Wednesday 28 February 2018
Tuesday 27 February 2018
The Sensitivity of True Worship
By Bill Izard
We must ask our twentieth-century selves an intensely serious question: In our desire to pursue biblical essentials of church life, have we subtly lost our way by designing and using worship as a means for accomplishing the end of evangelism? Or, more truthfully, are we making worship the handmaiden of church growth, measuring all that is done, especially and including worship, by its almighty rule? For although repentance is often seen in Scripture as a byproduct of true worship (e.g., Isa. 6:1-7; 1 Cor. 14:24-25), the act of purposefully designing worship to accomplish the goal of evangelism is without biblical precedent.
Evangelism is not an end in and of itself. The ultimate priority for the Christian is that God be glorified; evangelism must be seen as a means of worship - not vice versa. In other words, in all of his evangelizing, the Christian must be single-minded in his desire to please and honor God, just as he is in worship. We may worship through evangelism, but never are we instructed to evangelize through worship.
As sober-minded Christians of any age, but especially in this day of church-wide confusion, we would do well to examine the motives and methods that govern much of what we do in worship today. Let us look into the Scripture and ask some searching questions.
Does our worship emphasize the way in which we appear to men, or is it solely concerned with how we appear to God?
In Galatians 1:10 Paul claims to do nothing in order to please men, for in so doing, he says, he would no longer be serving God but men. In 1 Thessalonians 2:3-6 he again makes this point and adds that his presentation of the gospel was clear and up front: no "flattering words," no hidden agenda. In other words, he was not trying to look good in order to attract men to himself or to Christ. Does our worship reflect the same disinterestedness?
Does our worship tend to secularize the sacred and to profane what is holy in an effort to bring God down to man's level?
In 1 Chronicles 13 and 15 (as well as 2 Samuel 6) is recorded the story of David's moving the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. When David and the people attempted to use a common method (an ox-drawn cart) to transport that which was holy, God severely judged them by killing a man who reached out to steady the ark. Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 Paul says that some among the church's number had died due to their turning the sacred ordinance of the Lord's Supper into a free-for-all buffet that mirrored the pagan "love" feasts. Both of these passages teach the seriousness with which God desires us to set Him apart and to avoid secularizing worship. A church that seeks to look more and more like the world is in danger of presenting a God who is no longer holy because He is hardly discernible from the world.
Often we react to those who express distaste for the things of God, or those who make a mockery of His worship, by apologizing and modifying (or even eliminating) that which offends. But worship was never meant to be made palatable to the masses. In fact Christ specifically instructs in Matthew 7:6, "Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs." The illustration serves to prove a point: the true worshiper should expect the one who scoffs at Christ to reject his Spirit-motivated and biblically oriented worship. How can one who has no appreciation for the things of God nor a relationship with God, one who has no desire for holiness, accurately assess such a holy service? His heart needs transforming - not the worship service! Worship is a holy expression before a holy God. To invite nonbelievers into such a holy process is a precarious thing, and to design worship to accommodate their secular mind set is not only ineffective evangelism but also severely compromised worship.
Is our worship intended to soften nonbelievers into "liking" Christians and Christianity?
The Author of Scripture uses strong language with unmistakable meaning in James 4:4: "Don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God." Matthew 10:22; John 15:18-21; 2 Corinthians 6:14- 18; 1 John 2:15, and numerous other passages also teach this enmity. The world hates Christ and we will be hated if we are Christ's. Moreover we are to have no affection for the world and the things of the world. If we are obsessed with making our Christian worship comfortable and non-offensive to those who hate Him, we are in danger of denying Him and His call to holy living. Are we justified in taking such a risk, only that we may not offend? Surely Christians are not to seek to offend, but Christ says those who follow Him will be offensive - it is unavoidable.
Is our worship based on a philosophy that follows "human tradition" and "the basic principles of this world"? (See Col. 2:8,10.)
Man seeks to attract followers by putting on his best face, offering the world something it wants to buy, promising quick and easy solutions to life's problems. Those who seek to implement these tactics in the church appeal to "wisdom." But this is the wisdom of men referred to in 1 Corinthians 2:5, not the wisdom of God. This sort of wisdom teaches us to use whatever seems to work best - the most practical course according to our sensual observations. The true worshiper, however, will incessantly search the Scriptures for God's ways to both worship and evangelize and pursue those ways, although they may seem as utter foolishness to the world. Indeed, true worship is always scripturally based and is in fact seen as impractical by the world.
Sadly, in our day most churches are addicted to pragmatism. But in Matthew 26 Jesus shows that practicality or pragmatism is not always the course to follow:
Is our worship designed to make the nonbeliever feel comfortable, accepted, pleased, even entertained?
As evidenced in such passages as Matthew 17:5-7; Luke 5:8-10; Isaiah 6:1-7; Acts 2:43; and Revelation 1:17, fear and trembling are more often the result of standing in the presence of a holy God, not comfort or pleasure. Fear, respect, and worship are often synonyms throughout Scripture (compare Luke 4:8 to Deuteronomy 6:13). Instead of seeking to make the nonbeliever comfortable in worship, we should be seeking to make him feel the awful weight of his condemned state without Christ. Not we but only the Savior has the right to comfort the sinner - to say, "Get up, and don't be afraid" (Matt. 17:6-7).
Does our worship seek the participation of those who neither know God nor love Him?
Jesus' classic statement on worship (John 4:23-24) says that we are to worship the Father "in spirit and in truth." God wants true worshipers in His presence - those who come to worship Him only, in all honesty and from the depths of their being - not those who seek to be entertained or lifted by emotions. The practicalities of our worship are important, but not nearly as important as the motivation behind our worship to One who looks on the heart and not the outward appearance (1 Sam. 6:7).
True worship can be performed only by those who sincerely know and love their Father. In Nehemiah 9:1-3 we are told that Israel, after the public reading of God's Word (chapter 8), realized they were to separate as they worshiped from those who had not entered into the covenant relationship with God.
Likewise, Christians are forbidden to be "yoked together" with unbelievers.
"If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened" (Ps. 66:18). The unrepentant who do not acknowledge and turn from their sin have no audience with the Lord; their prayers are in vain because He refuses to listen. (See also Matthew 15:8-9 and Isaiah 29:13.) Other Scriptures use stronger language: "The Lord detests the sacrifice of the wicked" (Prov. 15:8), and "If anyone turns a deaf ear to the law, even his prayers are detestable" (Prov. 28:9). God finds the worship of the nonbeliever despicable, abhorrent. It turns His stomach - He hates it.
Is our worship exclusively led by and does it exalt those whom the world considers successful, attractive, "together," happy?
In the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20-26) Christ blesses those whom we often curse. "Blessed are you who are poor," He says, and "you who hunger, who weep - blessed are you when men hate you." We might say we love the poor, but are we willing to allow one who is poor, wearing clothing befitting the poor, reflecting an education belonging to the poor - do we allow such a one to lead us in worship or other public ministry? Or do we instead give place to the well-off (James 2:1-7), the "acceptable," so we will not offend or embarrass ourselves?
