more present day expressions of gratitude.

Here’s the six steps to the plan: [Read the rest at Seedbed.]

How to Spend a Day Alone with God

A few months ago, I wrote up a brief description for some colleagues with suggestions on how to spend a day alone with God. I'm currently working on the Advent series, and the topic has come up again, so I thought it might be handy to go ahead and have this posted:

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When we mention solitude and attempt to commit ourselves to it, a push/pull phenomenon almost always comes into play. We long for time alone with God, but we also resist it at multiple levels. That resistance most often surfaces in the form of thinking that we have too much to do to take a day away, but the real issue(s) are probably deeper than that. Solitude opens up the space for God to deal with things at some of those other levels which we are normally very good at ignoring.

As for details on how to go about this and what to do, please feel free to do it in a way that suits you and your life with your family. The point is to do it, not to do it perfectly.

For example, some people may be able to take a full 24 hour period and get away. Normally, for my wife and me, our day in solitude ends up being the length of a work day so that we can be back home with the kiddos for the evening. Find the length of time that works best for you (as long as it is some actual length of time).

As for the arrangement and content of the day, I would encourage you simply to try not to fill it with much. You’ll want to unplug from technology and be reasonably inaccessible. I find that I can’t spend days like this in my own house, but my wife can. It’s fine to have something to read–certainly some scripture and perhaps one other book, but even these can be twisted into tools we use to avoid God in solitude rather than encounter him, so make use of them as you wish, but without using them to cram full the space in the day that you have opened up for you and God. Journaling is good if it is a habit for you, or even if it feels inviting to you. But the bottom line is that there are no demands on you for this day–just be with God.

You might come away from a day like this encouraged and refreshed, or you might feel plain bored. Don’t be concerned with whether you “did” it well or poorly...the issue is more about having a day in which we let everything else go in order to be with our Friend. You may find it helpful to keep in mind the simple question, “What would God and I like to do together today?”

For years, I wanted to have days like this, but virtually never took them. I felt like they were a luxury and the demands of a life in ministry were too much for me to afford them. In that regard, I was badly educated, or–more likely–self-deceived. Now I view them as an indispensable part of the kind of life and ministry I want to have.

Wait on God: Daily Emails for Advent

I will be writing daily posts for Advent this year, beginning on December 1 and ending on Christmas Eve. In a similar style to our earlier series for Lent, each day's message will include a reflection from me and a prayer for the day.

If you already receive new posts from SalvationLife.com by email, you're all set to receive the Advent series. If you are not an email subscriber and would like to subscribe for just this series, select "Daily During Advent" on this form.

Beware of Bad Bible Reading, #1

"Look at the nations, and see!Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told." -Habakkuk 1:5

Eugene Peterson has said that "an enormous amount of damage is done in the name of Christian living by bad Bible reading."* I'm convinced he's right. We are often well-intentioned in our efforts to be biblical in our thinking and living. But, if the ways we go about attempting to be biblical are misguided, the result of our efforts can be futile–at best–or even harmful, as Peterson mentioned.

There are many ways that we can read the Bible badly (and Scot McKnight does a fantastic job of identifying them and proposing an antidote in The Blue Parakeet), but there is one in particular that has caught my attention lately. In a way, it's an opposite of what I have tried to point out with the Scripture Plaques You Won't Find at the Christian Bookstore. Whereas those are typically passages of scripture which we ignore because they don't fit the kinds of things we want the Bible to say, what I'm trying to get at here is how we see things we want to see in a passage and end up taking it to mean something that it never meant.

One common example of a passage of scripture you may have likely heard read badly is the story of the widow's mite, which I've already written about as The Most Abused Poor Widow in History. We isolate a passage and then think it says something (which we probably want it to say) and therefore miss what it really says.

The verse above from Habakkuk is a lesser-known example, but a pretty drastic one.

I remember the verse from a time that an inner-city ministry I visited was using it as their theme. They had nice graphics printed, with an image of their city along with the words of this verse. It appeared that they were hanging their hats on that passage as a promise, in the hopes that God would do astonishing things in their city as he had promised to do in ancient Israel through the prophet Habakkuk. I liked the verse and their graphics so much that I kept their materials and used them as a bookmark.

And then, years later, I read Habakkuk. Apparently the person who chose the verse didn't.

The preceding verses in the first chapter of Habakkuk are a plea to God from Habakkuk, essentially lamenting all of the terrible things he sees happening and that God is doing nothing about them. Then, the verse quoted above is the beginning of God's response. If God's response had ended with that verse–fine, we could go ahead and use it for our themes, and I could keep my slick-looking bookmark. The problem is that when we read the remainder of God's response to Habakkuk, we can summarize it (including verse five) as, "You think it's bad now? I'm about to devastate you so thoroughly at the hand of the Babylonians, that you wouldn't even be able to believe it if someone were to tell you."

Oops. I'm quite sure that is not what that urban ministry was trying to wish on its city.

Even though this example is a bit comical, it highlights a major difference between the ways that we often read the Bible–particularly the Old Testament–and the ways that we could read it for what it actually is, which would obviously then make it more likely to have its intended effect on us.

We like to look for verses. We like to know the book, chapter, and verse for God's promises to us. The problem with that approach is that the books of the Bible weren't written in chapters and verses, so we end up lifting a verse we like out of the story of which it was a part, and we can then take it to be something we want it to be whether it was meant to be that or not.

A better approach is to get to know the overall story. In this example, I should have started with reading Habakkuk, rather than just hanging on to the cool bookmark (which, ironically, made me feel biblical while proving me not to be). Then, if I got to know the rest of the story, I would be able to place Habakkuk in the overall story of God's dealings with Israel and the world as they're recounted to us in the Bible. And then, when I come across the more familiar verses from that little book, (like 2:20: "the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him") I'll be able to place them in their context, rather than just thinking, "Hey, that sounds nice. Let's print it up!"

*See Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, p. 82.