God's Perfect Timing: The Screwtape Letters

I see now why God wanted me to wait until this point to read The Screwtape Letters.  After several conversations this year that have taught me a lot spiritually, both through things the other people said and through things God revealed to me to share with them, I’ve been finding that C.S. Lewis came to a lot of the same conclusions I’ve been coming to this year.  God wanted me to find these conclusions on my own before reading The Screwtape Letters so that they would be confirmed to me, and that I would know I’m not the only one who He’s revealed these things to. The three biggest ones are:

1. “[God] sees that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality” (pg. 161). The devil produces fear in us, and when we’re afraid, we can be reassured that we are doing the Lord’s will because the devil wouldn’t want to hinder us if we weren’t working against him.
2. “[Precautions] have a tendency to increase fear… What you must do is to keep running in his mind (side by side with the conscious intention of doing his duty) the vague idea of all sorts of things he can do or not do, inside the framework of the duty, which seem to make him a little safer” (pg. 162). Faith with a plan B is weak faith. If I want my faith to be stronger, I have to take some risks without taking precautions. I have to learn to act in obedience to God without having second thoughts.
3. “Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us [devils] if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel” (pg. 67). If we hear God’s voice and disobey, we will continue to disobey his voice until we ignore it completely and it seems as if we can’t hear Him anymore. The best way to hear God more clearly is to do what He says.

Unceasing Prayer

What is unceasing prayer?  I know it can be confusing to think about.  The thought that immediately comes to mind is that to be in unceasing prayer means to be talking to God constantly, never stopping, even when we talk to other people, when we think about other things, and even while sleeping.  But of course, that's impossible.  We can't be shaping our thoughts into words of prayer while our mind is on something else.  But that's not what unceasing prayer is.

We talked about unceasing prayer in my prayer small group at Freshley this week.  The main thing that stuck out to me was an excerpt from a book that said that tennis is much easier to play when the player has had practice.  Thank you, Captain Obvious.  But the author takes this statement and applies it to prayer.  When we pray frequently, prayer becomes a natural response to everything in life, and prayer begins to flow out from us more easily.  We begin to pray as if by habit, but with none of the lifelessness of mere habit.

As a trumpet player and a music major, music analogies work really well for me.  Ceaseless prayer is like being a musician: If you practice your instrument (since I play trumpet, I'm going to use the trumpet for this analogy) regularly and frequently, playing becomes easier and the basic technique becomes second nature.  And as you continue to practice and get better, you begin to identify yourself as a trumpet player.  You don't have to be playing trumpet every single moment of every day to still be a trumpet player.  If I played my trumpet continuously and never stopped, I would eventually get burnt out.  It's impossible for me to constantly be playing my trumpet.  How would I eat?  How would I sleep?  But even though I am not playing my trumpet while I'm typing this, I can still say that I am a trumpet player because I practice regularly and it is a part of who I am.  Prayer is the same way: It is impossible for us to form our thoughts into prayers at every moment of every day, but if we regularly and frequently devote ourselves to prayer, we begin to identify ourselves as pray-ers.  And even though I don't walk around buzzing constantly (although I do buzz while walking occasionally—buzzing the lips is what makes sound come out of the trumpet), everything I do is shaping me to be able to play my trumpet the next time I pick it up: I may be resting after having finished practicing; I may be sleeping so I can get up to practice the next day; I may be eating to nourish my body, including my mouth/lips.  And in the same way, even though we don't pray constantly, if we pray frequently, everything we do becomes a prayer in itself: We sleep and thank God for giving us peace and rest, we eat and thank God for filling us, we talk with friends and thank God for giving us a community with the body of Christ and opportunities to share the gospel with our friends who don't know Him, we do homework or work at our jobs and thank God for giving us a way to serve Him and further His kingdom.  And everything we do also prepares us for the next time we put our prayers into words, because it gives us something to pray about.

So what is ceaseless prayer?  It's being so frequently in earnest prayer that prayer becomes a natural response to everything in our lives.  It's being so frequently in prayer that everything we do turns into a wordless prayer, expressing our thanks, our needs, and our desires.  To pray without ceasing is to dwell in God's presence and to allow our lives to become our prayers.

