Great expectations?

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Matthew 7:7-8

 And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it. John 14:13-14

When it comes to praying for particular topics or people – “intercessory” prayer – what’s your experience? Would you describe it as (a) dogged perseverance or (b) red-hot expectation?

All right, for most of us it may not be quite either of those extremes! But I ask because anyone who has been seeking to live seriously as a Christian for any length of time is likely to find themselves puzzling over it.

Certainly, dogged perseverance is taken for granted in the New Testament. It is often pointed out in sermons that Jesus’ well-known “ask… seek… knock” saying could well be translated “ask and go on asking, seek and go on seeking, knock and go on knocking” (Matthew 7:7). And he even told a story – the story of “the persistent widow” – to show his disciples that they “should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1).

But then there are those other passages where, frankly, Jesus’ words seem almost too good to be true. John 14:13-14 is an obvious example: “I will do whatever you ask in my name… You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it”. Whatever we make of that little phrase “in my name” – which is surely key -  Jesus certainly didn’t intend it simply as a magic formula to tag onto the end of our prayers in order to guarantee their effectiveness. The fact is that Jesus wants his followers to be expectant when they pray; and we mustn’t water that down.

It’s a conundrum. And it boils down to a question: If I have persevered in prayer for a particular matter over perhaps many months and even years, and that prayer has not yet been answered, how can I possibly maintain a spirit of expectation? Isn’t that just too much to ask?

I find myself wanting to say to God: “Look, Lord, I do have faith, I really do – whatever else has kept me persevering as I have! But expectation, to a large extent, is a mood, a feeling, and moods can’t just be conjured up by will-power! Yes, I can always accuse myself of not having enough faith – and I’m sure that’s true. But didn’t Jesus say that faith as tiny as a mustard-seed can move mountains? Lord, what do you expect from me?”

I think I know what God’s reply must be: “My dear child, just keep on plugging away in prayer. Don’t try and psyche yourself up artificially; you’ll only end up getting discouraged and depressed. But keep believing the promises! Your prayers will be answered, and the day will dawn when everything comes clear”.

I don’t think I can do any better than that – please let me know if you have a better suggestion. How we hold together in our minds day by day the two poles of vibrant, expectant faith on the one hand and stubborn, determined  perseverance on the other is one of those paradoxes of the Christian life.

However, there’s a marvellous story in Acts which, I’m tempted to think, might have been given to us by God to help us with precisely this puzzle.

In Acts 12 Simon Peter is delivered from prison by God: his deliverance involves a full bag of miraculous tricks (so to speak) - an angel; a heavenly light; chains dropping off; iron gates swinging open.

Wonderful! But we shouldn’t really be surprised, should we? After all, verse 5 tells us that “the church was earnestly praying to God for him”.

But no sooner has Peter come to his senses, and decided to head for the house of Mary the mother of John Mark, where that prayer-meeting is in full swing, than a wonderful miracle degenerates into something not far short of farce…

Peter knocks on the door; a servant girl called Rhoda comes to see who’s there; she realises, to her wonderment, that it’s Peter – and promptly runs to interrupt the group bowed in prayer with the breathless announcement “Peter is at the door!”

Whereupon they burst into joyful praise – “Thank God! Our prayers have been answered!”

Well, actually, no they don’t. I made that bit up.

They tell poor Rhoda off: “You’re out of your mind!” (verse 15). They don’t even do the obvious thing and say, “Then for goodness’ sake, you silly girl, go and let the man in!” No, they convince themselves “It must be his angel!” Note that: anything rather than believe in the very miracle they have been praying for. Doh!

Meanwhile poor Peter is still knocking on the door…

Of course, it all ends well. But this is what occurs to me: If, even in those wonderful early days of the church - days of Spirit-filled faith and miraculous events - the first followers of Jesus could fail in such a comically ridiculous manner… well, I’m not suggesting that that excuses our faltering faith, but perhaps God in his mercy is happy for us to draw a little comfort from it.

