Prayer from Louisa

Louisa sent me this prayer this morning (we were working out a babysitting arrangement, and Caroline and I are going to see the one about Winston Churchhill).

GRATEFULNESS
George Herbert (1593- 1633)

Thou that hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, a grateful heart ...

Not thankful, when it pleaseth me;

As if thy blessings had spare days:

But such a heart, whose pulse may be

Thy praise

Prayer from Sunday (June Kearns)

1. June Kearns led us in the following prayer on Sunday morning.  I asked her to let me post it.

'And may you have the power to understand, as, God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.  May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully.  Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God'  (Ephesians 3:16-20, New Living Translation).

Father we gather this morning to worship you as your Children, who have been adopted by the sacrifice of your only son. Unimaginable sacrifice and unimaginable love , so great a love that we will often struggle to understand and so many times feel unworthy.

 

But we  are drawn to the joy that you called each and everyone here this morning, not just to be a believer or a follower but to be YOUR child,  YOUR Son , YOUR daughter. So whatever our struggles, whatever our pains, whatever our joys, whatever we  have to be grateful for, may we always know that You are the centre.

 

Before we were formed you had a plan for each and every one of us here and in that we can be secure.

 

So we worship you Lord we worship your mighty power, we come now before your Throne to praise what you have done in each life here.

The Singing God

(My apologies.  I have lost the post I prepared for today.  This illustration focuses of a prayer that was used in an earlier devotional).

Susan was on the verge of emotional collapse.  So she went to her pastor for help.  She revealed that her father was an emotional tyrant.  He said, ‘if you look pretty, I will love you.’  ‘If you make good grades, I’ll love you.’  If you are successful and helpful, and don’t embarrass me in front of others, I’ll love you.’  Her father’s love was very conditional, and she always experienced his distain and criticism.  As a result she found it hard to believe that there is a God who is kind and gracious, who would give his precious Son so that we could be his dearly loved children.  Although she had responded to God’s love, it seemed too good to be true.

For an hour that pastor laboured to convince Susan of the love of her heavenly Father.  Then he read from Zephaniah.  ‘The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.  He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing' (Zeph. 3:17).  ‘That’s how God looks at you Susan!  He looks at you, he thinks of you … and he sings for joy.’

He read it again.  ‘The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.  He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing' (Zeph. 3:17).  She responded.  ‘If only I could believe it were true.  I think I could face almost anything.  If only it were true.’

If you have responded to the truth of the gospel, yet find the truth of your singing God too good to believe, I have a prayer for you. ‘I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and established in love, may have the strength to grasp with all God’s people what is the length and breadth and height and depth is the love of Christ, which surpasses all understanding, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God’ (Eph. 3:14-19).

To my animal loving congregations (and those not so keen on pets)

To my dear animal-loving congregation (and those who aren’t so made about pets),

As you know I am mad about my dog, Charlie.  So I was really drawn to an illustration in a book of sermons on the Prodigal Son by the nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon:

When I walked down my garden some time ago I found a dog amusing himself among the flowers.  I knew that he was not a good gardener, and no dog of mine, so I threw a stick at him and bade him begone.  After I had done so, he conquered me, and made me ashamed of having spoken roughly to him, for he picked up my stick, and, wagging his tail right pleasantly, he brought the stick to me, and dropped it at my feet.  Do you think I could stick him or drive him away after that?  No, I patted him and called him good names.  The dog had conquered the man.  And if you, poor sinner, dog as you are, can have confidence enough in God to come to him just as you are, it is not in his heart to spurn you.  There is an omnipotence in simple faith which will conquer even the divine Being himself.  Only do but trust him as he reveals himself in Jesus, and you shall find salvation.

What a lovely story, but also what an amazing statement Spurgeon says, ‘there is an omnipotence [an infinite power] in simple faith which will conquer even the divine Being.’  It is not in God’s nature ever to turn away those who are genuinely repentant, and even though our repentance always lacks fully purity, it is by nature a gift from God.

So, why not take some time to confess your sins to God and hold him to the following promises?

John 6:37, ‘All that the Father gives to me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out’

1 John 1:9, ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’

John 3:36, ‘Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.’

Psalm 32:5, ‘I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover mu iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” and he forgave the iniquity of my sin.’

Love from your animal-loving under-shepherd,

Paul.

Devotional: Adopted in love

To my adopted brothers and sisters,

Russ Moore writes of the occasion when he and his wife adopted two boys from an orphanage in Russia.

“When Maria and I first walked into the orphanage, where we were led to the boys the Russian courts had picked out for us to adopt, we almost vomited in reaction to the stench and squalor of the place.  The boys were in cribs in the dark lying in their own waste.  Leaving them at the end of the day was painful, but leaving them the final day before going home to wait for the paperwork to go through was the hardest thing either of us had ever done.  Walking out of the room, to prepare for the plane ride home, Maria and I could hear Maxim calling out for us and falling down and convulsing in tears.

“When Maria and I, at long last, received the call that the legal process was over, and we returned to Russia to pick up our new sons, we found that their transition from orphanage to family was more difficult than we had supposed.  We dressed the boys in outfits our parents had brought for them.  My mother-in-law gathered some wild flowers growing between cracks in the pavement outside the orphanage.  We nodded our thanks to the orphanage personnel, and walked out into the sunlight, to the terror of the two boys.  They had never seen the sun.  They had never felt the wind.  They had never heard the sound of a car door shutting, or the sensation of being carried along at one hundred miles-an-hour down a Russian road.

“I noticed that they were shaking, and reaching back to the orphanage in the distance.  I whispered to Sergei, ‘… that place is a pit.  If only you knew what is waiting for you:  home with mummy and a daddy who love you, grandparents and great-grandparents and cousins and playmates, and McDonalds’ Happy Meals.  But all they knew was the orphanage they had come from, and it was squalid.  They had no other reference point.