Christ blesses those who weep, but we demand every Christian leader wear a smile, be happy and excited. But as we lead worship, or as we live life; should we be forever smiling, as if happiness were holy and sorrow or sobriety were sinful? Christ Himself was sorrowful (Matt. 26:38), wept publicly (Luke 19:41; John 11:35), spoke in such a way that His audience became very grieved (Matt. 17:23; 19:22), and promised sorrow to His disciples (John 16:20). In fact, Ecclesiastes advises that "sorrow is better than laughter" and "a sad face is good for the heart" (Eccl. 7:2-4). Indeed, the Bible expressly indicates that repentance is accompanied by godly sorrow and that those who do not feel sorrow for their sin or the sins of others are still in danger of condemnation: "Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death" (2 Cor. 7:10).
Certainly the Bible also teaches joy in the Lord, and we are happy in expectation as we look forward to that day when our joy will be complete in the presence of Christ. But our desire to make everyone happy and comfortable, or happy and excited, is unscriptural, leads us into hypocrisy, and deceives those we lead with a false view of Christianity. Instead we should proclaim the warning of Luke 6:24-26 to those who are comfortable and satisfied: "But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep."
And we should take special heed to the last warning ourselves: "Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets." Are we seeking that all those who come to our worship speak well of us?
It is said by the church growth specialists that we should strive for "excellence" in worship. True. However, we must ask the question: "By whose standard are we to measure this excellence?" Are we to look to that which the outside world holds as honorable, acceptable, and praiseworthy, or rather to that with which Scripture declares God is most pleased?
Jesus Himself was not impressive or attractive, for He had "no beauty or majesty ... nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him .... He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering .... We esteemed Him not" (Isa. 53:2-3). And yet Christ accomplished the will of God perfectly.
The disciples were also valued little by the society in which they lived, and were notably "unschooled, ordinary men" (Acts 4:13). But God used them; "These men ... have caused trouble all over the world" (Acts 17:6). The apostle Paul was certainly not oratorically impressive nor physically attractive (2 Cor. 10:10). He appeared to the Christians of his day
First Corinthians 1:26-31 gives us God's perspective:
Is our worship truly Christ-like?
Nobody loves the unbeliever more than Jesus (Rom. 5:8). He, the true Seeker, came to seek and to save the lost. But Jesus was not "seeker sensitive" as the term is used today. There were many who came to Jesus, only to be turned away because they had come for the wrong reasons.
An example is found in John 6. After the miracle of the loaves (the "feeding of the five thousand"), Jesus rebuked the masses who were "seeking" Him. He knew they were coming to be satisfied with more bread, not to acknowledge Him as their Messiah (v. 26). They came to Christ for what He could do for them temporally, not because they were sinners in desperate need of the eternal Living Bread. Yet we advertise for nonbelievers to come for the upbeat music, the encouraging word, the friendly atmosphere, the biblical principles that will make them a success - it doesn't matter why they come, just so long as they come! This crowd persisted and persisted, but Christ only offered more and more difficult teaching to the point that not only was the public offended (vv. 60-61), but also some of His more faithful followers. (If anyone was a "seeker," it was a disciple!) And yet Christ did not back down or plead for them to give Him another chance. Instead He let them go their own way; He knew that "no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father" (vv. 65-66).
There were others who came. The rich young ruler in Matthew 19:16-26 (with whom we would be quite satisfied if he were to just tithe now and then) was turned away after the first inquiry because he wouldn't give up all he had to follow Christ. The men in Luke 9:57-62, invited by Christ Himself, would have been followers themselves, but each had his conditions: one wanted comfort along the way; another wanted to wait until his father had died, presumably to make it easier to transfer his allegiance; and the third simply wanted to say goodbye. But all were sternly rebuked by the Master, especially the last, who was described as one "unfit for the kingdom of God."
Today we come to Christ and say, "Yes, I'll worship You, but I must do it with a certain type of music," or "Yes, I'll listen to your sermon, but don't make it too long" or "Yes, I'll come to Christ, but don't tell me I have to give up my worldly music, my worldly clothes, my worldly acquaintances." When we add our own stipulations to worship, though they certainly may appear justifiable and reasonable to us, we usurp the authority of Christ who says, "Come! No holds barred! Come! No matter what!"
Some suggest that Jesus was "seeker sensitive" in that He worked His miracles in order to attract large crowds to which He could share the gospel. But in several passages it is plain this is not His motive: Mark 5:43; 7:36; 8:26, 30; and Luke 4:9-12 (and these are by no means exhaustive). Clearly, Christ did not intend these miraculous works for public exploitation. There is little to indicate Christ worked miracles in order to draw a crowd. He was opposed to selling the gospel by appealing to their love for the sensational. (See John 2: 23-25;) As seen above, He sharply rebuked the five thousand for seeking Him for merely physical satisfaction. Jesus did not teach us to draw people to Him by appealing to their senses. Instead He claimed full responsibility for drawing all to Himself by way of the cross (John 12:32); therefore, exalting Christ "and Him crucified" is to be the primary object in worship, as well as evangelism. (See Revelation 5:8.)
Neither can we say the disciples were "seeker sensitive." In Luke 10:10-16 Christ gave seventy of His most faithful followers specific instructions to symbolically "shake the dust from their feet" as a rebuke to those who do not accept the gospel. He doesn't tell them to try a different method, revise their message, or buddy-up to the people in an effort to win them over. Instead they were to do exactly as Christ had commanded, preaching the gospel He had declared and ministering in His Name, no matter what the result. And what about Paul? Hear again Galatians 1:10: "Am I not trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ." Instead of seeking to be a people-pleaser, the true disciple, and thus the true worshiper, mirrors Christ's uncompromising zeal to please the Father.
And so is our challenge. Can we hold ourselves accountable strictly to the Word of God in the areas of evangelism and worship rather than to charts of numerical growth and the response of the majority? Will we seek to please the true Object of our worship at the risk of losing our good standing with the "seeker"? Can we depend upon Christ to build His Church without abusing the purity of worship? Only those who know Christ can truly worship Him, and they will worship Him without the enticement of "seeker sensitive" tactics. To be sure, those who do not know Him need the attention of every believer as we attempt to earnestly persuade them to come to Christ. But let the focus of the saints be fully upon their holy God as they meet with Him in worship, so that when they take the gospel to the world, they will go empowered by the Seeker of men's souls and in such a way that will please Him most.
Author
Mr. Bill Izard, a former school teacher, serves as an associate in the ministry of Christian Communicators Worldwide, North Little Rock, AR. He has assisted in leading public worship through music and teaching.
We must ask our twentieth-century selves an intensely serious question: In our desire to pursue biblical essentials of church life, have we subtly lost our way by designing and using worship as a means for accomplishing the end of evangelism? Or, more truthfully, are we making worship the handmaiden of church growth, measuring all that is done, especially and including worship, by its almighty rule? For although repentance is often seen in Scripture as a byproduct of true worship (e.g., Isa. 6:1-7; 1 Cor. 14:24-25), the act of purposefully designing worship to accomplish the goal of evangelism is without biblical precedent.