It seems we aren’t the first believers whose expectations fall short of their faith!

Thank you, loving Father!

Father, when prayer seems routine and dutiful, please help me to persevere. When there is a strong sense of exciting things afoot, please help me to rejoice in your powerful, mysterious, unpredictable workings. Amen.

Medicine for a troubled conscience

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Luke 18:9-14

Do you have anything on your conscience today? It may be something that seems quite trivial (I say “seems”, not necessarily “is”) – you snapped at someone perhaps, or over-indulged yourself somehow last night.

Or it could be something more obviously serious – perhaps a painful memory of something done long ago, a memory that just refuses to fade away.

Whatever, we all know that feeling of guilt and shame, that sense of not just having let ourselves down but, far worse, of having hurt somebody and of grieving God by knowingly doing something wrong.

The beautiful little story Jesus tells in this passage is perfect medicine for a hurting conscience.

The Pharisee – that is, the proud, self-righteous, religious person – prays a prayer all about himself. He informs God (as if God needs informing!) what a fine person he is. He turns a superior, condemning eye on the tax-collector standing near him in the temple and thanks God that “I’m not like him”. If you met this man in the street you might be a little in awe of him; he is what used to be called “a pillar of society”.

But he is full of himself. (Are any of us like that?)

The tax-collector on the other hand may well have lived a pretty shady life (Jewish tax-collectors working for the Romans did not have a good reputation, to say the least). And he knows it. So when he comes into the temple to pray he really hasn’t got any fine words to use. The best he can manage – along with beating his breast with remorse – is “God, have mercy upon me, a sinner”. End of prayer. (Sometimes, note, the shortest prayers are the best.)

And guess what happened? Well, let Jesus tell us in his own words: “… this man went home justified before God”.

“Justified”? That means to be “declared in the right” - acquitted; discharged from the court; a free person. I picture that man leaving the temple a few minutes later: look! - he has a light step, a straight back, and his head is held high. This wasn’t because he had done anything good. No, all he had done was admit his own wretchedness and throw himself humbly on the mercy of God. But his confession cut more ice with God than all the fine deeds of the Pharisee. I wonder what his wife thought when he came in the door and she saw his glowing face? “What’s been happening to you…?”

We mustn’t tar everyone with the same brush; in this story Jesus isn’t simply having a go at the Pharisees, even though he had many debates and disputes with them. No; there were good, humble Pharisees as well as the kind depicted here – think, for example of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.

No, the Pharisee in the story stands simply for a certain type of mentality, and you can find it, sadly, wherever Christianity is to be found - among Anglicans and Charismatics, Methodists and Baptists, Roman Catholics and Orthodox. Why, you might even find it if you look deep enough into your own soul.

The point Jesus wants to make is clear; there is nothing God loves more than to forgive someone who is truly sorry for what they have done and the people they have become. In fact, Jesus tells us (twice, just to make sure we get the message!) a couple of chapters earlier that “there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine good people who don’t need to” (Luke 15:7,10).

Why does God choose to forgive us in this way? Because he loves us, that’s why! It really is as simple as that.

Did you know that God loves you, even in spite of all that is bad about you? You might answer, Of course I do! I’ve known it pretty much since I was a child! I hear it pretty well every Sunday in church.

All right… let me put the question another way. Have you taken this great truth to heart? Have you “taken it on board”, as they say? Have you ever sat down in a quiet and serious moment and said to yourself “God loves me? God is waiting to forgive me?”

No? Well why not today? Why not right now?

Thank you, oh God, that you sent your Son Jesus to die on the cross and pay the price for my sins. Help me to receive your forgiveness today, to rejoice in it, and to live, from this day on, the joyful life of a sinner washed clean as snow. Amen.

Why are we waiting?

Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed ears, then the weeds also appeared. “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’

“‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’” Matthew 13:24-30

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise… Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. 2 Peter 3:9

In an agricultural society there were (perhaps still are) various ways you could damage your enemy: you might, for example, set fire to their crops (Samson had a particularly imaginative way of doing this: see Judges 15), or you might poison their water supply by throwing an animal’s carcass down their well.

