The Most Important Thing in Your Future

Are you stuck right now? Or should I say are you stuck in the now?

A symptom of this is when you seem glued to ‘the feed’ whether Facebook, Twitter or your social media of choice. You stare at it fearing you might miss out if you don’t scroll a bit more. Life in the now is just a merry-go-round. Up, down, round and round without any sense of destination or destiny. ID-1006096

We can forget about the future and only be caught up in the whirlwind of the now. But consider what is the most important thing in the future. Your future.

Don Carson has the answer to that hefty question:

In our generation, which reflects too little on the future and almost never on eternity, it is distressingly obvious that we need help, help from God, so as to be able to know the hope to which we have been called. Only then will we become more interested in living with eternity’s values constantly before our eyes. What we will have to show before the great King on the last day will be infinitely more important to us than what we leave behind here. (A Call to Spiritual Reformation)

Are you ‘living with eternity’s values constantly before your eyes?’

Start thinking about your future. And what is the most important thing in your future.

Heart Work and Liturgical Fidgets

preachingBut we neglect to prepare our hearts; for, as the Puritans would have been the first to tell us, thirty seconds of private prayer upon taking our seat in the church building is not time enough in which to do it. It is here that we need to take ourselves in hand. What we need at the present time to deepen our worship is not new liturgical forms or formulae, nor new hymns and tunes, but more preparatory ‘heart-work’ before we use the old ones. There is nothing wrong with new hymns, tunes, and worship styles—there may be very good reasons for them—but without ‘heart-work’ they will not make our worship more fruitful and God-honouring; they will only strengthen the syndrome that C.S. Lewis called ‘the liturgical fidgets’. ‘Heart-work’ must have priority or spiritually our worship will get nowhere.

JI Packer, Quest for Godliness, 257

A Quest for Ashes

I don’t know anything about cricket. But I knew a guy in college from Australia who said he was a cricket bowler. He was the first guy who told me about what in my frame of reference was the Stanley Cup of Cricket: The Ashes. But like England’s historic quest for the Ashes of its cricket reputation, there has been a quest for the ashes of evangelical spirituality.

Credit: Praying Man by Vittore Carpaccio (1466-1525), Wikipedia

Credit: Praying Man by Vittore Carpaccio (1466-1525), Wikipedia

This spiritual quest has lead Evangelicals into the practice of observing Ash Wednesday. Carl Trueman gets to the heart of it when he says:

I also fear that it speaks of a certain carnality: The desire to do something which simply looks cool and which has a certain ostentatious spirituality about it. As an act of piety, it costs nothing yet implies a deep seriousness. In fact, far from revealing deep seriousness, in an evangelical context it simply exposes the superficiality, eclectic consumerism and underlying identity confusion of the movement.[Read the rest]

What is troubling is that the Protestant tradition has a great depth of spirituality, yet it is almost entirely ignored.

Is it me, or is the Reformed Resurgence/ Young, Restless, Reformed moving away from an awareness of what even the previous Calvinistic generation was reading and feeding on?

I may be wrong, but I don’t hear as much about the Banner of Truth’s Puritan Paperbacks, or a memoir like Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s. The preference seems to be for distillations from modern authors and bloggers.

A void develops in Protestant Evangelical spirituality if the resources of one’s own tradition are ignored. Into that void the mysticism of medieval Roman Catholic practice finds a welcome home. Trueman called it an ‘eclectic consumerism’ and many of the most pious Protestant believers through the ages would likely say the same thing.

Is the advocacy of Lenten observance a bellwether of ignorance in Protestant spirituality? I think so. But it may mark a marginalizing of preaching. Consider the thought of Martyn Lloyd-Jones in Preaching and Preachers:

It has been illuminating to observe these things; as preaching has declined, these other things have been emphasized; and it has all been done quite deliberately. It is part of the reaction against  preaching; and people have felt that it is more dignified to pay this greater attention to the ceremonial, and form, and ritual (24).

We are like the shallow planted tree when the west wind blows. The rapidity of change is so great that the slender connections to deep things are exposed.  With cords and braces we try to prop up what will eventually come down.

Only sending down a vigorous taproot can stave off the winds of change. Without it, we will be only have our Ash Wednesdays and a disconnected scaffold of traditions devoid of life and fruit.

Remembered Revelation is the Root of Prayer

Credit: Betende Hände by Albrecht Durer, 1508, Wikipedia

Credit: Betende Hände by Albrecht Durer, 1508, Wikipedia

Prayer is an active memory recital toward the living God. In prayer, we remember both needy people and God’s revealed promises. We boldly request that God would act for the people in accord with the promises.

Paul focuses on memory in prayer in Romans 1.9. When Paul said he prays, “without ceasing I mention you”, the word “mention” is the Greek word is mneian. It is a word for ‘remembering’. It is also in the first chapter of most of his letters (Phil 1.3, Eph 1.16, 1 Thess 1.2, Philemon 1.4, 2 Tim 1.3). If we want to pray like Paul, we need to have the same focus. We need to remember.

Why is this important? Why is ‘memory’ and our prayerful ‘mentioning as remembering’ important? Because it keeps our prayers from being merely speculations. We are not imagining whatever we want. We are not ‘dreaming’. We are remembering and reciting.

There are two aspects to prayer where our remembering comes in:

Remembering God’s Word. This means that the Scriptures, and God’s revealed will in the Bible is what should shape our prayers.

Remembering Others. This means that we actively recall people and situations.  We remember people who are close to us and those far away. We remember them: from missionaries to mother-in-laws.

This is not “listening prayer” as certain modern supposedly evangelical mystics say. We are not imaginatively speculating about what God would say to us, and acting like God actually said what we have speculated.  This is extremely dangerous, but it is becoming a more mainstream practice among evangelicals.

Rather prayer is remembering what has already been revealed and requesting the living God to act based upon that prior revelation.  Remembered Revelation is the Root of Prayer.