Evangelism is not an end in and of itself. The ultimate priority for the Christian is that God be glorified; evangelism must be seen as a means of worship - not vice versa. In other words, in all of his evangelizing, the Christian must be single-minded in his desire to please and honor God, just as he is in worship. We may worship through evangelism, but never are we instructed to evangelize through worship.
As sober-minded Christians of any age, but especially in this day of church-wide confusion, we would do well to examine the motives and methods that govern much of what we do in worship today. Let us look into the Scripture and ask some searching questions.
Does our worship emphasize the way in which we appear to men, or is it solely concerned with how we appear to God?
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full, but, when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you (Matt. 6:5-6).Jesus describes the worshipful act of prayer as an action to be done in private, not paraded before men in order to impress them; This passage is not a prohibition on public prayer but instead teaches an important principle regarding worship. Interaction with the Father is meant for the Father, not to be a display that pleases men. Worship is an expression of love to be directed solely to the Beloved, and there should be no concern in the heart of the lover/worshiper about negative or positive impressions gained by onlookers. The worshiper should give as little thought to onlookers as David did as he worshiped before the ark in his linen ephod (2 Sam. 6:14-22).
In Galatians 1:10 Paul claims to do nothing in order to please men, for in so doing, he says, he would no longer be serving God but men. In 1 Thessalonians 2:3-6 he again makes this point and adds that his presentation of the gospel was clear and up front: no "flattering words," no hidden agenda. In other words, he was not trying to look good in order to attract men to himself or to Christ. Does our worship reflect the same disinterestedness?
Does our worship tend to secularize the sacred and to profane what is holy in an effort to bring God down to man's level?
In 1 Chronicles 13 and 15 (as well as 2 Samuel 6) is recorded the story of David's moving the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. When David and the people attempted to use a common method (an ox-drawn cart) to transport that which was holy, God severely judged them by killing a man who reached out to steady the ark. Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 Paul says that some among the church's number had died due to their turning the sacred ordinance of the Lord's Supper into a free-for-all buffet that mirrored the pagan "love" feasts. Both of these passages teach the seriousness with which God desires us to set Him apart and to avoid secularizing worship. A church that seeks to look more and more like the world is in danger of presenting a God who is no longer holy because He is hardly discernible from the world.
Often we react to those who express distaste for the things of God, or those who make a mockery of His worship, by apologizing and modifying (or even eliminating) that which offends. But worship was never meant to be made palatable to the masses. In fact Christ specifically instructs in Matthew 7:6, "Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs." The illustration serves to prove a point: the true worshiper should expect the one who scoffs at Christ to reject his Spirit-motivated and biblically oriented worship. How can one who has no appreciation for the things of God nor a relationship with God, one who has no desire for holiness, accurately assess such a holy service? His heart needs transforming - not the worship service! Worship is a holy expression before a holy God. To invite nonbelievers into such a holy process is a precarious thing, and to design worship to accommodate their secular mind set is not only ineffective evangelism but also severely compromised worship.
Is our worship intended to soften nonbelievers into "liking" Christians and Christianity?
The Author of Scripture uses strong language with unmistakable meaning in James 4:4: "Don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God." Matthew 10:22; John 15:18-21; 2 Corinthians 6:14- 18; 1 John 2:15, and numerous other passages also teach this enmity. The world hates Christ and we will be hated if we are Christ's. Moreover we are to have no affection for the world and the things of the world. If we are obsessed with making our Christian worship comfortable and non-offensive to those who hate Him, we are in danger of denying Him and His call to holy living. Are we justified in taking such a risk, only that we may not offend? Surely Christians are not to seek to offend, but Christ says those who follow Him will be offensive - it is unavoidable.
Is our worship based on a philosophy that follows "human tradition" and "the basic principles of this world"? (See Col. 2:8,10.)
Man seeks to attract followers by putting on his best face, offering the world something it wants to buy, promising quick and easy solutions to life's problems. Those who seek to implement these tactics in the church appeal to "wisdom." But this is the wisdom of men referred to in 1 Corinthians 2:5, not the wisdom of God. This sort of wisdom teaches us to use whatever seems to work best - the most practical course according to our sensual observations. The true worshiper, however, will incessantly search the Scriptures for God's ways to both worship and evangelize and pursue those ways, although they may seem as utter foolishness to the world. Indeed, true worship is always scripturally based and is in fact seen as impractical by the world.
Sadly, in our day most churches are addicted to pragmatism. But in Matthew 26 Jesus shows that practicality or pragmatism is not always the course to follow:
A woman came to Him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on His head as He was reclining at the table. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. "Why this waste?" they asked. "This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor" (vv. 7-9).It would have been far more practical to sell the perfume and use the proceeds to minister to the poor. After all, hadn't Jesus just said in chapter 25 that the true disciple will be about the business of feeding, clothing, and ministering to those in need? But Christ knew the extravagance displayed by the woman was an act of worship: "Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to Me .... When she poured this perfume on My body, she did it to prepare Me for My burial" (vv. 10, 12). The worship service that focuses on exalting God should not be seen as a wasted opportunity to evangelize. There is certainly a place for direct ministry to the "seeker," but worship's priority must be in pouring out our sacrifice of praise to the Father. (Note: The terms "seeker" and "seeker sensitive" are popular church growth terms, yet questions abound as to their advisability - see Romans 3:11.)
Is our worship designed to make the nonbeliever feel comfortable, accepted, pleased, even entertained?
As evidenced in such passages as Matthew 17:5-7; Luke 5:8-10; Isaiah 6:1-7; Acts 2:43; and Revelation 1:17, fear and trembling are more often the result of standing in the presence of a holy God, not comfort or pleasure. Fear, respect, and worship are often synonyms throughout Scripture (compare Luke 4:8 to Deuteronomy 6:13). Instead of seeking to make the nonbeliever comfortable in worship, we should be seeking to make him feel the awful weight of his condemned state without Christ. Not we but only the Savior has the right to comfort the sinner - to say, "Get up, and don't be afraid" (Matt. 17:6-7).
Does our worship seek the participation of those who neither know God nor love Him?
Jesus' classic statement on worship (John 4:23-24) says that we are to worship the Father "in spirit and in truth." God wants true worshipers in His presence - those who come to worship Him only, in all honesty and from the depths of their being - not those who seek to be entertained or lifted by emotions. The practicalities of our worship are important, but not nearly as important as the motivation behind our worship to One who looks on the heart and not the outward appearance (1 Sam. 6:7).
True worship can be performed only by those who sincerely know and love their Father. In Nehemiah 9:1-3 we are told that Israel, after the public reading of God's Word (chapter 8), realized they were to separate as they worshiped from those who had not entered into the covenant relationship with God.
Likewise, Christians are forbidden to be "yoked together" with unbelievers.
For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? ... What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? ... Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord (2 Cor. 6:14-17a).Though nonbelievers may be present with us in the worship setting, we should never feel or encourage "unity" of worship with them. We have a message of repentance and faith for them, but we do not worship with them. Such a unity communicates an acceptance of them by God that He has denied. Indeed their father is the devil (John 8:44).