Or you might sow weeds among their wheat; this was a well-known and  particularly spiteful method, and it was dealt with in Roman law in the time of Jesus. So it’s no wonder that he chose to use it as an illustration in this “parable of the wheat and the weeds”.

Most Bible-teachers think the weeds were a particular form of “darnel”, about which there are three things worth knowing: first, it was poisonous; second, it was virtually indistinguishable from wheat once it had begun to grow; and third, once harvested it could be burned as fuel.

But most obviously, as Jesus makes clear, you would never dream of sowing it in your own field; if it appeared, that could only be the work of “an enemy”.

If we go down to Matthew 13:38, where Jesus gives his own explanation of this story, we find him stating that “the field is the world”. So it seems that he is offering an explanation for the sad fact that this beautiful world in which we live is also so disfigured by evil - witness the wars, the jealousies, the violence, the lies, the cruelty, and so much else.

The story suggests various important truths that we need to be aware of. Here are four…

First, we have an enemy.

If we go again to Jesus’ own interpretation of the parable, we find that the enemy is identified as “the devil” (verse 39), elsewhere called in the Bible “Satan” or “the adversary”. We probably think immediately of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, or of the tempter of Jesus at the start of his ministry (Matthew 4).

These are just two of the most prominent stories, but there are others too, and while we shouldn’t make the mistake of dwelling on them over-much (some Christians develop an unhealthy interest in the forces of darkness), neither should we gloss over them. If Jesus had to wrestle with an enemy, how much more do we…

Second, our enemy is a deceiver and a liar.

In John 8:44 Jesus calls the devil “a murderer from the beginning” and “a liar and the father of lies”. He lied to Jesus during the temptation – and he will lie to us. He will try to convince us, for example, that a particular sin is not really serious (“Everybody does it, anyway!”) or that the Christian life doesn’t require struggle and discipline (“Just let go and let God!”). He will tell us to drown out the voice of conscience and simply “go with the flow”.

The brute fact is that every day of our lives we are engaged in a spiritual warfare – which is why, according to Paul, God has provided us with an “armour” (Ephesians 6:10-20). What soldier would go into battle leaving his armour behind?

Are you – am I – consciously fighting the enemy today?

Third, judgment will ultimately be done.

The final end of the weeds is that they are burned. Our perfect, holy God cannot and will not tolerate anything unholy in the final, heavenly kingdom. And this means that while, as things stand at the moment, good and evil are not always easy to distinguish, at the final judgment there will be a clear division of the two.

The burning of the tares is, of course, a picture of what elsewhere in the Bible is called hell – in effect, a great cosmic incinerator. It is, after all, by burning that destruction of bad things is most effectively achieved. This doesn’t mean that God burns individual people in a literal, eternal fire, but is a vivid way of saying that ultimately we are called to account for the lives we have lived and the people we have been.

Judgment may be rather grim-sounding, but is in reality good news. It reminds us that there will one day be a final righting of wrongs, when perfect justice will be done. At the crucifixion Jesus “carried our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24), and this means that when that day comes, everyone who has put their trust in him receives the forgiveness he has earned through his death. Rejoice in the judgment of God!

A fourth truth suggested by this story – we need to cultivate the virtue of patience.

The servants of the owner of the field were keen to roll up their sleeves and get to work on the darnel. But the owner wouldn’t let them: that day would come as and when. And so it will be for us. (The apostle Peter offers an explanation of why we are being kept waiting: see 2 Peter 3:9.)

Which leaves us with a big question: how will we spend what time remains between now and that day? By focussing on essentially trivial things? Or by being busy about the work of the kingdom? What about… today?

Dear Father in heaven, thank you that Satan has been defeated by Jesus both in his life and in his death on the cross. Thank you for the merciful perfection of your final judgment. Help me to live daily in the light of it, and give me confidence that one day I will be “gathered into your barn”. Amen.