Isaac, Abraham's "only" son

Somehow, every time I read Genesis 22, I always manage to skip over where God says that Isaac is Abraham’s only son. What happened to Ishmael? Well, when Sarah made Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away, he basically had to disown them because he was kicking them out of the household. So even though God had promised Abraham that he would bless Ishmael along with Isaac, Ishmael was denied his rights as Abraham’s son and could not receive an inheritance from his father; his only inheritance would be what God gave him.
This puts the sacrifice of Isaac into a new perspective. Usually I think, “Wow, for Abraham to sacrifice his only son must take a lot of faith,” but I don’t even think about Ishmael. Now the sacrifice seems even greater because not only was Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, his only son, but he had also just disowned his only other heir. If he killed Isaac, he no longer had a back-up plan for his inheritance. But he went to sacrifice Isaac anyway, knowing that God must have something planned. This is a huge shift in Abraham’s way of thinking: back in chapter 16, Abraham doubted God’s promise to give him a son through Sarah, so he took matters into his own hands and had Ishmael with Hagar. After all, God had said that Abraham’s heir would be “a son coming form your own body,” not “from Sarai’s body (Genesis 15:4). But now in chapter 22, Abraham only has Isaac left, but he agrees to follow through with the sacrifice anyway. Of course, he could have gone against Sarah and went in search of Ishmael to bring him home and make him his son again, but he didn’t.

A lot of times we like to have back-up plans when God tests us. We say we believe God will pull through for us, but we always have something stored up just in case. “Who knows? Maybe His plan is for us to use what we already have instead of waiting for Him to give us something new.” I know I’m guilty of this. But what would we do if God took away our Plan B? Would we disobey God so we can have the security of knowing that God’s promise is still possible? Did Abraham think, “Well, Isaac is my only son now. And God, You told me he would be my heir, so I don’t think sacrificing him would be the right thing to do”? Maybe, but he didn’t act on it. When Abraham’s Plan B fell through, his only options were complete obedience or complete disobedience. Sometimes God has to take away our Plan B in order for us to see that. He has to remove Satan’s lies and deception in order for us to see that Plan B isn’t just another way to succeed if Plan A fails, it’s outright distrust. Resorting to Plan B shows that we don’t really think God can make Plan A work. I pray that we would be like Abraham in his later life, that when God gives us a task to do, we would recognize it as a necessary step in fulfilling His ultimate purpose, and then do it.

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."

Matthew 5:6

It's been a while since the last time I wrote anything.  I think part of it is that I've been writing my thoughts and revelations in a journal where I keep all my sermon notes, so my writing has been more on a personal level rather than being intended for teaching and sharing.  But God had another reason for delaying my writing on the Beatitudes.  I attended a Bible study a couple nights ago on what it means to be a man of God, and I was given a whole new perspective on this verse.

A lot of times we look at other Christians around us and feel like we're so far behind in our faith.  There are always those people who are so entirely devoted to God that their mere presence makes us want to be better Christians.  But too often, we let Satan use this view of our faith to condemn us.  He says, "Look at how full of the Holy Spirit they are!  Why aren't you like that?  You still have so much more to learn about God, and He has so many blessings He wants to give you, but you refuse to receive them.  That person over there is a good Christian.  But you?  You're still drinking spiritual milk.  When will you grow up?"  Of course, it is true that we have a lot to learn about God.  In fact, we will never be able to learn everything about His infinite glory, but that shouldn't discourage us and make us feel deficient in our faith.  It should encourage us to press in to know Him more because there is no limit to what He can reveal to us.

The devil tells us that we are lacking because we still need to learn more about God.  But Jesus calls us blessed because we desire to know Him more.  He says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness"—why?—"for they will be filled."  The fact that we are hungry is evidence that there is something that can fill us, and God will not leave us empty.  The revealing of our hunger is God's promise to us that He will fill us.

"For He satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul He fills with good things." ~ Psalm 107:9
"They feast on the abundance of Your house, and You give them drink from the river of Your delights." ~ Psalm 36:8

So when you feel like you're missing something, like there's more that God wants to give you that you haven't received yet, don't be discouraged.  It's true, God does have more that He wants to give us.  But the fact that we desire to receive it is God's way of saying, "Soon.  My blessings will come to you soon."  Blessed are those who long to draw closer to the Lord and receive everything He has for them, who know that they have not yet been filled to capacity, because they are in agreement with God's will, and their desire is for Him to have His way.  And His will is that we would be "filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:19).

Prophecy and Prayer

Wow.  Tonight was really encouraging.  God really had everything planned out to catch my attention, and I’m sure He caught a lot of other people’s attention too.  It started this morning when I was suddenly struck by the realization that I felt distant from God.  It’s not that I feel like He’s far from me, I just feel like He’s standing right next to me, but I have my back turned toward Him.  Well, when I stepped outside it was raining, and I suddenly thought of a couple songs that talk about rain: Let It Rain and Grace Like Rain.