"If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened" (Ps. 66:18). The unrepentant who do not acknowledge and turn from their sin have no audience with the Lord; their prayers are in vain because He refuses to listen. (See also Matthew 15:8-9 and Isaiah 29:13.) Other Scriptures use stronger language: "The Lord detests the sacrifice of the wicked" (Prov. 15:8), and "If anyone turns a deaf ear to the law, even his prayers are detestable" (Prov. 28:9). God finds the worship of the nonbeliever despicable, abhorrent. It turns His stomach - He hates it.
Is our worship exclusively led by and does it exalt those whom the world considers successful, attractive, "together," happy?
In the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20-26) Christ blesses those whom we often curse. "Blessed are you who are poor," He says, and "you who hunger, who weep - blessed are you when men hate you." We might say we love the poor, but are we willing to allow one who is poor, wearing clothing befitting the poor, reflecting an education belonging to the poor - do we allow such a one to lead us in worship or other public ministry? Or do we instead give place to the well-off (James 2:1-7), the "acceptable," so we will not offend or embarrass ourselves?
Christ blesses those who weep, but we demand every Christian leader wear a smile, be happy and excited. But as we lead worship, or as we live life; should we be forever smiling, as if happiness were holy and sorrow or sobriety were sinful? Christ Himself was sorrowful (Matt. 26:38), wept publicly (Luke 19:41; John 11:35), spoke in such a way that His audience became very grieved (Matt. 17:23; 19:22), and promised sorrow to His disciples (John 16:20). In fact, Ecclesiastes advises that "sorrow is better than laughter" and "a sad face is good for the heart" (Eccl. 7:2-4). Indeed, the Bible expressly indicates that repentance is accompanied by godly sorrow and that those who do not feel sorrow for their sin or the sins of others are still in danger of condemnation: "Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death" (2 Cor. 7:10).
Certainly the Bible also teaches joy in the Lord, and we are happy in expectation as we look forward to that day when our joy will be complete in the presence of Christ. But our desire to make everyone happy and comfortable, or happy and excited, is unscriptural, leads us into hypocrisy, and deceives those we lead with a false view of Christianity. Instead we should proclaim the warning of Luke 6:24-26 to those who are comfortable and satisfied: "But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep."
And we should take special heed to the last warning ourselves: "Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets." Are we seeking that all those who come to our worship speak well of us?
It is said by the church growth specialists that we should strive for "excellence" in worship. True. However, we must ask the question: "By whose standard are we to measure this excellence?" Are we to look to that which the outside world holds as honorable, acceptable, and praiseworthy, or rather to that with which Scripture declares God is most pleased?
Jesus Himself was not impressive or attractive, for He had "no beauty or majesty ... nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him .... He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering .... We esteemed Him not" (Isa. 53:2-3). And yet Christ accomplished the will of God perfectly.
The disciples were also valued little by the society in which they lived, and were notably "unschooled, ordinary men" (Acts 4:13). But God used them; "These men ... have caused trouble all over the world" (Acts 17:6). The apostle Paul was certainly not oratorically impressive nor physically attractive (2 Cor. 10:10). He appeared to the Christians of his day
... In weakness and fear and with much trembling .... My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on man's wisdom, but on God's power (1 Cor. 2:3-5).Indeed, Paul learned of the Lord, "My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness." He considered it a much greater thing to appear weak or infirm that all the glory might be Christ's (2 Cor. 12:9-10). In fact, it is hard not to find a biblical example that follows this pattern. Moses was not a naturally gifted speaker and tried to argue that his deficiencies in communication excused him from leadership and service for God, and yet he alone was chosen to speak for God, as well as lead and organize the nation Israel (Ex. 4:10-14); Jeremiah also objected that his inexperience, youthfulness, and lack of speaking skills disqualified him from public service, but to no avail: God had called him and God would guide him, speak through him, and deliver him (Jer. 1:4-10).
First Corinthians 1:26-31 gives us God's perspective:
Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things - and the things that are not - to nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before Him. It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, Who has become for us wisdom from God - that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord."Even our experience tells us that it is often those whom the world considers attractive and impressive according to their own value system who are steeped in their own pride and become disqualified for the Lord's service. Let us take our eyes off that which the world holds as excellent or acceptable, and ask instead how best we can please the Lord, no matter what the impression it makes on the world. Our worship must be led by those in whom Christ is exalted though they may be rejected by the world.
Is our worship truly Christ-like?
Nobody loves the unbeliever more than Jesus (Rom. 5:8). He, the true Seeker, came to seek and to save the lost. But Jesus was not "seeker sensitive" as the term is used today. There were many who came to Jesus, only to be turned away because they had come for the wrong reasons.
An example is found in John 6. After the miracle of the loaves (the "feeding of the five thousand"), Jesus rebuked the masses who were "seeking" Him. He knew they were coming to be satisfied with more bread, not to acknowledge Him as their Messiah (v. 26). They came to Christ for what He could do for them temporally, not because they were sinners in desperate need of the eternal Living Bread. Yet we advertise for nonbelievers to come for the upbeat music, the encouraging word, the friendly atmosphere, the biblical principles that will make them a success - it doesn't matter why they come, just so long as they come! This crowd persisted and persisted, but Christ only offered more and more difficult teaching to the point that not only was the public offended (vv. 60-61), but also some of His more faithful followers. (If anyone was a "seeker," it was a disciple!) And yet Christ did not back down or plead for them to give Him another chance. Instead He let them go their own way; He knew that "no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father" (vv. 65-66).
There were others who came. The rich young ruler in Matthew 19:16-26 (with whom we would be quite satisfied if he were to just tithe now and then) was turned away after the first inquiry because he wouldn't give up all he had to follow Christ. The men in Luke 9:57-62, invited by Christ Himself, would have been followers themselves, but each had his conditions: one wanted comfort along the way; another wanted to wait until his father had died, presumably to make it easier to transfer his allegiance; and the third simply wanted to say goodbye. But all were sternly rebuked by the Master, especially the last, who was described as one "unfit for the kingdom of God."
Today we come to Christ and say, "Yes, I'll worship You, but I must do it with a certain type of music," or "Yes, I'll listen to your sermon, but don't make it too long" or "Yes, I'll come to Christ, but don't tell me I have to give up my worldly music, my worldly clothes, my worldly acquaintances." When we add our own stipulations to worship, though they certainly may appear justifiable and reasonable to us, we usurp the authority of Christ who says, "Come! No holds barred! Come! No matter what!"
Some suggest that Jesus was "seeker sensitive" in that He worked His miracles in order to attract large crowds to which He could share the gospel. But in several passages it is plain this is not His motive: Mark 5:43; 7:36; 8:26, 30; and Luke 4:9-12 (and these are by no means exhaustive). Clearly, Christ did not intend these miraculous works for public exploitation. There is little to indicate Christ worked miracles in order to draw a crowd. He was opposed to selling the gospel by appealing to their love for the sensational. (See John 2: 23-25;) As seen above, He sharply rebuked the five thousand for seeking Him for merely physical satisfaction. Jesus did not teach us to draw people to Him by appealing to their senses. Instead He claimed full responsibility for drawing all to Himself by way of the cross (John 12:32); therefore, exalting Christ "and Him crucified" is to be the primary object in worship, as well as evangelism. (See Revelation 5:8.)