All about liars, evil brutes and lazy gluttons

For there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach - and that for the sake of dishonest gain. One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.” This saying is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith… Titus 1:10-13

Some Bible teachers have a lot of fun with these verses from Paul’s letter to Titus.

Paul is concerned for his younger friend, whom he has left on the island of Crete to look after the church there. It seems Titus is not going to have an easy time, for “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons”. Well, there’s no mincing of words there, is there!

Paul wants Titus to know that it’s not just his opinion, but that it comes in fact from a Cretan prophet, almost certainly a man called Epimenides, who lived some six hundred years before Christ. But “This saying is true!” Paul insists.

The bad reputation of the people of Crete obviously goes back a long way and is widely known. (In fact the Greek language even has a verb, to cretise, which means to lie.)

But wait a minute… This is where the fun comes in. If indeed “Cretans are always liars”, and if this comment is made by a Cretan, then obviously the comment itself must be a lie, so Cretans aren’t always liars. Putting it another way, if taken literally the comment is self-contradictory, for when Epimenides said what he said he was saying what he believed to be true; but he himself was a Cretan (and therefore a liar), so – well, it must be false, mustn’t it? Oh dear: one’s head begins to spin.

When Paul insists that “This saying is true”, should we imagine him smiling? – enjoying a bit of a joke? Was he writing “with a twinkle in his eye”, as one commentary suggests? I rather doubt it; our overall impression of Paul from his letters is that he was a very serious-minded man. I suspect that he was so concerned about the problems Titus might have to face in Crete that he was blissfully unaware of the seeming contradiction he was perpetrating.

Well, joke or not, there are various things we can take from this strange little passage.

First, it reminds us that the Bible is not always to be taken literally.

As Christians we believe that the Bible is inspired by God; but also that it is written by men. This means that it is marked by the usual characteristics of human language – things like figures of speech, metaphors, similes, exaggerations, paradoxes, rhetorical devices, features that are found in any and every language.

Obvious examples are some of the great claims of Jesus in John’s Gospel – to be “the Lamb of God” or “the door of the sheep” or “the living water”. Jesus, of course, wasn’t literally a lamb or a door or water; but we know very well the deep truths he was wanting to teach, and we gladly feed on them.

The rude remark about the people of Crete is an example of “hyperbole”, or extreme exaggeration, made to press home a point. Here in Britain we might say (though I hope we wouldn’t) that all Scots are tight-fisted, or all Yorkshiremen are stubborn, or all Essex girls… actually, I’m a bit hazy about what Essex girls are supposed to be like, but I suspect it's not very complimentary.

The point is simple: we need to learn to read the Bible on its own terms, not forcing it into a strait-jacket which we think it must fit. Our difficulty, of course, may be that we can’t always be sure when a passage is intended literally and when not – in which case we must look to wise and gifted teachers and pray for the Holy Spirit to give us light. And (please note!) be patient with fellow Christians who see it differently.

The second thing we need to take from this passage is that (as, sadly, we all know) even Christian people can behave badly -  and when they do they must be checked.

What is Titus to do about these Cretan trouble-makers? Answer: he is “to rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith”.

We don’t know all the details of where the trouble lay. But it seems that these people were Jewish Christians who were paying too much attention to “Jewish myths” (verse 14); and that the most troublesome belonged to “the circumcision group” (verse 10) – that is, they insisted that if a gentile, a non-Jew, wanted to become a Christian they must first submit to the Jewish law.

Well, we don’t today (so far as I know) have a “circumcision group” infiltrating churches and causing division. But there are plenty of other such groups: I know of good, healthy churches being virtually taken over by Christian “Zionists”, or by extreme charismatics, or by hard-line Calvinists.

This is tragic, for the body of Christ on earth is just too precious and important for such things to be ignored; and firm measures may be needed, hard though that can be.

But that’s a topic for another day.

As for Titus and the Cretans, let’s simply pray, first, to be thoughtful, prayerful and teachable Bible-readers, and, second, to have the faith and courage to stand up to bigoted and divisive behaviour when it rears its ugly head.

