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When Faith & Prayer Do Not Work This thoroughly biblical exploration of prayer will surprise many Bible believers. Many of us are floundering because our understanding of how to get prayers answered has seemed Bible-based and yet has become somewhat distorted. We all want quick, easy answers. If that’s all it takes, however, you would have had the answer already and would not be looking for more. I understand being so desperate that you want quick answers. Sadly, however, haste can produce shallow results that end up delaying rather than speeding the answer we so greatly need. It is alarmingly easy to waste years blindly dismissing something as irrelevant, certain it could not possibly apply to our situation, when deeper reflection would reveal it is actually the critical missing piece of the puzzle. Are you willing to slow down just a little and join me in seeking God for a deeper, more accurate insight into the mysteries of prayer? God’s Longing to ‘Spoil’ Us A divine goal of prayer is that “your joy may be full” (KJV). In the words of the NIV: John 16:24  . . . Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be made full . How exciting is that! We will explore other facets of prayer that might initially seem more sobering. Our perception of divine reality will be distorted, however, unless we keep in focus that our joy is the thrilling goal God has for our prayers. It is important never to lose sight of this, especially since we will discover below that reaching this joy is often a bumpy journey. Like the world’s most doting grandparent, God delights in ‘spoiling’ his loved ones, in the sense of showering them with blessings infinitely beyond what they could ever earn or deserve. It makes God’s day! On the other hand, he loves you far too much and is too wise a parent to spoil you in the sense of harming you – giving you something you clamor for and initially enthralls you but eventually ends up hurting you. The joy that God wants for you is joy that lasts forever, not something you end up regretting or turns out to be second rate. The gulf between what the immature want and what is in their best interest is a significant source of friction between little children and good parents – and between immature Christians and the good Lord. No matter how much ‘faith’ we try to muster and how much we nag God and whine and sulk, we will not corrupt our holy, loving Lord into someone who, just to shut us up, gives us things that end up robbing us of his best. Nothing is more fundamental to the nature of God than him being greater than us, and therefore smarter than us. Only he can know the intricate chains of events sent rippling through time and through all humanity by tiny actions. He alone knows the future. This means that God’s understanding of what is best for us is necessarily vastly superior to our own presumptions. It makes it inevitable that we will often ask him for things that he knows will end up being less than the best for us – sometimes alarmingly so – even though we, in our arrogance and ignorance, are convinced nothing could be better. Scripture puts this truth succinctly: “ We do not know what we ought to pray for” ( Romans 8:26 , NIV). There is nothing more central to Christianity than the cross. If the cross reveals anything about God, it is that he loves us so passionately and selflessly that he is willing to be despised and rejected in order to give us his best. So what can we expect if we desperately pray for something he knows is not his best for us? Would he who set the cross as his eternal precedent, love us enough to risk our hot displeasure – and even us temporarily despising and rejecting him – in order for us to have what he alone has the foresight and wisdom to know is in our best interest? More often than we realize, if God were so weak or spiteful as to give us what we clamor for, we would end up resenting him when it all turns sour. Our loving Lord is always working toward your everlasting joy; never a high that eventually fizzles and comes hurtling back to earth with such a devastating crash that you would be better off if it had never happened. You have heard fables of a genie in a bottle or lamp who grants favored people whatever they wish for. The word genie can be traced back to Arabian beliefs about demons or false gods. This is appropriate because, if you think it through, anyone who grants people their every wish would have to be evil. Surprisingly, the fable of King Midas, who lived to regret wishing everything he touched would turn to gold, also warns us of the danger we would face if we had a God so malicious as to answer our every prayer. Loving and serving God are the exact opposite of trying to use faith to manipulate God into giving us what he does not want to give us. And it is ludicrous to imagine that God’s love means he wants us to have things that seem good but end up harming us. A pervert might want what he lusts for, a lazy slob might want what he calls an easy life, a hateful person might want revenge, a greedy person might want money, a drug addict might want more highs, but granting them their wishes would ruin them. We can see the folly of other people’s wishes being granted but seldom do we see the folly of our own wishes. The logic is irrefutable: for God to give us whatever we ask for, he would either have to be as dumb as us or not love us – and neither of these is ever going to happen. More Complex than it Seems So one prerequisite for answered prayer is that we have asked for something that will genuinely complete our joy. Our dilemma is that this is significantly more difficult than we dare imagine. This is crystalized in Romans 8:26 , which says we desperately need the Holy Spirit’s intervention because we do not know what (KJV, NIV and many other versions) to pray for. Some commentaries on this Scripture mention pagans who became so convinced that they could end up praying unwisely that they concluded it is better not to pray. You might smirk but I commend their humility. Most of us could use a huge dose. Thankfully, we have the Holy Spirit, who is eager to intervene and prevent disastrous answers to our prayers. Even if we lack appropriate humility, however, do we at least have enough faith in God’s goodness to thank him for not allowing our dangerously short-sighted prayers to be answered the way we think they should? Or will we disgrace ourselves by resenting God or envying others when he mercifully protects us from our own ignorance? Why our requests are not divinely granted can easily get surprisingly complex and beyond our puny minds to compute, unless the Lord eventually solves the mystery for us. For example, a woman recently shared with me how a long time ago she had asked God to give her a cross she could wear as a necklace so that she could make her faith publicly known and use it to witness. What could be more harmless, selfless and honoring to God? She could have bought one herself but she wanted it to be something special from God so she could use the story of how he provided it as an additional witness. No cross ever arrived. Twenty years later, she finally mustered the courage to ask the Lord why he never granted her request. He replied that giving it to her would have put her in bondage. She would, for example, have feared never wearing it, lest by doing so it might be letting God down. The Lord told her he chose not to answer her prayer for a necklace because he wanted her to be free from such bondage. Of the millions of other examples, here’s just one more. A missionary’s monthly allowance failed to reach her. Her prayers for money or food went unanswered. For quite a while all she had to eat was oats. To make matters worse, she was sick. When she later returned to her home country she mentioned this to a doctor, who happened to also know about the serious stomach condition she had had at that time. The doctor informed her that not only was oats the ideal diet for such a condition, a normal diet could have killed her. Yes, the Lord could have both healed her and given her a better diet but no doubt he used this remarkable experience to bolster her “ faith, which is more precious than gold” ( 1 Peter 1:7 ). The What and the Why and the When You can fail to have your prayer answered because you ask for the wrong reason. Having the wrong attitude often results in asking for the wrong thing. But not always. Two people can pray for the same thing and get quite different responses from God because of their different motives. For example, it is one thing to pray for a million dollars because you want to spend a portion of it on yourself; it is very different to pray for the same thing because you want to use it all to feed the poor. But we can drill down even further. Do you want to feed the poor solely due to compassion or partly because you want the ego boost of impressing people with the power of your faith or with your generosity? Or you might want it as a sign that you are special to God because you are too lazy to take God at his Word when his Bible declares he loves you. We can go even deeper: we can pray for the right reason but focus our prayers on a wrong method. The method could be blatantly wrong such as praying for the death of one’s enemies. Or what we ask for might simply not be as effective as some other means God has in mind that we have not been smart enough to think of. For example, would God giving a million dollars for food aid be as helpful for the recipients as the breaking of drought? Or is there some other way of meeting their need that gives them greater dignity and frees them from dependence on handouts? Then you can pray for the right thing for the right reason but the timing is not right. Timing is critical with God. Again I will give just two of countless examples, this time from the Bible: Genesis 15:16 In the fourth generation they will come here again, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full. The time would come for the Israelites in Egypt to enter the promised land. This would mean the expulsion of those currently living there, however. They had to wait four generations because God’s patience with the Amorites had not yet been exhausted. Answered Prayer: More than Faith We are beginning to see that precisely because God is good, wise, and loving, there is more to answered prayer than faith and persistence. Let’s explore some more factors. Jesus told the paralyzed man to take his mat and walk, the blind man to wash his eyes in the pool, the ten lepers to show themselves to the priest (and we could add so many other examples from throughout Scripture) and they received only as they did what they were told to do. And so it is with us. “ But be doers of the word, and not only hearers, ” warns James 1:22 , “ deluding your own selves .” [Emphasis mine.] Too often we seem to act as if there were two different ways of obtaining God’s promises: we can either do as Scripture says or we can largely ignore Scripture’s directives and simply pray for it to happen. Consider these scenarios: The Bible tells us to work hard. Did God slip up every time he inspired a writer of Scripture to say that? Was he merely teasing us? Or can we ignore his directives by refusing to work as hard as we can, and expect God to answer prayers for finances? The Bible tells us to flee immorality. In fact, it says that the immoral or adulterous cannot enter the kingdom of God and that to look lustfully at a woman is to commit adultery. So when someone who lusts after women asks God to bless his marriage and family relationships, will God deny his own values, override everything he says about relationships and answer that prayer as if the Bible is wrong and people’s sexual mores are of no consequence to their marriage? In fact, we will later cite 1 Peter 3:7 that specifically states that a husband’s dishonoring his wife can sabotage his prayers. God’s Word tells us to keep reading the Bible, storing it in our hearts and putting it into practice. Doing this, it says, will make us wise. But is there some divine loophole that those too lazy to read the Bible can exploit? Can they ignore the Bible and get wisdom simply by praying for it? God tells us in his Word not to complain and to continually praise and thank God. Can we disregard this, and expect God to answer prayers to invent another pathway to joy? And of course there must be hundreds of other examples we could cite. To receive everything we ever request would make us as terrifyingly powerful as the Omnipotent Lord. Who would you dare let have such unlimited power? Would it be generous or irresponsible for the good Lord to use prayer to entrust Godlike power to anyone whose motives are not Godlike? Do we suppose the way to get our selfish way is by prayer to the God who demands we die to self? Having the audacity to imagine that prayer somehow allows us to bypass the need to follow Scripture’s God-given instructions is not only ludicrous but offensive to God. Dare we, for example, defile the holy Word of God by coming to the very Bible that devotes so much space and passion to denouncing the love of money, and then seize a verse about prayer as an open-invitation to use faith-filled prayer to feed our addiction to money and perpetuate our adulterous love affair with material things? That would be as atrocious as praying for guidance, wisdom and protection as we rob someone. It would be as perverse as praying God provide us with victims for a hideous sex crime. Manipulating God? Do we really think we could dupe the Holy God into giving us anything that by his exacting standards is unholy, or that he would invite us to pray for such things? If it were possible for prayer to nullify the Word of God, we would not be praying to the God of the Bible. The unspiritual side of us, however, keeps hoping to avoid God’s way and find some cozy alternative. Alarmingly, the Deceiver has gleefully prepared many such options for those who prefer the easy road that leads to destruction. And he is delighted to let them remain smugly convinced they have got away with it. For example, we are sometimes so dominated by greed and self-centeredness as to twist God’s Word by ripping fragments of Scripture out of context about prayer without even realizing what we are doing. Consider this favorite Scripture: Psalm 37:4  . . . delight yourself in the Lord , and he will give you the desires of your heart .(Emphasis mine) It is time to check your medication if you imagine this verse is telling you how to manipulate God or get your own way. Nevertheless, this is exactly how some greedy soul (whether greedy for power, fame, luxury, ease, sex, chemical highs, or whatever) could misinterpret it. Put simply: the Almighty is perfect; we are not. Perfection can never be improved upon. God never changes ( Scriptures ). This is not because he is inflexible or stubborn or self-centered but because any change could only be a move away from perfect wisdom, perfect goodness, perfect love, and so on. The Perfect One can never improve. For us, however, it is a very different story. Infinite love means that God is utterly unselfish. As dramatically affirmed by the cross of Christ, our Lord is always seeking the well-being of others and never his own comfort. This makes God forever focused on inspiring us to change our hearts for the better; not on getting us to change or corrupt God’s heart. The Scripture just cited is not saying that if you desire something, the way to get it is to delight in God. Delighting in God will profoundly affect your very desires, and the longer you delight in him, the more your desires will change; just as the more you delight in wildlife and pristine wilderness areas, the less you will want to do things that harm the environment. To delight in God is to take your eyes off yourself and lose yourself in the majesty and purity of God. Anyone delighting in God loves him so much that he/she would never knowingly ask for anything that grieves or disappoints God. You would be so passionate about God that pleasing him means more to you than life or pain-avoidance or anything else you could ever crave. We see this exemplified in Jesus: despite being so horrified by the consequences that sweat dripped from him like blood, our Role Model prayed, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.” “Teach us to pray” the disciples had pleaded, and yet they slept through the greatest example of all. In The Treasury of David , C. H. Spurgeon comments on the verse in Psalms we have been examining: Men who delight in God, desire and ask for nothing but what will please God; hence it is safe to give them carte blanche [divine authorization to get whatever they want]. Their will is subdued to God’s will and now they may have what they will. He immediately adds: Our innermost desires are here meant; not our casual desires; there are many things which nature might desire which grace may never permit us to ask for; these deep, prayerful asking desires are those to whom the promise is made. It is safe to say, “Love God and do what you want,” precisely because no one who truly loves God would ever want to grieve his Lord by knowingly doing anything that clashes with God’s holiness or his plans. To love God is to obey him. The Word of God puts it this way: Psalm 145:19 He will fulfill the desire of those who fear him . He also will hear their cry, and will save them. 1 John 3:22  . . .whatever we ask, we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do the things that are pleasing in his sight . (Emphasis mine) Not the Killjoy it Seems Taken in isolation, the portion of divine revelation we have so far examined might seem a letdown. God is not the genie in the bottle some of us have been hoping for. Disappointment vanishes, however, when we realize that riding high in the full truth is that God is staggeringly bighearted. Our love-filled Lord is not only the one “who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think” ( Ephesians 3:20 ) but he delivers. He “gives to all liberally and without reproach” ( James 1:5 ) and his goal is always that “your joy may be made full.” I will not repeat everything said in the above section, this time using only New Testament Scriptures. It could easily be done, however. For example: Matthew 6:33 But seek first God’s Kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. Despite greedy eyes lighting up when zooming in on just part of one verse, this is actually the very opposite of telling the greedy how to get their fill. The words “and his righteousness” should be enough to nail any such misconception. Many Scriptures confirm that lust, greed, selfishness, covetousness, slavery to pleasure, laziness, and so on are sin and therefore incompatible with righteousness. Moreover, we shall see that linking righteousness to answered prayer is a regular biblical theme. Two examples should suffice for the moment: Psalm 66:18 If I cherished sin in my heart, the Lord wouldn’t have listened. Isaiah 59:2  . . . your iniquities have separated you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. To make it still clearer that this is not an invitation to the greedy, Jesus introduced this promise by saying it is pagan to give priority to seeking first even the most elementary of human needs. Despite a superficial familiarity with this passage, please pause for at least one careful reading of the context: Matthew 6:24-33  . . . You can’t serve both God and Mammon [money]. . . . don’t be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing? See the birds of the sky, that they don’t sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you of much more value than they? . . . Why are you anxious about clothing? . . . Therefore don’t be anxious, saying, ‘What will we eat?’, ‘What will we drink?’ or, ‘With what will we be clothed?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first God’s Kingdom, and his righteousness . . . The briefest glance at the context affirms that Jesus was not referring to a television, hot and cold running water, or even clothes that are fashionable. He zeroed in on the most basic necessities of life that even birds need, declaring that above even those things, we must seek the kingdom of God, and the other essentials are for God to worry about. In the words of Paul: 1 Timothy 6:8-11 But having food and clothing, we will be content with that. But those who are determined to be rich fall into a temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful lusts, such as drown men in ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some have been led astray from the faith in their greed, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But you, man of God, flee these things, and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, and gentleness. Unlike some preachers who have lost sight of Jesus’ priorities, our Lord never stooped to exploiting people’s greed as a way of enticing them into the kingdom. In fact, such an attempt is doomed because the greedy cannot enter the kingdom: Matthew 23:25 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and unrighteousness. Mark 7:21-23 For from within, out of the hearts of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, sexual sins, murders, thefts, covetings, wickedness, deceit, lustful desires, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and defile the man. Luke 8:14 That which fell among the thorns, these are those who have heard, and as they go on their way they are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures  . . . (Emphasis mine) Luke 12:15  . . . Beware! Keep yourselves from covetousness . . . Jesus never said or implied, “I am your cash cow.” On the contrary, his passion was to get the greedy to reverse their thinking so that if the change in their attitude to feeding their selfish desires is sufficiently radical they might be able to enter God’s kingdom, (the realm where God – not one’s personal cravings – is king). Mark 10:17-25 As he was going out into the way, one ran to him, knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” . . . Jesus looking at him loved him, and said to him, “One thing you lack. Go, sell whatever you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me, taking up the cross.” But his face fell at that saying, and he went away sorrowful, for he was one who had great possessions. Jesus looked around, and said to his disciples, “How difficult it is for those who have riches to enter into God’s Kingdom! . . . It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into God’s Kingdom.” Immediately after feeding the five thousand, we read: John 6:15 Jesus therefore, perceiving that they were about to come and take him by force, to make him king, withdrew again to the mountain by himself. Jesus withdrew from anyone who thought he would meet their political or economic aspirations. Instead, he sought those who were desperate for godliness: Matthew 5:6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. And what will they be filled with? What really counts: righteousness (selflessness). Of course, the rest of the New Testament says such things as: Romans 8:5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. Colossians 3:2, 5 Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth. . . . Put to death therefore your members which are on the earth: sexual immorality, uncleanness, depraved passion, evil desire, and covetousness , which is idolatry 1 John 2:16-17 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, isn’t the Father’s, but is the world’s. The world is passing away with its lusts, but he who does God’s will remains forever (Emphasis mine) To be righteous, however, is to be like God. And God is the most dynamic and exciting and beautiful person in the universe. You were born for greatness and born again to be forever hailed a hero by following the path to never-ending glory; the trail blazed by our all-conquering King. Let go of the inferior that glitters and entices and fizzles and fails. Take God’s hand and soar to fulfillment and achievement beyond what you have dared dream. Life is not about getting our own way but about letting God have his glorious way in our lives. Stop resigning yourself to the inferior. Raise your aspirations to divine heights so that you will forever rejoice in the choices you have made. When Prayer Turns God’s Stomach Prayer turns God’s stomach if it degenerates into an excuse for disobedience or spiritual laziness. If you baulk at that statement, read what God says: Proverbs 28:9 He who turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination. Isaiah 1:15-16 When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Yes, when you make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, make yourself clean. Put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes. . . . James 4:3 You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it for your pleasures. Imagining that prayer can somehow allow us to bypass the need to follow Scripture’s instructions is not only mistaken but offensive to God. As already demonstrated, the Bible spells out the prerequisites for answered prayer a number of times. If, however, Scripture were to list all the conditions and exceptions every time any subject were raised, we would need a wheelbarrow to carry the Bible around and we would all be complaining about how tedious and boring it is to read. Doesn’t our long-suffering Lord have enough trouble getting us to read much of the Bible as it is? Imagine the burden if the Bible read like a legal document, spelling out all the conditions and exceptions every time it makes a statement, rather than assuming we have had the sense to read the rest of the most important book in the universe. We all do lip service to the importance of not taking things out of content, but let’s get serious: the full context is not just a couple of verses either side but the entire Bible. I would dearly love to be able to reassure you that, of course, we can claim for ourselves most Scripture. To be accurate, however, I cannot even say that of John 3:16 . We must not gouge from the rest of God’s written revelation even this basic Scripture and, by ignoring the rest of the Bible’s teaching about salvation, read into this verse things it does mean. This is getting off-track but to stress the importance of this principle, I need to briefly explain. This verse is typical of the Bible in that it packs an enormous amount into a single word (in this case, believe ) and it is unpacked only by studying the rest of the Bible. Suppose a doctor says you have two months to live, or someone hands you a check for a billion dollars. Whether you choose to believe either of these is entirely your choice. To truly believe in something of profound significance, however, profoundly affects our attitude (note the word attitude). And nothing is more profoundly significant than God. Other Scriptures reveal that genuine belief in God changes us so much that we repent (genuinely regret every time we have disobeyed God) and make Jesus our Lord (want, from now on, to always obey God, no matter what the cost). Note that regret and want are attitudes. They are not ‘works,’ nor even feelings, but a decision. They are a manifestation of the profound change of heart that accompanies truly believing who God is – believing that he is always right and that through Christ he loves and forgives us and empowers us to do what is right. Rationally and spiritually there is no other way to make God our God. Otherwise, we are own our God, and we relegate the true God to being our servant – the one we hope will obey us when we need him but whom we will disregard when his wishes clash with our own. The Bible’s teaching on prayer is founded on the presumption that those praying have died to self (and hence to spiritual laziness) and are committed to doing things God’s way. Since the Bible’s promises about prayer were usually addressed specifically to people who were already devoted to God, there was no point in continually adding at the end of every verse,“Of course, this only applies if you are living this Book, i.e. have died to self, been spiritually transformed by spiritual union with Christ and are in total submission to God, in everything thinking and acting like him.” That would be as ridiculous as an instruction manual for a high performance vehicle stopping at the end of each statement to explain that what it says only applies to that particular vehicle. If, in an emergency, you gave your trustworthy adult daughter your credit card details, telling her, “Use this however you feel appropriate,” there would be all sorts of unspoken conditions attached but there would be no need for you to detail them – indeed, to do so would be to insult her intelligence and character. How would you feel, however, if her irresponsible, much younger brother, overheard and used it as he felt appropriate, claiming that your words to his trustworthy sister gave him the authority to use your hard earned money irresponsibly? Even though nothing a verse says should be taken in isolation, many of Jesus’ declarations about prayer specifically added provisos, the ramifications of which we often gloss over. Consider, for example, the implications of offering prayer in Jesus’ name. John 14:14 If you will ask anything in my name , I will do it. John 15:16  . . . I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatever you will ask of the Father in my name , he may give it to you. John 16:23-24 In that day you will ask me no questions. Most certainly I tell you, whatever you may ask of the Father in my name , he will give it to you. Until now, you have asked nothing in my name . Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be made full. John 16:26-27 In that day you will ask in my name ; and I don’t say to you, that I will pray to the Father for you, for the Father himself loves you . . . (Emphasis mine) Average Christians in our era rarely grasp the grave significance of this expression. I was taught as a child to tack on to the end of my prayers, “For Jesus’ sake, Amen.” Whoever initiated this tradition truly understood prayer but, like so many other children, I never bothered to consider what the words meant. For me, it was simply the way to let God know the prayer was ended. I might as well have said, “Roger, over and out!” or “Goodbye, God – Nice to talk to you!” I never for a moment stopped to wonder whether what I had been asking was for actually Jesus’ sake or merely for my own sake. So let’s investigate what it means to pray in Jesus’ name. If I were to do something in your name, I would be acting as your representative. That’s a huge responsibility. If, in your name, I were to do anything stupid or unethical I could ruin your reputation. If ever there is a time to ask oneself, “What would Jesus do?” it is when doing anything in Jesus’ name. You are putting his reputation on the line. If ever you were exposing yourself to divine judgment, this is it. At first glance, it seems that in some of Jesus’ promises about prayer he is handing us a blank check. Only a fool, however, would give a blank check to anyone who is not highly responsible. So if the eternal Son of God were handing out blank checks, as it were, you can be sure he is giving them only to people he could trust never to abuse the responsibility. And, of course, that is what God does, as shown throughout both Testaments. But first: a note about the proportion of Old Testament quotes in the Scriptures I will cite. We have already quoted from the New Testament: James 4:3 You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it for your pleasures. Expressed another way: 1 John 3:22 and whatever we ask, we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do the things that are pleasing in his sight . 1 John 5:14 This is the boldness which we have toward him, that, if we ask anything according to his will , he listens to us. John 15:7 If you remain in me, and my words remain in you , you will ask whatever you desire, and it will be done for you. James 5:16  . . . The insistent prayer of a righteous person is powerfully effective. (Emphasis mine) And there are still more New Testament quotes to follow. Since the Old Testament is significantly larger and is the foundation for the New, however, it follows that there should be a higher proportion of Old Testament quotes on this topic. A further reason is that the New Testament was addressed primarily to new converts – first generation Christians – who had a corresponding fervor for God. Much of the Old Testament, however, was addressed to people born into their religion and were therefore more likely to be lulled into merely going through the motions and not realize that there is more to serving God than that. Whereas for the original readers of the New Testament it was obvious, those who had never had a personal relationship with God, or had lapsed into little more than lip service, needed the conditions for answered prayer to be spelled out. Sadly, that describes many of us today. So let’s see some of these Scriptures: Proverbs 15:8 The sacrifice made by the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright is his delight. Proverbs 21:13 Whoever stops his ears at the cry of the poor, he will also cry out, but shall not be heard. Micah 3:4 Then they will cry to the Lord, but he will not answer them. Yes, he will hide his face from them at that time, because they made their deeds evil. Let’s look at the following with new eyes: James 4:2-3  . . . you don’t ask. You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it for your pleasures. By saying they do not ask and in the next breath saying they do ask, James is not contradicting himself but highlighting a matter that too often goes unnoticed: ‘ask’ can have two different meanings and we dare not confuse them because they produce opposite results. The people James was addressing were not asking for godly things, so they were not asking in the godly, biblical sense of the word. What the Bible means by asking the Holy Lord involves asking in submission to God and is motivated by godliness, not greed. Since they were not asking for anything Jesus would ever ask for, they were not doing what Jesus meant when he spoke about asking, and so his promises about asking do not apply. Have we greedily interpreted certain Scriptures such as “ask anything” in a way God never intended them to be understood? To ask in the deep, biblical sense activates the Bible’s promises about asking. To ask in a shallow, secular sense is to ask in vain. James does something similar when writing about faith. At first, one might imagine he is contradicting Paul’s teaching on the subject but, instead, he is highlighting that the biblical word can be misinterpreted and used in a non-biblical way. He points out that what some people think of as faith is mere intellectual assent and so shallow that it is does not affect their behavior. Such ‘faith’ will get us nowhere with God because it is not what God means by the term. James was emphasizing the importance of understanding the depth behind the biblical meaning of faith , just as we need to understand the depth behind what the Bible means by ask . God’s promises about asking apply only to the type of asking God meant, just like his promises about faith apply only to the type of faith he meant. In both cases, James was targeting the disturbing human attraction to interpreting Scripture in a shallow way that allows us to think we can selfishly get away with less than total commitment. The teachings of the New and Old Testaments on prayer dovetail. Consider this, for example: Malachi 2:13-14 This again you do: you cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping, and with sighing, because he doesn’t regard the offering any more, neither receives it with good will at your hand. Yet you say, ‘Why?’ Because the Lord has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion, and the wife of your covenant. Note how similar this is to the following: 1 Peter 3:7 You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor to the woman, as to the weaker vessel, as being also joint heirs of the grace of life; that your prayers may not be hindered . The passage in Malachi not only mentions treating one’s wife as being critical in how God responds to our attempts to reach out to him (and Peter links this to prayer) but it says that offerings are useless if we mistreat people. Note how this dovetails with what Jesus said: Matthew 5:23-24 If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. It also fits snugly with Jesus’ warning: Matthew 15:7-9 You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, ‘These people draw near to me with their mouth, and honor me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrine rules made by men.’ Isaiah also proclaimed the following that fits this theme perfectly: Isaiah 58:4-9  . . . You don’t fast today so as to make your voice to be heard on high Is this the fast that I have chosen? A day for a man to humble his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under himself? Will you call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord? “Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to release the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Isn’t it to distribute your bread to the hungry, and that you bring the poor who are cast out to your house? When you see the naked, that you cover him; and that you not hide yourself from your own flesh? . . . Then you will call, and the Lord will answer . . . (Emphasis mine) God is all about love: 1 John 4:7-8  . . . love is of God; and everyone who loves has been born of God, and knows God. He who doesn’t love doesn’t know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:16  . . . God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. Matthew 22:36-40 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?”Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. A second likewise is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” So prayer to the God of love must be all about love – verbalizing our love for God and wanting to know him better, to be more like him and to please him, glorify him and see his purposes furthered. Since love focuses on the beloved, prayer should be God-centered, not self-centered. And trying to make it God-centered just because you think that approach will better aid your quest to manipulate God into giving you what you crave is no improvement on any other self-obsessed attempt to exploit God’s goodness. God’s piercing eyes expose all such schemes. Prayer should be about companionship and intimacy and yieldedness. If it is all about me or about continually getting rather than giving, it is not real prayer; it’s a perversion. To claim for ourselves Bible promises divinely given to people who were more devoted to Christ than we are willing to be, is as fraudulent as tampering with someone’s last will and testament, by trying to erase someone else’s name and replace it with our own. It is not only taking Bible promises out of context, it is ripping them out of Christianity and putting them into a false religion. Hoping to exploit God for our selfish ends might bear similarities to voodoo or witchcraft – I know too little about these religions to be sure – but it most certainly is nothing like genuine Christianity. Consider these Scriptures: Joshua 24:15 If it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose today whom you will serve . . . 1 Kings 18:21  . . . How long will you waver between the two sides? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him. . . . Matthew 6:24 No one can serve two masters . . . Revelation 3:15-16 I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth. In the light of these Scriptures I must conclude that as much as it breaks God’s heart, he would prefer us to abandon Christianity altogether than remain in hypocrisy and self-delusion by pretending to be Christian when we are actually serving not God but ourselves. Faith? Finally, let’s consider the role of faith in all of this. The faith the Bible speaks of should not be confused with screwing up one’s face and raising one’s blood-pressure trying to generate some magical force. It is focused not merely on getting an answer to prayer but on the whole character of God and submitting to him and to his ways. Biblical faith is simply resting in the thrilling fact that not only is the God of the Bible good, kind, caring, forgiving, generous, dependable, wise, powerful and honest, he is utterly superior to us in all these areas and more. Because of his infinite intelligence, wisdom and goodness, the Almighty is always right, and, because of his infinite love and selflessness, he loves us more than we could ever love ourselves and always has our best interest at heart. Anyone truly believing these truths about God would always want God to have his perfect way and never exalt his/her own longings above what the God of infinite love and wisdom deems to be best. Final Thoughts The last thing I want is for any of us to miss God’s best by failing to ask for it. “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God,” said William Carey, the famous missionary known today as the “father of modern missions”. There is nothing stingy about God. As powerfully expressed by Paul: Romans 8:32 He who didn’t spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how would he not also with him freely give us all things? The problem, however, is highlighted in verse 26 of the same chapter that we do not know what to pray for. The rest of the verse explains that the Holy Spirit mercifully compensates for our deficiencies in wisdom. We should not grieve or quench the Spirit, however, by seeking things that offend his holiness or by supposing that we are smarter than him or insulting his love by imagining we have our best interest at heart more than he does. On the other hand, we should not freeze with fear over what we pray for. The Spirit of our gracious Lord is always eager to forgive. Nevertheless, he is also eager that we stop blindly repeating our mistakes, and especially that we not hurt ourselves by pulling back from God through being so foolish as to get mad at him for mercifully not giving us things that to us seem wonderful but are actually inferior – sometimes dangerously so – to God’s plans for us. Often we are like King Midas, having no idea of the consequences of what we request. In the fable, Midas was granted his greedy wish (that everything he touched would turn to gold) before he realized the devastating implications for every morsel of food and every loved one he touched. God would be too kind to answer such a prayer. How tragic it would be, however, if any of us were to turn our backs on God simply because it is beyond our comprehension how superior the divine alternative plan is to the one we have concocted. I saw a shop advertising free range eggs. “Look! Free eggs!” I joked to someone with me who enjoys a bargain. To my surprise, she immediately became excited about getting range eggs (whatever they are) for free, not realizing that “free range” refers to uncaged chickens. Many of us are like that with God’s promises; gleefully latching on to a few words without bothering to consider the intended meaning. My goal has not been to cover every prerequisite for answered prayer. For example, except for praying for spiritual salvation, there is no guarantee of answered prayer without first being born again (redeemed). (For more about this, see You can Find Love .) Even this, however, fits into the general category of needing to be submitted to God and follow Scripture’s directives if our prayers are to be answered. These restrictions are not because God is a kill-joy. On the contrary, he wants to give us his best and our tendency to focus on quick gratification or simplistic solutions means the “good” things we crave often kill joy more than we can comprehend.