Neither can we say the disciples were "seeker sensitive." In Luke 10:10-16 Christ gave seventy of His most faithful followers specific instructions to symbolically "shake the dust from their feet" as a rebuke to those who do not accept the gospel. He doesn't tell them to try a different method, revise their message, or buddy-up to the people in an effort to win them over. Instead they were to do exactly as Christ had commanded, preaching the gospel He had declared and ministering in His Name, no matter what the result. And what about Paul? Hear again Galatians 1:10: "Am I not trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ." Instead of seeking to be a people-pleaser, the true disciple, and thus the true worshiper, mirrors Christ's uncompromising zeal to please the Father.
And so is our challenge. Can we hold ourselves accountable strictly to the Word of God in the areas of evangelism and worship rather than to charts of numerical growth and the response of the majority? Will we seek to please the true Object of our worship at the risk of losing our good standing with the "seeker"? Can we depend upon Christ to build His Church without abusing the purity of worship? Only those who know Christ can truly worship Him, and they will worship Him without the enticement of "seeker sensitive" tactics. To be sure, those who do not know Him need the attention of every believer as we attempt to earnestly persuade them to come to Christ. But let the focus of the saints be fully upon their holy God as they meet with Him in worship, so that when they take the gospel to the world, they will go empowered by the Seeker of men's souls and in such a way that will please Him most.
Author
Mr. Bill Izard, a former school teacher, serves as an associate in the ministry of Christian Communicators Worldwide, North Little Rock, AR. He has assisted in leading public worship through music and teaching.
A Consuming Fire
By R. Kent Hughes
During Christianity's second century, a notable heretic by the name of Marcion came to power in Asia Minor, and though he was excommunicated early on, his destructive teaching lingered for nearly two centuries. Marcion taught the total incompatibility of the Old and New Testaments. He believed that there was a radical discontinuity between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament - between the creator and the Father of Jesus. So Marcion created a new Bible for his followers which had no Old Testament, and a severely hacked up New Testament which consisted of only one Gospel (an edited version of Luke), and ten select and edited Pauline Epistles which excluded the Pastorals. His views were spelled out in his book Antitheses, which set forth the alleged contradictions between the Testaments. Tertullian, in his famous Against Marcion, wrote a five-volume refutation.
But Marcionism never completely died out, and in the nineteenth century, especially, with the rise of liberalism it underwent a revival among those who wished to separate what they considered to be the crude and primitive of the Old Testament from the New. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the eighteenth and nineteenth-century father of liberalism, said that the Old Testament has a place in the Christian heritage only by virtue of its connections with Christianity. He felt that it should be no more than an appendix of historical interest. Adolf Harnack argued that the Reformers should have dropped it from the canon of authoritative writings. Likewise, there are thousands today who have rejected the Old Testament either formally or in practice.
The error of this kind of approach was pointed out by a fellow liberal, Albert Schweitzer, who demonstrated that such thinking amounts to choosing aspects of God which fit one's man-made theology. Men project their own thoughts about God back to God and create a god of their own thinking. And, of course, anyone who is in touch with modern culture knows that this kind of reasoning, Marcionism, is alive and well.
So what does this have to do with us who hold both Testaments to be the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Very much! Because Marcionism is subtly alive in the evangelical enterprise in its understanding of God. Of course, it is true that the New Testament gives us a fuller revelation of God, and that we do not live under the Old Testament. Nevertheless the God we worship is still the same God. But, sadly, many Christians today are so ignorant of their Bibles, especially the Old Testament, that they have a tragically sentimentalized idea of God - which amounts to little more than a deity who died to meet their needs. The result is the incredible paradox of evangelicals who "know Jesus" but who don't know who God is - unwitting Marcionites!
The remedy for this travesty is the Bible, specifically the Old Covenant's Sinai and the New Covenant's Zion - each of which present a vision, an aesthetic, for understanding God. [1]
From Mt. Sinai we learn from Moses' mouth that God is a consuming fire - "Be careful not to forget the covenant of the LORD your God. . . For the LORD your God is a consuming fire" (Deut. 4:23-24). The vision is stupendous: a mountain-top blazing with "fire to the very heavens" (Deut. 4:11) - cloaked with a deep darkness - lightning illuminating golden arteries in the clouds, celestial rams' horns overlaying the thunder with mournful elephantine blasts - the ground shaking, undulating as God's voice intones the Ten Commandments. God is transcendentally "other," perfectly good and holy. He radiates wrath and judgment against sin. God cannot be approached.
This is the vision for the heart of every believer - "God is a consuming fire." It is the corrective so needed in today's church which has shamefully trivialized worship, turning it into a self-assured farce. Here God's divine intention in creating Sinai is obvious because, as we say "a picture is worth a thousand words," and pictures are easier for us humans to remember than words. Flaming Mt. Sinai is God!
Of course, the other mountain, Mt. Zion of the New Testament, completes the picture. There we see God's love, as God the Son becomes sin for us, taking all of His people's transgressions on Himself so that He "became sin" (2 Cor. 5:21; cf. Gal. 3:10-11) - writhing under its load like an impaled serpent (cf. Num. 21:4-8). There on the cross we see God the Son dying for our sins and extending forgiveness to all who will believe in Him, trusting His work alone for salvation. What a vision we are bequeathed from Calvary: God, with his arms nailed wide as if to embrace the whole of those who will come, His blood covering the earth speaking a better word than the blood of Abel - the consuming love of God. Mt. Zion, crowned by Golgotha is God!
Brothers and sisters, both mountains are God - Sinai and Zion are God! Neither can be separated from the other. God is not the God of one hill, but both. Both visions must be held in blessed tension within our souls - consuming fire and consuming love. This will save us from the damning delusion of Marcion!
It is this great twin-peaked God to whom we come as we marathon onward to "Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God" (Heb. 12:22). The massive dual revelation of the mountains is meant to shape our pilgrimage. And the question we must ask is, how then are we to march? What "oughtnesses" do the mountains bring? There are two: obedience and worship.
Obedience
Effectual Word. We ought to obey because God's Word is unstoppably effectual - "See to it that you do not refuse Him who speaks. If they did not escape when they refused Him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn away from Him who warns us from heaven?" (v. 25).
This is what is called in logic an a fortiori argument, an argument which argues that what is true in the lesser case will be even more true in the greater. In the lesser case, God's earthly warning at Sinai first suffered subtle refusal by the Israelites when they "begged that no further word be spoken to them" (v. 19, cf. Ex. 20:19) - though their refusal there at Sinai was more from fear than outright rejection of God. However in the years that followed, they explicitly refused God's Word by their repeated disobediences during the four decades of wandering in the wilderness. So grievous was their disobedience that Numbers 14:29 records that God pronounced judgment that everyone who was 20 and older would die in the desert. And, indeed; none did escape except faithful Caleb and Joshua. A million plus corpses littered the desert.