Oh - and I do hope Titus was effective in his tricky ministry, don’t you?

Dear Father, please help me to be a humble, teachable, Spirit-led and Bible-centred follower of your Son Jesus, to be wise in my reading of your Word, and a peace-maker in the life of your church. Amen.

A demanding glory

A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offence. Proverbs 19:11

This is a precious little proverb. It tells us that along with wisdom comes the gift of patience – and how our world could do with more of that! But what really captures my attention is this: “it is to one’s glory to overlook an offence”.

Overlooking an offence… Is that something you’re good at? - turning a blind eye to something you could get angry about? You could call it “generosity of spirit”, “big-heartedness”, perhaps, if you like long words, “magnanimity”. Whatever, our troubled, angry, vengeful world is in short supply of it. And perhaps you and I are too.

The opposite is to “harbour a grudge” or “nurse a grievance”. That’s terribly easy to do - quite likely we do it without even realising what we’re doing. So it may require real determination, a real effort of will-power, to not do it.

An “offence” which is seriously hurtful can leave a deep wound which never quite heals apart from the grace of God, and which even then leaves a scar. So people who have been victims of a life-changing injury or crime, for example, shouldn’t have this proverb quoted to them in a breezy, shallow way. Those grim words at the end of Psalm 137 – “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” - words directed at the cruel Babylonians, and words which make us flinch, shouldn’t be condemned until we know something of what the writer had experienced.

This is why it is a “glorious” thing to learn to do this; it reflects the very nature of our forgiving God himself, so to do it is a God-like act. Indeed, it is at the very heart of the Bible and the gospel itself, for isn’t this what God has done in the cross of Jesus?

Certainly, the Bible is full of this. Here are three key passages…

First, remember how dear, naïve Simon Peter came to Jesus with the innocent question: “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” (Matthew 18:21) He probably imagined he was being very generous-spirited. But Jesus (I picture him shaking his head sadly) replies, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times!” And I don’t think he meant that Peter should keep a careful count, so that once he had totted up seventy-eight offences he was free to let his hatred run riot, do you?

That leads directly to 1 Corinthians 13:5. This is part of Paul’s great hymn on love, and the particularly relevant words tell us that love “is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, and keeps no record of wrongs”.

Isn’t that exactly what Jesus was saying to Peter? Get rid of that calculating, totting-up mentality, Peter! Quite apart from anything else, such a spirit doesn’t hurt the other person anyway, but only corrupts your inner man or woman. Yes, to harbour a grudge is in fact an act of self-poisoning.

The third passage is, unsurprisingly, directly to do with the cross. In Luke 23:34 we read that as he was crucified Jesus prayed this breath-takingly wonderful prayer: “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing”.

Talk about “overlooking an offence”! Talk about “amazing grace”! Talk about “love divine, all loves excelling”! Such words barely begin to cover it. It would do us all good to close our eyes for a few minutes and let that prayer of Jesus, and all that it means, sink deeply into our souls.

I have always tended to take that prayer as offered on behalf of the soldiers who had the horrible job of carrying out the crucifixion - they were just ignorant men obeying orders, after all. But the thought occurs to me that perhaps he had in mind also the people in the seats of power, whether the religious leaders or the Roman authorities. How much did they really understand, in their blindness and stubbornness? I don’t know if that is right, of course, but I would like to think so.

Whatever, it certainly justifies the use of the word “glory” by the writer of Proverbs: “It is to one’s glory to overlook an offence”. Glorious indeed! It’s worth reflecting on the fact: I may have it in my power today to do something truly glorious.

C S Lewis wrote: “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive”. Yes! - overlooking an offence may be hard, painful and completely against the grain. But isn’t that just one of the reasons why it is also “glorious”?

Father, please drain out of my heart every trace of resentment, bitterness and vengefulness. Give me, I pray, the heart of Jesus himself, full only of forgiving love. Amen.