Hope and inspiration for frustrated, dejected or hurting Christians Paul’s patience was at breaking point. Day after day, wherever they went, the demonised slave-girl kept shrieking that Paul and Silas were God’s servants. Then, in a moment of desperation, he did it. He expelled the demon. And his greatest fears froze to excruciating reality ( Acts 16:16-24 ). They were arrested, tortured and thrown in prison. Incarcerated like common criminals? No such luck. It was the maximum security block for them. Everything pointed to a painfully long stay. Put ourselves in Paul’s stocks and our thoughts might be something like: ‘What an ant-brain! I walked right into Satan’s trap! Things were going so well – converts were being baptised, Lydia had opened her house to us – and like a twit I blew it! Now I’ve been flogged. Poor Silas is in agony. Both of us are in the slammer, no longer free to preach the Gospel. All because of me! If only I’d kept my cool ...’ I’d have been as miserable as an elephant with sinusitis. Yet instead of berating himself or being bullied by pain, the apostle sang praises. Almost instantly, tragedy yielded potent ministry. Not only was the Lord blessed and fellow prisoners touched, the jailer and all his family were converted. Praise turned misery into ministry. Praise snaps locks. If a door slams, praise can burst open another. If you think praise is hot air, you are right. It’s the hot air that makes faith balloon, lifting us to new heights in God, while warming the Father’s heart. Not easy Praise is life-changing. I could extol it for pages, but singing its praises is often easier than singing praises. It takes enormous energy for a spacecraft to blast off from earth on its way to another world. As it continues to leave earth’s gravitational pull, however, progress gets easier and easier until it is actually pulled along by the heavenly body it is headed for. With praise, too, it is the first part of the journey that is so demanding. The wonders of the rest of the voyage, however, makes the sometimes-huge initial effort so worthwhile. The less we feel like praising, the more we need its power. I suspect Paul used a couple of tricks to break through despair into victorious praise. Paul and Silas had so mingled worship with life’s humdrum that when things soured, their lips were still warm with his praises. There was no groping for a half-forgotten praise vocabulary; no brain-racking to find something praiseworthy in God. Praise was not a pill in their emergency kit; it was their way of life. If one of their helps was habit, the second was song. When praise is a struggle, melody and beautiful words can bear us forward. A third help was fellowship. They joined their praises. Where possible, do the same. My next suggestion, like the others, is far from original. Multitudes have found that it works. Don’t try to start at the top; just find a few reasons to be grateful. Things could be worse. Thank God they’re not. Thank him that things have not always been as dire as they now seem. Lean heavily on tiny blessings. As they multiply in your head, they will provide a rich array of praise material. You can even turn negative tendencies into an asset. We all need reminders to praise throughout the day. If your mind regularly clogs with negative thoughts, train yourself to use each recurrence of doubt or fear or gloom as a reminder to praise God. Each negative thought is packed with potential praise material. If, for instance, you are hounded by the thought that you are getting older, let it nudge you to thank God for the years he has given you. Praise him that your times are in his hands. Take comfort that at least someone is older than you – God – and revel in the knowledge that he will never fall for modern society’s infatuation with youth. Every time you feel old, rejoice that Jacob was in his nineties when he had his all-night wrestling match with an angel. Exalt the One who empowered eighty-five-year-old Caleb to conquer the enemies’ mountain strongholds, ( Joshua 14:10-15; 15:13-15 ) gave Job his greatest blessings in his later years, ( Job 42:12 ) and bypassed millions to show the Christ child to elderly Anna ( Luke 2:36-38 ). Yet if being filled with the joy of the Lord were as easy as flicking a switch, there are still times when we would prefer to sulk. Forgetting that it is faith, not tears, that most moves our Lord, we secretly hope that if we are sufficiently miserable, he will have pity on us. That’s like trying to scale a mountain by digging a hole. Praise achieves things self-pity or self-recrimination could never do. Balance ‘I will give you all my praise,’ I sang in a congregational song. Suddenly I realised I had lied. Every time I grumble I am praising the devil. Every complaint is an insult to God. For balance, however, listen to Psalm 13 . This dirge opens with, ‘How long will you forget me, Lord? Forever?’ With similar moans in the next few verses, the ancient blues singer continues his sob story. Then, just when we know where he is heading, he suddenly slams his song into reverse and declares, ‘I will sing unto the Lord, for he has dealt bountifully with me.’ The tail end of that little psalm looks as out of place as a fan of peacock feathers on the end of a pig. Yet no matter how odd it seems, psalm after psalm confirms that we can mingle praise with our pain. These inspired prayers prove that our Lord wants us to vent on him our grief and frustration. He wants honesty, not denial, and still he wants our praise. Try hard enough and in every circumstance we can find reason to complain and reason to rejoice. To praise is to feast on the goodness of God. To complain is to languish in the squalor of self. It’s your choice to rejoice Or to blame and complain. To sing a refrain Or refrain to sing Is to gain new ground, Or go round and round. Raise your praise Or weep in defeat; Make the gain Or remain the same. Curse and be worse, Or sing and bring Heaven to earth; Complain and remain Or praise and be raised. It’s you who choose To win or lose. To praise is to party. It is cutting the cords to earthly burdens and heading for heaven’s joys. It infuriates the devil because it not only plucks us out of the misery he had meticulously planned, it lets us sneak into the victory celebration ahead of time. To praise is to cheat the devil, laugh in his face and step into God’s time machine. Praise magnifies God. The alternative magnifies the problem. The last thing we need is a ‘small’ God and large problems! What will we choose to exalt: the mighty, eternal God, or the puny, temporary problem? Praise pricks bloated problems by empowering us to glimpse the enormity of God. Build muscle on your faith by constantly praising God, delighting in his answer ahead of time. It takes the wait off your mind. When Everything Goes “Wrong” I’m so sorry the fire engine ran over your mother on the way to your home that burned to the ground because your dog caught fire after you knocked the heater onto him when you fainted upon hearing that you had been dismissed from your job because your best friend interrupted making love to your wife to call the police to say it must have been you who embezzled the company to pay for the heart transplant you desperately need now that the chemo therapy is beginning to work. Nevertheless, God's love and power blaze as infinite and unstoppable as ever. Regardless of how overwhelmingly oppressive circumstances get, the truth remains unshakable: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” ( Romans 8:31 ). Nothing in heaven or earth or hell can change the fact that God works (not causes, but works) all things together for good for those who love him. No matter how hopeless things seem, as you yield to Christ and resist the devil you can keep saying over and over until you are convinced of it in every fiber of your being: God is making a smart cookie. If I’m covered with spilt milk, that’s marvellous. If there’s egg on my face, it’s a bonus. If I’m mixed up, I’m delighted. If I’m beaten, I’m making progress. If the heat is on, I’ll warm to my task. If I’m half-baked, something good is cooking. When I feel I could crumble, I’m nearing perfection. Everything is going my way. That might seem beyond belief, but with God on your side, you truly are a winner and you will spend all eternity celebrating that fact. It is undeniable that trying to celebrate ahead of time begins by making eating concrete seem intelligent fun. Despite everything, however, immense rewards await those who dare to persist with this apparent insanity. Even if you are only minimally successful in cheating time by celebrating before God's surprise twist is finally revealed, your best attempt will not only lessen despair and build faith that is valued far beyond diamonds, it honors the God who deserves all honor and will even flood yourself with never-ending glory. One Man’s Life-Changing Discovery Comment by a reader I’ve struggled with my Christian walk for many years now, always feeling heavy and depressed. Quite recently I discovered that praise in church made a big difference and was the one thing that lifted my depression, but it was always temporary. The depression would return later that day or the next day. So I searched the web for information about praise. I came across God’s Anti-Depressant. It’s really been life-changing for me. I was definitely one of those people who believed that the way to become free of depression was to complain to God and that if I became sufficiently miserable/depressed God would then be moved to help me. I believed that this attitude was right and that this was just a lengthy process of testing and becoming sufficiently broken. Well how wrong was I! Your article showed me that faith, praise, rejoicing and thankfulness form the key to overcoming depression and heaviness. I’m not completely free yet but I realize it’s a process and it can take a while to change mindsets that I’ve had for many years! But I’m experiencing freedom on a daily basis that I’ve never known or imagined I could have. Thank you for making the article free and available on the Internet. Nick

Practicing the Presence Of God In Modern Times Pray without Ceasing Enjoying God’s Companionship Many of us have heard of Brother Lawrence’s attempt to introduce us to the joyous wonder of gaining full practical value from the glorious reality that God is ever-present. Brother Lawrence succeeded in tapping into the life transforming power of what he called practicing the presence of God. By that he meant being continually aware of God’s presence, even when engaged in mundane activities. But this humble man lived in a monastery almost 400 years ago. He was a cook, not a high-powered business executive or a teleservice center operator, nor in any of the other jobs so typical of our society demanding intense concentration. Can “practicing the presence” really work in the pressure-packed world that most of us face today? So intensely personal and so passionately in love with you is the King of the universe that he is with you every moment of every day, eager to respond to anything you might tell him. You mean everything to him. If you struggle to believe this, I understand. The intensity of God’s personal love and devotion to you is truly mind-boggling. Begin the long journey to grasping the magnitude of this truth by remembering the torturous death the Lord of glory willingly suffered, just to be on intimate terms with you. Despite it being so astounding as to seem almost beyond belief, the most exciting, most breathtakingly exalted and most in-love-with-you person in the entire universe is with you every second, 24 hours a day, longing for your companionship. So why for hours at a time do we daily ignore the most precious person in our lives? Why is it that, often despite our best intentions, we rob our Lord and ourselves of priceless privileges by pushing the most astounding person out of our consciousness for hours at a time? He never leaves our side and yet our mind is continually wandering away from him, not only ignoring him but actually forgetting that he is even there. A friend of mine began each day with three hours of prayer and yet to his dismay he still found this happening in the rest of his day. Even when I am thinking about God, most of the time it is more like thinking of a friend who is elsewhere, than someone who is with me, intensely interested in my every thought. I share with you Twenty First Century pressures. To provide my web ministry without charge, I work in a secular job and squeeze this ministry into every remaining spare second. Don’t imagine, however, that I find what Brother Lawrence called “practicing the presence” any easier when I’m not in my secular job. The Spiritual Side of Going to the Movies Can someone explain to me why dating couples go to movies? Honestly, I can’t understand it. To have someone special is so rare for me that I would want us to spend every second focused on each other, not squander the opportunity on a movie. Nevertheless, the popularity of movie dates is of immense spiritual significance to me. It demonstrates that ordinary people can be absorbed in something else and yet simultaneously draw comfort and even excitement over someone’s presence. That charges me with hope. Living, as we do, in an era in which most relatively mindless tasks have been replaced by machines, the majority of us are left with days crammed with activities that demand full concentration. Can we, like moviegoers, be intensely involved in a task and yet retain such an awareness of God’s presence as to be able to draw strength and comfort from that awareness? If you find keeping in touch with God throughout the day almost impossibly hard, you and I are made of the same stuff. I’ve known repeated frustration, disappointment and defeat attempting it. I tend to flip from stressing out over trying, to giving up. Obviously, God wants us to suffer neither attitude. If you need excuses, I have bagfuls, but I believe you want answers. Let’s find them together. A head-in-the-clouds theory is of no use to me. Like you, I want practical solutions that really work. The first two pages in this series, explain how to make prayer exciting. Without the foundation they provide, this current webpage is much less likely to spur you to the heights you were created for. So before proceeding with this webpage, please ensure you have read Prayer Secrets . Why Try? Let’s begin our journey by considering reasons for attempting moment-by-moment contact with our mighty Lord. Our Desperate Need For me, one of the most staggering and life-changing statements in the Bible is Jesus saying about himself, “I can of myself do nothing.” Let the impact of those words shake you to the core. If the eternal Son of God could do nothing without Father God, how great our moment-by-moment dependence upon God must be! Our desperate dependence extends far beyond purely spiritual concerns. Only divine genius could calculate the chain reaction set off by the smallest action. Who of us, for example, can step into a car and be sure we will arrive alive? I presume that most car trips that end up inflicting pain or death would have been uneventful had the trip begun just a few seconds earlier or later. Conflicting results from research into the benefits/dangers of common foods confirm that, without divine help, even in a task as simple as deciding what to eat we could be dicing with disaster in the long term. We need divine guidance for the smallest of things. I cannot even type and be certain I will do more good than harm. Anxious to impress a woman I had never met who held an important position in a significant Christian organization, I thought I was typing in my e-mail to her, “I guess you are very busy.” My finger hit two adjacent keys at the same time. The sentence ended up, “I guess you are very busty.” We don’t need a weak mind to passionately agree with the thought expressed in the hymn of yesteryear, “I need thee every hour.” On the contrary, it is a failure to think deeply that keeps us from grasping the extent to which life is just too complex for any sensible person to dare attempt the tiniest task without involving God. Making God More “Real” If we thought of God for a total of an hour a day (that’s less than one-twentieth of the day) should we be surprised if non-spiritual things seem twenty times more real than spiritual matters? If we doubled our prayer time, would God seem twice as real to us? The proportions might not work out with that degree of precision, but surely there is a degree of truth here. Don’t Hurt Your Best Friend The greatest friend anyone could ever have is with us every second of the 24 hours, so why ignore him for 23 hours a day? If you walk with someone, isn’t it rude to go fifteen minutes without speaking to him? Would we do that to someone the world considers highly important? A Torrent of Inspiration Trickling through the Word of God are many streams related to continually reminding ourselves of God’s presence. Here is a representative Scripture from each stream: Colossians 3:17 Whatever you do, in word or in deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus . . . 2 Corinthians 10:5 . . . bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ Ephesians 5:20 giving thanks always concerning all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God, even the Father Psalm 1:2 but his delight is in the Lord’s law. On his law he meditates day and night. Philippians 4:4 Rejoice in the Lord always! Again I will say, “Rejoice!” Psalms 34:1 . . . I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise will always be in my mouth. Psalms 71:8 My mouth shall be filled with your praise, with your honor all the day. 1 Thessalonians 5:17 Pray without ceasing. Of course, for each of these themes there are numerous supporting references scattered throughout the Word of God. As tributaries of a powerful river, these significant streams merge to form a mighty torrent of reasons for practicing the presence of God. Not only are these reasons for us trying: they are reasons for believing that we can achieve this goal. God clearly wants it, since he has emphasized it in the Bible, and if the Almighty wants it, he wants to empower us to achieve it. The Lord wanting it to happen ensures that we can do it, but that does not necessarily mean it will be easy. Above everything, the Lord craves our love. And the greatest demonstrations of love are costly. Enjoying God’s Companionship Your enjoyment of God is the motivation I most want you to focus on. It’s not a selfish motive. Enjoying God is another way of saying delighting in God or loving the Lord with all your heart. It is a positive motivation that will draw you on. It’s a carrot rather than a stick. If whipping ourselves were so effective, the devil would not major on condemnation. Please don’t let trying to increase your hourly awareness of God become a burden in which you chide yourself whenever you forget. Instead, treat it as an exciting adventure. Rejoice when you remember rather than mourn when you forget. The goal of this webpage is not to provide prayer topics for people whose minds are free. Although the page might help such people a little, the focus is on those of us who of necessity are so caught up with our daily affairs that we could benefit from someone tapping us on the shoulder every now and then and saying, “Hey, God is here!” This webpage is for those times when we are too busy to give God our undivided attention but, when reminded, we are capable of communing with God for perhaps as little as one second every fifteen minutes and doing so will help keep us conscious of God’s presence for perhaps several more minutes. Toward a Solution I’d like you to read two Scriptures with new eyes: Numbers 15:38-40 . . . they should make themselves fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put on the fringe of each border a cord of blue: and it shall be to you for a fringe, that you may look on it, and remember all the Lord’s commandments, and do them; and that you not follow after your own heart and your own eyes, after which you use to play the prostitute; that you may remember and do all my commandments, and be holy to your God. Deuteronomy 11:18, 20 Therefore you shall lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul. You shall bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. . . . You shall write them on the door posts of your house, and on your gates The Lord wanted all his people – not just in Moses’ time but “throughout their generations” – to put in place a means whereby things would catch their eye throughout their normal day that would remind them of God and his Word. I would like to share some ideas based on this divine principle. Whether any of the suggestions appeal to you is not the point. My hope is to stimulate your creativity to develop your own methods. Roadblocks If you are like me, the enemy of your soul is continually trying to sabotage your progress by spearing into your head such thoughts as, “If God really wanted me to keep remembering him throughout the day, he would do something to remind me of him every few minutes.” The Lord, however, takes the opposite stance. He says, “If you really wanted to keep remembering me throughout the day, you would do something to remind you of me every few fifteen minutes.” Let’s avoid a standoff. Our Lord is forever taking the initiative, even though most of the time we don’t even realize it. You are reading this webpage, for instance, only because God took the initiative, both in causing it to be written and in causing you to find it. You might think you deliberately searched for this webpage, but who put it in your heart to search for it and who caused you to find this one now, rather than all the other pages on the web on this topic? Over and over and over, God has taken the initiative. Now it’s time for us to do something. This principle is emphasized throughout Scripture. For example, God pleads, “ Call to me, and I will answer you, and will show you great things, and difficult, which you don’t know ” ( Jeremiah 33:3 ). He doesn’t say, “Lounge around doing nothing and I’ll speak to you when I’m good and ready.” Scripture promises that God “ is a rewarder of those who seek him ” ( Hebrews 11:6 ); not that he rewards those who expect God to do everything. The Almighty did not do such things as put Scriptures on the Israelite’s doorframes as reminders; he told them to do it ( Deuteronomy 11: 20 ). Let me run past you some ideas that might serve as a spring board for developing your own personally tailored list. Triggers We are more time-conscious than any other culture in the history of humanity. It’s a symptom of our hectic life that makes it exceedingly difficult to remain conscious of God throughout the day. But we can use our enemy to spur us forward. Why not train yourself to say in your mind, “Eternity” whenever you look at your watch or a clock? What you then do will depend on how many milliseconds you can spare. You might offer a quick prayer or be reminded of the eternal perspective to what you are doing. Using checking the time as a reminder to think of God is a great idea, but if you suppose it’s easy, you either haven’t tried yet or you are streets ahead of me. Birthing a new habit seems to take as much effort as killing an old one. For weeks I kept forgetting: the link between checking the time and thinking, “Eternity,” was just a good idea rather than a firmly ingrained habit. If you’re like me, you’ll even need reminders to use the reminders. Here are some suggestions: Put a sticker on the face of your watch. Seeing the sticker – even a wordless one – will jog your memory, reminding you to link the word eternity with consulting the time. Wear your watch somewhere different, such as on your other wrist or on the inside of your wrist. When you can’t find your watch where it usually is, you will remember why you put it in a different position. After a while you’ll adjust to the new position and it will cease to be such a powerful reminder, so if the link between looking at your watch and thinking, “Eternity” is still a little weak, move your watch to yet another position. If you need a password to enter a computer system and you can choose that password, try to link the password to something that will remind you of God. For example, you might set a password by thinking, “I love you Lord, help me to pray,” and each time you say one of the words in your mind, type the first letter of that word. In this case, the password would be ilyLhmtp. Such a method makes it easy to remember the password but virtually impossible for anyone else to guess (assuming you don’t use my example exactly and someone you know reads this webpage). More importantly, it will remind you of God. I eventually ended up using such a password rather mindlessly, so that’s my cue to change my password. If you need a four-digit security code, you could use the reference to a favorite Scripture. For example, Psalm 23:6 would be 2306. We tend to take our safety for granted, forgetting that at almost any moment that we are on the road we could end up contributing to road statistics. Every time you enter a means of transport – bus, car or whatever – you could train yourself to remember the danger and say to God, “Thank you for being my Protector.” Again, the challenge lies in establishing this as a habit. All good habits initially take a frustratingly amount of effort but the exciting thing is that eventually they become effortless. Once it becomes a habit, it will serve as a valuable reminder to think of your glorious Lord and involve him in your hectic life. Helen, my treasured ministry partner, lives so far from me that we have seen each other in person only a couple of times. Upon visiting me, she discovered I drive an old, yellow car. Now, whenever she sees a yellow car she is reminded of me and offers a prayer on my behalf. I get spoilt whenever Helen visits relatives in another city. There, by law, all taxis are yellow. Hmmm, I wonder if there’s some way I could talk my readers into praying for me every time they see a yellow car? Okay, I’m admit the key point is that there might be some variation on Helen’s memory-jog that fits your particular prayer needs and memory. When something goes slightly wrong I involuntarily exclaim, “Oh, no!” in an embarrassingly loud voice. Everyone in the office looks at me thinking it must be the end of the world, when it’s quite minor. I wish I could break the habit and act more normal but I seldom claim to be sane. Anyhow, when I catch myself exclaiming, “Oh, no!” I can immediately smile to myself and pray, “Thank you, Lord! You’ll help me sort this out,” or some such thing. That’s much closer to rejoicing in the Lord than my usual moaning. It brings God into my consciousness and into the situation. People commendably trying to quit swearing, can use the same approach just described every time they catch themselves swearing. That would be far more positive and produce less bruises than kicking themselves for again slipping. More importantly, it strengthens one’s connection with God. Some people think or say, “Praise the Lord!” every time something goes wrong. It serves as an instant reminder not only of God but of the Almighty’s promise to turn all things around for good. As explained in a previous page, it is particularly helpful for our relationship with God if the moment we notice anything remotely nice or beautiful or pleasing, to savor it for as many milliseconds as our busy schedule allows and say silently, or even out loud, “Thank you, Lord!” or, better still, smile and inwardly say, “I love you, Lord!” A prayer of thanks before a meal – what some people call “saying grace” – is a good start, but the idea can be broadened. And try making it as joyful as you can. If you find formally giving thanks before eating embarrassing or a somber delay to enjoying your meal, you might be better off trying something else, such as silently thanking God while enjoying your meal. What we should be continually seeking is not a ritual but things that genuinely help us fall more in love with God. Imagine how annoyed the devil would get if every time he tempts you, it draws you closer to God because you have taught yourself to offer a quick prayer whenever a temptation comes. That’s putting that old loser in a no-win situation: he either stops tempting you or ends up deepening your walk with God! So try to think of God every time a temptation hits. Keep working on this until it becomes an ingrained habit. I shudder to share my personal battle with you. If I’m brave enough to reveal it, are you brave enough to keep reading the rest of the page or will I completely turn you off? I can only say the rest of the page is not controversial. Some Christian women seem to have never wondered why men typically wear loose fitting shirts that cover them up to the neck. Unless it is exceptionally hot, men in western society typically cover even their arms and feet more than women. Men are not trying to hide anything; it’s just a normal way to dress. In contrast, western women typically dress so as to put their sexual parts on display, with most women actually hoping to give the impression that they would look sexier naked than they really do. If you are a woman and a complete stranger started fondling you, you would feel as offended as I do when someone exposes her cleavage or some other sexual part of her body. For a woman to consciously or unconsciously exploit the fact that men are aroused visually is in my experience indistinguishable from sexual molestation. And I find anyone saying, “Men like it,” as offensive as someone saying women like being raped. Yes, I can look away, like you could turn away from a stranger trying to kiss you, but it is still offensive and it doesn’t erase the image from my mind. I find it not quite infuriating but more than annoying when I’m forced to keep adjusting my field of vision. I see it as a huge infringement of one of the most basic of liberties – the freedom to look wherever one’s eyes casually roam, just as I could on a deserted place. I mentioned in a previous webpage my conviction that lowering one’s eyes is depressing. I can’t stop the sexual assault when tight clothes or exposed flesh are thrust into my field of vision. I can’t undo the damage or magically delete the memory. I can, however, prevent it from escalating, and I can turn an offensive act into an occasion to draw close to God. Rather than lust or stress or become embittered, I can use the distasteful experience to help me practice God’s presence by training myself to look away and immediately think, “I look to you, Lord,” and feel warmly toward my Lord. If time permits I might then add, “I only have eyes for you.” That makes me smile as I recall a corny cartoon in which a man said that to a woman while offering her a bunch of eyes instead of flowers. It further warms my heart toward God because it reminds me that God is the love of my life. If time permits I can then proceed to thanking God for the purity that my sisters will display in heaven. I can think of how western decadence contrasts with Muslim modesty and repent on behalf of the western church for the offensive stumbling-block our immodesty has been to Muslims who might otherwise have not rejected Christianity as being too immoral to possibly be of God. Every time you are tempted to think ill of someone, bless that person in a quick prayer. Not only is this Scriptural – we all know Jesus told us to bless those who curse us and pray for our enemies – it will be another precious aid to practicing God’s presence. Whenever you see yourself in a mirror, pray, “May I radiate (or reflect) your beauty to the world. (I’m thinking of the spiritual beauty of divine compassion, gentleness, patience, goodness, empathy, wisdom, and so on.) Whenever you see or hear the number seven, think, “Heaven.” If you feel a jab of pain, tell Jesus, “Thank you for suffering for me.” Whenever you see sunglasses, pray, “Help me see things through your eyes.” Each time you see a Bible, pray, “Speak to me, Lord.” You might not at that moment be able to read from it but you can believe that God will at some time and in some way communicate to you because of that prayer. Whenever someone smiles at you, pray, “Love him/her through me.” When someone catches your attention pray, “Bless him/her, Lord!” Whenever you find yourself smiling, think, “Smile, God loves you,” Then direct the thought to God by saying, “Thank you, for loving me.” When someone uses the Lord’s name in vain, pray, “Bless you, Lord!” When you feel tired or stressed, tell the Lord, “I rest in you.” Every time you think of someone you love, say, “Thank you, Lord.” Principles for Developing Your Own List I suggest you prayerfully consider what will work best for you and tailor-make your own list. The triggers you choose should, of course, be things you usually encounter several times a day. Try to link each trigger to no more than a few words. There will be times when if your method takes more than a split second, you won’t be able to squeeze it in, or will be tempted not to. It is better to have something that can be done in a flash. If you are able to do it even when you are at your busiest, not only will it help you think of God more often, the very act of doing it more often will enable it to be more firmly established as a habit. The goal is to reach the point where it is an automatic response. The ideal is something that is not only lightening fast but can easily stimulate other prayers when time permits. For instance, thinking “Eternity” when you check the time is not only fast, it opens up a vast variety of prayer possibilities. Try to choose something that will help you feel warmly toward God and increase your faith; not things that will make you anxious. For example, I suggested that upon entering any means of transport you say to the Lord, “Thank you for being my Protector.” I could have suggested praying, “Protect me, Lord,” but that could increase anxiety, whereas the suggestion I decided upon could help you feel secure and thankful to God. I suggest you don’t try to memorize too many new triggers at once. Perhaps start with half a dozen or so, and build up the number after these are firmly established. To remind yourself of the triggers that you are trying to remember, review the list of triggers every night. Perhaps you could pin the list to your pyjamas. If nothing else the pin should remind you when you roll over. You might like to read through the list first thing in the morning as well. Better, still, carry the list with you in your pocket or handbag and scan it several times a day. You can each item on your list quick brief, such as: Clock – Eternity Transport – You’re my Protector Yellow car – Grantley Okay, you might not choose the last one but can you blame a guy for trying? Other Approaches Some young people have worn a WWJD (what would Jesus do) wrist band. This has similarities to the Lord telling the Israelites to wear Scriptures on their hands ( Deuteronomy 11:18 ). Perhaps you can think of something along those lines that would work for you. It would not have to be meaningful to other people – just a bracelet or ring or something that occasionally catches your eye and reminds you of the Lord. Earlier I mentioned dating couples being absorbed in a movie and yet still finding the experience far superior to sitting there alone. You might have objected – I certainly do – that it is much harder with God because we can see and touch a human friend. However, you can imagine yourself holding God’s hand or Jesus having his arm around you. This can be a significant help. When reading/hearing/watching the news or current affairs, offer brief prayers, like “Help them, Lord,” “Move in that situation,” and so on. Wear a watch that gives a tiny beep every 15 minutes and use that as a reminder to fire a thought heavenwards. Put a Christian ring tone on your phone, so that whenever your phone rings you hear something that reminds you of God. Grappling with Reality It’s easy to involve God in our thoughts, say some. Instead of thinking to yourself, just “think to God.” That sounds so simple, but like everything else in life, some people find it much easier than others. There is no point in beating myself: the fact remains that no matter how easy I might think it should be to consistently direct my thoughts heavenward, I sometimes wonder if climbing Everest could be any harder. But there is no glory in achieving anything that is easy and it is no proof of love to do something that costs little. Although I’m skilled at moaning about my difficulty, the truth is that finding it so hard gives me a brilliant opportunity to express to God my love for him. King David refused to offer to God anything that cost him nothing ( 2 Samuel 24:24 ). The more effort it takes, the better I can express my love to God. There are people who in my eyes are heroes for doing things that I find easy. I am thinking of people battling a handicap, such as having no arms, leaving me spellbound by performing what for able-bodied people is a simple task. What makes a hero in heaven’s eyes is not so much what a person achieves but what it costs the person to achieve it. My very struggle is my glory and my love-offering to God. And that is equally true for you. When the Bible speaks of being continually in prayer or praying frequently, it is usually in the context of being thankful. Daniel 6:10 . . . he kneeled on his knees three times a day, and prayed , and gave thanks before his God, as he did before. Ephesians 1:16-17 don’t cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers , that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may . . . Philippians 4:6 In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving , let your requests be made known to God. Colossians 1:9, 12 . . . since the day we heard this, don’t cease praying and making requests for you . . . giving thanks to the Father . . . Colossians 4:2 Continue steadfastly in prayer , watching therein with t hanksgiving . 1 Thessalonians 3:9-10 For what thanksgiving can we render again to God for you, for all the joy with which we rejoice for your sakes before our God; night and day praying exceedingly . . . 