Now, if such was the inexorable penalty for disobeying God's earthly message, how much more so will it be in the greater instance of disobeying His heavenly message of grace through His Son? (cf. 1:2). Surely no one will escape! This, of course, has been the preacher's message all along. In Hebrews 2:3a he has warned, "How shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?"
Later in 10:28-29 he said much the same thing, emphasizing greater punishment.
Final Word. If this is not sufficient reason to obey the God of the two mountains, there is another, and that is that His Word is final; as the preacher goes on to explain:
But there is an infinitely greater shaking coming, an eschatological cosmic shaking of the whole universe, which will itself be triggered by God's Word. Here the preacher has quoted God's promise from Haggai 2:6; "Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens" (v. 26b) - indicating that every created thing will be shaken to utter disintegration. This is in accord with what the Scriptures teach us about the power of God's Word. Genesis says that He created everything by His Word as He spoke the universe into existence. Therefore, one "little word" from Him can and will fell creation!
The Psalmist tells us that creation is transitory. "In the beginning You laid the foundations of the earth; and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You remain; they will all wear out like a garment" (Ps. 102:25-26; cf. Heb. 1:10-12). Isaiah says of the future, "Therefore I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath of the LORD Almighty, in the day of His burning anger" (13:13). And Peter identifies it with the day of the Lord: "But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare" (2 Peter 3:10). Think of it all one hundred thousand million galaxies - each containing at least that many stars - each galaxy one hundred light years across - will hear the Word and shake out of existence! Just a little word from God, and it is done.
The reason for this is clearly spelled out, "So that what cannot be shaken may remain" (v. 27b). The people of God, as a part of the order of things which are unshakable, will survive. But everything else in the universe will be shaken and therefore purged; everything that is wrong will be eradicated. No sin, no imperfection will remain. Then, there will be a blessed reconstitution of a new heaven and a new earth - ''Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away" (Rev. 21:1).
To those who are obedient this is good news. And the preacher means it to be a powerful encouragement to the beleaguered little church to which he writes, where some might feel like their lives are being shaken to pieces by Rome. "Stand firm midst the Roman tremors," he seems to be saying, "because the ultimate shaking is coming when Rome, and indeed the entire present evil order, will shake to oblivion. And you, as part of the new order, will survive. Take heart!" On the other hand, to those who are ignoring God's Word and drifting further away - it was a disquieting revelation and challenge to obedience.
But to all, including us, there is a mighty call to obey God's Word, because it is effectual and final. No Israelite who disobeyed God's earthly Word survived the desert, and how much more will be the case with those who disobey the heavenly Word through Christ. God's Word is effectual; it never fails. And God's Word is final. It started the universe, and it will stop it! So the command to all us pilgrims in verse 25 comes with such force, "See to it that you do not refuse Him who speaks."
Are you refusing God? Has He been speaking to you, but have you been ignoring His Word? What folly! His Word is effectual, and it is final.
Worship
After obedience, the other great "ought" which comes from the two mountains concerns worship:
Note our text well! It says that "[Our] God is [not was!] a consuming fire." The God of Zion is the same God as the God of Sinai. God has not changed. To some of us, the great religious traditions' troubles may seem far removed. But the truth is, similar problems are common in the more independent, evangelical traditions.
One Sunday morning a friend of mine visited a church where, to his amazement, the worship prelude was the theme song from the Paul Newman/Robert Redford movie "The Sting," titled (significantly, I think) ''The Entertainer." The congregation was preparing for divine worship while cinematic images of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in 1920s garb hovered in their consciousness!
And that was just the prelude, for what followed was an off-the-wall service that made no attempt at worship, the "high point" being the announcements when the pastor (inspired no doubt by the rousing prelude) stood unbeknownst behind the unfortunate person doing announcements making "horns" behind his head with his forked fingers and mugging Bozo-like for the congregation. This buffoonery took place in a self-proclaimed "Bible believing church" which ostensibly worships the holy Triune God of the Bible.
But what was in the pastor's and peoples' minds? What did they really think of God? How could anyone do such things and understand who God is? The answer is, they were modern evangelical Marcionites whose ignorance of Holy Scripture had so edited God that divine worship had become man-centered vaudeville - and poor slap-stick at that!
Don't misunderstand. Christians ought to laugh, they ought to have the best sense of humor on this planet. And Christians ought to enjoy life. But they must know and understand that God remains a "consuming fire" and that acceptable worship takes place when there is authentic "reverence and awe." This is God's Word! When we come to worship we must keep both mountains in view: the approachable Zion with its consuming love, and the unapproachable Sinai with its consuming fire - and then come in reverent boldness.
Conclusion
Reverent worship understands both God's love and His holiness. This is what I desire for myself and my church. And everything depends on how we see God. If we see him scripturally we will make Sunday mornings an occasion for awe and reverence - and there will be times when we are overwhelmed with the numinous as our souls are engaged by God. My heart's desire for young people raised in my church from, say, birth to twenty is that: they be regenerated; that they have a radical biblical vision of God, a sense of his holiness and transcendence; and that this will inform all of life: their worship, their sense of mission and evangelism, their stewardship, their affirmation and delight in creation, their relationships, their sexual ethics - everything!
And, yes, lastly, my heart's desire is that we members of the unshakable kingdom worship with thankful hearts. Our pulses should race with thanksgiving - "Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!" (2 Cor. 9:15). Whatever we do or wherever we go we must be "always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph. 5:20).
Fellow pilgrims, it is so easy to succumb to focusing on one mountain at the expense of the other. But theological balance is the key. Our God is both unapproachable and approachable.
The twin peaks of our spiritual life demand two things as we march to Zion and worship. Let us obey His Word implicitly, for it is effectual - it never fails; and it is final - it will shake the whole universe. Let us worship Him with reverence and awe and thanksgiving!
EndNotes
Dr. R. Kent Hughes is senior pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Wheaton, IL. He is the author of a series of commentaries for ministers and teachers, Preaching the Word, and has written: Disciplines of a Godly Man (1991), Crossway. He serves as a board member of Reformation & Revival Ministries, Inc.
See to it that you do not refuse Him who speaks. If they did not escape when they refused Him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn away from Him who warns us from heaven? At that time His voice shook the earth, but now He has promised, "Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens." The words "once more" indicate the removing of what can be shaken - that is, created things - so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our "God is a consuming fire" (Heb. 12:25-29).Introduction
During Christianity's second century, a notable heretic by the name of Marcion came to power in Asia Minor, and though he was excommunicated early on, his destructive teaching lingered for nearly two centuries. Marcion taught the total incompatibility of the Old and New Testaments. He believed that there was a radical discontinuity between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament - between the creator and the Father of Jesus. So Marcion created a new Bible for his followers which had no Old Testament, and a severely hacked up New Testament which consisted of only one Gospel (an edited version of Luke), and ten select and edited Pauline Epistles which excluded the Pastorals. His views were spelled out in his book Antitheses, which set forth the alleged contradictions between the Testaments. Tertullian, in his famous Against Marcion, wrote a five-volume refutation.
