FINALLY have a chance to sit down and write on here again, here we go.
Since we defined prayer as our response to God, we must now
explore how it is that he first speaks to us, and then how to answer him.
My relationship with God is meant to be much more of a
conversational and meaningful relationship than is my relationship with Tim
Keller or C.S. Lewis or Rubel Shelly. I read Keller, I read Lewis, I read
Shelly, I read God’s Word, but one of those is quite different than the rest.
God decreed in the Old Testament that the prophets would
speak for Him, that once a prophet received God’s words, they could be written
down and could be effectively read as God’s speech when the prophet is absent
or after he is gone. We also have this likewise prophecy of Christ
Deuteronomy 18:15-18
15 “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me
from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen— 16 just as you
desired of the
Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire any more, lest I
die.’ 17 And the Lord said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken. 18 I will raise up
for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.
The scriptures were God’s speech, God’s word when it was
written, and it is no less God’s word
today!
Now here is a kind of cool and crazy conclusion found in scripture: GOD ACTS
THROUGH HIS WORDS!
In the
beginning how did God bring about creation? With His words.
“Let there
be light.”
Hebrews 4:12 says God’s words are
“alive” and “active.”
Therefore, YOU WANT
TO HAVE GOD ACTIVE AND MOVING DAILY IN YOUR LIFE?
“THE WAY TO HAVE GOD DYNAMICALLY ACTIVE IN OUR
LIVES IS THROUGH THE BIBLE.”!!!!
He goes on,
“The Bible is the way to ACTUALLY
HEAR GOD SPEAKING and also TO MEET GOD HIMSELF”!!!!! (Keller)
You only know who you are praying
to if you have learned it in the Bible.
(pg 55 of Prayer- Keller)
“Eugene Peterson reminds us that ‘because we learned
language so early in our lives we have no memory of the process’ and would
therefore imagine that it was we who took the initiative to learn how to speak
However, that is not the case. ‘Language is spoken into us; we learn language
only as we are spoken to. We are plunged at birth into a sea of language . . .
Then slowly syllable by syllable we acquire the capacity to answer: mama, papa,
bottle, blanket, yes, no. Not one of
these words was a first word. . . All speech is answering speech. We were all
spoken to before we spoke.’ . . . We speak only to the degree that we are
spoken to.”
Before you can speak to God, God must speak to you. I don’t
mean in some mystical way, I mean clearly and definitively in scripture. Like
babes, we too must go through the stage of “dadda…..ball…..blanket….yes….no” Our
prayers should arise out of our immersion in scripture.
“We should plunge ourselves into
the sea of God’s language, the Bible.”
We should read and think on and
listen to the Bible and our hearts will naturally respond, maybe with shame or
joy or confusion or appeal, but regardless, that response is the essence of
prayer.
If we have nothing to use to find out who God is and to
discover Him, then we will make a God up in our minds that looks a lot like the
God we want instead of the God that actually is. We must pray to and only to
the REAL God, and the Bible is where we discover Him.
We cannot hear God clearly outside of scripture; and at the very least, nothing will ever compare to the clarity that is found in scripture.
Take a second and watch some of this video.
She doesn’t know this guy, yet she creates this amazing
prince charming that dances with her at a ball and cries to her from the ground
as she stands on a balcony, meeting her in the woods with a lantern, the man of
her dreams!!!!
. . . . . This dude could be a serial killer, she doesn’t know anything
about him. Why not? They have never talked. She has never heard from him. All
she has done is taken who she wants this guy to be and made him into a guy that
he never was and never intended to be.
This, sadly, is what we, and so many, do so often in prayer.
Instead of letting God speak to us and hearing from Him, we make God into the
god that we want instead of the god that IS. We make God into a God that we
think is the right god and the way that he should be, instead of the God that
He declares Himself to be.
Edmund P. Clowney puts it this way:
“The Bible does not present an art
of prayer, it presents the God of prayer. …. Without immersion in God’s words,
we may be responding not to the real God but to what we wish God and life to be
like. We naturally want to make God into a god that is like us. Without prayer
that answers the God if the Bible, we will only be talking to ourselves.”
“The lesson here is not that God never guides our thoughts
or prompts us to choose wise courses of action, but that we cannot be sure he
is speaking to us unless we read it in the Scripture.” (TK)
Good to be back.
Grace and Peace