1 Timothy 2:1 I exhort therefore, first of all, that petitions, prayers , intercessions, and giving of thanks , be made for all men 2 Timothy 1:3 I thank God . . . unceasing is my memory of you in my petitions , night and day (Emphasis mine.) It is hard to be both miserable and thankful at the same time. To be thankful is to look on the bright side. It is to stop bewailing the emptiness of the bucket and instead rejoice in the whatever is left in the bottom. It is rejoicing’s first cousin. Look at the sentence into which “Pray without ceasing” is sandwiched: 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks . . . So praying continually is divinely intended to be a joyful experience, but it is not automatically so. If continual joy were an inevitable consequence of being a Christian, the Bible would not bother to tell us to “Rejoice always.” It is something we have to work at. Nevertheless, just as it would be a pity to turn marital intimacy into a grim duty, so it would be to turn praying continually into a grim duty. We need to keep trying to lighten up. As explained in a previous webpage, prayer is like riding a bicycle. Go far enough and you will inevitably encounter discouragingly hard uphill stretches but if you keep going you are sure to enjoy the exhilaration of zooming down the other side, even though there are more hills ahead. Overall, prayer is a joy. Don’t beat yourself just because uphill stretches are hard, but know that as you keep going, exhilarating times are ahead. When learning to play a sport, your enjoyment of the game would be ruined if you found yourself continually frustrated over not yet being at professional level. Not only would it spoil the experience, you are likely to get so discouraged that you eventually give up and never reach your potential. So try not to stress over your efforts to think more often of your Lord. Rather than give yourself blue ankles kicking yourself over times you forget, aim to be thankful to God whenever you have the tiniest success in remembering. Be alert to any way you could be turning it into more of an ordeal than it need be. Add more thanks, more smiles, more joy, more peace, more fun, more love to your prayers. In the long term, it is draining to keep even positive emotions continually at fever pitch. Rather than feel obliged to keep, as it were, the name of God displayed in blazing lights to the sound of a blaring hundred piece orchestra, it might be more realistic to ease up and aim to have God, in the words of the old love song, “ever gentle on my mind.” The Sacred Versus the Mundane Involving God in your workaday life is important because he is the God of your life, not just the God of your spare time; the God of your years, not just of your weekends. Bringing God into the mundane can make the mundane sacred. What alarms me, however, is that attempting this might have the unwanted effect of making the sacred – the most awe-inspiring Person in the universe – seem mundane. I don’t want my view of God to slide, or my relationship to grow stale. It would be devastating if I were to allow frequent, superficial contact with my Lord to cause the romance and excitement to ebb from the relationship. Suppose you worked in the same building as your marriage partner. The practical realities of work pressures mean that all you can usually do during working hours is occasionally pass each other in the corridor and exchange a one second acknowledgement. Unless this were later supplemented by special times of intimacy, your partner would increasingly seem to be just one of the crowd. For me, times of special spiritual intimacy are usually associated with worship. By that I mean not merely thinking or singing about God, but singing love songs to him. In the above analogy, what would reverse the possibility of superficial encounters detracting from your marriage is if every time you catch a glimpse of your beloved, you think, “Isn’t he/she breathtaking! What matchless times we’ve had together! I can hardly wait for our next time of exquisite intimacy!” That would stoke the fire. So try the spiritual equivalent in your busy times. Recall special moments you have had with God and cultivate a yearning for times of giving your Lord your undivided attention. My Attempt to Avoid Ending Up in the Nuthouse One of my difficulties is that I’m not particularly talkative and yet silences when I’m with someone make me feel cut off from the person and also make the person seem less interesting to me. So when I draw near to God, silences disturb me. I fear the lack of simulating conversation might tempt me to find Almighty God, the most thrilling of persons, boring. I like having talkative friends who can compensate for my lack of talkativeness and fill up the silence. When it comes to my relationship with God, that hits a raw nerve. Why does God seem so silent? Does it mean he loves me less than people to whom the Lord always seems to be talking? Does it mean there is something wrong with me? Biblically, I know that God seeming silent does not mean he loves me any less, but knowledge of that fact does not stop me from feeling uncomfortable and wanting to avoid silences. Sometimes, God seems silent simply because I miss what he is saying. I repeatedly fall into the trap of expecting God’s voice to be loud and unmistakable; forgetting that the Almighty usually reveals himself in far gentler, easily missed ways. I explain this in a link about hearing God’s voice, listed at the end of this webpage. I might know at least some of the theory, but silence still tends to make me feel insecure in my walk with God and so I find myself trying to avoid it. But isn’t when everything else is silent the best situation in which to hear? In the silences I make in the midst of the turmoil of life I have appointments with God. From these silences I come forth with spirit refreshed, and with a renewed sense of power. I hear a Voice in the silences, and become increasingly aware that it is the Voice of God. O how comfortable is a little glimpse of God. – David Brainerd (1718-1747), famous as an intercessor If practice makes perfect, how can I learn if I keep running from practice sessions? A serious problem of mine – and almost everyone in our society suffers from it to some extent – is that I tend to push God out by cramming my mind with too much activity. We have become so addicted to entertainment and mind stimulation that to be still before God is rare indeed. We seem, like no other society in human history, to shrink from silence or being alone with our thoughts. Not only is our era unique in having canned music, radio, television, the internet, and video games, but even crosswords, magazines, newspapers and ready access to affordable books are, historically speaking, relatively new on the scene. It is said that couples reach a special place in their growing intimacy where they can be comfortable with silence when they are together. For them, there is no such thing as an embarrassing silence and a desperate need to kill silence with chatter, but there is a warm contentment just knowing that one’s loved one is close. That’s something I need to cultivate, without using it as an excuse for being less talkative with God than I should be. Someone once advised me to stop to smell the roses. My subconscious has a philosophy of life that goes like this: “There’s a whole world to save and I’m just one person. So if I don’t do my utmost to meet this catastrophic need, it won’t be through lack of frantic activity (translation: running around like a headless chicken) on my part.” By the way, the heading about avoiding ending up in the nuthouse was just my attempt at humor. Of course I’ll end up in the nuthouse! Why should it only be others who get a nice enforced rest? I don’t care what you say, I’ve worked jolly hard for a breakdown. Stop to smell the roses? Sure! I can just see me standing before God on Judgment Day saying, “Well, I mightn’t have helped many people, but I found some nice roses.” I’d be devastated to discover I could have done more to please the One I love. From this side of eternity – I can’t speak with authority about how I’d feel the other side – it seems to me that discovering I had failed to delight God as much as I could have would devastate me more than any loss of heavenly rewards. So my typical response is feverish activity, rather than spending even a second to notice something nice the Lord has caused to cross my path and to let my heart warm with thankfulness to him for his loving gift. Maybe if I can make enjoying God’s gifts more of a habit, doing it not for myself – which proves no motivation to me – but for the Lord, I’ll come up smelling like roses. My nephew, Leigh, who is less than half my age and in so many ways superior to me, including at practicing God’s presence, read the above and commented: I cringe at the thought of being so busy trying to delight God, that I fail to give him his greatest delight, which is me delighting in him. Talking to Myself Versus Talking to God One day, when listening to talkback radio, I was astounded to learn that some people actually address themselves by name when talking to themselves. Now that I’ve adjusted to the idea it sounds quite normal but because I never do that, it initially seemed bizarre. Another caller on the talkback show, a retired footballer, said that when playing he would speak to himself as if he were a radio commentator in the grandstand describing the footballer’s actions. Many preachers often think by imagining themselves preaching what they are thinking about. I think it would be fascinating to know the full variety of different ways that people think. My most common way of thinking is by imagining I am talking to someone. My choice of person who I imagine myself talking to varies considerably. I frequently find the process quite annoying. I’m usually boring myself, repeating over and over in my mind something that is in no way new to me. But I find it exceedingly hard to stop. A man, when asked what he does in his spare time, said that sometimes he sits and thinks and sometimes he just sits. I don’t have that option. While I am conscious I have to think of something. What particularly frustrates me is that, in theory, it should be so easy to make God the person I imagine myself talking to. That way it would not be low value imagination but a real life conversation because, of course, God can actually hear my thoughts. Then the thoughts that I can’t stop anyhow and largely seem of little value – often a total waste – would at the very least be reminding me of God’s presence and drawing me closer to him and often would be valuable prayer. What a simple way to multiply – in fact revolutionize – my prayer life. My entire walk with God would soar to inconceivable heights. Well, it’s a superb theory. I can’t believe how hard I find it to put into practice. Surely it should be one of the simplest things in the world to substitute God for some human I’m imagining myself speaking to! One of the problems I’ve discovered is that in my imagination I’m talking to someone who is not familiar with what I’m saying. It therefore makes sense that I’d be talking to the person about the matter. God, however, knows me inside out. It seems less meaningful to tell him something he already knows. Another issue is that when I’m puzzling over something by imagining I’m discussing it with someone, I’m not surprised that the person in my imagination is no smarter than me. After all, my own mind is producing both sides of the conversation. God, on the other hand, knows the answer. I find it hard to avoid feeling at least a tiny bit hurt if he does not immediately tell me the answer. It makes me feel he is not too interested in talking to me. No matter how irrational that feeling might be, I cannot seem to avoid feeling at least a little rejected by God in such circumstances. Since the Lord is the most important person in my life, this feeling is something I want to avoid like the plague, and so I long to avoid putting myself in that situation. I’d be a lot wiser today if I had asked God much more because I’m sure he would sometimes give me answers – if not right at that moment, then later. But I keep wanting to protect myself from the possibility of hurt. A further problem – and one that I understand even less – is that substituting God for an imaginary conversation with a friend somehow makes the thinking harder work. For some perplexing reason it becomes more taxing. For example, when I’m lying in bed, the extra effort seems to keep me awake when I need to sleep. Discouragement is my fiercest enemy. It tempts me to give up. I concluded that my best tactic in fighting discouragement is to congratulate myself every time I manage to direct my thoughts to God, rather than beat myself every time I forget. Congratulating myself rather than beating myself seems easy and yet I even find that hard to do consistently. So now it’s time to beat myself for beating myself. Part of the problem is that directing thoughts heavenward seems so simple as to be no achievement, and not doing it seems so foolish as to warrant beating myself. Perhaps if things seemed harder, I would not get so annoyed with myself. I suspect that a further complication is that I so much fear pride that a part of me will not dare let me praise myself. I went for a walk with the Lord – quite a rare event for workaholic me. It was a beautiful summer’s, evening with my consciousness of the Lord making everything I saw so much more beautiful. I was chatting to the Lord as I strolled and at one point I thanked him that at least this time I had focused on him for most of the walk. Then it hit me. Of course! Congratulating myself is the way of the world. No wonder it wasn’t working. “he who boasts, let him boast in the Lord” (2 Corinthians 10:17). Instead of trying to pat myself on the back – something I’m pathetic at anyhow – I should be thanking and praising God when I make a little progress. Rejoicing in God will lift my spirits and encourage me and it’s something that should come more naturally to a Christian and is spiritually healthier than self-praise. Of course, praising God whenever I make the tiniest progress is yet another thing that is more easily recognized as a good idea than concreted into my life as a habit but I decided to seek God’s assistance in converting it into a habit. Then my heart warmed because my struggle reminded me of what the Lord had shown me many years ago about how to write in a way that most glorified him. I had discovered that God wanted me not as a dictating machine but as his lover. His longing was that in union with him – my hard work and his divine revelation and assistance – I could birth a unique creation that bore, as it were, both his genes and mine. As much as I had wanted my writing to be all of him and none of me, he was not interested. The result would be much more exquisite if he did it all himself but his unfathomable love compels him to want me to want me to play a significant role and to share in the reward. Something similar is happening in my attempts to practice his presence. If he did it all, it would be instantaneous and perfect but because he cherishes my contribution he wants me to a play a significant role in this. He is being robbed of fellowship with me while I’m stumbling around trying to get this right. That pains him, but he wants you and me as his valued son/daughter, not as a robot. At times I’m on the knife edge of feeling at least a little rejected because of God not doing more to make it easy, when I should actually feel deeply loved because of God wanting my contribution. That’s amazing! It turns out that what makes me feel unloved is the very thing that should make me feel more loved that ever! Wrap Up Such are my time pressures that this webpage has been published prematurely. I haven’t as yet had a chance to polish it, much less find more answers but rather than keep from you the few hints I’ve so far found I’d prefer to share them with you. I’ve come to the end of this webpage – for the moment at least – and I’m still looking for answers. Whether my agenda is jammed-packed or I’m alone, cut off from distractions, I still struggle with continually communing with God. I’ve bared my heart because I don’t want you to feel inferior or discouraged if you struggle, too. I pray, however, that my practical suggestions provide a helping hand and that you will be inspired to keep pressing on in your quest to draw full value from our Lord’s continual presence. Even more about prayer

Making Prayer Exciting! (Part 2) Start at: Part 1 Throughout the universe the truth screams that God loves variety. Consider all the different means besides laying hands on people that Jesus used to transmit miraculous healing. Or think of the extensive range of literary forms that make up the Bible – history, poems, parables, proverbs, prophecies, letters, songs, visions, and so on. Wherever we look, be it snowflakes or fingerprints, flowers or sunsets, stars or molecules, scriptural revelation or God’s dealing with individuals in our own era, God’s love of variety is undeniable. I do not believe God gets bored. For humans, however, sameness lowers our desires, whereas variety stokes our fire. At a display, variety makes us want to linger longer. At a banquet, variety stimulates our appetite. At an art gallery, variety boosts creativity and pushes one to new frontiers. Likewise, variety adds new dimensions to prayer, increases one’s longing for more, and kills blandness and boredom. So you can expect not rules and regulations in this series of webpages but encouragements to expand your repertoire of prayer methods. We will, however, investigate whether any seemingly harmless prayer habits could have unexpected downsides. Western Christianity Versus Biblical Christianity In western Christianity we often gain the impression that the ideal posture for prayer is to bow one’s head and close one’s eyes. This is in such stark contrast to the Bible that when Jesus wished to convey how exceptionally despondent and guilt-ridden the tax collector in his parable was, he said that this man “would not even look up to heaven” when praying ( Luke 18:13 ). For this to be meaningful to Jesus’ hearers, praying while looking upwards must have been the norm in his day. Jesus himself regularly prayed with his head lifted and his eyes open ( Mark 6:41; Matthew 14:19; Luke 9:16; Mark 7:34; John 11:41;17:1 ). This practice is not limited to New Testament times. Bowed knees might show loving reverence, but in Scripture a bowed head is different. In the Word of God, looking down while praying is usually associated with the shame and grief of not being right with God because of sin. Ezra 9:6 . . . “O my God, I am too ashamed and disgraced to lift up my face to you, my God, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens. . . .” Psalm 123:1 I lift up my eyes to you, to you whose throne is in heaven. Amazingly, there is no reference in the entire Bible to praying with one’s eyes closed. Obviously, the commendable idea behind a bowed head and closed eyes is to remove distractions and hence aid concentration. In some churches the posture is encouraged to give privacy to people who might respond to a call for salvation. As an occasional practice, this posture is fine but if it becomes the prominent way in which we pray, it might have unintended side effects. Even on a blind date, people open their eyes! As a novelty, someone might go on a date blindfolded but to do it regularly would definitely detract from the experience. Whereas darkness and gloom depress a person, light brightens one’s spirits. The Psychology of Prayer? There is a powerful psychological phenomenon that today is known as conditioning but I’m sure it was intuitively understood long before the rise of modern psychology. Later we’ll see how thoroughly biblical this matter is, but for now we’ll limit ourselves just to human knowledge. Just one of the ways it manifests itself in everyday life is the process mentioned earlier by which devoted husbands keep training themselves to feel attracted to their aging wives. In a ground-breaking experiment, a bell was rung before giving a dog food. This was repeated many times until the bell was so strongly linked in the dog’s mind with food that the mere sound of the bell would cause the dog to salivate. A vast range of further experiments with animals and people have confirmed that if, through repeated association, something neutral becomes linked to something that produces fear, relaxation, sexual excitement or whatever, then that neutral thing will of itself begin to generate whatever feeling it is regularly associated with. Prayer is relatively neutral in that it has the potential to produce a wide range of different emotions. So if, through repeated association, prayer becomes linked in our minds with something that produces a particular mood or feeling, then prayer of itself will begin to generate that mood or feeling within us. Much of this webpage is about how we could be unwittingly training (conditioning) ourselves to find prayer dull, and how we can reverse this. I think for most of us there is already a firmly established link between a bright sunny day and fun, excitement and high spirits. Blackness, on the other hand, tends to produce a more somber mood. The connection is so firmly wired in the human psyche that it is part of everyday speech. “Dark times” are depressing or distressing, whereas someone said to have a “bright” personality is cheerful. “You light up my life” means you make me happy. Perhaps you can think of other examples. Given this strong link between brightness and happiness/excitement, it would seem harder to keep associating the thought of prayer with excitement and eager anticipation if prayer is linked in our minds with the blackness of closed eyes. Is it mere coincidence that the Bible never speaks of closing one’s eyes in prayer? I’m not laying down any law. I myself sometimes close my eyes in prayer. Perhaps, for you, closing your eyes conjures feelings of peace. That’s not exactly exciting but it could be quite welcome in times of stress. What especially concerns me, however, is my suspicion that a bowed head or slumped posture generates nothing but despondency. (We’ll see later how research has confirmed that facial expression has a direct effect on our feelings. I suspect this applies to other bodily positions as well.) 1 Timothy 2:8 I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer . . . More frequently than is often realized, the Bible speaks of praying with raised hands (More). King Solomon even lifted his arms when kneeling: 1 Kings 8:54 When Solomon had finished all these prayers and supplications to the LORD, he rose from before the altar of the LORD, where he had been kneeling with his hands spread out toward heaven. Since it is awkward to raise one’s arms while keeping the rest of one’s body bowed down, the very act of raising the hands tends to lift the head. So in both Testaments, to pray bowed down or prostrate was out of the norm. Such a posture was usually a response to crushing negative emotions such as grief or fear. We’ve noted that bowed knees are in a different category, since one can kneel with the hands or head raised. Scripture records very special instances when people had such overwhelming encounters with the holy Lord that they fell on their face like weeds flattened by a hurricane. The Almighty seemed to draw no delight in this, however. Even in these extreme situations, when people had so little strength that it would have been much easier to leave them prostrate on the ground, time after time, the Lord insisted on them not remaining face down but standing to their feet to converse with him. The relationship between a bowed head and depression is so strong that we use such expressions as, “downcast” (ie. looking down), “hang your head in shame,” “keep your chin up,” and so on. The Psalmist called his God “the lifter up of my head” ( Psalm 3:3 – literal translation). Rejoice? For some peculiar, non-biblical reason, many of us find ourselves haunted by the impression that acting as if we are in mourning shows God respect. The very first step in respecting God, however, is obedience. What chance have we of reverencing God if we don’t worship him the way he asks us to? Not only is the New Testament crammed with such exhortations as, “ Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” ( Philippians 4:4 ), the Old Testament is also filled with it: Nehemiah 8:10 . . . This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength. This is worth reading again. Like some other Scriptures, it implies that acting joyful is a key element of holiness. Let’s examine some more revelation from God: Deuteronomy 28:47-48 Because you did not serve the LORD your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the LORD sends against you. . . . Deuteronomy 12:18 . . . you are to rejoice before the LORD your God in everything you put your hand to. Psalms 100:2 Worship the LORD with gladness Psalms 71:23 My lips will shout for joy when I sing praise to you . . . Psalms 149:2 Let Israel rejoice in their Maker; let the people of Zion be glad in their King. We tend to suppose that rejoicing in the Lord must be the spontaneous reaction of our spirits to being supernaturally touched by the King of glory. Scripture has a very different view. It says rejoicing in the Lord is our deliberate act of obedience to God’s command that we must rejoice. Yes, we are commanded of God to manufacture it. This obedience is truly being spiritual. If by a sheer act of will you regularly force yourself to act joyful, it will increasingly become a habit, with the result that it will become easier and feel more natural. Most of us reject the Bible’s teaching on this matter and stubbornly cling to the worldly view that rejoicing, gladness and genuine love cannot be produced: they just happen. We suppose that any conscious effort to generate such feelings would be fake and displeasing to God. The truth is very different. God commands us to rejoice in him, delight in him, serve him with gladness and love him with all our mind, strength, effort and emotions. Habakkuk 3:17-18 Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. Since Habakkuk lived in an agricultural society, here’s how we could paraphrase this man of God: Though I’m facing economic ruin – maybe even starvation – and though everywhere I look I see disaster and a new reason for misery, I will compel myself to rejoice and be joyful in the Lord. Biblical rejoicing is not some unthinking response to pleasantness but a deliberate decision to act joyful despite everything within us screaming for self-pity and continued misery. We have been brought up in a society that is so out of step with biblical thinking that for almost all of us it actually feels fake to do what thrills God’s heart – getting excited about God when our natural feelings are dead or even pulling us into despondency. In reality, the Lord is unimpressed by any feelings we have that are not a deliberate act on our part. Feelings that spontaneously erupt within us are like hiccups. They prove nothing. They bring us no more glory and God no more joy than us having indigestion. Smile! Lovers can have serious moments when engrossed in deep conversation, but usually they smile often when talking with each other. How often do you smile when praying? A young woman in a church choir was reprimanded for smiling while singing of the God she adores. Would she be chided for smiling in the same church on her wedding day? Doesn’t Scripture say we should love God more than we love any human? If a bride had an atrocious headache, wouldn’t she smile for the sake of the camera? Is God more important than a camera? “ Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing ,” says Scripture ( 1 Thessalonians 5:16-17 , KJV). What sort of rejoicing produces a solemn face? Research has confirmed that forcing oneself to smile broadly for two minutes reliably alters one’s mood. (Grimacing has also been shown to alter mood – in the opposite direction.) According to researchers, not only are there psychological reasons, there are actually physiological reasons why, even if one feels miserable, the mere act of smiling lift one’s spirits . “So what?” you may ask. We are looking at everything that might contribute to prayer becoming a dreary duty rather than the highlight of your day. We have looked at several factors such as a bowed posture and closed eyes that, taken individually, are minor. I believe they combine, however, into something so significant that if all these slightly negative things are regularly associated with prayer it is almost inevitable that prayer will slowly slump from sheer delight to mere duty. And one of the things that will help you warm toward God is to deliberately smile when praying and while mediating upon his love and goodness. Research into the effect of forcing oneself to smile fits a major theme of this webpage by confirming that acting joyful can actually produce joyful feelings. We are divinely ordained to be masters of our emotions. We don’t have to wait for feelings to hit us; we can seize the initiative and act joyful and loving, and eventually feelings will begin to follow our lead. I will mention smiling several times in this webpage. If smiling seems too much effort, however, or the suggestion is a little unconventional, then feel free to be ultra-conservative and stick to the Bible. It does not mention smiling. It only speaks of praising and rejoicing and expressing delight in the Lord by such means as jumping, dancing, using cymbals and uttering blood-curdling, ear-piecing shouts. The shout regularly referred to in the Psalms ( Psalm 100:1 in the King James Version translates it “a joyful noise”) as the way to enter into God’s presence and delight in God is the very word used elsewhere in Scripture for a deafening battle cry designed to instill fear in the enemy. Maybe smiling is not so bad after all. Get Ready for a Miracle The command to rejoice in the Lord is close to being told to get excited about God. How can we do that when we don’t feel like it? Of course, Scripture often commands us to do things we don’t feel like doing. We might not feel like blessing those who curse us, giving to the poor, or giving up our favorite sin. Not to feel like doing something is hardly a legitimate excuse. Nevertheless, the question remains: how can we genuinely rejoice when we feel miserable? To rejoice might seem impossible but we can at least make a move in that direction and act the part. All God requires is that we do our level best. No matter how hollow it might feel, any attempt to feel positively toward God is crammed with meaning when done as an expression of love for God. It’s part of the clumsy human effort that positions us for a supernatural wave. Or would you prefer that expressed more biblically? Every attempt to stir up positive feelings toward God is an act of faith and obedience like the Israelites trudging around and around Jericho. It seems nothing but a tiresome waste of effort – until God suddenly turns up ( Joshua 6:1-20 ). It’s like leprous Naaman unable to heal himself but able to dip seven times in the muddy Jordan ( 2 Kings 5:10-14 ). He grumbled about it, but eventually decided to give it a go. It’s like the widow and her son facing starvation asked to share their last meal with Elijah ( 1 Kings 17:12-16 ). It’s like the ten lepers seeking a priest to declare them clean when they still had leprosy ( Luke 17:12-14 ). It’s a loving act of faith-filled obedience like tired, discouraged Peter saying, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets” ( Luke 5:5 ). We could keep drawing from Scripture’s deep pool of examples, but let’s finish with this: doing what we can to feel positively toward God is like Abraham and Sarah, year after year trying again and again and again to have a baby; never knowing when their miracle baby would be conceived. No matter how pathetic it seems, when in obedience to God you do the little you can do to arouse positive feelings toward God, you are setting yourself up for a miracle. Luke 6:22-23 Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy . . . (Emphasis mine). Psalms 150:44 praise him with tambourine and dancing . . . Psalms 98:4 Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth, burst into jubilant song with music When we feel down, there is only so much that we can do, but we can jump, we can shout, we can sing with gusto. I know that isn’t your personality. It’s as beneath you as washing over and over and over in a dirty river. But will you give it a go, like Naaman? To try to act excited about God when you don’t feel excited makes no more sense than Joshua’s army dragging themselves around a fortified city. But is this nonsensical act your invitation to be part of a miracle? If you refuse to rejoice the biblical way, at least you can make yourself grin from ear to ear, no matter how artificial it seems. You can put on some praise music and join in. You can recall your blessings and thank God with as much enthusiasm as you can muster. Of course you don’t feel like it! To do only things you feel like doing is to serve yourself, not God. That would be sentencing yourself to mediocrity. Since God is utterly loving and unselfish, when he asks us to do anything, it’s not to burden us; it’s because it ends up helping us. When we read, “Rejoice in the Lord always . . .” we want to protest, “You don’t know what I’m going through!” But before we get too many protests out, we bite our tongue as the realization hits that those words were penned from prison by the man who regularly suffered deprivations and disasters and beatings and whippings and stonings like few people in all of history. “Rejoice in the Lord always” is not psychobabble; it is the holy Word of God. It is not rejoicing in blessings or in life in general, it is rejoicing in the Lord . This point is so significant that the Word of God uses the expression “rejoice in the Lord” (or very similar) over and over and over. It is deliberately linking – or, in the language of psychologists, “pairing” – the thought of God with positive feelings. It isn’t doing it a few times and then giving up, or moving on to something else; it is building it into the strongest of habits. It is doing it always . Perhaps you’ve seen the old Christian sticker, “Smile, God loves you!” Why not, even if only for a minute or so, literally think those words and wear the matching smile several times a day? I’m not being flippant. I’m not denying that you could be in excruciating pain and as much distress as the apostle Paul. I’m not talking about doing it for appearances’ sake or to be positive, but as your possibly feeble yet sincere attempt to privately express to God your delight that his personal love for you is real, even when it doesn’t feel real. If you smile for no other reason but your determination to do the little you can to warm to God at a time when he feels distant from you, then not only is your attempt not fake, it blesses the heart of the One who loves you. If rejoicing in the Lord is virtually equivalent to getting excited about God, so are biblical references to delighting in the Lord. We can conclude from Scripture that deliberately getting excited about God is one of God’s favorite ways of us loving him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Another vital way is by deliberately cultivating warm, loving thoughts toward God. What matters is not so much how successful we are at achieving this, but how much we try. The mere fact that we try moves God and sets us up for supernatural encounters. Lover’s Delight Rejoicing and delighting in God are favorite topics in the Bible and both words are intimately connected in Scripture with being deeply in love. A tiny sample of Scriptures should suffice to prove the link with human romance: Isaiah 62:5 . . . as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you. Song of Solomon 4:10 How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much more pleasing is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your perfume than any spice! Song of Solomon 1:4 . . . We rejoice and delight in you; we will praise your love more than wine. How right they are to adore you! Ezekiel 24:16,18 “Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes . . . .” So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died. . . . (Emphasis mine.) The command to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind and strength is so all-embracing that it must encompass all forms of non-sexual love, including being in love with God. It is significant, then, that we are commanded both to be in love with God and also to delight/rejoice in him. The biblical emphasis on deliberately cultivating these emotions is so strong as to be inescapable and yet it is so contrary to western thinking as to seem almost bizarre. We think if love is genuine, feelings will be automatic and that to command them is ridiculous. In fact, if feelings don’t come we almost blame God for it. In contrast, the Lord thinks that if our love is genuine we will deliberately stir up these feelings and do whatever it takes to keep them on the boil. He is moved, not by our actual feelings, but by how much we try to generate within us feelings for him that are worthy of him. Whereas God insists that trying to have positive feelings toward him is our responsibility, most of us presume it is God’s responsibility. While we’re waiting for God to do something to get us excited about him, he’s waiting for us. They would never word it this way, but it is not uncommon for people to consider themselves sincere Bible believers and yet stubbornly insist that on this issue they are right and the Bible is wrong. Not surprisingly, their spiritual progress grinds to a halt. A total mind shift is the only way out of this stalemate. We can dig our heels in as much as we like, demanding that God prove his love by giving us feelings, but it will get us nowhere. God insists we prove our love by working on our own feelings. Streams in the Desert Bitter tears might be the opposite of smiling but there are other types of tears that are fully compatible with rejoicing. There are tears of joy and there are healing tears that mysteriously soften the heart. If, for no apparent reason, your eyes leak when you are in the presence of God, you might find it perplexing or even embarrassing but something beautiful, though mysterious, is happening. Like Jesus, who so often wept, let the tears flow. Prayer and Sensory Enjoyment Is God in love with you? Does he romance you with flowers and chocolates and beautiful meals? Absolutely. He is the One from whom all good things flow. Every flower you have ever seen, every chocolate you have ever tasted is from him, along with every sunset, every rainbow, every smile and every cozy feeling. But have you just indulged yourself or do you allow his loving gifts to you warm your heart toward him? Like a mother who does everything for her darling child and is usually taken for granted, so is God. There are love notes on every tree and every hill, but do we bother to read them? Open eyes can lift our spirits not only by removing the gloom of darkness but also by allowing us to gaze upon beauty. When couples go on a date, they usually choose beautiful surroundings. This is no accident. Even when they know their relationship has a lot going for it, they want to add still more to make it truly momentous. Do you, at least occasionally, deliberately choose beautiful surroundings in which to pray? Nature is God’s artistry. Drinking in the beauty, admiring God’s skill and sharing the experience with him will not only draw you closer to God, it will deepen your enjoyment of nature. The same is true of all God’s gifts – food, music, rest, friends, your achievements, and so on. Savor them with him and your enjoyment of them will multiply and your bonding with God will deepen. (Although you are already spiritually one with God, there are other levels, such as the experiential and emotional, in which your bonding can deepen.) Thanking God because we feel guilty if we don’t thank him is neither a recipe for enjoyment nor for deepening our bond with God. Instead of taking God’s gifts for granted or slavishly enduring some ritual of thanks, why not cherish his gifts, giving thanks out of genuine appreciation? Why not delight in the tiniest of God’s blessings? Could it be that the person who is grateful even for little will be given much? Aren’t you more motivated to give to someone who consistently shows delight and thankfulness when receiving your gifts? It is good to ease into the habit of every time we enjoy something, immediately thinking of God and appreciating his gifts to us. Enjoying a meal honors the chef, enjoying a painting honors the artist and enjoying a gift honors the giver. Even more so, enjoying any good thing honors the One who is the Source of all good things and who gave us sight and all our other senses with which to delight in the wholesome pleasures he lavishes on us. Acts 14:17 Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy. Psalms 145:9, 15-16 The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made. . . . The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing. 1 Timothy 6:17 . . . God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Psalm 103:2,5 Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits . . . who satisfies your desires with good things There are spiritual benefits in regularly combining enjoyment with a consciousness that the pleasure comes from God. When we are in trouble, it is both right and natural to look to our best friend, the almighty Lord, for help. It is most unfair to God, however, if we are more likely to think of him when in distress than when enjoying the beautiful and delightful things that flow from his love and creative genius. It is sadly possible to become too self-focused to even notice precious gifts from our loving Lord. What would be even more damaging than taking our bountiful Lord for granted, however, is if we end up unintentionally associating God in our minds not so much with anything desirable as with unpleasantness – distressing things that remind us of God because they remind us of the need to pray. A habit of tending to think of God less often or less intensely when we are enjoying something than when life is unpleasant would establish an emotional connection in our psyche between God and unpleasantness. As surely as the dog referred to earlier was trained to associate a ringing bell with mouth-watering food, we would have trained ourselves to associate God with unpleasant feelings. Despite it being unintentional, we would end up with a negative emotional response to the very thought of God. The way to avoid this is to seize the initiative. Stop leaving this matter to chance and letting yourself be a victim of things you do not want. End laziness and deliberately train yourself to have warm thoughts toward God whenever you are enjoying even the smallest of wholesome pleasures – and keep training yourself until it becomes an automatic response to pleasure. Dating God Go on a date with God. Select a wholesome pleasure and share it with the Lover of your soul. Whatever pleasure you choose, it should not, of course, be anything morally questionable or remotely sexual outside the sanctity of marriage. The ideal activity for a date with God is one that is not mentally demanding but allows your mind to wander. You might, for instance, go for a walk along the beach with God – just you and One who made the sea and the sand and the sun and the shells. You might have an ice-cream with God. If it’s your type of fun, go shopping with him. You might be feeling chatty on your date. If neither of you say much, however, that’s fine. Just savor the pleasure and delight in the realization that the nice feeling flowing through you is a manifestation of your Creator’s personal love for you. While seeking to maximize your enjoyment of the experience, dwell on the love behind his gift to you that you are currently enjoying. As you savor this expression of divine love, let the awareness grow that you are the focus of God’s love. Let your heart well up with thankfulness and tell the King of kings how wonderful he is and how much you love him. Or go somewhere nice with a friend. Enjoy your friendship as a gift from God. As you sit or walk or drive together, try taking it in turns praying audibly with your friend, thanking God for your time together and for your friendship, and praying for each other’s needs and dreams. My suggestion about going on a date with God might seem bizarre to you, but it is consistent with the spirit of such Scriptures as: 1 Corinthians 10:30-31 If I take part in the meal with thankfulness . . . So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Deuteronomy 26:11 And you and the Levites and the aliens among you shall rejoice in all the good things the LORD your God has given to you and your household. (Amazingly, the second Scripture appears in the context of tithing.) Pamper both yourself and the relationship that will last for eternity by regularly dating God in this way for the rest of your life. An exciting possibility is that in between dates we can have countless mini-dates that will do wonders for our relationship with God. We can paint in our imaginations a beautiful scene or remember a pleasant experience and savor the feelings, while thanking our magnificent, mind bogglingly generous Lord who “ who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” ( 1 Timothy 6:17 ). We can do this even on occasions that are