Christian Living

Years ago when our kids were very young, we lived in South Florida. Even though I hadn’t grown up with an annual white Christmas (snow in our part of Tennessee was a pretty rare event) I found it very difficult to get into the Christmas spirit when it was 75 degrees outside. You can only turn the air conditioning down so far, and there’s just something wrong with Christmas lights strung on palm trees.

Read the series so far.

In the last post I cited what is often called “The Lord’s Prayer.” It would be good to have a brief exposition of it. Let us begin by dividing it up (Matt. 6:9-13):

“Pray, then, in this way…”

Introduction and First Petition: Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come
Second Petition: Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
Third Petition: Give us this day our daily bread.
Fourth Petition: And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
Fifth Petition: And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Doxology: For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.

As a matter of fact, and as most of you know, this isn’t an actual prayer to be prayed (although it can be put to that use), but a model or outline of how to pray. Since it comes from the One who hears the prayers we send up, this little outline is full of interest.

(The series so far)

In the last book he wrote, C.S. Lewis made this observation:

To confess our sins before God is certainly to tell Him what He knows much better than we. And also, any petition is a kind of telling. If it does not strictly exclude the principle that God knows our need, it at least seems to elicit His attention. Some traditional formulae make that implication very clear: “Hear us, good Lord” – … As if, though God does not need to be informed, He does need, and even rather frequently, to be reminded. But we cannot really believe that degrees of attention, and therefore of inattention, and therefore of something like forgetfulness, exist in the Divine mind. I assume that only God’s attention keeps me (or anything else) in existence at all.” (C. S. Lewis, Letters To Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 20.)

The question being posed by Lewis is the seeming contradiction between God’s attribute of omniscience, His knowledge of all conceivable things, and our praying to Him. After all, why do we have to inform God of what He already knows? I think this question rears its head often in Christians’ minds. Why “go through the motions?” What is God up to?

Where can we begin as we thank God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit for telling us what we need to know about the true identity of the Triune God and what each Person of the Godhead has done and will do in the created universe?

First, the Father, through Christ the Son, as revealed by the Spirit in the Bible, created millions of wonderful spirit-beings called angels. The Lord asked Job:

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (NKJV, Job 38:4, 7; Job 1:6 informs us that “the sons of God” were angels).

How many angels did God create? Approximately 600 million—because one-third of all angels, led by Satan, rebelled against their Creator (Rev. 12:4), and their number was 200 million (Rev. 9:16). That is a large number—but praise God, twice that many remained faithful to Him, in contrast to mankind, where:

All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way. (Isa. 53:6)

Now, this is the focus of our Thanksgiving meditation this year: We, being limited human beings, need the help of God’s holy angels. “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for those who will inherit salvation?” (Heb. 1:14).

One morning, about two weeks ago, I woke to the sound of my four-year-old son screaming at the top of his lungs. In a response that has become more instinct than will, I jumped out of bed and ran to find him. He was in the bathroom, standing in front of the toilet, wailing with all the angst and fury a preschooler can muster against the injustice of life. His stuffed rabbit—the one that has been with him since birth, the one that we search for every night before bed, the one that has accompanied us on every road trip, vacation, and doctor’s visit—was floating in the bowl. And in that moment, I remembered what day it was.

It was Monday.

In our culture, Monday holds a certain psychological mystique. It’s the bully of the week. The day that knocks you down and laughs. The day that steals your lunch money. The day that many of us just hope to survive. In the words of Alexander, Monday is a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.”

A lot of this is because Monday is the first day back to normal after the weekend. It’s the first day back to business—the first day back to school lunches and briefcases and time cards. The coming week looms large before us, and instead of being invigorated, we feel helpless. Instead of charging forward, carpe diem, we drag and slide and haul ourselves forward, bleary-eyed and overwhelmed.

(The series so far)

The first voice of the creature

The first thing that prayer is is communication with God. If language is a gift of God then prayer is, or ought to be, the first or primary use of language. As such it is the first voice of the creature—whether audible or in silence—speaking to the Creator. As such it is never speaking to some “god,” but is always speaking to the God. If in no other way (and I do not say there are not other ways) this is what sets true prayer apart from false prayer. False prayer is a counterfeit because the god to whom it is offered is a counterfeit. Do we offer up pleas and praise to a divinity who smiles sedately upon all our trivial worship styles and our romanticized views of the Christian Life? That is not God. Do we pray to a cold, distant, offended deity, who moodily withholds answers because he is upset with us even after we have repented? Then our prayers are directed to a false god—one of our imagining.

In either of these scenarios it is ignorance which is the problem. And here I am addressing people with a Bible and a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. I say it again, true prayer can only be given to the true God, the God who reveals Himself in His holy Word.

We have already seen from Exodus 34 how God, even on Mount Sinai on the day the Tablets of the Law were cut, first proclaims those qualities of His essential goodness which promote our sanguine hope:

compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; ⁷ who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin.

This is a God to whom we can come with eyes open and hopes raised. Let us be encouraged. This is the covenant God of hesed—of steadfast devotion to us; sinners in a fallen world.