But Marcionism never completely died out, and in the nineteenth century, especially, with the rise of liberalism it underwent a revival among those who wished to separate what they considered to be the crude and primitive of the Old Testament from the New. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the eighteenth and nineteenth-century father of liberalism, said that the Old Testament has a place in the Christian heritage only by virtue of its connections with Christianity. He felt that it should be no more than an appendix of historical interest. Adolf Harnack argued that the Reformers should have dropped it from the canon of authoritative writings. Likewise, there are thousands today who have rejected the Old Testament either formally or in practice.
The error of this kind of approach was pointed out by a fellow liberal, Albert Schweitzer, who demonstrated that such thinking amounts to choosing aspects of God which fit one's man-made theology. Men project their own thoughts about God back to God and create a god of their own thinking. And, of course, anyone who is in touch with modern culture knows that this kind of reasoning, Marcionism, is alive and well.
So what does this have to do with us who hold both Testaments to be the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Very much! Because Marcionism is subtly alive in the evangelical enterprise in its understanding of God. Of course, it is true that the New Testament gives us a fuller revelation of God, and that we do not live under the Old Testament. Nevertheless the God we worship is still the same God. But, sadly, many Christians today are so ignorant of their Bibles, especially the Old Testament, that they have a tragically sentimentalized idea of God - which amounts to little more than a deity who died to meet their needs. The result is the incredible paradox of evangelicals who "know Jesus" but who don't know who God is - unwitting Marcionites!
The remedy for this travesty is the Bible, specifically the Old Covenant's Sinai and the New Covenant's Zion - each of which present a vision, an aesthetic, for understanding God. [1]
From Mt. Sinai we learn from Moses' mouth that God is a consuming fire - "Be careful not to forget the covenant of the LORD your God. . . For the LORD your God is a consuming fire" (Deut. 4:23-24). The vision is stupendous: a mountain-top blazing with "fire to the very heavens" (Deut. 4:11) - cloaked with a deep darkness - lightning illuminating golden arteries in the clouds, celestial rams' horns overlaying the thunder with mournful elephantine blasts - the ground shaking, undulating as God's voice intones the Ten Commandments. God is transcendentally "other," perfectly good and holy. He radiates wrath and judgment against sin. God cannot be approached.
This is the vision for the heart of every believer - "God is a consuming fire." It is the corrective so needed in today's church which has shamefully trivialized worship, turning it into a self-assured farce. Here God's divine intention in creating Sinai is obvious because, as we say "a picture is worth a thousand words," and pictures are easier for us humans to remember than words. Flaming Mt. Sinai is God!
Of course, the other mountain, Mt. Zion of the New Testament, completes the picture. There we see God's love, as God the Son becomes sin for us, taking all of His people's transgressions on Himself so that He "became sin" (2 Cor. 5:21; cf. Gal. 3:10-11) - writhing under its load like an impaled serpent (cf. Num. 21:4-8). There on the cross we see God the Son dying for our sins and extending forgiveness to all who will believe in Him, trusting His work alone for salvation. What a vision we are bequeathed from Calvary: God, with his arms nailed wide as if to embrace the whole of those who will come, His blood covering the earth speaking a better word than the blood of Abel - the consuming love of God. Mt. Zion, crowned by Golgotha is God!
Brothers and sisters, both mountains are God - Sinai and Zion are God! Neither can be separated from the other. God is not the God of one hill, but both. Both visions must be held in blessed tension within our souls - consuming fire and consuming love. This will save us from the damning delusion of Marcion!
It is this great twin-peaked God to whom we come as we marathon onward to "Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God" (Heb. 12:22). The massive dual revelation of the mountains is meant to shape our pilgrimage. And the question we must ask is, how then are we to march? What "oughtnesses" do the mountains bring? There are two: obedience and worship.
Obedience
Effectual Word. We ought to obey because God's Word is unstoppably effectual - "See to it that you do not refuse Him who speaks. If they did not escape when they refused Him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn away from Him who warns us from heaven?" (v. 25).
This is what is called in logic an a fortiori argument, an argument which argues that what is true in the lesser case will be even more true in the greater. In the lesser case, God's earthly warning at Sinai first suffered subtle refusal by the Israelites when they "begged that no further word be spoken to them" (v. 19, cf. Ex. 20:19) - though their refusal there at Sinai was more from fear than outright rejection of God. However in the years that followed, they explicitly refused God's Word by their repeated disobediences during the four decades of wandering in the wilderness. So grievous was their disobedience that Numbers 14:29 records that God pronounced judgment that everyone who was 20 and older would die in the desert. And, indeed; none did escape except faithful Caleb and Joshua. A million plus corpses littered the desert.
Now, if such was the inexorable penalty for disobeying God's earthly message, how much more so will it be in the greater instance of disobeying His heavenly message of grace through His Son? (cf. 1:2). Surely no one will escape! This, of course, has been the preacher's message all along. In Hebrews 2:3a he has warned, "How shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?"
Later in 10:28-29 he said much the same thing, emphasizing greater punishment.
Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?The message is so clear, we had better obey God's Word because His threat that no one will escape who disobeys is ineluctably effectual. It is a "done deal." No person will escape who refuses the gospel! God is a relentless "consuming fire."
Final Word. If this is not sufficient reason to obey the God of the two mountains, there is another, and that is that His Word is final; as the preacher goes on to explain:
At that time His voice shook the earth, but now He has promised, "Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens." The words "once more" indicate the removing of what can be shaken - that is, created things - so that what cannot be shaken may remain (vv. 26-27).The initial historical event where God's voice shook the earth was at Sinai when he verbally spelled out the Ten Commandments with a thunderous voice. Imagine how terrifying it was to have the ground under one's feet tremble in response to God's audible word. What a homiletical device! No sleepers in the congregation at Sinai!
But there is an infinitely greater shaking coming, an eschatological cosmic shaking of the whole universe, which will itself be triggered by God's Word. Here the preacher has quoted God's promise from Haggai 2:6; "Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens" (v. 26b) - indicating that every created thing will be shaken to utter disintegration. This is in accord with what the Scriptures teach us about the power of God's Word. Genesis says that He created everything by His Word as He spoke the universe into existence. Therefore, one "little word" from Him can and will fell creation!
The Psalmist tells us that creation is transitory. "In the beginning You laid the foundations of the earth; and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You remain; they will all wear out like a garment" (Ps. 102:25-26; cf. Heb. 1:10-12). Isaiah says of the future, "Therefore I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath of the LORD Almighty, in the day of His burning anger" (13:13). And Peter identifies it with the day of the Lord: "But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare" (2 Peter 3:10). Think of it all one hundred thousand million galaxies - each containing at least that many stars - each galaxy one hundred light years across - will hear the Word and shake out of existence! Just a little word from God, and it is done.