Let It Rain:

Let it rain, let it rain, open the floodgates of heaven.

Grace Like Rain:

Hallelujah, grace like rain falls down on me.  Hallelujah, all my stains are washed away.

That got me thinking, and I remembered that God doesn’t care about my past—He cares more about what I’m doing right this instant—and this time I actually understood it.  No matter how many times I’ve tried to run away from Him, He still calls me back expectantly.  That realization was an answer to prayer that would be elaborated on later on today.

The rest of the day went by pretty much as usual until around 5.  The guys in the Redcoat trumpet section had a get-together for about an hour, and then I had dinner and went back to my dorm until the UGA brass band concert at 8.  While I was in my dorm, I started working on arranging another song for On That Note.  (On That Note is the acapella group I’m in that started this semester, for those of you who didn’t know.)  This one was written by my friend Jon Joiner, who is on the worship team at the UGA Wesley Foundation, specifically in Freshley, so I’m really excited to work on it.

Then I went to the brass band concert, which was great!  It would have been even better if it hadn’t been during Freshley.  But thankfully, the concert was less than an hour, so I got a ride to Freshley and was able to get there in time for the last song of an extended worship session and for small group.  And boy, what a song it was!  It was Revelation Song, which is probably one of my favorite worship songs.  And the Spirit was very present at Freshley tonight; it was obvious as soon as I walked in that He had been filling the room all night.

Then came small group time.  In my prayer leadership small group we talked about prophecy.  It was kind of funny because I had a conversation with my friend Josh about prophecy last year, and I had already heard everything that we talked about tonight from him.  It was cool getting that affirmation that what I believe about prophecy is supported by others within Freshley.  But even better was what came next.  I was hoping we would get a chance to “practice” prophesying for each other, and we did!  And the best part was that there was absolutely no way that we could interfere with the way we heard God’s voice: we were given a number and told to write down our prophecy/encouragement for that person without knowing who the number was assigned to.  We had no way to make up a prophecy because we didn’t know who we would be asking God about.  We just had to trust that He was telling us what we needed to tell the person we were supposed to be prophesying over.  Well, the encouragement that was given to me was that I am a child of light and that God will free me from the trap that is set for me and allow me to come to Him wholeheartedly and be redeemed, rejecting Satan’s lies and accepting the Lord’s truths (Ephesians 5:8, Psalm 31:4-5).  Like I said earlier, God answered my prayers to an even greater extent than I deserved.

But He didn’t stop there.  As I was praying and writing, God gave me a set of verses that seemed to refer vaguely to witnessing.  Basically what He told me to say was that even though witnessing may be hard with a particular person and it seems like you’re suffering, don’t give up, because God didn’t give up on you.  James 1:12 says that God has promised the crown of life to those who love Him and who have stood the test, and Philippians 4:1 indicates that those who come to know Christ through us are our crown, so together the two verses are a hint that God is promising to save the lost person in answer to the prayers of the person I was prophesying over.  He also wanted me to give encouragement to continue showing God’s love and to work diligently because He won’t leave the faithful without a reward.

Well, when we found out who we had been prophesying over, I gave my paper to her, and she told me that her boyfriend isn’t a Christian and it’s been a struggle.  The fact that what I said was exactly what she needed was really encouraging for me.  But prophecy isn’t about what we say or about saying the right thing for the right person at the right time.  If that’s what we focus on, then we don’t really see the big picture of prophecy.  Prophecy is one of God’s ways of sharing truth with us, and we should want to get to know Him more through prophecy.  Prophecy shouldn’t be our main concern; we need to focus on the Giver of prophecy.  It's not about me, it's about Him.  Anyway, I was thinking about it when I got back to my dorm after Freshley, and it hit me: God didn’t just give me an eerily accurate prophecy about a person who needed to hear exactly what I had to say.  He gave me a promise to share.  He gave me the promise that if she perseveres with Christ’s power, He will save her boyfriend!  The last thing I wrote on my paper was, “Your friend’s resolve to reject Christ is shaking!  Stay confident [that God will move in him]!”  That came straight from God, because I had no idea who I was talking to or who I was talking about.  If that’s not encouraging, I don’t know what is!

And then to top it all off, another friend told me that our prayers for her roommate are being answered, slowly but surely.

Lord, let Your will be done!  Come quickly to keep Your promise!

"For He spoke, and it came to be; He commanded, and it stood firm."

Psalm 33:9.