so hectic that we can spare only 15 seconds at a time. Softening One’s Heart toward God Earlier in this series of pages I told of Ruth, who from birth had felt bitter rejection from those closest to her and how this produced an expectation of rejection that led to her feeling unloved by her husband and even her children. Inevitably, this carried over into her relationship with God, causing her to be unable to feel God’s love, even though she commendably served her Lord. Ruth’s inner pain prevented her from feeling (or even truly believing) the genuineness of God’s personal love for her and she interpreted her lack of feeling as confirmation that she was second-class in God’s eyes. Despite her excellent Bible knowledge, gained through years of faithfulness, she was unable to shake the feeling that it must be because God is forced to love everyone he tolerates her. Every time she heard of someone having a beautiful experience with God, she took it as further proof that God has favorites and she was not one of them. Ruth had been a Christian for fifty-two years before she discovered www.netburst.net . Over and over and over, she faithfully and prayerfully read the webpages about God’s love. Ever so slowly the truth of God’s personal love for her began to sink deeper and deeper into her being. The process has been continuing for several years now and it will never end – at least this side of eternity, maybe even on the other side – because there are always deeper levels of understanding of God’s infinite love. Here’s how Ruth, who has battled for decades over trying to have tender feelings toward God, told me she softens her heart toward God: When I have problems getting started in my prayer time I focus on my personal list of Christ’s attributes. For example, Christ is beautiful, compassionate, delightful, indispensable, faithful, good, unique, everlasting, kind, loving, joyful, majestic, holy, omnipotent, valiant, wonderful, excellent, awesome. I have a similar list of Christ’s titles: he is my Friend, Benefactor, Counselor, Example, Guide, Advocate, Bridegroom, Door, Everlasting Father, Wisdom, Priest, Hope, Inspiration, King, Life, Judge, Salvation, Teacher. Obviously both lists can be lengthened. After meditatively going through such a list it is rather hard to feel indifferent about him. I also find it helpful to try to recall situations where I have experienced those attributes. Like Ruth, we might long for a soft heart but fear left over from people having treated us with ungodly harshness can make us so tense that we involuntarily steel ourselves whenever we seek to draw closer to God. Our every attempt to feel tenderly toward God or excited about him might seem to us so pathetic that we are constantly tempted to give up. Our heart might seem like stone, but continual dripping water will wear away even granite. With enough time, the hardest heart yields to patient effort. Our attempts to think positively toward God will pay off. Serenade Music is a quite powerful way of influencing our mood. When couples want to make their evening together extra special they often use romantic music. Similarly, worship music can significantly add to our time alone with the Lord. What is particularly romantic, however, is for a lover not merely to play a CD but to tenderly sing a love song to the other. One day a woman was home alone and feeling close to God. She was about to turn on some Christian music when, despite her voice being quite ordinary, the Lord seemed to say to her, “You are blessed when you hear the music, but I am blessed when I hear your voice.” So she sang to her Lord and thereafter make it a feature of her times with God. Other Helps It often helps to pray aloud. Even in private prayer, Jesus seems to have prayed out loud. That would explain why even in the middle of the night when no one would pester him he would go to a deserted place to pray ( Mark 1:35 ; see also Mark 6:46; Luke 5:33; 6:12 ). In the garden of Gethsemane, the disciples heard what he was praying even though they were a stone’s throw away ( Luke 22:41-42; Matthew 26:39-44 ). In John 17 is a chapter-length prayer that Jesus prayed out loud, and the Gospels give us several other examples of Jesus praying out loud (eg Matthew 11:24-28; 27:46; Luke 23:34, 46; John 11;41-42; John 12:28-29 ). Praying aloud is a significant aid to concentration and can make prayer seem more concrete. Similarly, praying while pacing can help mental alertness. I’ve never known anyone to fall asleep while pacing. Praying while standing was common in Jesus’ day ( Mark 11:25; Luke 18:11 ). Praying with a friend can be particularly powerful. It takes my prayers to a whole new level. I just phone someone, briefly chat until I discover a prayer need my friend has, quickly ask permission and then launch out. Frequently I find myself praying with a level of faith and flow of words far beyond what is normal for me. Whatever you like to call it, something special happens at such times that is most precious to me. My early attempts at praying with people were clumsy and embarrassing – like most first attempts at anything – but am I ever glad that I persevered! Concentrated Truth How special are you in God’s eyes? How delighted with you and proud of you is God? Your answer – not God’s answer – to these questions is the greatest determiner of how exciting you find prayer. The sticking point is not how forgiving and in love with us God is, but the extent to which we grasp just how loving and forgiving he is. I feel deeply for the vast numbers of Christians who are being cheated out of much fulfilment and intimacy with God. God’s Word unmasks the enemy of our souls as a deceiver who seeks to con us out of as much of our Christ-bought inheritance as we will let him get away with. I have sought to expose some of his lies (and links at the end of this page will further help). I have also sought to develop your closeness with God by suggesting methods that at first sight seem unusual but have actually been successfully used for countless generations to foster relationships. If they work for human relationships it should be no surprise that they work with our relationship with God, since we still retain our humanity when we relate to God. We have seen that if communication is a chore, it is because a degree of excitement has seeped from the relationship. If this applies to our relationship with God, it is never because God has gone stale or is no longer passionately in love with us. It is most likely because we have lost sight of how exciting God really is. Too often we mope around, waiting for God to pump up our emotions or zap us with a revelation of how wonderful he is, when it is up to us to get our thinking right and keep urging ourselves until our feelings eventually catch up with spiritual reality. We should charge ahead of our feelings, blazing a trail for them to follow; rejoicing in God because he is worthy and because that’s the way he longs to be honored. As we do so, we are positioning ourselves for a miracle. Like Sarah and Abraham trying for a baby, it might take years but God is a rewarder of those who persist in faith. Our spiritual enemies – the devil and his invisible horde of whispering deceivers – cannot change reality. They are powerless to alter the fact that Christ loves you so resolutely and passionately that he let himself be tortured to death to erase your every failing from heaven’s database. The only thing these cheaters can do is try to mess with your mind; trying to fool you into imagining that the delighted smile on God’s face when he gazes upon you must be false. If we begin to doubt God’s forgiveness of our every sin, we’ll begin to cherish spending time with him with as much relish as a trip to the dentist. Our problem is not the intensity of God’s mind-boggling love for you and me; our problem is our inability to keep believing it. To us, it seems too good to be true. We find it as difficult to keep feeling the reality of God’s love as trying to keep aware of what is happening behind a wall that is as high as our head. We might occasionally jump high enough to catch a glimpse, but we soon tire of jumping. Our one hope is to trust someone in a more elevated position to keep us reliably informed. Likewise, our only reliable way of consistently knowing what God is like is not by dependence upon what we see and feel but by trusting a higher source – the integrity of God who has revealed in Scripture what he is really like. If the most powerful determiner of how much prayer thrills us is how much we accept the reality of God’s personal love for us, the second most powerful determiner is the degree to which we overcome nagging fears that the Perfect One might have a character flaw. Perhaps you worry that, despite God’s rhetoric, he might actually be selfish or spiteful or have a cruel streak or is egotistical or snobbish or cold or hypocritical. These are serious concerns for the very practical reason that we cannot be head-over-heels in love with someone we fear has a dash of Hitler in his personality. God is warm. He is exciting. In all his ways he is wondrously perfect. Correctly understood, his morality and everything about our magnificent Lord is stunningly beautiful. If our eyes could truly be opened to spiritual reality and our IQ exploded to superhuman levels, we would be so overwhelmed with admiration of God and his ways that our view of him would soar to inexpressible adoration. If the Lord miraculously gave us an emotional high every time we prayed, how would we ever know whether we pray because we love God or merely because we love getting high? Whenever we, as it were, struggle to paddle out to sea in search of an elusive spiritual wave, it reveals our love for God. It thrills God’s heart and will end up thrilling us, unless we were to spoil the adventure by giving up too soon. One of the most critical discoveries in this series of webpages is that a key to making prayer more exciting is not to avoid times when prayer is boring. Everything else being equal, the more boring times we go through, the more exciting times we will have, just as, when cycling, the more hills we pedal up, the more hills we eventually get to zoom down. It is equally important, however, never to become content with boredom. We must keep trying to stir ourselves up and push through the boredom barrier. Dating couples put much effort into their relationship and if they have found the right person, that effort ends up paying rich dividends. No matter how good it starts, however, their relationship will slowly lose its sparkle if they slide into taking each other for granted and seldom bother to do much to make their times together special. The little extras that married couples usually let drop off seem superficial and inconsequential and yet these extras can end up having a surprisingly significant impact on their relationship. God, the perfect partner, is so ideally suited to us that we were literally made for him. Nevertheless, our humanity is such that even this superb relationship will lose its edge if we let ourselves drift into habits that make our times alone with him seem dull. Even when young lovers are apart, the very thought of each other lifts their spirits and makes them feel like smiling. It’s proof of the genuineness of their love. And it’s how I am with God. A significant help in me reaching this point in my relationship with God and maintaining it decade after decade is that I have not let myself be habitually solemn when I converse with the Holy One. By such a habit I would be unintentionally sabotaging the feeling of joy that is now mine when I think of the Lover of my soul. Smiling when thinking of God seems such a minor thing, but imagine if children were ordered to be stony-faced and not permitted to play or act happy whenever grandma or grandpa is near. If this were allowed to become an ingrained practice, how excited do you think they would be when told they will visit grandma and grandpa? The same principle applies to us as children of God. Being forced to be solemn when praying will do much to drain the excitement from being in God’s presence. Whether we like it or not, all of us develop prayer habits that end up shaping our emotional response to being with God and determining the extent to which prayer is a joy or a hard slog. We can be mindless victims of this subtle yet powerful process or we can turn it around and deliberately use it to intensify our enjoyment of God. We have mentioned the value of variety in our approaches to prayer and noted the advantages of including in that variety times of intensive prayer with our eyes open, or our faces uplifted, or with a grin on our face, or praying while savoring one or more of God’s precious gifts. We have mentioned singing to God and ensuring a high proportion of our times with him include praise and expressions of love, not just focusing on needs or mundane matters. We even mentioned pacing and praying out loud. In a flash, we can recall a sunset or some other awe-inspiring scene of beauty, or times when we were happy or at peace. We can let that memory warm our hearts and begin to fill with gratitude and adoration toward the One from whom that pleasure and all good things flow. As we bask in that, we can let our face break into a smile; knowing that our happiness delights the One who loves us. These are not gimmicks. Deliberately doing such things to deepen your bond with God is a manifestation of genuine love. Dating couples tend to do these things unthinkingly because they are so anxious to please each other, but even they begin to slip into bad habits as their relationship wears on, and then they need to more consciously choose to act this way. If we truly love God with all our heart, mind and strength, we will embrace anything that has the potential to deepen our emotional bond with our beautiful Lord. Why would the Almighty be thrilled when we have positive feelings toward him that we have no more control over than sneezing, or when the feelings come from him, not us? What moves God is when we so much want to feel positively toward him that we make the effort to produce these feelings. We thrill our Lord and prove our love when we obey him by deliberately arousing our emotions and compelling ourselves to get excited about him. We will lead with our mind and our will, and occasionally our emotions will catch up. We have not focused in this page on a quick fix for our prayer life. Long-term solutions are best. After all, our relationship with Christ is forever. We need to build positive habits into our lives. For this we need supernatural help. We even need to pray about praying. Nevertheless, it will also take effort on our part. The latter is our chance to show God our love for him. More on prayer

How to Make Prayer Exciting And Fall More in Love with God How to improve your prayer life Get more answers to prayer and enjoy praying It’s easy ! Simple, practical help for all Christians My passionate goal is that after reading this series of webpages you will enjoy more answers to prayer than ever before. Nevertheless, I have far higher goals for this series than this. Just as there are more delights and fulfillment in marriage than a ring and wedding presents, there are far more fulfilling and thrilling aspects of prayer than spectacular answers to your requests. Your wonderful God wants you to have the lot. So if you want more answers to prayer, this series should take you there, but we will commence by exploring still greater joys among the breathtaking wonders of prayer. Prayer is Spiritual Surfing When surfing the sea, times of clumsy human effort (paddling) are interspersed by exhilarating times of being moved by a wave of power far beyond anything human. The same is true of prayer. Most of us have heard of, or even had a taste of, the exhilaration that prayer can produce. There are times when prayer is effortless and thrilling and you are moved by a power beyond your own. Nevertheless, many of us end up drifting in the shallows because we have not understood the necessity of the prayer equivalent of paddling in order to catch a spiritual wave. Riding a wave is cool, but paddling seems like something for nerds. Paddling looks awkward and is hard work. No one in the prime of manhood would want to be seen paddling, except that it is essential for experiencing the ultimate in surfing. Surfers discover that riding a wave is worth all sorts of hardship. What motivates them is not duty but the thrill of catching a wave. The same applies to those who discover prayer’s unique spiritual highs. It can take effort to catch a wave but those who understand spiritual surfing don’t endure prayer’s hard times out of grim duty; they are drawn by the excitement awaiting them. This webpage is about the spiritual equivalent of paddling – the lumbering human effort needed to position oneself for the adrenalin rush of being swept along by supernatural waves. Just as there is no comparison between paddling and surfing – they seem almost opposites – so many of the secrets I will share seem superficial and artificial and nothing like the pinnacles of prayer. But as paddling is an essential part of surfing, so this page deals with an essential aspect of supernatural prayer. I have no desire to imply, however, that there is only one way to paddle, nor that you must follow my practical suggestions to the letter. Nevertheless, I believe you will find here helpful hints that you might not find elsewhere. The Height of Intimacy As thrilling as being in love is, any counsellor will tell you that the quality of communication is a vital key to the health of a marriage. And we all know that Christianity is not a ritual but a relationship that is so dynamic that Scripture likens it to marriage. In fact, to be a Christian is to have the most intimate relationship that any human can ever enjoy. This renders prayer – communication with God – of such critical importance that it is virtually a Christian’s life-blood. It’s fine to ask others to help you pray for a particular need but to leave prayer primarily to others is like asking them to go on a luxury cruise for you, or eat a gourmet meal for you. It is not quite like asking a friend to make love to your marriage partner (since that would be sin), but it comes uncomfortably close if you relinquish your right to pray. If you find communication with the most exciting Person in the universe a little dull, then for some unfortunate reason, you are missing something exquisitely beautiful and wondrous. Sadly, for many married couples, talking with each other degenerates into a chore. Making the effort to communicate despite it being boring or difficult suggests there is considerable hope for the relationship. Likewise, it is good for us to make the effort to pray. Nevertheless, if a couple perpetually find communicating a hard slog, they are in danger of spending less and less time doing it and gradually drifting apart. What they really need is not just dedicated effort – as important and loving as that is – but to discover how to make their chats exciting and fulfilling. This might seem an impossible dream to many couples but most of them achieved it when they were dating each other, and by revisiting what made their former conversations zing, they can recapture what they have lost. There are many factors that made a couple’s early communication exciting, and each factor has surprisingly practical applications for turning prayer into the highlight of each day. But perhaps this connection should not surprise us, since marriage is perhaps the closest thing in the universe to our intimacy with God. We will examine many of the extras that dating couples use to enhance their times together. These externals seem minor and take a little effort. That’s why married couples tend to use them less and less as the years roll on. It is better for couples to put effort into these externals, however, than end up finding it an effort to enjoy sharing their hearts with each other. And the same applies to our relationship with God. Passion The time when a now-bored couple found talking easy was when they didn’t take each other for granted. They cherished and valued each other. There was tenderness and respect. And there was passion. They believed they had found the most wonderful person on the planet. In God, we have truly found the most loving, fascinating, knowledgeable, intelligent, gifted, unselfish, patient, good and faultless Person in the entire universe. Who else fully understands us, is never moody or tired, will never let us down, can always help, and is always eager to hear from us no matter what the time of night or the occasion? To what extent do we shake ourselves out of complacency, stir up our emotions and delight in the breath-taking privilege of being on intimate terms with this astounding Person? When you take delivery of a new car that you will use everyday, you know that despite it being fully within your ability, it would take exceptional effort and care to keep the vehicle year after year looking and operating like that gleaming new car. Everything in this life has a natural tendency to slowly lose its sparkle, and to resist this tendency takes continual effort. Relationships are no exception. The natural tendency of every relationship, even one with our perfect Lord, is for it to lose its gloss. So although relationships can actually grow richer through the years, it takes continual effort to fight the downward trend. The Lord of glory will never lose his gloss. We will never discover hidden weaknesses or character flaws or bad habits in God. He never grows old or gets boring. His strength and beauty and power to amaze never fade. With our boundless Lord, the more wonders we discover, the more there is to discover. He remains as fresh and as perfect and exciting as ever. In this tendency for our relationship with God to cool, the problem is never God. The problem is our perception of God. And unless we actively and persistently keep resisting it, our perception of God will keep deteriorating, not merely for natural reasons, but for supernatural reasons. The Supernatural I am staggered that some people can believe in a supernatural God and maybe even good spirits (angels) and perhaps even intelligent life in other worlds (aliens – who might not necessarily be benevolent) and they can believe that humans have messed up their gift of freewill, and yet they insist that there can be no spiritual beings that have evil intent. If such people suppose biblical revelation and Jesus’ teaching are primitive because they mention evil spirits, I have a rather different view as to whose spiritual understanding is primitive and naive. We are not the only created beings in the universe that have rebelled against their loving God. And whenever we get interested in God, his spiritual opponents get jealous. Like termites, they keep as far from sight as they can, while continually and insidiously gnawing away at our opinion of God and trying their hardest to undermine our belief in our Savior’s mind-boggling love for us. Forces with ugly agendas are forever trying to whisper doubts into our minds and false accusations against God and against ourselves. Often subtly, but always relentlessly, they keep trying to erode our view of God and our certainty that the Lord of the universe delights in us. Most of us know that condemnation is of the devil, but have you ever wondered why such an evil, sin-loving being would act so seemingly righteous in making us feel guilty about our sins? The simple answer is that if we can be conned into thinking God is displeased with us, it will undermine our enjoyment of God. Who of us wants to spend time alone with someone we think is angry with us? We would go to such a person with the enthusiasm of a naughty schoolboy told to go to the principal’s office. Even if we are sure the person is not angry, merely thinking someone is critical of us is enough to drain us of all enthusiasm for being with him. Talkative lovers delight in spending ages looking into each other’s eyes because they see love and delight in those eyes. If you could physically see God looking at you, would you expect to see his eyes sparkling with delight at what he sees? If not, it’s no wonder if you find times alone with him less than exciting. The problem cannot be with God. He is the perfect partner, and his infinite love means he is more in love with us than any human has ever loved anyone. The problem is our distorted view of God. Years ago, when most cars had front bench seats and men were almost exclusively the designated drivers, a married couple were out driving. They could see in the car ahead that despite there being lots of space, the young woman was squeezed up tight against the male driver, for no reason other than the obvious fact that they found each other exciting. Suddenly missing her romantic past, the woman in the car behind said to her husband a little accusingly, “Do you remember when we used to drive like that?” “Well I haven’t moved,” replied the driver. If the spark has gone from our relationship with God, it’s not because God has withdrawn. His passion hasn’t waned. He’s pining for us to move closer. “Draw near to God,” pleads Scripture, “and he’ll draw near to you” ( James 4:8, NKJ). Does God Play Chess? Have you ever been momentarily distracted when playing chess and found yourself waiting for ages for the other person to make a move, only to discover that your wait was in vain because it is your turn? Because our crucified Lord has already taken the initiative, the next step must be ours. This is why Scripture puts the onus on us drawing near. “We love because he first loved us,” says 1 John 4:19 . God loved us before we were even born. Isn’t it time we began to catch up with God and love him back? Just as it isn’t right for a chess player to move when it is the other person’s turn, so God reaches a point where it is inappropriate for him to make another move until we make ours. When we make a move, the stalemate is shattered. As you keep edging closer to him, your Lord will rush to make yet another move. If God is to walk with you, he must let you set the pace. He’s forced to wait for you, or you will be left behind. He is powerful enough to forcibly drag you along, but what sort of friendship would that be? Too often we find ourselves getting annoyed at the Lord for keeping us waiting, when he is actually waiting for us. The problem is that we have not trusted God to have already done what is necessary. We mistakenly think he should do more, when his love compels him to seek our partnership and graciously wait for us. For example, we might get frustrated thinking we are waiting for God to build our faith by quickly answering our prayers, when he is actually waiting for us to build our faith to the point where we will keep believing no matter how long the delay. We are waiting for God to baby us; he is waiting for us to grow. His dream for us is to rule with him; not to be his eternal babies. The Lord waiting for us is our opportunity for g lory . It is our opportunity to do something for which God will praise us forever. In my attempts to spend more time in prayer, I’ve found it easy to feel offended, thinking that if God really wanted me to chat with him he would make it easier. As much as I try to suppress it, the nagging thought keeps surfacing that if God really loved me and wanted me to talk with him, he would give me a mind that didn’t wander and he would make prayer a breeze. That’s like saying if God really wanted me to stop sinning he would remove all temptation, or if God had really wanted Jesus to die for our sins he would have made it easier for his Son to go to the cross, instead of Jesus being in such turmoil that his sweat was like blood before he was even arrested. The Almighty wants us as his treasured companions, not his robots. He longs to partner with us, not squash us. He wants to coax us to our full potential, not reduce us to mindless tools. It can seem – not just to observers but even to me – that what is holding me back from a great prayer life is such things as my laziness, busyness and inability to concentrate. The real culprit, however, is me feeling hurt over God not magically making prayer easier. Theologically, I might know all the right answers but inwardly I feel rejected. I feel God cannot be too desperate to hear from me, or he would make it easier. It is this feeling of rejection that deflates my efforts, sapping my motivation to persist in prayer. But the majestic Lord is the only one with a right to feel unloved. He has invested far more into the relationship than I have. It was Jesus, not me, who let himself be publicly humiliated, tortured and executed so that I could have this relationship with him. My Savior has no doubt already babied me much more than I suppose in my relationship with him. It’s about time I grew up. It’s time I started proving I truly want this relationship by putting in more effort. Otherwise, the Lord and I are in danger of a stand-off, with him waiting for me, and me waiting for him to make the next move. How Thin is God’s Love? Being continually aware of the reality and intensity of God’s personal love for us is central not only to prayer but to every aspect of the Christian life. For this reason I’ve written much on this subject. There’s a link to it further on in this web series. Here’s a sample: I can easily believe the atom-holding, earth-spinning, galaxy-sustaining, life-giving Source of everything wonderful can do whatever he likes. Even the devil believes God’s power. My difficulty is believing that God’s special love for me makes him long to use that power on my behalf. Few of us doubt that God can do amazing things. The weak link in our faith is believing that he would do such things for ordinary, inconsequential you and me. We suspect we are not sufficiently special in the Almighty’s eyes to warrant such attention. Oh yes, “God loves everyone,” but we have a hunch that by the time that love reaches us it has spread pretty thin. I’m just one of millions. Why would God want to focus his omnipotence on me? If we could grasp the enormity of God’s love for us, our faith would sky-rocket. Pray for a revelation. ( Ephesians 3:17-19 highlights the necessity of such prayer. “ . . . I pray that you. . . may have power. . . to know this love that surpasses knowledge . . .”) Awareness of how much we are loved is forever slipping from our consciousness. Partially in sight for a few days, it begins to fade again. Are You Royalty? For almost all of us, Jesus defending Mary over Martha is so contrary to our understanding of God as to be unintelligible. Here’s my attempt to paint the picture, taken from a web book of mine: They had just brought in the washing when there was a knock on the door. “Oh no! The house is in a mess! And just look at me . . . !” exclaimed Martha. “I’ll get it,” called Mary. She opened the door and her heart skipped a beat. There was Jesus and all his disciples. “Come in!” she gushed excitedly. “Martha! It’s Jesus!” Martha was in a panic. How was she going to feed them all? If only she’d had more warning. She had wanted everything to be so nice for Jesus. “Where’s Mary? She’s taking her time!” She ran next door to borrow some food. Still no Mary. She stoked the oven and got out the plates. Still no Mary. She peered out and there was Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet with not a care in the world! Martha exploded. Yet it was Mary that the Savior defended. More than anything, the King of kings simply wants us to enjoy being with him. That thought clashes so wildly with our self-image that nothing we do can make it fit our presumptions about how God feels about us. It is like the embarrassment of putting a machine back together and finding we have a piece left over. That God would treasure us doing nothing but enjoy him seems so out of place that we feel we have no choice but to ignore the thought. We feel compelled to slip out of God’s embrace and whip ourselves into running errands for him. To sit with the King in the drawing room might be acceptable for royalty, but slaving in the kitchen seems more appropriate for the class of people we see ourselves as. That mentality breaks the heart of the One who shed his last drop of blood so that you could become divine royalty. And though we feel guilty about not praying more, what really kills our desire for prayer is not laziness but our failure to grasp how special we are to God. Do You Thrill God? When a married couple who are mystified as to why they are no longer talk much, look back on the time when things were different, they will discover that even the less talkative of the two felt inspired to talk because he/she knew the other person was vitally interested and excited over every little thing about him/her. New lovers draw torrents of words out of each other because each is certain that the other is hanging on to every word and thinks his/her beloved is witty, stimulating and fascinating. We need to maintain the consciousness that God is likewise thrilled to hear from us. He is sitting on the edge of his throne, leaning down from heaven, anxious to catch our every whisper. Our problem is that we rarely manage to believe this for long. We keep degrading God by thinking of him as having human weaknesses. We insult him by expecting him to treat us the way fickle, self-centered humans do. And so the excitement of communing with him begins to evaporate; not because of God but because of our low opinion of God’s passion for us. Does Almighty God ever get tired? We are rightly convinced that he doesn’t. But the significant implication often eludes us: he never grows tired of us. We never bore him. A God so devoted to us and in love with us that he keeps track of every hair on our head is a God who hangs on to our every word as if he had not heard from anyone for ten thousand years and you were the most fascinating person alive. Unlike humans, his interest in you remains as fresh and as intense as ever. God’s love doesn’t wilt. A wife might tire of hearing her husband’s same old jokes, but she is not someone who counts every hair on her husband’s head. If she had a mere one percent of God’s love, she would never tire of her husband’s voice. Even if her human frailty causes the average loving wife to tire of her husband’s jokes, however, she never tires of her husband’s genuine expressions of love. To God, your efforts to talk to him – even if you think of it as trivia you’ve recounted thousands times – is precious to him because you bothering to share it with him makes it a genuine expression of love. The Almighty occasionally babies some people by giving them goose bumps and a torrent of words with which to effortlessly pray. But Father God wants us to grow up. He longs for us to get excited, not because we cannot help ourselves but because we love him enough to make the effort to get excited and express our love to him. There aren’t many women who, after waiting in vain for their husband to buy them flowers, buy flowers for themselves, write a loving note on them, sign their husband’s name and find it deeply moving. Neither is God impressed when he always has to give us gooey feelings and personal invitations before we bother to spend long in prayer. He aches for your love. How Risky is Love? One of the riskiest things in the universe is to love anyone other than God. Any human can let us down or suddenly die, leaving us heart-broken. We have all been hurt and left with varying degrees of fear about loving. Caving into the fear and backing off from love is understandable but it not only cuts us off from the possibility of temporary hurt, it cuts us off from fulfilment and from becoming Godlike. This fear often dominates us more than we realize. We harden our hearts, steeling ourselves lest we love and again get hurt. One of the insidious things about fear is its tendency to generalize. For example, after suffering a serious fall from a height, someone can end up fearing heights not just when there is genuine danger but even in situations where netting or safety glass makes it impossible to fall. Likewise, many of us fear falling in love with God, even though loving God is the ultimate security. Unlike humans, God can never die or be cruel or mistaken or unfaithful. People hurt us by acting contrary to God’s ways and then we fear the only Person who cannot act contrary to God’s ways. Often without us even realizing what is happening, this fear of getting hurt makes us tighten our grip on our emotions, preventing us from “feeling” almost anything associated with God. It is understandable that fear causes us to tense up and stop feeling. The peculiar thing, however, is that when our (groundless) fear of rejection hinders us from feeling anything we are tempted to interpret this lack of feeling not as the natural consequence of our own fear but as rejection by God. We worry that our failure to “feel” God indicates that he is closing his heart toward us when it is actually our fear unconsciously causing us to close our own hearts. The more we learn to trust God, the more we will relax and be better able to warm to him and sense him moving in our lives. Writes a widow in response to an early draft of this webpage: If I try to stir up warm feelings toward God I almost immediately decide that God is not going to respond to me since he never has in the past. So I immediately close off and turn my attention to something secular. I’ve suddenly realized that I have this attitude not because of how God treats me but because of how my husband used to treat me. My husband was faithful to me and a loyal family man, but he never caused me to feel that I was loved and wanted and accepted. Although he was keen to gratify his own desires, I continually longed for non-sexual displays of warmth and affection during my long marriage but I never received them. I came to expect that my feelings toward my husband would never be reciprocated, so I gradually cooled off toward him. Trying to stir up my own feelings would lead only to painful disappointment. It is better not to hope than to hope and be continually disappointed. As the book of Proverbs says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” I have just realized that I have transferred this attitude to God; presuming that there is no point in me trying to stir up warm, loving feelings toward God because, like my husband, he won’t respond. At last I have discovered my mistake. May God forgive me and change me! Instead of excitedly drawing near to God, confident that he would fulfil the Bible’s promise by drawing near to her, this dear woman would only briefly draw near and then quickly withdraw for fear of being emotionally hurt like her husband used to hurt her. She had let her experience with humans so strongly color her beliefs about God’s love that she unconsciously forced her whole spiritual experience to conform to her expectations. Her failure to trust God’s love was not stopping God from loving her but it was stopping her from thinking warmly toward God for long enough to sense his love. Instead of understanding the real cause, she interpreted her failure to sense God’s love as proof that he was just like her husband. Talk of returning to one’s first love is applicable to some Christians who have had a relatively easy emotional life. As we have already hinted, however, in stark contrast to some, there are those – especially people who suffered trauma in their impressionable years or had a love-starved family life – for whom warm, loving feelings are highly elusive in any situation. For these dear people, it takes mountain-moving faith and enormous effort to attain even half the feelings that others experience on their spiritual honeymoon. Feeling Loved Because feeling loved is so critical to one’s prayer life, I’ll dwell here a little longer. Any genuine expression of love is open to an endless number of interpretations. If a man gives a woman flowers, for instance, she could conclude: * He’s besotted with me * He’s trying to manipulate me * He thinks of me as a sister * He must have been unfaithful and is riddled with guilt * He’s treating me as a harlot; trying to buy me for sex * He’s trying to give me hay fever * The flowers were for someone else who has turned him down * He wrongly thinks it’s my birthday * He thinks I’m a pushover * He must have stolen the flowers * He thinks I’m old-fashioned * He wants to borrow money from me * He’s going to dump me and wants to soften the blow The list could go on and on. Whether she is flattered or insulted by the man’s action depends more on her than on him. Her own self-image and how others have treated her is critical in influencing her interpretation of a loving act. My friend, whom I’ll call Ruth, is an example of many who find it hard to feel loved. She suffered hostile rejection from her father from the day she was born premature – and hence unattractive – and the “wrong” gender. Ruth was ten when he formally ended the marriage. Knowing how much he despised Ruth, her mother openly blamed her for the divorce and maintained that belief until her dying day. When her mother re-married, Ruth’s alcoholic stepfather mistreated them both. Brainwashed by her mother into thinking no decent man would want her, Ruth married more in desperation that by choice. I believe her husband loved her in his own way but he was unskilled in expressing love and understood little about how to treat a woman. With her past convincing her that she was unlovable, Ruth had little hope of interpreting anything her husband did as an act of love. If he got physical with her, it must have been for his own lust, not because he found her attractive. If he was always home when not at work, it couldn’t be because he liked her company. Until eventually widowed, Ruth endured thirty-eight years of what she considered a loveless marriage, with each year adding to her conviction that she was unloved. Her children, too, did and said things that she mistakenly interpreted as indicating that they thought lowly of her. Only in the last year or so, after undergoing a significant change of mindset, is Ruth beginning to discover that her children regard her much higher than she had imagined. Can you see how such a person would find it so hard to feel loved by anyone, even if that Person were God, the most loving Person in existence? Ruth became a Christian as a child and faithfully served him, even though she felt largely rejected by him. Many dear people suffer this sort of tragedy. I deeply admire them for clinging on to God despite having little awareness of his fervent love for them. It is so sad that they feel this way, and although it is dishonoring to God for them to have a low opinion of his love, it is deeply honoring to him that they still hold on to him despite feeling so unloved by him. For people like Ruth it takes great courage to edge closer to God, release the iron grip on their emotions, and begin to feel. Things are at last changing for Ruth. I’ll explain later how this came about. Warming to God For some of us, feeling loved comes so much easier than for those like Ruth afflicted with a long history of feeling rejected by people. Regardless of whether we can look back to spiritual feelings of love, however, the time will come for each of us when we have no positive feelings when praying. The Lord engineers this so that we all finally learn that we are not meant to sit around waiting for God to give us feelings. We are each meant to stir up our own affections. You might object, saying that young lovers don’t consciously arouse their own passions. Not deliberately, perhaps, but when people are falling in love there are huge gaps in their knowledge of each other and they inevitably fill in those gaps with rose-tinted presumptions and daydreams. Moreover, after the honeymoon they either learn to intentionally stir up their own feelings or their relationship is doomed. I have a lengthy, Scripturally-based webpage on the importance of married couples deliberately arousing their personal feelings and purposely getting excited about their partners. This subject is too little understood, and the consequences of this ignorance are tragic. In effect, Proverbs 5:19 is saying that every day for the rest of their lives, husbands should ensure that they are head-over-heels in love with their wives. God is implying in this Scripture that it is every man’s marital duty to find his wife’s body the sexiest on this planet. Of course, the same level of control over feelings is expected of women. Wives are not to let nature take its course in their marriage or be dictated to by their emotions. They are to make their heart skip a beat when they see their husbands. Yes, this is hard, but every married person should be working toward this degree of control. Even godless people can be good at it. Let’s examine how people achieve this in their earthly relationships and uncover the implications for our heavenly relationship. As men grow older they do not naturally find wrinkles and sagging bodies beautiful. In fact, their sex drive declines with age, making them even more fussy, just as a declining appetite for food makes one a finicky eater. For anyone to find his older wife physically desirable takes continual, rigorous training. I could explain the process in psychological terms, but devoted husbands do it regardless of whether they have even heard of psychology. They do not let themselves feel negatively about their wives. On the contrary, they very deliberately and repeatedly link the sight of their wives with warm feelings and excitement. For us to have a passionate life-long relationship with God we must similarly train ourselves to get excited (in a non-sexual sense) about God. From my university years studying psychology I recall research demonstrating that newly married women could more accurately recall their husband’s physical appearance than those who had been married for considerably longer. Other findings suggested that husbands perceived their wives as being better looking than they really were. A man with a long marriage has the potential to dredge from this memory countless diverse images of his wife, ranging from the highly sexy to the plain disgusting. He has seen his wife as the pretty young thing, the glowing bride, the dishevelled, bleary-eyed woman stumbling out of bed, the woman who couldn’t stop vomiting, the woman giving birth, and so on. Which images does he tend to recall when he thinks of his wife? I can guarantee that if he has a good relationship with his wife, it is the better images that he keeps displaying in the billboard of his mind. I would further suggest that although his wife might get annoyed that he “never notices” what she wears, this blindness to what she really looks like works greatly in her favor and is why she is often far more desirable to him than she is in her own eyes. Likewise, any husband of several years has experienced an astounding range of feelings generated by his wife: intense pleasure, joy, comfort, pride, anger, pain, guilt, disgust, and so on. Which feelings does he habitually bring to mind when he thinks of his wife? He can choose to dwell on the highly positive, the mundane, or the negative. What he most often chooses to recall will gradually become entrenched as a mental habit. It will become his usual, automatic response when thinking of his wife and will powerfully affect his attitude toward her. Let me underline this point: it makes no difference whether the habit is established unthinkingly or deliberately. The result is the same. The habit can be changed, but changing any habit is a prolonged and demanding process. What is true of a successful marriage applies with equal force to our relationship with God. Whenever you pray you are, of course, thinking of God. The feelings you choose to cultivate and dwell on each time you pray are of profound significance. Though we cannot fully control our feelings, there are always ways that we can influence them. As we proceed further we will explore some of them. Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly training ourselves to have a particular emotional response to God. Whether we find God thrilling or dreary, fascinating or boring, warm or aloof, comforting or upsetting, depends far less on how God treats us and far more on how we train our emotions, than most of us would ever imagine. By what you choose to do and feel each time you pray, you are endlessly shaping and reshaping your habitual emotional response to God. We reap what we sow. Deliberately sow by forcing yourself to think warmly about God – doing what you can to have joyful, loving, thankful feelings whenever you pray – and those feelings will slowly grow into habits that you will eventually end up reaping as automatic responses to the mere thought of God. True Love True love clashes with trashy novels, soapies and the worldly brainwashing that keeps fueling the skyrocketing divorce rate. True love – whether it be love for God or for someone else – is about excitement. It must be deliberately generated, however, by the person who is excited, not just by the other person. When awoken by your alarm and you know you must get up despite your body screaming for more sleep, you force your body into submission and get out of bed. True love is about telling your emotions what to do, just like you tell your body what to do. This is contrary to worldly notions, but are we going to live by biblical revelation – insight coming direct from the Originator of love and the Creator of sex and marriage – and rule our emotions, or will we languish in mediocrity as slaves of our emotions? Everyone who has ridden a bicycle knows that it is by enduring uphill stretches that you get to zoom effortlessly down the other side faster than you could possibly run. Love is a road over a thousand mountains, all of which start off frustrating and end up thrilling. Wise lovers find even the uphill parts exciting as they strain up the steep sections in anticipation of the thrills awaiting them further on. Married couples have many occasions when they end up soaring to ecstasy together only after first struggling to overcome hurt feelings, remove distractions, focus on each other, recall their most touching times together, and deliberately arouse their own passions. For love to last a lifetime there are frequent occasions when their ride to ecstasy has to be push started. At times when they don’t feel like it, they seize the initiative for the sake of their relationship. As they keep struggling, however, their feelings suddenly burst into life and finally they find themselves roaring forward under a completely different power. This principle applies as powerfully to our love relationship with God as it does to marriage. Scripture’s hundreds of commands to rejoice in God, delight in God, thank God, praise God, shout to God, and so on, are just that: commands. If the Lord expected us to wait until we feel like it, there would be no need for any of these Scriptures and the Bible would be much slimmer. Did Abraham wait until he felt like sacrificing his son Isaac? Did Daniel wait until he felt like being on the lion’s menu? Did Paul wait until he felt like being stoned? Ironically, couples who enjoy the most instances of wedded bliss probably have more times than most couples when attempts at lovemaking are a disappointment. Suppose, for example, a couple never make another attempt after their first disappointment. They will certainly suffer fewer times when intimacy is disappointing but, of course, they will miss out on pleasures that other couples enjoy. Similarly, a secret to making prayer more exciting is to go through more times when prayer is boring. It is essential, however, not to settle for boredom but to keep doing what we can to stir up our feelings. Though in such anguish that his sweat was like blood, Jesus “for the joy set before him endured the cross” ( Hebrews 12:2 ). Will we, like him, push ahead of our feelings or will we keep missing our opportunity for spiritual greatness by waiting until we feel like it? Over and over, God has given the invitation. Now he expects us to finally make the next move and draw near to God, whipping up our feelings, warming our hearts toward him, and at the right time he will respond. Go into Orbit One of the insidious things about depression is that it so easily becomes self-perpetuating. Depression makes you feel as if doing anything that could help cheer you up – such as going out with friends – is just too much effort. C. S. Lewis described depression as like lying in bed, feeling too cold to sleep but too tired to get an extra blanket. Finding prayer a little dreary is similar. Initially, doing anything that could end up making prayer more enjoyable seems more effort than it is worth. As you persist, however, your prayer life and awareness of God will begin to go into orbit. By pushing through every obstacle, determined to draw near to God despite there being no positive feelings, our emotions will eventually kick in and whisk us to heights beyond our dreams. Like surfing, no matter how experienced we are, there will always be times when we must paddle, but as we endure mundane times we’ll eventually catch a wave and end up carried effortlessly far beyond what our own efforts could ever generate. No matter how exhilarating a wave is, even the best one eventually ends. Nevertheless, there are many more waves, if you are willing to paddle out again. There are times when the paddling stage seems endless but as you persist you’ll position yourself so that you will again know the thrill of being propelled by a power far greater than yourself. No matter how skilled and experienced you get, you will often have to paddle, but wow! is it ever worth the effort! Some waves are tiny. They move you forward a little without you having to exert yourself for a while but they cannot be called spectacular or exhilarating. You might hear the tales of other surfers and be envious, but if the seas are rather calm it would be ridiculous to take it personally! It is important not to give in to discouragement and decide never to try again. Keep surfing. It will develop your skills so that you can make the most of the opportunity when the big surf comes. As you keep persisting, month after month, year after year, you will be there when the waves are magnificent. Mood Change – A Practical Tip An impressive example of a self-induced mood change occurred when David was hiding from King Saul; exiled among people who would kill him if ever they discovered that he was secretly plundering their people and killing all witnesses. His fervent attempt for greater acceptance among these people failed and they sent David and his men back to where they had been living with their loved ones. Rejected, they returned home, only to find their dwellings burned to the ground. A frantic search for the bodies of their wives and children revealed nothing and confirmed that all their possessions were either destroyed or stolen. Distraught, “ David and his men wept aloud until they had no strength left to weep ” ( 1 Samuel 30:4 ). Soon the men David had considered his loyal friends began blaming him for the catastrophe and angrily discussing stoning him. Not days later, but right then, when he was an emotional cot case, David “ encouraged himself in the Lord ” ( 1 Samuel 30:6 KJV). We understand C. S. Lewis finding it so hard to do anything to break out of depression after the death of his wife. How did David manage this so quickly? I believe a key to his mastery is that from his youth David had been practicing cheering himself up, singing psalms, and so on, when minor things got him down. (You will recall that King Saul, not having a CD player, employed David to play his harp because music – especially when it is praise to God – is good at lifting one’s feelings.) We find David writing psalms of praise through the low points of his exile. Daily entering into God’s presence with joy despite not always feeling like it, was just the training David needed when the biggest of crises hit. Everything hinged on the mood change and feeling positively toward God that David achieved that day. It empowered him to recover all the kidnapped loved ones and plundered goods. Note that there was a step in David’s mood change that positive confession fanatics usually miss. David wept bitterly. He did not live in denial of his true feelings. He fully and emotionally expressed the depth of his grief, but he refused to wallow there. So daily practice doing what you can to turn around negative emotions. It is worth all the effort, even if the mood change you achieve is only miniscule. Lifting your spirits is like lifting weights. The more you do it, the stronger you will get. Regularly doing the little you can to warm to God and rejoice in him will not just help you from day to day; the time will come when you reap rich rewards from all this practice. Hurt Feelings Not only could David have continued to mope over the disaster that had hit him and so lose the opportunity to recover his loved ones, he could have turned to blaming God. Had he let himself be aloof from God at that moment, the result could have been devastating. To pursue those who had kidnapped his loved ones, he needed not only emotional strength, he needed to draw upon the Lord’s strength. If we are angry at someone we might refuse to speak with him. If the situation is less serious but on-going we will almost certainly be less inclined to speak with the person, even though talking less might not even be conscious. Feeling God has let us down, disappointments, a niggling doubt about God’s goodness, or a half-buried suspicion that God might favor some people over us deeply affect our relationship with God – probably far more than we realize. We tend to be so ashamed of such feelings that we are loath to admit even to ourselves how we feel. Some mysteries will remain longer than we would prefer but we will benefit from taking our lead from David and the Bible’s other psalmists who had no qualms about expressing to God their fears and frustrations. Although the Bible’s psalms might take just a few verses until they have worked their way through mind-numbing concerns to heart-felt praise, each instance encapsulates an experience that was agonizingly more prolonged for the psalmists than it takes to read about it. Jessica Reynolds Shaver discovered the joys of clearing the air with God. She wrote: I told God I was angry, I thought He’d be surprised. I thought I’d kept hostility quite cleverly disguised. I told the Lord I hate Him, I told Him that I hurt. I told Him that He isn’t fair, that He’d treated me like dirt! I told God I was angry, but I’m the one surprised! “What I’ve known all along,” He said, “You’ve finally realized. At last you have admitted what’s really in your heart. Dishonesty, not anger, was keeping us apart. “Even when you hate Me, I don’t stop loving you. Before you can receive that love you must confess what’s true. In telling me the anger you genuinely feel. It loses power over you, permitting you to heal.” I told God I was sorry, and He’s forgiven me. The truth that I was angry had finally set me free. Source From Virtue January/February 1996 We can’t be expected to have the intellect to always figure out God’s love and wisdom, but we can be expected to trust that everything our Lord does is compelled by love and wisdom. As I have written elsewhere: Embraced by divine love, your life will be tinged with mystery but aglow with glory. Tucked in the heart of Scripture sleeps a tiny psalm of precious truth ( Psalm 131 ). The singer confessed that as a mother denies her baby access to her milk when it’s time for her darling to be weaned, so God sometimes denies us things we crave. Yet as a weaned infant lies warm and secure in its mother’s bosom, our soul can nestle into God, not knowing why we have been denied that which we have clamored for, but content to draw love and comfort from the Father’s heart. As the heavens soar far above us, high and unreachable, so is God’s wisdom ( Isaiah 55:8-9; Psalm 139:6; 147:5; Job 11:7-9; Romans 11:33-34 ). Our tiny minds may understand the Father’s ways no more than a babe understands its mother, yet still we can rest in Him, bathed in the certainty that when the omnipotent, omniscient Lord lets the inexplicable touch a child of His, it is a manifestation of unfathomable love. In the hands of the One who wouldn’t so much as break a damaged reed or snuff a smoking wick, you are safe ( Matthew 12:20 ). Lover’s Praise Scripture captures in the Song of Solomon the communication of lovers. It is filled with praise. Lovers make love verbally by doing just two things: describing to each other how much they love each and by praising each other. They praise their beloved’s looks, intelligence, character – everything they can possibly think of. Lovers who really enjoy talking with each other have conversations that are crammed with compliments and praising each other. Most of their chats focus on each other, rather than mundane things like household expenses and who will take out the garbage. On the nosedive to communication becoming a chore, expressions like, “I love you,” “You’re beautiful,” “You’re amazing,” give way to ones like, “Do this,” “Give me that,” “I need so and so.” A famous man of God who was admired and respected by vast numbers of people used to receive praise from countless people, but not from his wife. He questioned her about this and it turned out that she thought her praise was superfluous because he received it from so many people. He explained to her that because he loved her so deeply, her opinion meant more to him than that of all the others. Praise from someone seems so hollow when you have to ask for it but he found himself having to humble himself to beg her to praise him. God is like that. No matter how many millions of people praise him, you are so special to him that he aches for your praise. And he yearns for it so much that he has even gone to the humiliating extreme of actually asking you to praise him. Or will you hold out until God sends ten thousand angels in luminescent nighties flying in formation to spell out your name in the sky before accepting Scripture as his personal word to you? The Almighty asking for your praise isn’t because he is egotistical; it is because he is deeply in love with you. Praise and worship are making love to God, and he does the same to us, but few of us receive it. We usually reject the Lord’s attempts to praise us and tell us how much he loves us. We dismiss his loving whispers because we don’t believe how loving he is. Our faith in our failings is stronger than our faith in his forgiveness. We feel surer of how unlovable we are, than of how loving he is. By falling into this hole, we insult and hurt not ourselves but the One who loves us. More than just delighting the receiver, using endearing terms and verbalizing love, thanks and praise, warms the heart of the giver. It arouses the giver’s passions, causing him or her to feel more affectionate and appreciative of the loved one he or she is addressing. Indeed, it often proves yet another instance of it being more blessed to give than to receive. Many of us have pet names that we reserve for someone we are in love with. It might be darling or honey or sweetheart, or any of a vast number of other possibilities, only a few of which will feel right to you. We also have words of praise that we would reserve for the love of our lives, such as you’re gorgeous, beautiful, exquisite. Again, preferences vary from person to person. These special names and adjectives conjure within us feelings of love, excitement, passion and romance like almost nothing else can. So using them when expressing our hearts to God can be a powerful way of arousing within us such feelings for God. For our prayer life to have any chance of being exciting and fulfilling, a significant proportion of it should focus on adoring God and expressing our love to him. We should certainly pray for everything we are anxious about. If, however, prayer becomes primarily a time for recounting all our worries and/or remembering our sins and failings, prayer is doomed to be dreary. Likewise, praying for people is important but we must not let prayer degenerate into little more than a grocery list of people we feel obligated to pray for. Unless we add more elements to prayer than that, cutting our toenails will be more exciting. Increasing the proportion of endearing terms and verbal expressions of love and praise to God in our prayers will do much to reverse any tendency for our relationship with God to go on a downward slide. Even when we pray for our concerns, it should be mixed with faith and thanksgiving so that we end the session more at peace and uplifted than we began. Philippians 4:6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving , present your requests to God. (Emphasis mine.) The Spice of Life Rather than provide a list of things to do or to avoid, one of my hopes is to inspire you to increase your prayer repertoire; introducing more variety into the way you pray. Continued . . .

What Intercession does for the Pray-er Uplifting thoughts by Prayer NET member, Frank Alcamo “I believe when you pray for someone else you are praying for yourself” When you help someone else you are helping yourself, and when a member of the body of Christ gets help, healing, a renewal of the Power of the Holy Ghost, I believe it affects the whole body of Christ for the better, because no one lives unto himself. And he that waters shall be watered himself by the Lord. My dad used to say if you help someone then you just helped yourself. When we live unselfishly, then we find the joy of the Lord. Whatsoever we do to the least of His brethren; we do to Him. This can have positive and negative connotations. May God help us always to do good and especially to those who are of the household of faith. We don’t have to beg God to save anyone. He wants to save them more than we want to see them saved. I am reminded of a conversation Moses had with God. It would almost seem at face value, that Moses was trying to persuade God to be merciful by not destroying the Israelites. But it was the other way around. God was building within Moses depths of compassion and mercy Moses had never had before. God was giving Moses a chance to stand in the gap for the stiff-necked Israelites. I believe when we pray for others; God works a softness and tenderness that was not there before in our hearts. This is because we are talking to the One who is all mercy, all beauty, all powerful, all kind and all loving. When we pray to Him, He changes us and makes us like Himself. We become most like the thing that we worship. That is why the Bible admonishes us to praise the Lord so much. Every time we do it, we become a little more like Jesus. God was testing Moses to see if Moses was only interested in himself or whether he was jealous that God be glorified. By the grace of God, Moses passed the test by saying that God should spare the Israelites so that the Egyptians would not think that God would bring them into the desert just to destroy them. Moses was interested in God’s reputation not in his own fame. And God rewarded him for it. The Start of This Series

Life’s too short to skimp on prayer! More Power! More faith-building, uplifting thoughts to inspire your prayer life. You want to pray more. Here’s the help, inspiration and encouragement you need. Ask As long as God, the Genius running my life, knows what he is doing, I can tolerate being mystified. Even if he told me, there are sure to be aspects of God’s wisdom beyond my intellectual grasp. Moreover, it could be dark in the nest because God is hatching something. It might be humility (better to be blind-folded by God than blinded by arrogance), it might be faith or patience, but when God keeps us in the dark, something good is incubating. Too often, however, we remain ignorant for a less profound reason: we have not bothered to ask. The possibility of hearing from the Lord seems too remote to warrant the effort of genuine prayer. I am like the prodigal’s brother in Jesus’ parable. ( Luke 15:29-31 ) ‘The father doesn’t give me so much as a kid,’ I almost grumble, forgetting that guidance, revelation - everything the Father has - is mine for the asking. ‘Ask ... seek,’ said Jesus. Dare I ignore his plea? How else can I know whether I should work harder or sleep longer; study engineering or needle-work; live off widow’s tithe’s or support myself? Passion ‘If you don’t spare your people, Lord, I don’t want to live,’ cried Moses. (Exodus 32:10,32 paraphrase) Does that mirror the intensity of your prayers? A half-hearted request invites a half-hearted reply. We must pray like the widow badgering the judge, and the neighbor hammering the door in the dead of night until receiving the thing desired. ( Luke 11:5-10; 18:1-7 ) The Lord has written a blank check for his children: ‘Keep asking, [‘...present tense, which indicates continuous, persistent prayer.’ - France, p 144, confirmed by Hendriksen, p 362, Gaebelein, p 186, Amplified Bible, etc. Proof that this is exactly what Jesus meant is found in the context in which it appears in Luke (Luke 11:5-10) and further supported by his parable in Luke 18:1-8] and you shall receive ...’ (Matthew 7:7) That’s his holy vow to you - the unbreakable promise of the unchangeable Lord. Our sole requirement is to keep asking. The only way our Savior could constrain us without desecrating his sacred oath would be by curbing our desires so that we don’t keep asking. The mere existence of a strong desire indicates that its fulfillment is inevitable, if it drives us to persist in relentless faith and prayer. Break the drought In the 1850s, Jeremiah Lanphier gave up his business and walked the streets of New York, his heart throbbing with a divine obsession. He distributed leaflets inviting people to attend an hour-long prayer meeting. No one turned up. Half an hour late, someone arrived, followed by five others. Next week, twenty came. Within six months they were meeting daily, and the number had risen to ten thousand. People were being saved. Diverse denominations were working together in unity. Revival sparks flew to other parts of the nation. In two years over a million converts were added to the churches and a further million church-attenders revived. What if, twenty-nine minutes into that first prayer meeting, Lanphier had left in despair? Elijah prayed for rain. Not a cloud in sight. He prayed again. Nothing. Six times he prayed. Six times there was no response. Time to implement plan B. This is how it went: if prayer doesn’t work after six times, try seven. Israel got wet. God’s chosen were in a desert facing starvation. And it was God’s doing. The Lord later revealed he had engineered it to see what his people were made of. ( Deuteronomy 8:2-3 ) Would they fall into faithless despair, or would they muster faith and declare, ‘Somehow, some way, God will bring us through’? Unlike the Israelites, we may not be in a life-threatening situation, but our ministry hopes could be staring at death. We’re wasting in a wilderness where through sickness or whatever, there’s not a crust of ministry to be found. This is not the time to crumple in a whimpering mass. This is our moment of glory. It’s the time to display our faith to the entire spirit-world, declaring, ‘God is the God of the impossible! Somehow, some way he will fulfil my heart’s desire.’ The Spirit can thrust us into a wilderness for testing as he did Jesus. But like Jesus and through Jesus we can emerge Spirit-filled and burst into ministry. In Christ, our possibilities would blow the circuits of anyone’s imagination. Let’s not succumb before discovering at least a fraction of the astounding things God can do through us. Remember Elijah and pray up a storm. Remember Lanphier and never walk away. Conquest The last time I flirted with danger was when I decided against a double knot to tie my shoelace. I have a heart of gold - yellow to the core. Yet Christ died that I might rule. Yield to my old nature and I cower; yield to my Christ-bought nature and I conquer. Fear will come. I can’t avoid it, but through Christ I need not bow to it. Victor or victim: it’s my decision. The tragedy is that we are often enslaved by forces that are meant to be our slaves. Rather than being tyrannized by fear, we should rise up and let it serve us. Fear’s duty is to impel us to prayer. Deprived of this faithful servant we might foolishly expose ourselves to danger without activating God’s wall of safety. Ensure your plans are in the will of God. Then list every fearful possibility. Pray through each point for as long as it takes to muster the faith that God has taken control. Now you have divine protection, the highest conceivable security. Fear has done its work. Bid it farewell. Like a naughty puppy, fear may still tag along, but ignore it. Reciting the fear-crushing promises of Scripture, fix your eyes on the goal and stride toward it. Waiting for fear to fade before advancing is like Peter waiting for the lake to evaporate before stepping out of the boat. Faith is the defeat of fear - not usually by fear’s removal, but by moving us to proceed despite fear’s yelps. All of heaven is on red alert when you follow Father’s orders. Help is a prayer away. Heaven’s resources - infinitely more than you will ever require - are available the instant you need them. ( Matthew 21:12-19; Luke 10:19; 21:12-19 ) As you march forward in obedience success is certain. Impossibilities Cringe in Defeat If it involved just God and us, ministry would be complex. Yet this is complicated many times over by the involvement of other people and even demonic powers. Nevertheless, every impediment to service will break under the weight of stubborn, faith- filled prayer. It may take days, months or years, but it will happen - provided we don’t let doubt, disobedience or bitterness sap our prayers of power. Christians are surrounded by serious problems. For us, problems have to be serious - if they smiled we’d see they have no teeth. Spiritually enthroned in heaven with Christ, we have instant access to the Father. Though evil forces of incredible power impinge upon us, resident within us is One greater than the combined forces of hell. ( 1 John 4:4 ) So we are never helpless pawns in a battle between spiritual superpowers. And divine omnipotence doesn’t sag when adversaries take human form or merge with psychological factors. The origin of our difficulties may be outside us, but not, in Christ, outside our sphere of influence. We serve a God in whose presence impossibilities cringe in defeat. Our mighty Lord can manipulate Satan like a puppet. Rest in the love of God, and a hostile world becomes a feather-bed. ‘You meant if for evil, but God meant it for good’ (Compare Genesis 50:20) describes every calamity we could ever face. ( Romans 8:28 ) The Kingdom needs prayer warriors, not prayer worriers. No matter how much you cry, beg, and wish, you have not moved from superstition to authentic Christian prayer until you can thank God for the answer, knowing it is yours before you hold it in your hand. Faith is not thinking that God can; it is knowing that he will. ( Mark 11:24; James 1:5-8 ) You will see it when you believe it. Hold on. Victory is certain. Love Jesus chided the Pharisees for using service as an excuse for neglecting family responsibilities. ( Matthew 15:3-5 ) Though sacrificial giving is a magnificent vocation, (Eg, Romans 12:6,8; 2 Corinthians 9:12-13; Philippians 4:17-18; Hebrews 13:16 ) it becomes a grotesque perversion when it leaves one’s family in need. ( 1 Timothy 5:8 ) To deny oneself is commendable, but to thrust impoverishment upon unwilling family members is to leave God’s blessing behind. A love of good works must not eclipse a love for people. Labor without love, is a torch without light; a fire without warmth. The principle is further demonstrated by Scripture’s directive to marriage partners. A zeal for prayer and self-denial, it implies, must not be allowed to overshadow marital obligations. ( 1 Corinthians 7:5 ) Even prayer can become a monster. If people are of value only in so far as they further our ministry opportunities, most people are trash. To give them so much as a grunt is to waste your precious time. But if the measure of people’s worth is the price Christ paid for their friendship, then you are surrounded by people of incomprehensible value. To do the tiniest thing for the least of them is an enormous privilege. Grasp this and you will discover that unless you are marooned alone on an island (and even then you can worship and intercede), you are constantly inundated with ministry opportunities. Whenever you meet someone, think to God, ‘How may I show this person your love?’ Anything could happen. You might end up being a little friendlier or breathing a five second intercessory prayer. By some measures the result may seem small, but for a few moments you have allowed yourself to be a critical link in a flood of love from Almighty God to a person of infinite importance. That’s an honor of the highest order. Nuggets In Argentina, around-the-clock pray-ers do battle in what is possibly one of the most powerful centers of prayer earth has seen. Some independent observers have concluded that it is bolts from this continual prayer storm that fuel the massive Argentine revival and spill over to the rest of the world. The participants are 2,000 prisoners. * * * Though offered with the best intentions, much sentimental waffle is sometimes uttered about returning to one’s ‘first love’, as if the starry-eyed euphoria of new Christians is greater than the mature depths of your average older Christian. Poppycock! Most spiritual honeymooners are radiant primarily because they think they have entered a blissful world of near-perfect Christians, instant answers to selfish prayers and a life forever free from pain, heartache and trials. Theirs is most likely mere puppy love, relative to the ardor moving you to tough it out. * * * How would you like to amass so much wealth that you could educate 122,683 children; buy 282,000 Bibles and one and a half million New Testaments; give away 112 million books, pamphlets and tracts; support hundreds of missionaries; and feed, clothe and house 10,000 children from the time they were orphaned until becoming independent? George Muller did. And he achieved this not by sweat and business acumen, not by garage sales and mailing lists, not by borrowing or asking for help, but solely by faith and prayer. He refused to let his needs be known to anyone but God. Fifty times in just one two-year period there were insufficient funds to see them through the day, yet what was needed always came in time. * * * Unbelieving prayer is wasted prayer. * * * Listen to Psalm 13. This dirge opens with, ‘How long will you forget me, Lord? Forever?’ With similar moans in the next few verses, the ancient blues singer continues his sob story. Then, just when we know where he is heading, he suddenly slams his song into reverse and declares, ‘I will sing unto the Lord, for he has dealt bountifully with me.’ The tail end of that little psalm looks as out of place as a fan of peacock feathers on the end of a pig. Yet no matter how odd it seems, psalm after psalm confirms that we can mingle praise with our pain. These inspired prayers prove that our Lord wants us to vent on him our grief and frustration. He wants honesty, not denial, and still he wants our praise. * * * Have you read The Cross and the Switchblade? The whole story - Teen Challenge, the conversion of Nicky Cruz and countless manifestations of God’s power - hinged on David Wilkerson’s decision to sharpen his use of time. He substituted prayer for television-viewing. What intercession does for the pray-er

