SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/1/2017
5:25 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “The
Speech of Prayer”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
4:2
Message of the
verses: “Devote yourselves to
prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving;”
In our last SD we ended up looking at a couple of
parables from the gospel of Luke which speaks of prayer and today we want to
give some comments on these two parables.
MacArthur writes “The point of both those parables is
that if unwilling and sinful humans will honor persistence, how much will our
holy, loving heavenly Father?” He then
goes on to quote Virginia Stem Owens who wrote the following about wrestling
with God in earnest prayer:
“Christians have always
interpreted the splitting of the temple veil during the crucifixion as symbolic
of their liberation from the mediated presence
of God. Henceforth they were ‘free’ to
approach Him directly—which is almost like telling someone he is ‘free’ to
stick his head in the lion’s jaws. For
once you start praying there is no guarantee that you won’t find yourself
before Pharaoh, shipwrecked on a desert island, or in a lion’s den.
“This is no cosmic teddy
bear we are cuddling up to. As one of
the children describes him in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles
of Narnia, ‘he’s not a tame lion’ [Jacques] Ellul is convinced that prayer
for persons living in the technological age must be combat, and not just combat
with the Evil One, with one’s society, or even one’s divided self, though it is
also all of these; it is combat with God.
We too must struggle with Him just as Jacob did at Peniel where he
earned his name Israel—‘he who strives with God.’ We too must be prepared to
say, ‘I will not let you go till you bless me.’
“Consider Moses, again and
again intervening between the Israelites and God’s wrath; Abraham praying for
Sodom; the widow demanding justice of the unjust judge. But in combat with God, Ellul cautions, we
must be ready to bear the consequences:…’Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint,
and he went away lame. However, the most
usual experience will be God’s decision to put to work the person who cried out
to Him…Whoever wrestles with God in prayer puts his whole life at stake.’
“Awful things happen to people
who pray. Their plans are frequently
disrupted. They end up in strange
places. Abraham ‘went out, not knowing
where he was to go’…And Mary’s magnificent prayer at the annunciation, she
finds herself the pariah of Nazareth society…How tempting to up the stakes,
making prayer merely another consumer product.
How embarrassing to have to admit not only that prayer may get you into
prison, as it did Jeremiah, but also that while you’re moldering away in a miry
pit there, you may have a long list of lamentations and unanswered questions to
present to your Lord. How are we going
to tell them they may end up lame and vagrant if they grasp hold of this God.” (“Prayer—Into the Lion’s Jaw,” Christianity Today, November 19, 1976,
pp. 222-23; italics in the original)
6/1/2017 5:45 PM
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