“We knew the boys had acclimatised to our home—that they trusted us—when they stopped hiding food in their high chairs.  They knew there would be another meal coming.  They wouldn’t have to fight over scraps.  This was the new norm …

"But I still remember those little hands reaching for the orphanage, and I see myself there.”

Adoption is a beautiful thing.  At its best it originates in the in the heart of people who simply want to pour out love.  It transforms the lives of the broken and vulnerable.  And it is a reality that is offered to each of us.  For God is an adopting God.  This idea of adoption gives us the deepest insight into the nature of his love.

The apostle Paul wrote, 'But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law so that we might receive adoption as dearly loved children (Galatians 4:5-6).  He didn’t only free us from guilt and condemnation; he has taken us to his heart.  He didn’t just let you out of prison; he gave you a place in his family.  He gave his Son to make you his son.  You are his treasured possession.  He delights over you with singing.

James Packer writes, ‘In adoption, God takes us into his family and fellowship—he establishes us as his children and heirs.  Closeness, affection and generosity are at the heart of the relationship.  To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater’.  He also adds that the concept of adoption is the guarantee that God will not let you go, even when you let him down and fall into sin, ‘for only bad fathers throw their children out of the family, even under provocation; and God is not a bad father, but a good one’ (Packer).

Cast your mind back to the love that Russ and Maria Moore had for those two Russian boys—Max and Sergei.  Do you realise that that is just a taster of the infinitely greater love that God wants us experience in him?  Remember that it took time for the boys to realise that they were safe and accepted—to stop hiding food in their high-chairs.  God wants us to realise our position as adopted children, and so he gives us the person of the Holy Spirit, so that we might cry out Abba, Father.

Jack Miller writes, ‘Unless you’re assured that God loves you, it’s pretty hard to do anything in the Christian life’.  So why not pray a prayer that the apostle Paul gave to the Ephesians (and when you have prayed it for yourself, pray it for three other people you know:

'And may you have the power to understand, as a, God's people should, how wised, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.  May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully.  Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God' (Ephesians 3:16-20, New Living Translation).

Your brother, Paul.

Devotional: Praying for our prodigals

Dear Church Family,

Greetings from Irish Preachers' Conference. 

Last Sunday we were thinking about 'Praying for Prodigals'.  A friend described a prodigal as someone for whom the good news has simply stopped being good news.  However, I want to broaden the definition of prodigal to include those who have grown up in Christian homes, or churches, and have never seen the good news as good news.  It breaks our hearts to see people we love be presented with Jesus and yet walk away empty. 

Jack Miller was a wonderful Christian leader whose daughter, Barbara, dramatically walked away from the faith she had been taught by her parents.  In a wonderful devotional ('Saving Grace'), Jack writes about our own prodigal tendencies:

Many times we think, whether consciously or unconsciously, that we can go on vacation from God.  What's really happening is that we think of God as the enemy of our happiness, and we go our own way.  But God is not our enemy.  He's our friend and he wants us to be happy and free.

One of church history's most famous prodigals was Augustine (from the fourth-century).  His mother, Monica, prayed for him for years as he excelled in wild living.  In his spiritual autobiography, 'Confessions', he begins: 'God you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.'  He also wrote that God loves the individual Christian as if their was only one of us.

So pray with me:

'Dear loving Father, we know your desire to save the lost.  You know the burden we have that you would save our sons, daughters, grandchildren, parents, wider family, friends and neighbours.  Please convince them that you are not the enemy of their happiness but want them to be truly happy and free.  Please show them how empty life is without you.  Please convict them of their sin through the work of the Holy Spirit.  Please show them that love is defined at that cross where Christ died for human guilt.  And please help us not give up hope or grow weary as we pray for them.'  Amen.

Extra note:

Two books worth reading for those who are concerned about their prodigal children are:

John Miller and Barbara Miller Juliani, 'Come Back, Barbara',

and  

Jeff Lucas, 'Will your prodigal come home?'  

Devotional: Are we weak and heavy ladden?

Dear sisters and brothers:

As you know I went through a mental and emotional blip a few weeks ago.  I am aware that a number of you have suffered in this way far worse than I ever have.  Anyway, you are not alone in being a Christian who feels low (just read the Psalms).

Oswald Chambers (1874-1917) is best known for his classic devotional book 'My Utmost for His Highest'.  At one stage in his life he was living dangerously close to the edge of a complete breakdown.  In an excellent biography on his life, David McCasland writes:  

Only three times during the past four years had Oswald been conscious of God speaking personally to him: Once, when sitting in  his room late at night, his collie, Tweed, had  come in through the window, put his head on Oswald's knee, looked into his eyes for a few minutes, then gone out again.  Another time his door opened and in came the baby boy of the house, barefoot and in his night clothes [Chambers was living at a theological college].  He came up to him and said, 'Mr. Chambers, I loves you' and went back to his bed.  Again, while conducting a Christian Endeavour meeting, a mentally retarded girl walked down the church aisle and laid a bunch of withering flowers on the table.  A piece of paper tied to the flowers said, 'With love from daft Meg.'  Each event seemed to be a tender touch from the Father conveying His presence and love.  

I encourage us today to be mindful to pray for the many in our church (and those known to our church), who are passing through difficult times.  May God use us, and especially our prayers, to help them be conscious of God's presence.

I leave you with a few of Chamber's comments, that we might pray these would be a felt reality in the lives of those we pray for:

The dearest friend on earth is a mere shadow compared to Jesus Christ.'

When a man is at his wits end it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.'

'Many a man has had his soul restored in the valley of the shadow, not in the green pastures ...'

God bless you my family in Christ,
Paul.