Encouragement and inspiration for everyone who prays Fan the Flames! Whether you’re a prayer slogger or a prayer slacker, a powerful intercessor or a very average pray-er, this should challenge, uplift and motivate you. We all need to get fired up at times. Rekindle the fire! The Lost Weapon A Christian leader flew from America to Calcutta to put an extraordinary proposition to missionary Mark Buntain. Mark, who was approaching his sixties, was offered what his daughter called a ‘fantastic’ salary for life plus an expensive house in the United States. In return, he would be asked to devote the rest of his life to prayer. Let that haunt you for a moment and join me in 1 Timothy . I used to be perplexed by Paul’s guidelines for the selection of widows financially supported by the church. ( 1 Timothy 5:3-16 ) In general, Paul favored widows remarrying. ( 1 Timothy 5:14 ) So why, for these widows, was remarriage regarded as a broken vow? ( 1 Timothy 5:11-12 ) Why was as much scrutiny given to their character and past service as to their material need? ( 1 Timothy 5:7,9 ) The requirements read like the selection criteria for deaconesses, not welfare cases. And why were the ‘real’ widows those who pray night and day? ( 1 Timothy 5:5-7 ) After years of bewilderment, the pieces suddenly fitted: these elderly ladies were more than charity recipients, they were the church’s paid staff, devoted - like Anna in the temple ( Luke 2:36-38 ) - to the ministry of prayer, with perhaps other duties as well. That’s why such high standards were expected. That’s why marriage would interfere. Intercession is no frolic through the daisies. In parts of the globe wars rage to determine whether multitudes will be dominated by Islam. I shudder. I would rather be killed than kill. Yet, as I contemplate the horrors soldiers endure in order to kill, I wonder what I should be willing to suffer, battling in prayer for the liberation of souls. That’s the gutsy ministry entrusted to women we might have thought had passed their usefulness. The very class who today are perhaps most tempted to view themselves as worthless, formed the early church’s prized power-house. The Most Powerful Ministry? Lost in prayer, David Brainerd did not see the reared rattlesnake poised to strike his face. Watching wide-eyed with glee, were hate-crazed savages who had snuck up to the tent for the express purpose of murdering him. Unexpectedly, the snake suddenly veered and slid away. The Red Indians also silently retreated, awed by the snake’s reaction and intent upon spreading the word about this pale-face who so clearly had the Great Spirit’s protection. Oblivious to the entire episode, David broke camp and continued his journey. Yes, that was unusually dramatic, but are you any less ignorant of what takes place in the unseen spirit-world and within the sealed vault of people’s minds as you go about your normal affairs with the touch of God upon your life? Put bluntly, the main reason we undervalue many important ministries is worldliness. The world looks for human recognition. (Compare Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18; 23:2-12, 27-18; Luke 6:22-26 ) We do lip service, for example, to the power of prayer, yet view an evangelist basking in the limelight more favorably than the prayer-wrestler hidden in the back room. We exalt the virile missionary and sneer at the withered old lady whose paltry dollars God multiplied to carry that missionary to the field. If we’re blinded by carnality, heaven isn’t. To measure success in terms of human acclaim is to serve man, not God. The most powerful ministry is probably intercession. And the world’s greatest intercessor could be the ‘no-body’ sitting next to you in church last Sunday. Only the spirit-realm comprehends what Christ’s sacred service agents accomplish behind closed doors and behind enemy lines. Of necessity, singers perform in public; sound mixers and prayer fighters serve off- stage. Everyone sees your eyebrow. No one sees your liver. But which is more important? Your average evangelist steals glory for soul-winning from those who prayed, witnessed and worked the miracle of enticing non-Christians to a Christian meeting. Many of the evangelist’s ‘converts’ either found Christ before he arrived or through counseling after he left. Though few preachers are deliberate glory thieves, there will be many reversals in the next life. It was hardly a contest: two elderly ladies on their knees, versus a confident evangelist in the prime of manhood. They wanted Dwight Moody to have the Spirit’s power. He thought he already had it. But for him to resist was to pit his power of positive thinking against their prayers to the invincible Lord of every universe. A worn-out pop- gun versus a nuclear arsenal might have been less one-sided. The One who hears the prayers of the frail gave power to the ‘strong’. The impact shook the planet. Moody preached the same sermons but suddenly hundreds were being converted. He declared he wouldn’t return to his earlier days if offered the entire world. Star Wars Satanic opposition hampered Daniel’s ministry. He had sought a revelation. Heaven was silent. Though uncertain about what was happening, Daniel fought on in prayer and fasting, day after day. Heaven’s reply had been dispatched on angel’s wings, but evil powers blockaded it. When the celestial courier finally arrived, he revealed he had been engaged in heaven’s answer to Star Wars. ( Daniel 10:12-13 ) Spiritual powers had been locked in supernatural combat. For twenty-one earth-days the battle raged. Perhaps the weapons used defy our comprehension, but I believe a deciding factor was something we know a little about - the impassioned prayers of a man who longed to serve God. With the resolve of a marathon winner, Daniel prayed on and on and on. Had he accepted the hold-up as heaven’s final answer, the enemy might have successfully intercepted the prophetic message. With Satan lusting after our ministries like a crazed beast, we either pray or are preyed upon. The presence of obvious physical reasons for our problems does not reduce the likelihood that they are shots fired from the spirit world. Paul faced enough natural dangers to seize anyone’s attention - wild seas, infected wounds, bandits - yet he focused on spiritual battle. Humanists imagine they have suddenly become incredibly smart, being able to discern physical and psychological reasons for phenomena. They have actually become incredibly thick, being able to see nothing but the blatantly obvious. Paul’s words stick with appalling accuracy: ‘Professing to be wise, they became fools.’ ( Romans 1:22 ) Don’t catch their blindness. Though Paul regularly bled at the hands of human opponents, he insisted that our fight is not with people but with spiritual powers. ( Ephesians 6:12 ) His gospel threatened the livelihood, pride and traditions of thousands. Wherever he looked, human reasons for his struggle glared at him. Yet he saw the human component of his conflict as inconsequential. Either Paul was a fruitloop or we clash with the non-physical realm more than most of us suppose. Foot-sloggers are no match for the prince of the power of the air. If we neglect prayer, dark forces will forever sabotage our labors; our attempts to attack their kingdom will never get off the ground. Join the prayer force. A defiant fist amuses Satan. An uplifted hand terrifies him. Prayer will shoot him down. Prayer is Not Enough Prayer is fearsome ammunition. Without a canon, however, even the deadliest ammunition cannot pound the enemy. For faith-packed prayer to reach its full ferocity it must be used in conjunction with two other aspects of spiritual warfare. One aspect - legality - is automatic for the born again warrior. It is the other - authoritative aggression - where many of us falter. Add this to prayer and you have an arsenal against which the combined forces of hell are reduced to a cringing rabble of terrified wimps. If undesirables have moved into our house, it is insufficient to establish that their action is unlawful. Nor is it enough to complete an assertiveness training course. Confirming our legal standing and strengthening our resolve to enforce our rights are both vital steps, but it is futile to stop here. We must actually evict the squatters. Our spiritual union establishes the illegality of Satan’s move against us. Without this, as the sons of Sceva discovered, good intentions and pious or aggressive ranting achieves nothing. ( Acts 19:13-17 ) In addition, we need prayer to build us up, empowering us for spiritual confrontation. We often so focus on Paul’s itemization of the armor in his classic on spiritual combat that we forget it culminates in ‘praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit’. ( Ephesians 6:18 ) The disciples, bewildered by their inability to expel a demon, needed Jesus’ revelation that there is no alternative to prayer. ( Mark 9:17-18,28-29 ) No matter how intimately they knew Jesus, prayerlessness still meant powerlessness. Yet with our union with Christ resolving the legal issue and prayer girding us with divine strength, insidious trespassers will continue until we enforce our blood-bought rights. Jesus, ‘who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil,’ ( Acts 10:38 ) not only spent entire nights in prayer, he authoritatively confronted anti-God forces. Time and again he rebuked opponents to God’s will, be they fevers, storms, demons or whatever. We must follow his lead. The Bible opens by affirming that God created humanity to rule. From the onset, the Lord of hosts delegated authority to man and woman. ( Genesis 1:26-28 ) Humanity lost much when it lost its innocence, but with the breaking of sin’s curse by the shed blood of the innocent Son of God, we are again expected to rule, acting like Jesus in ousting evil hordes. If you were granted police powers, would you tolerate a law breaker vandalizing a sacred place, or assaulting someone, or molesting a child? Well aren’t you the Spirit’s holy sanctuary, part of Christ’s body and God’s own child? Is it proper for you to passively endure an evil assault upon your person? Shouldn’t you be incensed that defeated low-life, whose surrender cost the very life of the Son of God, would have the audacity to trespass onto God’s turf, insult a work of God and violate a part of Christ’s very body? When opposed by vile spirits, rise with indignation and enforce your Christ-won authority by ousting those frauds. When buffeted by malicious powers we are likely to feel as green and as limp as wilted spinach. We must understand that authority has nothing to do with how vibrant we feel. A police officer has as much authority when he is tired as when he is fresh. A bed-ridden king has more authority than a nobleman in the prime of manhood. The issue is not how strong we feel, but whether we are bound to the One granted all authority in heaven and earth. Prayer Drought In the game of life, how long you stay on the bench often depends on how you pray in the trials. Israel prayed and God called Moses. ( Exodus 2:23; 3:9-10 ) Israel prayed and God called Othniel. ( Judges 3:9 ) Israel prayed and God called Gideon. Israel prayed and God called Barak and Jephthah and Samuel and Saul and ... ( 1 Samuel 8:22; 12:10-11 ) You get the picture. (See also Judges 3:15; 4:3 ff; 6:7-8,11,14; 10:10-16; 11:1 ff; Nehemiah 9:27 ) Individual prayers are also spectacularly potent. Moses prayed and God ordained seventy elders. ( Numbers 11:10-25 ) Jesus prayed all night and twelve disciples were chosen. ( Luke 6:12-13 ) As thunder follows lightning, ministry followed the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus. His disciples’ experience was similar. On both occasions, prayer predominated, as it did when Paul and Barnabas received their missionary call. ( Luke 3:21-22; Acts 1:14; 2:1 ff; Acts 13:2-3 ) And I sense the air was heavy with prayer when elders imparted to Timothy his ministerial gift. ( 1 Timothy 4:13-14 , compared with Acts 13:3; 28:8 ) ‘ Pray the Lord of the harvest,’ instructed Jesus, ‘that he will thrust laborers into his harvest.’ (Matthew 9:38) Prayer and the emergence of ministries march arm in arm. Heaven is a bit old-fashioned. The ‘buy now, pray later’ philosophy has never caught on up there. I was threatened with a change that would have robbed me of so much time that continuing this book seemed impossible. While writing, I can convince myself that this time will be different; this time God will choose to use me. The possibility of having even that straw snatched from me swamped me with near-panic. I was agitated, worried, almost angry. The anguish of life in deep freeze is indelibly chiseled into the cortex of my mind. Who could forget month after month of coveting death? I dreaded even the briefest return to that dank hole. I was ashamed of my feelings. They hardly seemed Christian. Why not add a dash of condemnation to the devil’s brew bubbling through my brain? Looking back, I’m grateful for my ‘unchristian’ emotions. They drove me to fervent prayer. Pain is infinitely preferable to prayerlessly drifting from the will of God. Grab God’s Ear If we cannot glibly assume things will work out, there is a solution: ‘I’m stuck in this awful job,’ said Miss Fit. ‘I wish I had it so good!’ retorted N.V. ‘My ministry attempts are just one disaster after another,’ said Miss Hap. ‘I can’t get experience,’ complained Stayz Green. ‘I know what you mean,’ said Mrs. Often. ‘You’re just not good enough,’ declared Eymer Payne. ‘They say I’m too old,’ groaned Mr. Boat. ‘I’m fed up with waiting,’ said Patience Small . ‘Well if it’s that bad why waste time moaning when you could be praying?’ asked Ben Ya-knees. For the enthralling solution for the above nine puns please write, enclosing a fifty dollar check. (Well I thought it was worth a try!) Too often we speak piously of ‘closed doors’ as if Christ had never uttered those potent words, ‘Knock and it shall be opened.’ Power resides in persistent prayer; never in prayerless passivity. And it is faith, not fate, that releases us into ministry. We all wish we had better prayer lives and we would pray more, if only it sapped our powers of concentration less. Yet for most of us an easier way of praying actually exists. There are innumerable possibilities. You can pray on a hill, in a garden, in bed; kneeling, jogging, driving; out loud (a great help to concentration), in a whisper, in song, in your mind, in inarticulate longings or groans; by yourself, with a friend, in a group; at night, in the morning, at lunchtime; and there are too many other variations for me to list or even think of. Experiment. You will discover methods that boost your prayer life remarkably, either by making prayer easier or by giving you more hours in the day by letting you pray in circumstances where you would normally be prayerless. I especially urge you to find a prayer partner. It may be quite a search. Many people will have a manner of praying or prayer burdens quite different from your own. And praying together often creates such a bond that it is usually inadvisable to choose a prayer partner of the opposite sex unless you are both willing to risk romantic involvement. Find the right person, however, and you will be amazed at how fast an hour of concentrated prayer can whiz by. Life is too short to skimp on prayer An American army chaplain served in Germany with little success. When he transferred to Korea, he unpacked his old sermons and preached them to the American soldiers there. Suddenly, he was winning souls at a phenomenal rate. He was preaching the same sermons in the same manner to the same type of audience. There seemed just one difference: Koreans were interceding for their country, launching prayer assaults against the powers of darkness, at a level beyond anything known in Germany. Prayer and ministry are hammer and nail. But don’t bother praying for anything that you consider too unimportant to work sacrificially for. The great mystery of Christian life is not unanswered prayer, it’s unfinished prayer. Prayer that quits before the answer arrives is like a mansion carefully constructed, almost furnished, and then abandoned. As days snake by with no apparent change, our prayers become less passionate, less hopeful. We must fight this tendency with all we’ve got, employing to the full the irresistible force of prevailing prayer. It was persistence in prayer that made George Muller great. In the last year of his life he revealed that every day for over sixty years he had prayed for the salvation of two people, resolutely refusing to imagine they were beyond the touch of believing prayer. Though sixty years had passed without an answer, he publicly affirmed that he expected to see them in heaven. One of the two was converted just before Muller’s death and the other some years later. Such determined persistence - far more than any instantaneous, dramatic answer to prayer - reveals one’s faith. Passive people rust; Fools stay in bed. Prayerful people trust; Kneelers surge ahead. Sluggards keep their faults; Loafers end in shame. Pray-ers get results; Kneelers always gain. Pain raged through his body, muscles pleading with him to ease up. Ron Boehme kept running. His heart thumped. His lungs burned. On and on he pushed himself until finally completing his run. ‘Very good,’ the Lord seemed to say, ‘Now do the same in prayer.’ Prayer can be a battle we must slog out in the face of bitter opposition. We must fight on when everything within us seems to scream out ‘S-t-o-p!’ Even so, we must not turn prayer into a works program, hoping we can earn divine answers by the length of our prayers or the sweat on our brow. Prayer is casting ourselves upon the Lord. It’s declaring, ‘I can’t; you can.’ It’s delighting in him. It’s resting in him. It’s loving him. It’s yielding to him. Even misdirected prayers throb with power. Adoniram Judson, yearning for the privilege of evangelizing Jews, prayed to be sent to Jerusalem. When divine orders finally arrived they said ‘Burma’. There he suffered in prison. News of his torment spread as far as Turkey, where it moved Jews to yield their lives to Christ. When Adoniram learned of it, he was awed. That prayer for Jews was decades old. The spent prayers of yester-year still echo in the heavenlies. Don’t waste them; amplify them. Is God asking for a fight? I was driving home from church, dejected. Prayer had been offered for people who felt any special call upon their lives. Though I longed to respond, God had never spoken to me about future service. ‘The Lord gives almost everyone a personal word to cling to while waiting,’ I mused. Abraham may have languished for years, but God had promised him descendants. Young Joseph had a dream. David was anointed with oil. And the names kept coming. ‘Lord,’ I complained, ‘you’ve never given me a promise!’ ‘Except the million in God’s Word,’ came the thought. I went to bed, still agitated. As I lay there next morning my mind floated to Ruth, who found God’s blessing by stubbornly resisting the pleas of the most godly woman she knew. ( Ruth 1:4-17 ) My thoughts flashed through the centuries to the Canaanite who won her daughter’s healing and Jesus’ praise by persisting, despite being ignored, called a dog, and told her request was improper. ( Matthew 15:22-28 ) My heart leapt. Maybe God is doing the same to me! Surely, despite heaven’s silence, God’s heart is still open to my cry. I recalled something I placed in an early draft of this book: Most biblical teaching on prayer can be summarized thus: God delights in lavishing his blessings upon those too resolute to take ‘No’ for an answer. It’s true, and I hate it. Not only does it sound like a grueling endurance test, I loathe arguments. I cringe at the thought of pestering the One I love, or grieving him by not instantly yielding to the slightest indication of his wish. Further, I’m awed by the realization that God’s wisdom is infinite. That makes mine infinitesimal. Who am I to haggle with the greatest Mind in the universe? Jacob was blessed because he wrestled with God - and won. ( Genesis 32:24-30 ) I thought we scored by letting God win! This side of prayer seems to tear up everything Scripture teaches about love, submission and respect. After years of confusion a gleam penetrated in the guise of a startling thought: ‘God is a tease’. I slammed shut my mind. It couldn’t be. God’s not like that! Yet as I dared peek at that mysterious ray, light flooded my understanding. It’s true! God is a beautiful, loving tease! He declares he is the giving God ( James 1:5 , literal translation) and then lets everything suggest he is a tightwad. ‘You can’t have it! It’s not worth having. You’re not good enough!’ heaven and hell seem to howl. All the while he is hoping we will see through the jest to the heart of God. Play-fights with God make us strong. They are not to be taken lightly, however. Eternity holds its breath. Ruth’s sister-in-law surrendered to Naomi’s repeated pleas and returned to her people, turning her back on God’s blessing. Elisha wanted a double portion of Elijah’s spirit. The hide of the man! Time and again God’s oracle tried to shrug off that bald-headed upstart, yet Elisha clung to him with the obstinacy of a blood-sucker. ( 2 Kings 2:1-15 ) That’s what made him grate - er - great. Heaven’s strong room is plundered by everyone with the audacity to ask and the tenacity to receive. And God is tickled pink! Look above the stern ‘No’ on God’s lips to the sparkle in his eyes.

Hello Team, Thankful for so many pages now uploaded. If your favourite isn’t there, please let us know so we can get it up. Thank you for your continuous prayers! God is good. Grantley and Vicki

Feminism, Gender Issues & the Bible God’s View of Women Surprising Insights Has Your Church got it Wrong? Various beliefs and attitudes about gender issues can empower people, or crush them; inspire them to soar, or enslave them. That makes our views on the roles of men and women critically important to the God who has invested into humanity more than we can even conceive. Feelings can be devastatingly strong and deceptively convincing. No matter how real it seems, however, any feeling that God loves women less than men, or that he thinks women are inferior to men, is not from heaven. Most likely, that insidious feeling is the product of significant people in one’s life breaking God’s heart by failing to treat women or girls with the tenderness, honor and respect that their Creator expects them to be given. Any woman who has felt put down by a man has been subjected to abuse that appalls God. If the perpetrator claims to be a Christian, the offense is even more serious. The Almighty’s compassion for the oppressed powers a terrifying passion for justice, as seen in such Scriptures as: Mark 9:42 Whoever will cause one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him if he were thrown into the sea with a millstone hung around his neck. So mindboggling is divine love, however, that it even extends to oppressors whose callousness infuriates him. As heart-rending as it is, however, we all benefit from this conflicted situation. If that has you scratching your head, I’m forced to confess an embarrassing complication: the chilling truth is that even the most saintly of us stands in desperate need of the Judge’s eagerness to forgive our atrocities. For a while, then, our merciful Lord restrains his stupendous yearning for justice: Romans 2:4 Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? (English Standard Version) 2 Peter 3:9-10 The Lord . . . is patient with us, not wishing that anyone should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief . . . Our tender-hearted Lord is eager to forgive all who are broken with regret over their blunders. Those who remain unrepentant, however, will reel in regret for all eternity. I must confess, nonetheless, that no matter how critical gender issues are, I cannot help feeling tenderly even toward people whose views and behavior alarm me. Let me explain. We each have a surprising tendency to forget we are human. Although the reminder will probably be painful, I pray the Lord graciously reminds me of my humanity as often as needed – which is particularly likely whenever self-righteousness begins to intoxicate me. In the Greek New Testament, angel (aggelos, pronounced angelos) simply means messenger. Ironically, however, whether in the Bible or in your neighborhood, God speaks to humans through humans, vastly more than he uses angels. Have you thought through the implications? I’m no heavenly being; no alien from another world with any claim to innocence or infallibility. Even to call angels an entirely different species does no justice to how staggeringly they differ from us. They are so far removed from us that they are not merely genderless; they are not even physical. Unlike celestial beings, I need look no further than myself to know how often we humans are blinded and bullied by hurts, fears, prejudices, presumptions, and even by the dogmatic assertions of godly people whose walk with God or Bible-thumping ability makes them seem almost infallible. At the end of almost everything I write, I link to a webpage emphasizing my own fallibility. (I name the link My Shame to entice people to read it.) So neither feelings, nor current experience, nor people’s opinions, are reliable indicators of God’s view of women, nor of how immensely he treasures you out of all the billions on this planet. To grasp how the infinite Lord, the God of the Bible, thinks and feels, we must put aside our biases and preconceptions, and dive into an exciting exploration of God’s very words. In fact, whilst keeping it fascinating and easy to understand, I’d like us to plunge deeper than most Christians ever go. We could make some unexpected discoveries. Will you join me? Let’s start at the very beginning: Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Condensed, but without distortion, this is saying, ‘. . . God created man . . . male and female . . . ’ If that sounds odd, it is because the English language has changed over recent decades. Nevertheless, the point is so important that to ensure that no-one is left in any doubt, here in the very beginning of the first book of the Bible, this verse defines precisely what God’s Word means when it uses the word man. It means humanity. Whenever the Bible speaks of ‘man’ or ‘men’ in a general sense, it is referring equally to both genders. Yes, it is God’s express desire for women and girls to be included just as much as men. Until the last few decades, this was more readily understood because it was the way everyone spoke, not just in biblical Hebrew, but in everyday English. Language has now changed so much that to reflect the true meaning, up-to-date Bible versions should use ‘humanity’ or ‘people’ rather than ‘man’ or ‘men’. Make no mistake about it: humanity’s Judge is flawlessly impartial and holds both genders equally accountable. You will find in the just-cited link many Scriptures affirming that God shows no favoritism, but if you crave further confirmation that God does not judge with double standards, you need go no further than the Ten Commandments. Consider how they merely state, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” ( Exodus 20:17 ). Nothing is said about coveting husbands. It was quite unnecessary to spell out that God applies the same standard to both genders. Consider this: Hosea 4:14 I will not punish your daughters when they play the prostitute, nor your brides when they commit adultery; because the men consort with prostitutes, and they sacrifice with the shrine prostitutes . . . This is not, of course, saying one gender is justified in sinning because the other gender sins, but it is emphasizing that with God, sexual morality applies equally to both genders, no matter how much some men might wish it did not. Consider also how men and women are granted equal sexual rights: 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 Let the husband give his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also the wife her husband. The wife doesn’t have authority over her own body, but the husband. Likewise also the husband doesn’t have authority over his own body, but the wife. Don’t deprive one another . . . (Emphasis mine.) In fact, it is worth reading almost the entire chapter because it spells out over and over that, with God, the exact same rights, responsibilities and pressures apply equally to men and women ( 1 Corinthians 7:10-16, 32-34 ). A Deliverer? The creation story has depths that reveal more about the honor and dignity of women than you might have realized: Genesis 2:18-20 T he Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field, and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. . . . The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field; but for man there was not found a helper comparable to him. To become aware of his need for a helper, God had Adam examine the animal world. When, for example, birds pair off, the female role is not to pander to the male’s whims but to play an essential role in the fulfilling of their joint, divinely-appointed task to be fruitful and multiply. So it is with wives: their divinely intended focus is not the meeting of their husband’s personal desires but a task so noble that it is bigger than both of them – the fulfillment of the couple’s divinely-appointed assignments. Someone limited to English, unable to access God’s Word in its initial form, might be excused for supposing that the term ‘helper’ could apply to a servant and/or menial tasks. The reality is astonishingly different. Never in the Bible does the Hebrew word here translated ‘helper’ imply servitude. It is the term for a savior/deliverer. It is such a strong word that it is used almost exclusively of God as humanity’s helper. For example: Exodus 18:4 . . . “My father’s God was my help and delivered me from Pharaoh’s sword.” Psalms 33:20 Our soul has waited for the Lord. He is our help and our shield. Psalms 70:5 But I am poor and needy. Come to me quickly, God. You are my help and my deliverer. Lord, don’t delay. Psalms 121:2 My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. (Emphasis mine.) This suggests a wife is like God to her husband. Of course, she does not in any way replace God, but by giving a woman the status of her husband’s helper/deliverer, the Lord is assigning her a Godlike role in her man’s life. * * * As with our need of God, a man’s need of a helper implies his weakness, not his right to lord it over the one on whom he depends. The Hebrew word for help that we have been examining means to be rescued from deep trouble – from a predicament so dire that one is unable to save oneself. We all know how men typically loathe having to ask for help. They find it humiliating to admit even to themselves that they need someone’s help, and yet, in this situation, the help they so desperately need can only come from a woman. A man can either resent that dependence – the source of much misogyny? – or remain forever grateful to the woman who keeps on rescuing him. He can bless God for her; delighting in her, or grieve God by despising her or tiring of her: Proverbs 5:18-23 . . . Rejoice in the wife of your youth. . . . let her breasts satisfy you at all times. Be captivated always with her love. For why should you, my son, be captivated with an adulteress? Why embrace the bosom of another? For the ways of man are before the Lord’s eyes. He examines all his paths. The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare him. The cords of his sin hold him firmly. He will die for lack of instruction. In the greatness of his folly, he will go astray. The degree of never-ending faithfulness divinely expected of husbands and wives is appallingly rare in our throw-away society. Over and over, Scripture speaks of Israel going after other gods as if it were marital unfaithfulness. Despite being the ultimate, the Lord knows all too well the sickening blow of people thinking someone else might be preferable to him. And every day of every year, multiplied millions ensure the Perfect One knows the pain of being falsely blamed. No wonder he defends the spurned wife ( Malachi 2:13-14 ). Feminine Aspects of Almighty God? What if the Lord of Creation thinks so highly of womanhood that he deliberately chooses to refer to aspects of his own nature as being female? First, let’s get straight what is obvious to everyone, and yet somehow often fails to impact us: the Almighty has none of the most basic things that make someone male. In fact, there are many ways in which it is insulting or even blasphemous to think of God as being male. He does not have male genitals, even though, from the moment of birth, that is one of the most fundamental things that differentiate a male from a female. Neither does God have a Y chromosome or testosterone. Men tend to be hairier. God, being spirit, has nothing physical, including hair. Neither does he ever have sex with anyone. He has no opposite sex. Moreover, Scripture emphasizes that the man needed woman. He was incomplete without her. There is nothing needy or incomplete about God. He is, like no one else, the All-Sufficient One. So if there is any possible way in which God could ever be thought of as male, it would have to be in a very peculiar, limited and non-human sense. Nevertheless, in creating the human race in his very image, God chose to make humanity male and female. “In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27) certainly means that women and girls bear the divine image equally as much as their male counterparts. Put negatively: anything distinctively female in our species is no less like God than anything that is distinctively male. But is there a deeper reason for the Word of God placing side by side humanity being in God’s image with the creation of male and female? To see how strong the link is, let’s print the latter part of Genesis 1:27 this way: In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them . This reads like Hebrew poetry in which “male and female” parallels or corresponds with “in God’s image.” Whereas a common feature of English poetry is repetition of sounds (rhyme), in Hebrew poetry, a common feature is repetition of truths (synonymous parallelism). Other examples of parallelism: Psalm 49:1  . . . Hear this, all you peoples. Listen, all you inhabitants of the world Proverbs 6:20 My son, keep your father’s commandment, and don’t forsake your mother’s teaching. Proverbs 19:5 A false witness shall not be unpunished He who pours out lies shall not go free. Isaiah 1:10 Hear the Lord’s word, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah! Amos 8:10 |I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation. Does the divinely authorized account pair the two so closely because creating the sexes is a significant aspect of God making humanity in his image? The link suggests that both genders were required for God’s image to be complete. Could it be, for example, that the breadth of qualities pooled when a man and woman become one in marriage, better reflects the breadth of God’s nature than either gender does without the other? Perhaps this is one reason why people feel a unique completeness in a good marriage. We certainly know from the biblical teaching of the body of Christ that the fullness of Christ is better portrayed by the entire church than by individuals. The book of Proverbs does not shy away from implying there are feminine things about God. It hails wisdom as infinitely precious and of unrivaled importance (“ Wisdom is supreme . . .” – Proverbs 4:7 ). It never speaks of wisdom as being weak or fickle but as the most critically important and dependable quality that will protect us and provide for us, and yet it speaks of this priceless quality not as being male, but female. e’s intelligence is an essential, fundamental and inseparable part of anyone, whether it be a human or God himself. And Proverbs speaks of this crucial part of God, that has always been in him and through which he created everything, as being feminine. It treats wisdom as being so much of God that you could almost replace the word wisdom with eternal Son of God and the result would be theologically correct. For example: Proverbs 3:15 By wisdom the Lord founded the earth . . . Proverbs 8:23, 27, 30 I [wisdom] was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before the earth existed. . . . When he established the heavens, I was there. . . . I was the craftsman by his side. . . . (Compare this with John 1:1-3; Colossians 1:15-17 ) Together, this forms just one example. For more, see Similarities Between Proverb’s Wisdom & the Son of God. God, of course, is a person and Proverbs links God and wisdom so much that it refers to wisdom not as a thing, but as a person. Staggeringly, however, that person is female, not male. Jesus, too, speaks of wisdom as female, and refers to wisdom to justify his own actions ( Luke 7:34-35 ). In fact, Scripture says, “Christ is the . . . wisdom of God,” ( 1 Corinthians 1:24 ) Several of Jesus’ parables featured women and/or were more likely to appeal to women than to men. One of particular interest is in Luke 15 , where Jesus delivers three consecutive parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost (prodigal) son. In them, God is likened to a shepherd and a father. In the middle parable, however, Jesus likens God to a woman ( Luke 15:8 ). This might surprise some misogynists, but not someone who takes seriously the Bible’s insistence that God made both male and female in his own image ( Genesis 1:27 ). There is, of course, a huge overlap between men and women in their abilities and qualities, but any features more typical of either gender, reflect the glory within God himself. It is true that Scripture speaks of God as being a father, but burn this into your brain: Matthew 7:11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Emphasis mine.) To get even a vague idea of what God is like, we must never forget “then how much more,” plus Jesus’ insistence that, alongside the good Lord, every other father we have ever met is evil. God is a father without equal, but there is far more to him than our experience of fatherhood. He is powerful, but also tender and nurturing. Average fathers might be lacking in the special qualities that mothers have, but there is nothing average or deficient about God. Not only does Scripture reveal God as like everything desirable about a human father – only infinitely better – but it also speaks of him as being like a mother. For example: Isaiah 66:13 As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you. . . . For more surprising and deeply moving examples hidden in God's Word, see God’s Maternal Side. Also noteworthy, is how highly heaven values Christ’s body (Ephesians 1:22-23; 5:30-32 ; 1 Timothy 3:15) and yet, even though half of it consists of males, Scripture speaks of it as being female: Ephesians 5:25-27 . . . just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her . . . to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle . . . (NIV) Revelation 19:7, 9 Let’s rejoice and be exceedingly glad, and let’s give the glory to him. For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready. . . . Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb. . . . Revelation 21:9 . . . Come here. I will show you the wife, the Lamb’s bride. (Emphasis mine.) Not one of us has a thing to boast about. Everything even slightly good about us is entirely the grace of God and the work of Christ. And, even then, we too often break his heart and sabotage what he has done for us at stupendous cost to himself. Nevertheless, redeemed humanity is the spiritual elite; the best humanity has to offer God. And, as we have noted, the best of humanity is divinely portrayed, not as male, but female. Moreover, no matter how much it might make men squirm, and how much it might clash with their self-image, every male Christian is asked to see himself as part of the bride/wife of Christ. / Furthermore, God’s Word insists that men and women are spiritually equal: 1 Peter 3:7 . . . husbands, . . . live with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor to the woman . . . as being also joint heirs of the grace of life . . . (Emphasis mine.) Galatians 3:28 There is neither . . . male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Imagine the impact, if the words in that last Scripture ( Galatians 3:28 ) were ringing in one’s ears on the momentous occasion of first joining the church, and you and everyone else kept hearing it every time anyone else joined. What if this was, in fact, what happened in the early church – in the very era when that declaration was at its most radical, because it stood in total contradiction to what almost everyone outside the Christian community believed? Theologian, Robin Scroggs, is convinced this actually happened. He says this verse “is almost surely a fragment of an early baptismal formula . . . The community was powerless to alter role valuations in the outside culture, but within the church, behavior patterns and interrelationships were to be based on this affirmation of equality”. The quote is from Robin Scroggs in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Supplementary Volume, Abingdon Press, Abingdon, Nashville, 1976, page 966 Ronald Fung, says Scroggs is “probably right” about it being a baptismal formula, and F. F. Bruce cites it as a possibility. Ronald Fung The Epistle to the Galatians (The New International Commentary on the New Testament) Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1988, page 175 F. F. Bruce The Epistle to the Galatians (The New International Greek Testament Commentary) Paternoster Press, Exeter, 1982, page 187 Writes James Montgomery Boice, “It is hard to imagine how badly women were treated in antiquity even in Judaism, and how difficult it is to find any statement about equality of the sexes, however weak, in any ancient texts except those of Christianity. The Jew prayed, ‘I thank God that thou hast not made me a woman’ (common morning prayer). Josephus [a famous first century Jewish historian] wrote, ‘Woman is inferior to man in every way’ . . . The Gentile world had similar expressions. But Paul reverses this.” James Montgomery Boice Galatians Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan.1976, page 469 ff Commenting on a significantly different portion of Paul’s writings, Donald M. Lake says something similar: “Paul’s description of the sexual relationship in 1 Corinthians 7:1-7 is unparalled in ancient thought and lit. [literature]: ‘the husband does not rule over his body, but the wife does.’ ” Consider also Martha’s squabble with Mary ( Luke 10:40-42 ). Martha was virtually telling her sister, “As a woman, your place is in the kitchen, not at Jesus’ feet with the apostles,” but our Lord defended Mary’s right to the privileged position she had chosen. A Powerful Person For another aspect of the Bible’s view of womanhood, consider this description of a wife: Proverbs 31:11, 14, 16-18, 24-26, 28-29, 31 The heart of her husband trusts in her. . . . She is like the merchant ships. She brings her bread from afar. . . . She considers a field, and buys it. [A huge financial decision.] With the fruit of her hands, she plants a vineyard. She arms her waist with strength, and makes her arms strong. [Even her physical strength is valued.] She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. . . . She makes linen garments and sells them, and delivers sashes to the merchant. [She has her own business.] Strength and dignity are her clothing. . . . She opens her mouth with wisdom. Faithful instruction is on her tongue. . . . Her children rise up and call her blessed. Her husband also praises her: “ Many women do noble things , but you excel them all.” . . . Give her of the fruit of her hands! Let her works praise her in the gates! . . . (Emphasis mine.) This is one highly capable person! Her husband esteems her intellect, talents, economic prowess and even her physical strength. We all know how expensive property is. The woman Scripture exalts, not only has the ability to make such critically important decisions; her husband has full faith in her. And this part of the Bible was written centuries before Christ. Just a few centuries ago, for a married woman to wield such power was exceedingly rare, and even in the twenty-first century, many Muslim women are not allowed to do so. Nowhere in the full account does her weight, age and figure even rate a mention. Neither does how sexy or attractive she is. In fact, Proverbs 31:30 specifically states that charm is deceptive and beauty is vain but the woman who honors God should be praised. Treating anyone as a sex object is totally contrary to biblical thinking. Instead, she is esteemed for endowing herself with ‘strength and dignity’. A literal translation of the Hebrew is that they are her clothing. We are not born with clothing. We choose what we wear. Likewise, being clothed with ‘strength and dignity’ is not something she has no control over, but what she chooses to do. It refers not to certain features some women are born with and others miss out on, but what any woman can choose to do. The same applies to honoring God and to other things mentioned in this passage. The Weaker Sex? To rightfully claim the ability to discern the subtleties of expressions in New Testament Greek takes ten to twenty years of harder work than I am capable of. What I know, however, is that the same Greek word for ‘as’ is used in both of the following: love your neighbor as yourself ( Mark 12:31 , and elsewhere) giving honor to the woman, as to the weaker vessel ( 1 Peter 3:7 ) The similarity of expressions suggests to me that the Bible is no more emphatically stating that women are weaker, than it makes the nonsensical claim that you are your own neighbor. Since the first quote is saying love your neighbor as if he were yourself (not because he is yourself), the second could be saying husbands should love their wives, not because they are weaker, but as if they were weaker (and hence deserving greater care). To love someone as if that person were oneself demands immense love and respect. Consider, for example, how much time one devotes to tending to one’s own needs. God insists, however, that husbands must go beyond even this. In Ephesians 5:25 , God says husbands must love their wives as Christ did when he literally sacrificed everything, even his very life. And in the Scripture that inspired this discussion, God tells each husband to love his wife as if her earthly shell – the part of her that houses eternal treasure – is worthy of even more consideration than his own. Let’s plunge deeper: 1 Peter 3:7-9 You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor to the woman, as to the weaker vessel, as also being joint heirs of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered. (Emphasis mine.) As you know, it is my conviction that whether wives are actually more delicate is a matter this Scripture does not address. What it does stress, however, is that every husband is divinely required to treat his wife with greater care, sensitivity, thoughtfulness and gentleness than he treats himself. Moreover, it declares that if any man fails to do this, the God who both made the woman and cares passionately for her, is so alarmed that the man’s prayer life – the very core of his relationship with God – is at stake. The last thing anyone needs is communication problems with God. Who wants to find oneself cut off from God’s blessings? Who wants to be in a crisis and have his desperate pleas to the only One who can save us go no further than the ceiling? Suddenly the implications of this Scripture hit hard: James 5:16 . . .The insistent prayer of a righteous person is powerfully effective. (Emphasis mine.) And this sends chills down the spine: Isaiah 59:2 . . . your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. And what about this? Galatians 6:7 Don’t be deceived [its coming could be so slow that we are in grave danger of fooling ourselves into thinking we have got away with it, but it is as unavoidable as death]. God is not mocked [it is divinely guaranteed], for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap [we choose our future and seal our fate: we will end up on the receiving end of whatever we have dished out]. Even for someone unimpressed by my understanding of “as to the weaker vessel,” it is worth observing that this passage is speaking not of women in general but of wives. We all know how gender generalizations have oodles of exceptions, but it is interesting to note that people tend to pair up so as to reinforce the generalization. For example, women who are taller than average men often try to find husbands who are even taller, and men who are shorter than most women often try to find women who are even shorter. So even though gender differences have many exceptions, they often apply within a marriage. We should also consider the big difference between what people enjoy doing and what they are capable of achieving, if forced to. By way of example, consider introverts and extraverts. Both are equally normal and both have strengths and weaknesses. Introverts can be very good socially. That’s not what differentiates them from extraverts. The difference is that socializing energizes extraverts – it recharges them – whereas it tires introverts. Similarly, it is not that wives are incapable of being tough, but Scripture is saying that it is wrong for husbands to force their wives to act tougher, thicker-skinned, less expressive, or whatever, than their wives would prefer to be. On the other hand, there are, of course, ways in which men are typically weaker than women. Physically, however, men are usually stronger than their wives, thus rendering their womenfolk vulnerable. In the words of a divinely moved writer, “we have this treasure in earthen vessels ” ( 2 Corinthians 4:7, KJV – same Greek word for vessel as in 1 Peter 3:7 ). Any physical advantage, however, must never be abused. Whatever edge either partner has, it must be used to serve – not put down – the other. That’s what love is all about, and God is all about love. Obviously, women are not to be treated as if they have weaker minds or are spiritually weaker. Indeed, the Scripture we keep returning to insists that they are spiritual equals (joint heirs of Christ’s riches). We have noted that the Bible honors women not only for their intellect and industriousness but for their strength: Proverbs 31:17, 25 She arms her waist with strength, and makes her arms strong. . . . Strength and dignity are her clothing. . . . Nevertheless, Scripture adds that wives should be treated not with the roughness that some men might treat themselves, but as if female vessels – the outer shell; the earthly, temporal, least important part of us that is “decaying,” as contrasted with “our inward person” that is being “renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16) – deserves even greater consideration than men typically give themselves. Moreover, the Word of God insists that for a man to disregard this, will threaten his relationship with God. Note the similarity between these two passages: Malachi 2:13-14 . . . You flood the LORD’s altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer pays attention to your offerings . . . You ask, “Why?” It is because the LORD is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant. 1 Peter 3:7-9 . . . you husbands must live with your wives in an understanding manner, as with a most delicate partner. Honor them as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing may interfere with your prayers. (New International Version) The passage in Malachi not only highlights treating one’s wife as being critical in how God responds to our attempts to reach out to him (and Peter links this to prayer) but it says it renders offerings useless. Every husband is expected to treat God’s daughter as the most delicate, priceless and irreplaceable crystal ware. Think of her as a cheap, unbreakable plastic mug, and even on earth you will suffer spiritually. Ride roughshod over her feelings, and God is so much his daughter’s avenger that when he acts, even your prayers for mercy might go unheeded. Earlier, when examining Scripture to discover what husbands must do to avoid divine judgment, I cited the context to emphasize that husbands were divinely obligated to act that way. God is not into double standards, however. Peter wrote about how wives should act toward their husbands and then immediately said, “ You husbands, in the same way . . . ( 1 Peter 3:7 ). This confirms that even if husbands and wives have slightly different roles, there is great similarity between what God expects of each partner. And immediately after that verse, the passage reveals not merely what God expects of husbands but of everyone, regardless of gender or marital status: 1 Peter 3:8-9 Finally, all of you be like-minded, compassionate, loving as brothers, tenderhearted, courteous, not rendering evil for evil, or insult for insult; but instead blessing, knowing that you were called to this, that you may inherit a blessing . (Emphasis mine.) God excuses arrogance and me-ism in no one. We have already noted that to lord it over someone or manipulate anyone for one’s selfish gain is to set oneself on a collision course with one’s eternal Judge. Scriptures such as the following, of course, apply equally to both genders: Philippians 2:5-8 Have this in your mind, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, . . . he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, yes, the death of the cross. Beyond Marriage We have so far spoken often of wives. It is important to understand that a woman’s value extends beyond marriage. Nevertheless, it is a fact of life that most people marry, and it is in marriage that we see men and women side by side, making a comparison of the sexes easier. And it is here that, right from the beginning, the Lord reveals women as Godlike, relative to men. We have seen that God chooses to describe the contribution of women in marriage by using a word similar in meaning to savior. “Besides me, there is no savior,” declares the Lord ( Isaiah 43:11; Hosea 13:4 ). Likewise, the Hebrew word somewhat inadequately translated help or helper is elsewhere in Scripture reserved almost exclusively for God. In addition, we all know how vitally important and irreplaceable mothers are. Children deprived of a good mother will suffer the loss for the rest of their lives. It is divinely required that mothers be honored and obeyed, even by their sons, just as much as fathers. This is as basic as the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:12). We are so aware of this that we take it for granted. It is significant, nonetheless. Kings’ mothers are frequently named ( 2 Kings 8:26; 12:1; 14:2; 15:2, 33; 18:2; 21:1; 23:36; 24:8, 18 ), suggesting they wielded considerable political influence. Ahaziah’s mother certainly did, though brutally ( 2 Kings 11:1, 3 ). In 1 Kings 1:11-31 we see Solomon’s mother, Bathsheba, taking a key role in helping her son gain the throne, and we see an example of her political power in 1 Kings 2:18-21 , where her favor was sought to entreat the king, and she sat at the enthroned king’s right hand. 2 Timothy 1:5 strongly implies Paul was acknowledging the huge impact that both Timothy’s mother and grandmother had had on Timothy’s walk with God. Nevertheless, as exceedingly valuable as wives and mothers are, it would be wrong to imagine that a woman’s worth peaks in marriage. Scripture is adamant that remaining single is good ( 1 Corinthians 7:1, 8, 26 ). The Greek word for good has connotations, not of dour asceticism, but of being wholesome and beautiful. In fact, Scripture goes beyond saying that not marrying is as good as marriage; it says that not marrying is even better ( 1 Corinthians 7:38 ). Elderly widows deprived even of relatives to support them might seem to have little to offer, but that’s not how the Spirit-led early church viewed them. They were the church’s fulltime staff, ministering through prayer and probably other service. Not even the apostle Paul served fulltime, but divided his time between ministry and earning an income ( Acts 18:3-4; 1 Corinthians 9:11-18; 2 Corinthians 12:14-15 ). Insights from a Little-Read Passage In Romans, Paul sends individual greetings to Christians he esteems. Ten of them are women. For your convenience, I have highlighted each one in Women in Romans 16:1-15 . Let’s look at some of the women specifically named. There being no US Mail back then (I doubt they even had email, and Paul’s letters were too long for Twitter) letters were usually hand-delivered by a trusted, dependable friend. Theologian, John Murray says “It is highly probable” that Phoebe was honored with the special responsibility of personally delivering to the Christians in Rome Paul’s letter that is now a key book of the Bible. Murray continues, “But if Phoebe conveyed the epistle there would be an additional reason. . . . Phoebe was a woman who had performed distinguished service to the church and the commendation had to be commensurate with her character and devotion.” F.F. Bruce says she was a deacon and adds, “That the duties of a deacon could be performed by either men or women is suggested by 1 Timothy 3:11 , where ‘the women’ are to be understood as ‘deacons’ (like the men in verses 3-10). . . . Phoebe was evidently to [the city of] Cenchreae what Lydia [another woman] was to Philippi (cf. Acts 16:15 ).” Likewise, Frédéric Godet wrote, “It seems to us impossible to think that the widows spoken of, 1 Tim. 5:3 et seq. were not persons invested with an ecclesiastical [official, church] office.” “Both Paul and Luke generally name Prisca (Priscilla) before her husband, perhaps because hers was the most impressive personality,” comments F.F. Bruce on the passage we have been looking at. Hendriksen asks, “Could the reason be that in this case the wife ranked even higher than the husband in her labors for Christ?” If so, she must be quite remarkable because he rightly adds, “her husband too was fully committed to the cause of Christ”. Hendriksen, William Romans: 9-16 New Testament Commentary Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1981, page 499 ff Everett Harrison says her name appearing first “seems to testify to her great gifts and usefulness in the kingdom of God” but notes that “Priscilla and Aquila represent a splendid image of Christian married life, since they are always mentioned as a couple. Harrison, Everett F. Romans Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1976, page 160 ff One of the times Priscilla’s name appears first is particularly noteworthy: Acts 18:24-27 . . . Apollos . . . was mighty in the Scriptures. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, although he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside, and explained to him the way of God more accurately. When he had determined to pass over into Achaia, the brothers encouraged him, and wrote to the disciples to receive him. When he had come, he greatly helped those who had believed through grace . . . Comments Richard C. H. Lenski on this Scripture, “Luke surely wants his readers to understand that Priscilla was the main teacher.” Without even considering the significance of Priscilla’s name coming first, however, this Scripture makes it undeniable that “ they [not just Aquila] took him aside, and explained to him the way of God more accurately” (emphasis mine). At the very least, she clearly played an important role in instructing this man, who was already “mighty in the Scriptures” and “had been instructed in the way of the Lord,” and who “taught accurately the things concerning Jesus.” As suggested by the end of the quote, after receiving Priscilla’s instruction, Apollos went on to become a significant early Christian leader. F.F. Bruce points out that the Mary in Romans 16:6 (see above) is yet another Mary referred to in the Bible and is not mentioned elsewhere. He also says that although the gender of the bearer of the name Junia is not certain, it is preferable to presume it was a woman. Leon Morris agrees, and refers to an article in which Ray R. Schulz “argues strongly” that it is a woman’s name. Morris is one of many who believe that the original Greek text implies that she was actually an apostle. He cites as one line of evidence the fact that this was precisely Chrysostom’s understanding. (Since Chrysostom was an early Christian scholar, born about 349 AD, one could hardly argue he was influenced by modern feminism.) Morris, noting the meaning of Tryphaena’s and Tryphosa’s names, writes, “Paul is perhaps using some gentle irony when he commends two ladies called ‘delicate’ and ‘dainty’ for the fact that they work hard ” (emphasis Morris’s). Commenting on Paul’s touching reference to Rufus’s mother as “his mother and mine,” Hendriksen writes, “. . . here, as often, the apostle again proves that he appreciates what the female members have done and are doing for himself and for the church, for the glory of God.” Clearly, Paul felt warmly and tenderly toward this woman. In fact, he considered each of the women listed as worthy of honor. You might think little is said about these women but we rarely pause to realize that the same is surprisingly true about almost everyone else in the New Testament. Every human is of infinite importance to the infinite Lord. For a little more on that last sentence, see Infinitely Important. The Lord of glory is so staggeringly better than anyone else we have ever encountered that we keep going to appalling extremes in underestimating him. Let’s not let human limitations cause us to doubt not only how much an entire gender means to their Creator and Savior, but how stupendously important to him is the most seemingly insignificant of us. We would need a freight train to haul around a book recording every human act that in a single moment our Lord considers important. So, rather than detailing all the people whose service God regarded as invaluable, the role of the New Testament is to focus on matters essential for our spiritual well-being. For example, we learn from Acts 1:21-23 that Joseph and Matthias had been with the apostles “all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, to the day that he was received up from us,” but not one of the Gospels mentions them. They were nominated to replace Judas, and Matthias was chosen. Neither of them was ever cited again in the Bible. This surprises people who forget that the same is true of most of all the other eleven. For example, nine of the new Twelve are never again mentioned in the entire book of Acts, even though they must surely have had significant ministries. In all the Bible, Judas himself is mentioned only in relation to his betrayal and suicide – other than one Gospel saying he objected to the extravagance of the perfume poured on Jesus’ feet ( John 12:4 ). The other Judas, too, is recorded asking just one question in one gospel ( John 14:22 ) and virtually nothing else. It is not even certain who he is in Matthew’s and Mark’s list of apostles, since they use a different name for him. Even apostles we feel familiar with are almost never mentioned beyond their names appearing in the list of Jesus’ Twelve. We know that Jesus called Matthew, who then invited his friends and Jesus to his home ( Mark 2:14-15 ), and that’s about all Scripture tells us. We actually know a little more about Zacchaeus, and a number of others, who were not even apostles. Outside the list of apostles, Philip is mentioned only in John. And these are among the apostles we know most about! There are ancient traditions of many of the little-mentioned disciples doing significant things. It’s certainly possible – after all, they were hand-picked by our Lord and filled with his Spirit – but there are so many about whom the Bible says astonishingly little. The Bible mentions Jesus’ mother so much more often than his father that biblical accounts give no proof that he was even alive for most of Jesus’ life. Even about Jesus’ time on earth, Scripture tells us far less than most of us realize. Building on What We Have So Far Learned We all know the honor showered on the first person to climb Mount Everest, the first person to walk on the moon, and so on. Ponder this: the first person to see the resurrected Lord was a woman ( Matthew 28:1, 9; Mark 16:9; John 20:11-17 ). God does not have accidents. She was divinely chosen for this honor. If businessmen who finance significant projects are considered important, how important should we regard those who financially supported the Son of God’s earthly mission? Except for Joseph, who gave Jesus his tomb ( Matthew 27:59-60 ) and a few like Zacchaeus ( Luke 19:5 ) and Simon the Pharisee ( Luke 7:39-40 ), I only know of women who even slightly filled this valuable role: Luke 8:1-3 . . . he went about through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of God’s Kingdom. With him were the twelve, and certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary who was called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out; and Joanna, the wife of Chuzas, Herod’s steward; Susanna; and many others; who served them from their possessions. (Emphasis mine.) Among the “many others” mentioned in the above quote must have been “Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee” ( Matthew 27:55-56 ). Not only is financial support significant, these women supported our Lord not by mailing a check, but up close and personal; following him from village to village to village; seeing his every miracle, hanging on to his every word, and interacting with him as intimately as his twelve apostles. We miss so much when, as we inevitably do, we read Scripture with twenty-first-century eyes. Robin Scroggs, who has a greater familiarity with the cultural background to Jesus’ time on earth, says of the women who followed Jesus, attending his needs: “Since these women were not wives of the disciples, a picture emerges of an itinerant traveling entourage of males and females unmarried to each other – a situation which would have been scandalous to the pious Jew.” He goes on to say, “The attention and acceptance given in the gospel tradition to prostitutes and women with other immoral sexual histories is startling, seen against the backdrop of Jewish piety” So radically did Jesus’ ways clash with the prejudices and self-righteousness of the religious elite of his day, that it is no coincidence that in the genealogy (usually an all-male document) of the Messiah, we find five women, all of whom, along with their male partners, were involved in some form of sexual impropriety. To start a Gospel highlighting this, as Matthew did, must have shocked Jews, even though the Old Testament scriptures made them very familiar with the facts. When King Josiah wanted to hear from God, he told the priest and other officials, “Go inquire of the Lord for me, and for the people, and for all Judah.” To do so, they consulted a woman; a prophetess who, moved by Spirit of God, spoke a message from God to them ( 2 Kings 22:12-15 ). Both Miriam ( Exodus 15:20 ) and Deborah ( Judges 4:4 ) are specifically called prophetesses. Speaking of Miriam, note the significance of her ministry as indicated by this Scripture: Micah 6:4 For I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage. I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. Temple-dwelling Anna is specifically called a prophetess ( Luke 2:36-38 ), and Mary’s ecstatic utterance was clearly prophetic. I believe the same applies to Elizabeth and to Hannah. In 1 Corinthians chapters 12-14 , Paul devotes much space developing the argument that prophecy is the greatest of all spiritual gifts, and he writes of women prophesying ( 1 Corinthians 11:5 ) as if it were an everyday occurrence, as does Acts 2:17 (quoting Joel about the new era of the Spirit). And, much later, Acts 21:9 mentions not one or two, but four women “who prophesied.” We have also cited biblical evidence for a female apostle. Significantly, Paul wrote that two women, Euodia and Syntyche, “labored with me in the gospel ( Philippians 4:2-3, KJV ). Hawthorne says the word here translated “labored with me” means “to fight together side by side with.” He explains that it “is a metaphorical word drawn from the games or the gladiatorial arena. . . . It implies a united struggle in preaching the gospel, on the one hand, and a sharing in the suffering that results from the struggle, on the other.” He explains that the use of this word implies “more than a hint of cooperation on the same level [Emphasis mine]. By using it Paul wishes to say that these women are . . . to be respected highly for their energetic cooperation with him, working at his side as esteemed members of his team.” Using another Greek word, Paul refers to another woman, Prisca, (along with her husband) as his fellow worker or co-laborer ( Romans 16:3 ). The particular term Paul used here for fellow worker, is what he used elsewhere for such significant people as Timothy ( Romans 16:21; 1 Thessalonians 3:2 ), Titus ( 2 Corinthians 8:23 ), Apollos ( 1 Corinthians 3:6, 9 ), and Luke and Mark ( Philemon 1:24 ). Abigail is praised for being wiser than both her husband and David: 1 Samuel 25:3 Now the name of the man was Nabal; and the name of his wife Abigail. This woman was intelligent . . . but the man was surly and evil in his doings. . . . 1 Samuel 25:32 David said to Abigail, “Blessed is the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you today to meet me! Blessed is your discretion, and blessed are you, who have kept me today from blood guiltiness, and from avenging myself with my own hand. . . .” In addition to all of this, it might be timely to again remind ourselves that, except for a rare few granted the ability to feel complete without marrying ( 1 Corinthians 7:7 ), women are the divinely-ordained deliverers of men who find themselves in a dire predicament. 2 John is addressed to “the chosen lady and her children” ( 2 John 1:1 , note also 2 John 1:4-5, 13). Ruth Edwards comments, “Though frequently interpreted today as the personification of a church , there is much to be said for the older view that ‘the elect lady’ is an individual (cf. 3 John 1:1 ) who was in a position of leadership within a Christian group (cf. other references to churches meeting in the houses of individual women, e.g. Acts 12:12 ).” An Offensive God? We noted that, in their abilities and characteristics, there is a huge degree of overlap between the sexes. Moreover, God has none of those things that are unique to human males, and he should not even be thought of as having them. Nevertheless, God is by no means an ‘it’. He is so much a person that alongside him, the most warm and caring of us seems cold and insensitive. We have no pronoun in our language for a genderless person. Forced to choose a pronoun that is either associated with a male or a female, the Lord, for some reason, chose the male one. On the other hand, he deliberately opts for the feminine pronoun for that critically important part of him: wisdom. We cannot expect the one and only God to fit neatly into human categories. It is tragic if the male pronoun is disconcerting for some dear women who have suffered atrocious at the hands of certain males. There are, however, more males than is commonly acknowledged, who have also suffered atrociously because of men and, for example, reel at the thought of God being called a father. On the other extreme, many people who missed out on having a good father have found special comfort in thinking that in God they have the perfect one. Likewise, women who ache for a husband they do not have, often find comfort in such Scriptures as: Isaiah 62:5 . . . As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so your God will rejoice over you. Isaiah 54:4-5 Don’t be afraid, for you will not be ashamed. . . . You will remember the reproach of your widowhood no more. For your Maker is your husband . . . For them, seeing God as male means a lot. Men who find themselves without a marriage partner, however, are deprived of such comfort. Edwards then proceeds to make an interesting comment on Mark 10:12 , which speaks of a woman divorcing her husband. “This statement is problematic, since in Jewish law only a man could initiate a divorce, and adultery was an offense against the husband. Either the Markan formulation is an adaption to Jesus’ words to a gentile, possibly Roman, setting, or Jesus is here radically differing from the Jewish position by placing the woman on an equal footing with the man.” An Offensive God? We noted that, in their abilities and characteristics, there is a huge degree of overlap between the sexes. Moreover, God has none of those things that are unique to human males, and he should not even be thought of as having them. Nevertheless, God is by no means an ‘it’. He is so much a person that alongside him, the most warm and caring of us seems cold and insensitive. We have no pronoun in our language for a genderless person. Forced to choose a pronoun that is either associated with a male or a female, the Lord, for some reason, chose the male one. On the other hand, he deliberately opts for the feminine pronoun for that critically important part of him: wisdom. We cannot expect the one and only God to fit neatly into human categories. It is tragic if the male pronoun is disconcerting for some dear women who have suffered atrocious at the hands of certain males. There are, however, more males than is commonly acknowledged, who have also suffered atrociously because of men and, for example, reel at the thought of God being called a father. On the other extreme, many people who missed out on having a good father have found special comfort in thinking that in God they have the perfect one. Likewise, women who ache for a husband they do not have, often find comfort in such Scriptures as: Isaiah 62:5 . . . As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so your God will rejoice over you. Isaiah 54:4-5 Don’t be afraid, for you will not be ashamed. . . . You will remember the reproach of your widowhood no more. For your Maker is your husband . . . For them, seeing God as male means a lot. Men who find themselves without a marriage partner, however, are deprived of such comfort. Fear and resentment are natural human reactions to being treated in an ungodly way. Regrettably, these feelings inevitably turn cancerous and spread from the original cause, until we end up feeling this way even toward innocent people. For example, if one male’s cruelty induces fear and resentment in us, it can spread until we find ourselves feeling this way about most males. More alarming still, no one is as innocent as God. When we let our reaction eat away at our relationship with God, it is truly tragic. A vital aspect of Jesus’ earthly mission was to show us what God is like ( John 1:14; 14:9; Hebrews 1:1-3 ). Almost everything he did offended some people, whether it was eating and drinking with ‘sinners’ ( Matthew 9:11; Matthew 11:18-19 ) pronouncing someone’s sins were forgiven ( Mark 2:5-7 ) healing on the Sabbath ( Luke 6:7; 13:14 ) letting women get close to him ( Matthew 15:22-23; 28:9; Mark 5:27-32; Luke 7:39; 10:39-40; 18:15; John 4:27 ) or whatever. Astonishingly, what offended some, was often the very thing that greatly blessed someone else. Something that offended virtually everyone, however, was when Jesus spoke of people having to consume his flesh and blood. He could have expressed it another way but, instead, he used it to sort out who truly wanted him: John 6:60-61, 66-68 Therefore many of his disciples, when they heard this, said, “This is a hard saying! Who can listen to it?” But Jesus knowing in himself that his disciples murmured at this, said to them, “Does this cause you to stumble? . . .” At this, many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him. Jesus said therefore to the twelve, “You don’t also want to go away, do you?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life. . . . ” All of us will eventually find something about God that offends, even though there will usually be some people who find it not even slightly off-putting, and possibly even comforting. Not only is the Lord of all mind-bogglingly complicated, even human variability is so frustratingly complicated that it is quite impossible to please everyone – and certainly not until we are willing to let go of prejudices and preconceived ideas and can see beyond our initial emotional response. Of necessity, anyone seeking a relationship with the infinite Lord who in every way is staggeringly superior to us, has to be willing to tolerate mystery. Though bewildered, those who are genuine, will push through the source of offense and eventually find solace. A Sobering Re-Assessment I know an intelligent family in which every member has been devastated by too many years in a spiritually abusive church. I cringed to sense how hurt and broken they were. The woman described the church as “strongly patriarchal.” Her husband attended faithfully but was not allowed to be a member because he had previously been baptized by a woman. Women were not permitted to serve communion, or even take up the offering. Men were expected to wear suits and ties in church. Even outside church, women could wear only dresses – and very long ones at that – and their hair had to be a certain length. Behind the scenes was a domineering control freak who manipulated everything. Just when I thought I knew where this was going, I was shocked to hear that the powerful manipulator who shattered precious lives was a woman. Things are not always what they seem. We are now near the end of this webpage, but near the beginning, I confessed that I often find myself feeling compassion not just for victims but for offenders. I’m at it again. I shudder to think what that domineering manipulator might have suffered to end up that way. I’m pathetic at righteous anger. The problem is that to have it, one must be righteous. Too often, all we can muster is self-righteousness, which is as useless as self-made banknotes. I dare not attempt assigning blame. The log in my own eye disqualifies me. All I can do is hang my head and sincerely pray, “Lord, have mercy on us all.” Despite everything said in this webpage, it is vitally important that we remain acutely aware of how terrifyingly easy it is to slump into a sleazy, ungodly view of power and significance. It’s the way to end up envying those who grieve God – and not even know we have fallen into this seductive trap. Divine standards are so astonishingly different from human ways that we ignore to our peril our Lord’s warning that what “is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God” ( Luke 16:15 ). Worldly acclaim, and what delights God, are popularity poles apart. The beauty of Christlikeness is lost in the glare of the limelight. May we have the wisdom to swap the fame that fizzles, for the glory that gleams for all eternity. Let’s remind ourselves of what Christlikeness is all about: Mark 10:42-45 Y ou know that they who are recognized as rulers over the nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you, but whoever wants to become great among you shall be your servant. Whoever of you wants to become first among you, shall be bondservant of all. For the Son of Man also came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. John 13:14-15 If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. (Emphasis mine.) Our Lord kept stressing this principle and applying it to different scenarios. So vital is this that the rest of God’s Word likewise emphasizes it. It is so contrary to the thinking of the world we are immersed in, however, that we keep missing it. See Significant Examples. Despite some critics angrily misjudging him as arrogant, even the Apostle Paul actually had the heart of a servant. He not only labelled himself as the chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15), “the least of the apostles,” “not worthy to be called an apostle” (1 Corinthians 15:9), “less than the least of all God’s people” (Ephesians 3:8, Weymouth New Testament – NIV is almost identical) and as “like an aborted fetus,” he repeatedly said such things as: 2 Corinthians 4:5 For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. (NIV). Some ministries, by their very nature, are upfront and hog the limelight. Teaching is such a ministry, but James sobers us quicker than ice dumped in a hot tub: James 3:1 Let not many of you be teachers, my brothers, knowing that we will receive heavier judgment. Every part of one’s body wants and needs every other part. As mentioned in the previous link, it’s the same with Christ’s body – every part is vital and should be regarded as such. Before whizzing on, let’s pause for a moment to consider how astonishing it is that God’s Word says the eternal Son of God is so intimately connected to each of us that we could be thought of as actually being part of the very body of the indescribable Being enthroned in heaven ruling the universe. That’s so staggering that if it were not in the Bible, I would probably have thought it blasphemous. It drives home just how important each of us is to God. “When one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. When one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it” ( 1 Corinthians 12:26 ). And since this is his body, the exalted Lord suffers, too. And if this is true of individuals, consider how much more must it apply to an entire gender. Like me, you might be familiar with the following but have missed what it is actually saying: 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 Don’t you know that you are a temple of God, and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is holy, which you are. In my teens, I used to conclude from this that my body is God’s temple and I should therefore treat it with care. Regardless of how true that might be (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 6:19 ) I was basing it on the wrong Scripture. Clearly, temple is singular in the above quote, but what is not obvious in English is that the Greek for you is plural. Paul is not saying here that each individual is a temple of the Holy Spirit, but that all his readers together form one temple. He is saying that collectively – as Christ’s body – we are a temple, and that to harm it is to expose ourselves to divine judgment. It is hard to imagine much greater harm to that sacred temple than to fail to honor not just a few individuals but an entire half of the temple. Since either gender makes up half of Christ’s body, both genders are critically important, and to devalue either is to offend our Lord. The key point of the Bible’s teaching on the body of Christ is that it is essential for a fully functional body that there be significant differences between parts: 1 Corinthians 12:17-20 If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole were hearing, where would the smelling be? . . . If they were all one member, where would the body be? But now they are many members, but one body. Rather than it be our similarities that make us equally valuable, it’s actually our very differences that make us equally needed and irreplaceable. If we were all the same, anyone could replace anyone. In fact, whether it be a human body or the supernatural body of Christ, a bland uniformity among members would be a catastrophe, resulting in a hideously deformed, malfunctional monstrosity. Could there be anything more hideous and malfunctional than a ‘body’ that consists of nothing but one huge tongue or an eyeball? Differences are to be delighted in. Consider a priceless oil painting: some colors are used more, some might stand out more, some might look drab, but each is vital. What if someone ruined the masterpiece; sincerely believing he was improving it and promoting equality by pouring thick, gray paint over it so that all the colors are the same? ‘Equality’ like that would debase everyone. For any of us to devalue our uniqueness would end up robbing not just ourselves, but each other, and the non-Christian world that needs our witness infinitely more than it can understand, and even God himself, who both treasures diversity, and created it: 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 “. . . there are various kinds of gifts . . . various kinds of service . . . various kinds of workings, but the same God, who works all things in all. . . . For to one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, and to another . . . according to the same Spirit; and to another . . . and to another . . . and to another . . . and to another . . . and to another . . . and to another . . . and to another . . . But the one and the same Spirit produces all of these, distributing to each one separately as he desires . (Emphasis mine.) It has never been God’s wish that in his family there be envy, resentment, fighting for dominance, or thinking oneself superior or inferior. “. . . the members should have the same care [equal care, says the NIV] for one another” declares 1 Corinthians 12:25 . It would grieve our Lord, however, if anyone sought to destroy his carefully created diversity; mistakenly thinking that that was the path to harmony. You might be suffering an injustice that makes you envy some people. If so, my heart goes out to you. Perhaps you have been made to feel second class because of people’s attitudes or, even worse, because of actual things Christians or people claiming to be Christians, have done to you. Their behavior is unacceptable. You might also have been cruelly barraged by slanderous lies from one called “the accuser of our brethren” ( Revelation 12:10, JKV ). The devil is an evil trickster who delights in trying to sow discord among God’s people, and in trying to falsely accuse and denounce all who through Christ are approved and cherished. One day, every one of these malicious assaults will be exposed, and the perpetrators will be eternally shamed. In the meantime, however, we are called to hold on to God’s truth and, with the eyes of faith, see through the oppressive fog fiendishly designed to obscure the Lord’s loving heart. Maintaining that faith can be a tough, prolonged battle. Few would believe – or even care – how much I know this from bitter experience. But God cares, regardless of how intensely it can feel that he doesn’t. No matter how lonely and hopeless and relentless the battle can feel, love and approval is on the side of all who cling to Christ. The Lord was just as proud of Paul when he was languishing in prison, or too wounded to move after one of his many beatings, as when he was preaching to hundreds. The Almighty was just as proud of him when he was making tents or washing his clothes, as when he was saving souls. If so, our Lord is as proud of the one who, week after week, stays behind to tidy the church, or the one whose prayer battles no earthly person realizes moves heaven from behind closed doors, as the one behind the pulpit. He is just as proud of the elderly lady singing in a choir to an almost empty church, as he is of the solo artist whose songs inspire millions. In fact, those who get the glory now, are in grave danger of the sad plight of those about whom Jesus said, “they have received their reward” ( Matthew 6:2, 5, 16 ). Those who want their reward now are like those who sell for a few dollars shares that will end up worth billions. Just as “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction” (1 Timothy 6:9), so it is with those who want to be ‘important’. The most common and tragic reason for people falling into this trap is not realizing how immensely loved of God and special to God they are. Most of us have enormous difficulty realizing even a tiny fraction of how special we are to God. For help with this I urge you to read How Much does God Love Me? Receiving a Personal Revelation of God’s Love for You. More Help on Gender Issues Is God Male or Female? God’s Gender God as Tender as a Mother?