I was reading the story of the centurion and his servant in Matthew 8:5-13 when something suddenly occurred to me.  This story has always been strange to me; I could never make any sense of the centurion's words or why Jesus was so astonished by his faith.  But it finally clicked just now.  The secret lies in the beginning and end of verse 9: "'For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me... I say to my servant, "Do this," and he does it.'"  I believe the centurion is specifically talking about his servant who is paralyzed, saying that the servant always obeys his commands because the centurion has authority over him; in saying this, he acknowledges that Jesus has authority over him, so he relinquishes his authority over his servant and gives the reins to Jesus.  He knows that, because Jesus is the ultimate authority, whatever He says goes, so his servant will obey Him if He gives him a command.

And what's more, the centurion recognizes Jesus' identity as the Sovereign Lord, the God of all creation.  In verse 8 the centurion says, "But just say the word, and my servant will be healed." As God spoke the world into existence in Genesis—just as light came into being at His command—all of creation, even mankind, must submit to His authority.  If God were to simply command the servant to be healed, he would become well.  He wouldn't even have to hear Jesus give the command in person because the Holy Spirit would speak the command to his spirit.  Creation didn't even exist yet when God commanded the world into being, and it still obeyed; so why shouldn't something that already exists be able to hear and obey the Lord when He speaks?

The centurion's faith is so shocking because he truly acknowledges not only Jesus' identity as God, but also the fullness of God's sovereignty.  He understands that nothing is impossible with God, and he holds tight to that truth.  Even the Israelites in the Old Testament didn't have that kind of faith.  Repeatedly they abandoned the Lord because they felt hopeless in the wilderness.  They forgot that the Sovereign God was with them—no, they didn't forget that He was with them; they forgot that He is omnipotent.  They lost faith in Him, not that they didn't believe He existed, but they didn't believe He could help them.  But the centurion didn't forget.  He trusted the Lord, so his faith was rewarded.  As Mark 11:24 says, "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."  The centurion believed in Jesus' sovereignty, and he was granted the blessing of seeing His power in action.

I pray that we would all have the kind of faith the centurion had.  Let's remember Jesus' simple command in Mark 11:22: "Have faith in God."

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

Matthew 5:5

I think this verse gets misinterpreted a lot.  So many people have the wrong idea about what the word meek means.  According to Mirriam-Webster, meek means “deficient in spirit or courage: submissive; not violent or strong.”  We understand that Jesus is often called “meek and mild,” but Jesus was not weak, and He most definitely was not deficient in spirit (although, if we go back to the first beatitude, we could say that He was poor in spirit and rich in the Spirit, but I don’t think that context applies here; in the first beatitude, ‘spirit’ refers to self-sufficiency, which is contrary to being dependent on the Holy Spirit; but in the dictionary definition of meek, ‘spirit’ refers more to hope and joy).  Jesus was strong in the Spirit—and He still is—and He was bold in proclaiming the gospel of salvation and the coming of the kingdom of God, even to the point of causing violent division between Christians and their persecutors.  So if Jesus was meek, then we must find another definition for the word that fits who Jesus was (and is).

Now, this first definition of meek is actually the second definition in the dictionary.  The first is this: enduring injury with patience and without resentment: mild.”  That sounds a lot more like the Jesus we know, doesn’t it?  But I think there’s even more to it than that.  It might just be me, but when I hear “enduring injury,” I get the impression that whoever is enduring injury has the ability to decide to not endure injury.  In other words, the meek person has the power to put an end to his own suffering, but he chooses not to for some reason, whether it be to protect others from harm or to encourage them in their present suffering or simply to show his love for someone.  I believe the true, biblical definition of meek is the complete opposite of Mirriam-Webster’s second definition: a meek person is one who possesses great power, given to him by the Spirit, yet refuses to use it for his own benefit in favor of the rewards that will come with the fulfillment of a larger purpose.  A truly meek person is one who sees the big picture, God’s perfect plan, and submits to His will even when it calls for personal suffering.  And when the Lord does call him to suffer, the meek man will “endure injury with patience and without resentment.”  He will not grow angry with God for causing him to go through trials, and he will be patient with his persecutors and show Christ-like love to them.

Now look at the blessing Jesus gives the meek: “for they will inherit the earth.”  This is interesting to me: a man with great power can conquer the world and take it for himself; but a meek man, one who has great power but refuses to use it to benefit himself at others’ expense, will inherit the world and be given it by God.  And the gift of God is far more valuable than our own wages, because “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

We have been given great power by the Lord.  According to 2 Timothy 1:7, “God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a Spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline.”  In the famous words of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  We have been given the Spirit not just for our own benefit, but also so that we can benefit others.  So let’s use the power He has given us appropriately. Our job is not to arrive in heaven; it’s to make sure it’s crowded when we get there.