Those, who by stalking or worse, force themselves on people, are not acting in divine love. True love respects the boundaries a person sets, even when their limits crush the lover’s heart. Unlike most humans, God is utterly trustworthy. The fruit of the Spirit (the very essence of who God is) is “love . . . self-control” ( Galatians 5:22-23 ). Logically, if the all-powerful Lord were an abuser, keeping our distance from him would be no protection. Like no one else, however, the Almighty is worthy of infinite power because he will never abuse that power, but will use it for your good. One of the ways in which our Lord differs from us, however, is that he is not sexual. Taking this to heart is especially important for people who suffered as children to the point where even the word love is distressing because perverts repeatedly used the word when they meant not love but sexual violation. Jesus strongly disapproved of lust: Matthew 5:27-29 You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery;’ but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it away from you. For it is more profitable for you that one of your members should perish, than for your whole body to be cast into Gehenna. Remember that it was not in our sex-obsessed society that Jesus declared lust to be as depraved as adultery. He was speaking to people who regarded adultery as such a heinous crime that it incurred the death penalty ( John 8:3-5 ). Jesus was no hypocrite. Indeed, he alone has never sinned: John 8:46 Which of you convicts me of sin? . . . 2 Corinthians 5:21 For him who knew no sin [Jesus] he made to be sin on our behalf; so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Hebrews 7:26 For such a high priest [Jesus] was fitting for us: holy, guiltless, undefiled, separated from sinners . . . 1 Peter 1:19 . . . as of a faultless and pure lamb, the blood of Christ 1 Peter 2:22 who did not sin, “neither was deceit found in his mouth.” 1 John 3:5 You know that he was revealed to take away our sins, and in him is no sin. The holy Son of God has never lusted. The Son of God is as sexually innocent as a newborn. Moreover, in heaven, where he is now enthroned, there is no sex. Even for humans who are currently very sexual, their sex drive is temporary. It slowly rises from nothing as a baby to intense in their late teens and early twenties and then gradually fades until it completely disappears in the next life. Mark 12:25 For when they will rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. It is there, in that place where there is no sex, that the bodies of all deemed worthy of heaven will be like that of the eternal Son of God: 1 Corinthians 15:42-44 So also is the resurrection of the dead. . . . It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. . . . 1 Corinthians 15:49 And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. (NIV) Philippians 3:20-21 For our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will change the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory . . . 1 John 3:2 . . . when he is revealed, we will be like him; for we will see him just as he is. One of the similarities between the bodies of people in heaven and that of our risen Lord is lack of sex drive. He has no sexual feelings. As implied elsewhere in this series of webpages, an accurate intellectual understanding of God’s love will not magically change our emotional reaction. It’s an important starting point, however, from which one can start confidently pushing closer to God despite groundless but unpleasant feelings. In addition, one needs healing from past wounds, and I have devoted very many pages to this (see Healing from Sexual Abuse). Healing is facilitated, however, by becoming convinced of the purity of God’s motives and by drawing as close to God as we can. Related Page: Is God Male or Female? God’s Gender

God as Tender as a Mother? Does God have a Feminine Side? The Motherly Love of God? My passionate yearning is for this webpage to be both highly biblical and go way beyond touching merely your intellect. The goal of the following – indeed of the entire website – is to help you fall more deeply in love with the most fascinating, exciting, wonderful and lovable Person in the entire universe. A committed Christian of very many years standing confided that an early draft of this webpage had empowered her to see God in a thrillingly new light. ‘ What a huge difference!’ she wrote, ‘Instantly I felt I could communicate with God again.’ For the first time, she saw God as being highly protective of her. A satisfying and much needed sense of security in her relationship with God flooded her. Suddenly she knew that God could be trusted to keep his covenant with her. Her experience hints at why I am writing. No matter how intimately you already know God, my longing for you (and me) is for a spiritual revelation propelling you into life-transforming greater fulfilment in your relationship with God. The prayer of my heart is that my writings be a launching pad from which you leave my words behind and get caught up in a divine encounter. In Luke 15 Jesus delivers three consecutive parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost (prodigal) son. In them, God is likened to a shepherd and a father. Some of us are shocked to realize, however, that in the middle parable, Jesus likens God to a woman ( Luke 15:8 ). Should this really surprise, since God made both male and female in his own image ( Genesis 1:27 )? I am driven to write about our perception of God’s ‘gender’ because it has profound, practical implications for us, and can deeply affect the warmth and nature of the most satisfying, fulfilling and vital relationship any human can enjoy – our relationship with God. Gender is a highly emotive issue for us humans. It is at the very core of our being. It is such a primary aspect of human identity that gender is usually the first thing we notice about a person and what we most want to know when sizing up a stranger. To think of God as a father or mother would hit us deeply even if it only raised gender issues but by linking God with parenthood it can send our sensitivities through the roof. Our strongest emotional bond during our most impressionable years is with our parents. If something goes even slightly wrong with that foundational relationship, causing the love and trust that children instinctively want to give their parents to be violated, it affects profoundly our every other relationship until our dying day, unless we experience a remarkable degree of healing. Even among those who think they have survived their childhood unscathed, many think of a father as colder and sterner than a mother and this unconsciously affects their feelings for God. Yet another emotive layer to this mix is that those who truly know spiritual truth correctly recoil from any whiff of pagan religion. Rightly or wrongly, any hint of God being anything other than emphatically male conjures in many people fears of paganism or departure from biblical truth. Occasionally fear might protect us, but it also has the disturbing potential to paralyze what should be our relentless quest to know the God of the Bible with ever increasing depth and accuracy. Our only true protection is to be led by the Spirit, not driven by fear. So the issue of God’s gender and linking God to parenthood by using the word Father, profoundly interacts with the deepest part of us, affecting us not just intellectually but causing the feelings of many of us to cool toward the warmest Person in the universe. People who think themselves better than those whose emotions cause an irrational reaction against the thought of God being a father, seldom have any right to feel smug because they are often the very people whose rational and spiritual pursuit of truth is stymied by an emotional reaction against the notion of God being like a mother. The real God is the God of truth. And fear, emotions and prejudice are the enemies of truth. Regardless of the position taken, much that is said on this subject reveals more about our personal hang-ups and biases than it does about the heart of God. To have any hope of diffusing some of this we need to take a wider view before zeroing in on the issue of whether it is biblically accurate to think of God as a mother. Life’s Greatest Adventure Let’s begin by intensifying our passion for discovering all we can about God and by gaining deeper insight into why life’s greatest adventure centers on continually growing in our intimate understanding of the most beautiful Person in existence. Like a babe’s knowledge of its mother, our knowledge of God can be warm, intimate, fulfilling and continually growing but there still remains much beyond our capacity to understand. Our lack of understanding can at times be frustrating, as it is sometimes for children not understanding adult wisdom, tastes, sexuality, and so on. Growing in our knowledge and understanding of God, however, should be as exciting as lovers getting to know each other. The Almighty is so much bigger than us that the never-ending challenge is to keep bursting the confines of our own hang-ups and narrow human thinking and shallow reading of Scripture. We need daring humility, a courageous passion for reality, and a yearning for divine intimacy if we are to continually expand our understanding of God to include more and more of the full biblical revelation of who God is. Even a brief meditation on the following Scriptures will affirm that our highest calling and life’s most thrilling adventure is to know God as intimately and as fully and as accurately as humanly possible. Romans 1:21-22 Because, knowing God, they didn’t glorify him as God, neither gave thanks, but became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools Jeremiah 9:23-24 The Lord says, Don’t let the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, don’t let the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, that he has understanding, and knows me, that I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, justice, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, says the Lord. John 17:3 This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus Christ. Job knew God so well that we read: Job 1:8 The Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant, Job? For there is no one like him in the earth, a blameless and an upright man, one who fears God, and turns away from evil.” Yet still this man of God had grasped so little of God that he later declared: Job 42:5-6 I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. Knowing God deeper is an on-going adventure: Ephesians 1:16-17 . . . making mention of you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him John 8:31, 54-55 Jesus therefore said to those Jews who had believed him . . . ‘It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say that he is our God. You have not known him, but I know him. . . .’ Isaiah 55:9-8 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Psalms 119:18 Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things out of your law. Matthew 16:17 Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. . . .’ Jeremiah 29:13 You shall seek me, and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart. Exodus 33:18 He [Moses] said, “Please show me your glory.” Mark 12:28-30 One of the scribes came, and . . . asked him, “Which commandment is the greatest of all?” Jesus answered, “The greatest is, ‘Hear, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ . . . Let’s pray: Dear Lord, The magnificence of your glory, the perfection of your ways, the depths of your intellect, the scope of your powers, the vastness of your love, and every other aspect of your nature, far exceeds human comprehension. Nevertheless, relative to what we are currently capable of grasping, we do not want to settle for a hazy or inadequate or even fanciful view of you. We want to know the real you. To know you is to love you, and to love you is to want to know you more. If we have misunderstood you or limited you, leaving ourselves with feelings for you that are colder than you deserve, we ask that you melt our hearts with a deeper revelation of who you really are. If you are more wonderful, more beautiful, more desirable, more thrilling, more lovable than we realize, we ask that you open our eyes to see you more fully. We ask you to explode any blockages that our past hurts or prejudices or worldliness or small thinking might have created. We want you to captivate our hearts, taking us on a never-ending journey of discovery of the breathtaking beauty of your heart. God’s Courage Deuteronomy 32:15 . . . he abandoned God who made him, and rejected the Rock of his salvation. More than twenty times the Bible calls God a rock. That’s a bold act because by calling himself a rock God leaves himself wide open to misinterpretation. This is typical of God. Consider for instance when Jesus lost a huge portion of followers by saying that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. He could easily have expressed that far less offensively but instead of carefully explaining, he used it to differentiate between those who genuinely wanted the true God from those who preferred a god of their own fancy; a god who requires little faith because he is within the scope of their own intellect. If you want a staid, predicable God, you are doomed to an inferior earthly life and perhaps even a terrifying eternity. To qualify for life’s greatest adventure, you must be willing to tolerate mystery. If you want a God you always understand – one who will not so frustrate and mystify you that you often feel offended – then you do not want the true God at all. You want a fanciful god of human invention, not the God who is too driven by his love for us to limit himself to human ways rather than use all his resources – his infinite intellect, supernatural ways, access to dimensions that we cannot even conceive of, and so on – to lead us into what is best for us. The Bible choosing to call God a rock is not in any way a denial of the fact that God has many abilities beyond that of a rock, such as intelligence, senses and emotions. Likewise, the Bible calling God Father cannot of itself be taken to deny that God has attributes far beyond those of a father. To say that God is a rock does not mean God is unfeeling. Likewise, to say that God is a father cannot of itself be taken as implying that he is lacking in motherly softness or feminine tenderness. To know whether God is more feeling than a rock and has motherly compassion necessitates a deeper exploration of biblical revelation than hasty presumptions based on a couple of words. We might despise rocks as cold and hard but it would be foolish to reject the Judeo-Christian God as cold and hard if, in fact, the Bible reveals that God is loving, gentle, kind and compassionate, and that he is a rock only in such ways as dependability, agelessness and a place of shelter and safety. It would be a tragedy of eternal proportions if we were to rob ourselves by rejecting the God of the Bible just because some preachers or certain superficial readings leave us with the false impression that God is cruel, harsh or egotistical. It would be a serious mistake to create a God of our own making that suits our own whims and fantasies. We must come face to face with the real God, as truly portrayed in the Bible, not as we guess him to be as a result of a superficial encounter with him or shallow reading of Scripture. Just because some people think warmly about fathers does not mean that even for them there are not thrilling, staggeringly beautiful aspects of God’s nature that are not adequately covered by the word ‘father.’ Not having hang-ups about fathers does not mean a person has grasped all the depths and beauty and love and purity and goodness and wisdom of God. No matter how much we know of God’s heart, there is still more to learn, and no matter how deep and sophisticated our conception of God, our understanding is still shallow and over-simplistic relative to who the almighty, eternal, holy, infinite Lord really is. As a friend, commenting on an early draft of this webpage, wrote: God is a rock, but not just a rock! God is also a father, but not just a father. To say God is only Father would be to apply human constraints on a limitless God. God is Not a Man Many societies twist and distort males, forcing them into a mold that is contrary to God’s conception of masculinity. Jesus – the perfect man and the perfect revelation of the heart of God – cried often and had a tender heart. In fact, wherever we look in the Bible – even among men sometimes mistakenly thought of as being somewhat callous, such as warrior David, Old Testament prophets, loud-mouth Peter, and the apostle Paul – we find men crying. I suggest you let your eyes glide over the vast number of biblical references to men crying. You might be amazed at the impact of seeing all the references gathered together. That many of us think it unmanly to cry shows that there is a softness about the biblical conception of masculinity that is often lacking in our view of what it means to be male. Nevertheless, one of the most basic biblical revelations is that God is not a man. Neither is he to be represented by the image of a man. Numbers 23:19 God is not a man, that he should lie, nor the son of man, that he should repent. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good? 1 Samuel 15:29 Also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent. Romans 1:23 and traded the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man . . . I know a woman who from a very tender age was not just molested but sexually tortured. Understandably, she became so sexually inhibited that as a teenager she recoiled from so much as a glance at her partly unclothed body such that she had no idea what even her pubic hair looked like. Very many sexual abuse survivors have shared their hearts with me, along with many married couples, yet today this woman stands out as so remarkably healed that although she is highly moral, within the sanctity of marriage, the average Christian wife seems riddled with hang-ups in comparison with her. This outstanding healing came about by God, without any human intermediary, personally and very intimately teaching her about human sexuality and marital love. What allowed this to happen was this woman’s assurance that God is not sexual and therefore fully trustworthy in the realm that terrified her. As she discovered, God is not anti-sex. He is the Creator of sex. Nevertheless, he himself is not a sexual being. To develop sexual feelings toward him is as inappropriate as it is to have sexual feelings for any non-human, whether non-living objects, animals, demons or angels. God is not a man. Neither is he a woman. At least until very recently, almost every application form asks for your sex and date of birth. God couldn’t answer either question. They apply to earthly creatures but not to the infinite Lord. He couldn’t even give you his street address or telephone number. ‘What is God’s sex?’ is as meaningless a question as, ‘How old is God?’ To have sex (gender) implies not only sexuality but a certain incompleteness outside of union with the opposite sex. There is no incompleteness in God. To think of God as either male or female – as humans are – is not only theologically mistaken, it is an insult to God. God is neither fully male – which would imply some sort of need or yearning for a female God, nor is he an emasculated male, as if there were something lacking in him. The Almighty is perfectly whole and self-sufficient. God is not only not sexual, he is not even physical. He is warm and personal and yet he is spirit. He has many qualities of which our own are reflections, and we have such compatibility with him that we were literally made for him, and yet he is breathtakingly different to us. As a mother and baby are so intimate and yet so different in their abilities, God is even more intimate and different to us. Since all humans have gender, few, if any, earthly languages have the capacity to refer to a being who has a personality without automatically assigning a gender to that person. This has nothing to do with the nature of God, but the nature of human language. So to know whether the Bible teaches that God is male, one has to delve deeper than the mere use of the male pronoun. The Lord referring to himself as if he were male must not be interpreted in a strictly literal sense, any more than we should interpret literally God calling himself a rock, a tower, a shield, a lion, and so on, and referring to his “hands,” “feet,” “wings”, and so on ( Deuteronomy 3:24; 1 Corinthians 15:27; Ruth 2:12 ). When it is Insulting to Call God, ‘Father’ There are hearts for whom the words, ‘Daddy is home’ are the most chilling, terrifying words that could ever pierce the air. Tragically, these dear people cannot even imagine how those same words flood millions of hearts with delight, making them feel warm, secure and content. That children can beam from ear to ear at the sound of a father’s entry staggers their imagination. So different is their father that they find it almost beyond belief that there are those for whom their father is not only their protector and hero; Daddy is fun. There are children who know that in their Daddy’s eyes they are as close to perfection as any child could get. These greatly loved children know it is not because they are special; they think all fathers are like that. When seeking to portray something that nothing in the universe can match, it is a communicator’s nightmare that what for some people conveys the most powerfully evocative and accurate picture, is for other equally important people so far off beam as to be considerably worse than nothing. If the Christian God is even remotely like the person many people know as father, we would have good reason for rejecting and despising him. For vast numbers of us today the word ‘father’ produces little of the warmly secure feelings of being cherished, doted on, protected and wisely guided that the word was intended to have when originally delivered to humanity. In present-day western society, fatherhood has suffered such horrific breakdown that what God’s Word meant by Father is as foreign to many of us as ox-drawn plows and other features of Bible times. God: The Best of Both Genders? Genesis 1:27 God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them. This famous Scripture shows that women, as much as men, are in the image of God. It also hints that both male and female were required for God’s image to be complete. In fact, it might be that a man and woman made one through marriage portray the fullness of God better than individuals. We certainly know from the biblical teaching of the body of Christ that the fullness of Christ is better portrayed by the entire church than by individuals. God is neither male nor female, but in whatever respect one gender excels, in that respect that gender better reflects the nature of God. For example, the typically greater male physical strength – significantly more important in pre-mechanical eras than now – means that in their ability to offer the security of physical protection, men in biblical times portrayed slightly better that aspect of God. On the other hand, if women tend to be a little less callous than men, in this respect they are that bit more like God. In their ability to nourish and comfort, women typically better portray that side of God’s nature. We need to keep expanding our view of God. For instance, down to the minutest detail, God knows exactly what it is like to suffer period pain or impotence; not because God has male and female characteristics, but because he is all-knowing. The Lord knows you more intimately than you know yourself. The Almighty, without feeling the need to explain his actions, has chosen to reveal himself to humanity as a God and not a Goddess. One possible reason is that in the biblical era men usually filled leadership roles. However, I suspect a significant factor behind God’s choice is the nature of human sexuality. Men, tending to be more sexually volatile, seem more likely to fall into perversion than women. Consider, for example, the horrific incidence of child sex abuse instigated by men, relative to the somewhat lesser incidence of female-initiated sexual abuse. (And this without men breast-feeding babies or spending the long periods alone with them that is typical of mothers.) As much as it may shock you, a few women actually nurture sexual feelings toward God. I suspect that male sexual vulnerability is such that perverted feelings for God would be more prevalent in humanity if God were commonly thought of as being female. So not only does God’s application of the male gender not imply male superiority, it might actually be an accommodation to a weakness in fallen males. There is also a heartwarming reason for God preferring to reveal himself as Father. If, in this fallen world, fathers are more likely than mothers to be cold and aloof, then people will need God as the warm, approving father they never had. It might grate on us initially, but the ironical reality is that the less able we are to see a father as being kind, loving and gentle, the more we need to see God as Father because, like it or not, suppress it or not, we have a deep, painful ache within us for a good father figure, and nothing can meet that need like a relationship with Father God. This webpage, however, is for the many of us for whom that is too much, too soon. Another complication is that human language and thought patterns restrict our ability to cope well with the concept of a person who has no gender. Our language leaves us with no option but to say ‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘it’ when referring to God. The Lord is most certainly not an ‘it.’ God is so personal that alongside him we are coldly impersonal. This forces the selection of either the masculine or feminine pronoun. Until quite recently in our history, the English language was such that the words ‘man’ or ‘men’ often referred not exclusively to males but to every man and woman in the human race. The Hebrew language (the original language of the Old Testament) was the same. Thus, Genesis literally says in Hebrew: Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him [note the singular male pronoun]; male and female he created them. Clearly in some contexts the Bible’s use of ‘he’ or ‘him’ in its original language is gender-neutral. It might well be that it is in this gender-neutral sense that the Bible uses ‘he’ or ‘him’ when referring to God. In many contexts when the original says ‘men,’ we would be very mistaken if we assumed it only refers to males. We might be making a similar mistake if we read too much into the apparently masculine references to God. Studies have shown that even in modern English literature, referring to a male to illustrate a point is seen by readers as excluding the other gender less than if a female were cited. So even in modern English, to refer to God as ‘she’ might more pointedly imply that God is female than referring to God as ‘he’ implies God is male. Some people are beginning to avoid all references to pronouns when referring to God and simply say ‘God’ each time. Given the direction our language is going, this, although tedious, might be technically more accurate. Whatever God’s reasons for choosing to reveal himself using the masculine pronoun, I respect God’s wisdom and holiness too much to dare tamper with his decision by using the feminine pronoun. I seek, nevertheless, to broaden my understanding of God to embrace the full breadth of his revelation, which includes what we might label feminine characteristics. Feminine Aspects of God The Interpreter’s Bible Dictionary sees it as highly significant that the Hebrew term for the uniquely female organ, the uterus (womb), is used in the original Scriptures to describe God’s compassion. God’s wisdom is obviously an integral, eternal aspect of God. Scripture frequently speaks of this highly rated aspect of God’s character as if it were a person. Scholars believe John’s concept of the Logos, the Word that was God and became flesh ( John 1:1-14 ) was derived from the Old Testament understanding of Wisdom as much, probably more, than from the Greek idea of Logos. And yet Wisdom, the one with whom are riches and honor and righteousness ( Proverbs 8:18 ) and who shared with God in the creation of all things ( Proverbs 8:27-31 ) is consistently given a female gender in Proverbs and by Jesus ( Proverbs 1:20; 4:6; 8:1,11; 9:1; 14:33; Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:35 ). God as Mother Ponder these words from the lips of God: Isaiah 66:13 As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you. . . . By what it inserts in brackets, the Amplified Bible (Classic) leaves no doubt as to how its scholars interpret the words immediately prior to these: Isaiah 66:12 For thus says the Lord: . . . you will be nursed, you will be carried on her hip and trotted [lovingly bounced up and down] on her [God’s maternal] knees. . . . In a beautiful picture of maternal love, Jesus expressed the depth of divine compassion with the words: Matthew 23:37 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to her! How often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! Since Jesus came to show us the Father ( John 14:11-6) it is not surprising that we find in the Old Testament a similarly beautiful picture of God’s love: Psalms 36:7 How precious is your loving kindness, God! The children of men take refuge under the shadow of your wings. Tender, Compassionate Jesus, Versus God the Father Millions upon millions of people see Jesus as tender and giving and compassionate; a friend of the outcast; a defender of the downtrodden; someone personally and voluntarily overwhelmed by the depths of human suffering. They see him as warm, approachable, innocent. He is all that is loving and desirable. He is a dove; a soft, inviting blanket to cozy into in a shivering world; a protector who would gladly take a knife or bullet for you. What is startling, however, is that many who rightly hold this view of Jesus see God differently. Nothing could break Jesus’ heart more than someone imagining the Jesus is kinder or gentler or more forgiving than the true God. Reading about someone is very different to meeting that person in the flesh. This is one of the reasons why there are a million mistaken views about God. A significant part of Jesus’ mission was to sort out the mess. God, as he really is, is exactly what you see in Jesus. John 14:7, 9-10 If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on, you know him, and have seen him. . . . He who has seen me has seen the Father. How do you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I tell you, I speak not from myself; but the Father who lives in me does his works. John 5:19 Jesus therefore answered them, “Most certainly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the Father doing. For whatever things he does, these the Son also does likewise. . . .” John 10:30 I and the Father are one. Jesus’ God – the true God – is so different from the God of most people’s imagination that one of the favorite names early Christians had for God was “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Let’s select one of these: 2 Corinthians 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort (Other Scriptures) No wonder the New Testament is filled with such Scriptures as: Hebrews 1:3 His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his [ i.e. God’s ] substance . . . Have We Got It Back To Front? When wanting to gain insight into God, is it Scripture’s intention that we should use as a springboard not so much our feelings toward our parents as our parental feelings toward our own children? Let’s read Scripture with new eyes: Matthew 7:11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! Jesus was not saying, think of your father: God is like that. He was saying, think of your tender feelings and sacrificial love for your own children: God is like that. Moreover, he was saying that God’s love is so good and pure and selfless that alongside him even our best attempts at love are evil. The Divine Dilemma The insurmountable difficulty is that there will always be people for whom an analogy evokes the intended warm feelings of love and security far more effectively than any abstraction, and at the same time there will be some people, though fewer, for whom the analogy is a disaster. Any group of humans – children, lovers, grandparents, sisters, pet owners, pastors, nurses or any others you could name – who for some of us epitomize tenderness, loyalty, devotion, selflessness, wisdom and all things good and wholesome, will be symbols of raging hurt for a few of us. Communicators can only appeal to the intelligence and charitableness of their audience to realize that when they select an analogy they are thinking of the finest examples of that group of humans. There will be some dear people, however, whose emotional pain screams louder than their ability to be coldly intellectual. Ironically, those for whom an analogy is an excruciating disaster are the very ones who desperately need to discover that God is the one person who can fill their gaping wound with his loving compassion and faithfulness. Your Dadda Three times, the New Testament in its original Greek refers to God as Abba ( Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6 ). The peculiar thing is that this is not even a Greek word. It was the word Jesus used when speaking his native language. Mark, apparently because he felt there was something precious – almost sacred – about the expression, left Jesus’ choice of words untranslated. We can’t be sure whether Paul’s use of the term was influenced directly from Jesus’ earthly preaching or came from the apostle’s own revelation, but he, too, clearly felt there was no Greek equivalent that adequately reflected the depth of Abba. It is popularly thought that Daddy is the best English approximation, but we can do a little better. For the people Jesus addressed, Abba was a baby’s first attempt to call out to its father. The closest English is Dadda. It is not entirely coincidental that it even sounds a little like Abba. It is derived from baby talk. Being one of the very first words a normal baby ever utters, it must be easy for a baby to say. (In some households, the word would be Pappa, but again you’ll recognize the similarity.) The significance of this choice is that Dadda engenders feelings of tenderness and intimacy and trust that might not be there with the more formal Father. The word Dad might suggest someone a little boring or taken for granted, but Dadda or Daddy has connotations of someone who is special, maybe even exciting. Names used by older children might also bring with it overtones of a disciplinarian, since fathers are likely to be stricter with older children than with babies. The point is that this tender expression was Jesus’ and Paul’s choice of the most appropriate form of address to God. If thinking of God does not elicit within you warm feelings of love and acceptance and security, then you are missing a significant aspect of what God was wishing to convey to humanity by the use of this word. When things get tough, God would like us to have the carefree confidence of a little child leaving her broken bike with Daddy and happily running off to play, certain that Daddy will fix it. There are some very moving Scriptures about the depth of God’s compassion for his children. The eye can slip over them in casual reading, but I urge you to view these Scriptures one on top of another, letting the impact mount until they touch you deeply. See God’s Tender Love . Grasping for analogies Of course, divine love is not merely equal to that of earth’s best parents. God’s love, being perfect, is incomprehensibly superior to all human feelings. Psalms 27:10 When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. Isaiah 49:15 Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, these may forget, yet I will not forget you! Matthew 7:11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! God’s love is so immense that we are forced to scan the full range of human attachment and love and compassion to find a mere shadow of God’s feelings for us. We have noted that in grasping for glimpses into divine love that we might understand, Jesus in just one chapter, likened God’s love to a woman, a shepherd, and a father. The woman was deeply anxious about her lost coin, which might have been part of her dowry, having great sentimental and emotional, as well as material, value. Today’s equivalent would be a stone from an engagement ring. The shepherd, upon finding the sheep, actually carried it home, joyfully lugging the quite heavy eastern animal on his shoulders. The highly forgiving father had apparently been on the constant lookout for his ungrateful son, day after day, month after month, year after year. Seeing him a long way off, he runs the distance, throws his arms around him and showers him with kisses in an emotional display that could call for no less than the slaughtering of the prize calf and throwing a party ( Luke 15 ). Another hint of God’s love is the commitment of the most faithful husband or even the excitement of a newly wed: Isaiah 62:5 . . . As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so your God will rejoice over you. Yet another way that Scripture tries to convey to us what is ultimately indescribable is by using our commitment to our own body. The New Testament often refers to Christians as being part of Christ’s own body. What could be more intimate? Christ nourishes you, protects you and feels your pain, like you would feed, look after and to rush to soothe the pain of any part of your body. God treats his people as the apple (pupil) of his eye – that most precious part of the body which we instantly shield by blinking or taking whatever measures are appropriate to meet its every need. Thus we find this description of how God treated the Israelites: Deuteronomy 32:10 He found him in a desert land, in the waste howling wilderness. He surrounded him. He cared for him. He kept him as the apple of his eye. In a rush of metaphors, the inspired psalmist prayed: Psalms 17:8 Keep me as the apple of your eye. Hide me under the shadow of your wings And the Bible’s attempts to convey God’s love keeps coming. Many people think Jesus must have had a very special love for his earthly mother. He did. There’s a wonderful side to this, however, that is often overlooked. The special feelings Jesus had for Mary are the very same feelings he has for you. It is with that extreme devotion that he loves you. Or maybe for some of us, the love of a brother or sister is more meaningful. No problem. Jesus said: Matthew 12:50 For whoever does the will of my Father who is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother. Jesus’ longing to be our brother, pushed him to astounding extremes: Hebrews 2:11, 14, 17-18 For both he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one, for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brothers . . . Since then the children have shared in flesh and blood, he also himself in the same way partook of the same, that through death he might bring to nothing him who had the power of death, that is, the devil . . . Therefore he was obligated in all things to be made like his brothers, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make atonement for the sins of the people. For in that he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted. Romans 8:29 For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. Comprehending the Incomprehensible Ephesians 3:14, 17-19 For this cause, I bow my knees . . . that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strengthened to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge , that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Emphasis mine) As brilliant as Paul was at communicating, he found himself forced to resort to prayer because he wanted his readers to gain insight that no amount of explaining or describing could ever achieve. He longed for them to experience the supernatural miracle of knowing that which was beyond knowing. Each time Paul mentioned Abba, he did so in the context of receiving a revelation from the indwelling Spirit of God. Romans 8:15 For you didn’t receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” Galatians 4:6 And because you are children, God sent out the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” So the only hope we have of truly knowing God’s love is by a spiritual miracle that begins with new birth. For help in entering this, the most significant of all human experiences, see You Can Find Love: What Your Fantasies Reveal Healing of hurts Vast numbers of us carry wounds because our earthly father was considerably less than perfect. Your loving Lord feels your pain and he wants to heal you in two ways: 1. By continually being the Perfect Father you have always deserved. (If you have been emotionally wounded, this is something you secretly crave and yet something you fear. What makes it scary is the thought of again being let down. Thankfully, unlike any human, God fully understands and is utterly trustworthy.) 2. By removing the festering bitterness that would otherwise keep infecting your wound and preventing healing. The following few paragraphs are extracted from Serious, Do-It Yourself Healing From Emotional Pain. Maybe your resentment is as strong toward your father as implied below, maybe it is less, but the principles remain the same. Suppose someone broke your hand. This makes you so mad that every day as you pass that person’s photo hanging on the wall, you punch it with your broken hand. The release of pent up anger might feel good, but the constant punching prolongs your agony and prevents your hand from ever healing. A desire to see someone else suffer inevitably ends up perpetuating our own suffering. The devastating thing is that resentment is addictive. Like a junkie, we focus so much on the welcome relief resentment offers that we hardly realize it inflames the downer that follows, and so the agonizing cycle continues. Despite our fanciful notions, it is unlikely that we could ever see anyone suffer so profoundly as to satisfy our lust for revenge. Moreover, as people keep discovering to their dismay, it is our pain that drives the desire for revenge and, except for Jesus, no one else’s pain cannot lessen our own pain. So the tragedy is that if we get stuck on the revenge path, in fifty years’ time we will still be no closer to a resolution. For as long as we are dominated by the longing to see someone suffer, that person has succeeded in lowering us to his abysmal level. He hurt us. Now we want him to hurt. We degrade ourselves by entering the slimy world of hate, staggering through life a defeated person, floundering in the same moral mud in which our tormentor lives. In fact, sex offenders are often themselves abuse victims with heart-wrenching stories. They failed to resolve their anger and pain and so inflict it on others. Regardless of how it manifests, resentment enslaves and corrupts its victims. Pathetically, people blinded by anger or hate usually feel morally superior to other people who are blinded by anger or hate. Bitter people are beautiful people turned ugly. Thankfully the process is reversible, once we learn to forgive. We move from victim to victor only when we break free from resentment’s death-grip. I often hike in wilderness areas infested with snakes so venomous that without specialized medical treatment I would have only a couple of hours to live after being bitten. Suppose a snake bit me, then slid out of sight. I would be a fool to squander precious time angrily trying to find and kill the snake. First priority must be to seek medical attention. For your own survival, focus on healing, not revenge. I am convinced that just as martyrs are especially honored in heaven, so are those who have suffered greatly and yet have forgiven. Forgiving others is tough. It is so critical to our own emotional and spiritual well-being that our spiritual enemy strongly attacks us on this issue. Nevertheless, divine help is available. It’s sometimes subconscious, but people suffering great difficulty in forgiving others usually have as the basis of their agony the pain of having great difficulty forgiving themselves. The two sides of forgiveness – forgiving yourself and forgiving others – rise or fall together. Many people raging against someone else’s guilt are pressured to do so by an urge to keep suppressed the tortured screams of their own conscience. Their subconscious is forever frantically trying to deflect the attention off themselves by blaming others. Peace soothes our troubled mind when we dwell on the extent of the forgiveness and purity that we have in Christ. When we realize how much God has forgiven us, it becomes easier to act more Godlike and have that same forgiving attitude toward ourselves and others. For this reason, I recommend beginning with the webpages about handling guilt . Other pages you will benefit from are: Breaking the stranglehold of bitterness: Unforgivable! Lord make him regret what he did to me! Wrap Up A failure of those close to you to love you like God loves will leave you bleeding emotionally. But everything that is missing in human love is found in the endless depths of the One who longs to hold you in his arms forever. People so tragically hurt by one or more men that it darkens even their attitude toward God – the utterly sinless, genderless non-human – are suffering a crippling inner wound that God longs to heal. And, as already discovered by many astonished people who were once afraid to think of God as having any male qualities, at least part of that healing flows from finding in the safe, warm God, the love of the perfect Father. Ironically, it turns out that those who most object to relating to God as Father are the ones who will eventually most benefit from relating to God as Father. Yet this is so difficult to grasp for those who are deeply hurting because of abusive humans, and they desperately need to snuggle into God’s comfort long before they can see God as the tender Father who will fill a gnawing emptiness within them left by a hopelessly inadequate human father. Since God is nothing like an abuser, he does not force healing upon us. If a surgeon will not act until a person is willing to consent to the operation, God – whose respect for us is far deeper – will wait for you. Sadly, it often takes us a long while to muster the courage to heal. So if you do not yet feel ready to relate to God as Father, put that thought on hold, but do not perpetuate your inner pain by letting it hinder you from drawing close to the true God, who alone brings the comfort you desperately need. Those close to you are imperfect, but the One who is closest to you is perfect. Everything that a starry-eyed bride could wish for in love and security and faithfulness and devotion; everything a little child could hope for in a Mommy or Daddy or brother or sister or grandparent; God is all that and more.