The reason for this is clearly spelled out, "So that what cannot be shaken may remain" (v. 27b). The people of God, as a part of the order of things which are unshakable, will survive. But everything else in the universe will be shaken and therefore purged; everything that is wrong will be eradicated. No sin, no imperfection will remain. Then, there will be a blessed reconstitution of a new heaven and a new earth - ''Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away" (Rev. 21:1).
To those who are obedient this is good news. And the preacher means it to be a powerful encouragement to the beleaguered little church to which he writes, where some might feel like their lives are being shaken to pieces by Rome. "Stand firm midst the Roman tremors," he seems to be saying, "because the ultimate shaking is coming when Rome, and indeed the entire present evil order, will shake to oblivion. And you, as part of the new order, will survive. Take heart!" On the other hand, to those who are ignoring God's Word and drifting further away - it was a disquieting revelation and challenge to obedience.
But to all, including us, there is a mighty call to obey God's Word, because it is effectual and final. No Israelite who disobeyed God's earthly Word survived the desert, and how much more will be the case with those who disobey the heavenly Word through Christ. God's Word is effectual; it never fails. And God's Word is final. It started the universe, and it will stop it! So the command to all us pilgrims in verse 25 comes with such force, "See to it that you do not refuse Him who speaks."
Are you refusing God? Has He been speaking to you, but have you been ignoring His Word? What folly! His Word is effectual, and it is final.
Worship
After obedience, the other great "ought" which comes from the two mountains concerns worship:
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our "God is a consuming fire" (vv. 28-29).Charles Colson, in his book Kingdoms in Conflict, relates that:
In 1896, the ... planners of St. John the Divine in New York City envisioned a great Episcopal cathedral that would bring glory to God. Nearly a century later, though the immense structure is still under construction, it is in use - in a way that its planners might well have regarded with dismay. St. John's Thanksgiving service has featured Japanese Shinto priests; Muslim Sufis perform biannually; Lenten services have focused on the ecological "passion of the earth." ... St. John the Divine has ceased to be a house of the one God of the Scriptures, and has become instead a house of many gods. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., wrote for the cathedral's centennial brochure that "the Cathedral is to this atheist .. . a suitable monument to persons of all ages and classes. I go there often to be refreshed by a sense of nonsectarian community which has the best interest of the whole planet at heart."Dean James Morton has encountered opposition, but he defends it by saying:
This cathedral is a place for people like me who feel constricted by the notion of excluding others. What happens here - the Sufi dances, the Buddhist prayers - are serious spiritual experiences. We make God a Minnie Mouse in stature when we say these experiences profane a Christian church. [2]The Scriptures, however, would argue that it is Dean Morton who has made the great God of Sinai and Zion into a mousey deity whose only "virtue" is sub-biblical toleration. It is difficult to conceive how much farther one could depart from the awesome God of Scriptures - who is a God who tolerates no other gods before Him, forbids idolatry, and demands the holiness of His people. Instead of giving his people a golden calf, the cathedral Dean has given them a Mickey-Moused reflection of popular culture - a profoundly vapid idolatry.
Note our text well! It says that "[Our] God is [not was!] a consuming fire." The God of Zion is the same God as the God of Sinai. God has not changed. To some of us, the great religious traditions' troubles may seem far removed. But the truth is, similar problems are common in the more independent, evangelical traditions.
One Sunday morning a friend of mine visited a church where, to his amazement, the worship prelude was the theme song from the Paul Newman/Robert Redford movie "The Sting," titled (significantly, I think) ''The Entertainer." The congregation was preparing for divine worship while cinematic images of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in 1920s garb hovered in their consciousness!
And that was just the prelude, for what followed was an off-the-wall service that made no attempt at worship, the "high point" being the announcements when the pastor (inspired no doubt by the rousing prelude) stood unbeknownst behind the unfortunate person doing announcements making "horns" behind his head with his forked fingers and mugging Bozo-like for the congregation. This buffoonery took place in a self-proclaimed "Bible believing church" which ostensibly worships the holy Triune God of the Bible.
But what was in the pastor's and peoples' minds? What did they really think of God? How could anyone do such things and understand who God is? The answer is, they were modern evangelical Marcionites whose ignorance of Holy Scripture had so edited God that divine worship had become man-centered vaudeville - and poor slap-stick at that!
Don't misunderstand. Christians ought to laugh, they ought to have the best sense of humor on this planet. And Christians ought to enjoy life. But they must know and understand that God remains a "consuming fire" and that acceptable worship takes place when there is authentic "reverence and awe." This is God's Word! When we come to worship we must keep both mountains in view: the approachable Zion with its consuming love, and the unapproachable Sinai with its consuming fire - and then come in reverent boldness.
Conclusion
Reverent worship understands both God's love and His holiness. This is what I desire for myself and my church. And everything depends on how we see God. If we see him scripturally we will make Sunday mornings an occasion for awe and reverence - and there will be times when we are overwhelmed with the numinous as our souls are engaged by God. My heart's desire for young people raised in my church from, say, birth to twenty is that: they be regenerated; that they have a radical biblical vision of God, a sense of his holiness and transcendence; and that this will inform all of life: their worship, their sense of mission and evangelism, their stewardship, their affirmation and delight in creation, their relationships, their sexual ethics - everything!
And, yes, lastly, my heart's desire is that we members of the unshakable kingdom worship with thankful hearts. Our pulses should race with thanksgiving - "Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!" (2 Cor. 9:15). Whatever we do or wherever we go we must be "always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph. 5:20).
Fellow pilgrims, it is so easy to succumb to focusing on one mountain at the expense of the other. But theological balance is the key. Our God is both unapproachable and approachable.
The twin peaks of our spiritual life demand two things as we march to Zion and worship. Let us obey His Word implicitly, for it is effectual - it never fails; and it is final - it will shake the whole universe. Let us worship Him with reverence and awe and thanksgiving!
EndNotes
- Aesthetic in the original Greek idea of aisthetikossense - perception.
- Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict (Grand Rapids, MI: William Morrow/Zondervan, 1987), p. 22.
Dr. R. Kent Hughes is senior pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Wheaton, IL. He is the author of a series of commentaries for ministers and teachers, Preaching the Word, and has written: Disciplines of a Godly Man (1991), Crossway. He serves as a board member of Reformation & Revival Ministries, Inc.
Worship: The Glory of Revival
By Eric J. Alexander
The end of all true revival of religion, and indeed of every true work of grace, is the offering to God the worship, honor, praise and glory which is due to His great name.
In terms of revival we can think of the church in two aspects: first, in its moribund condition in need of revival, and second, in its revived state in times of revival. But there is a third picture the Scriptures give us. It is of the church in its glorified condition in heaven. As we read about it, as in Revelation 5, for example, we recognize that the glorified church has as its great business and constant activity the offering to God the glory and honor that are His due. The whole of its preoccupation is with God in His infinite glory, and it cries concerning His worth, "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!"
The significant thing is that whenever the church is quickened here on earth, that revival is marked by an increasing approximation to the worship of the church in glory. William McCulloch wrote how the revival at Cambuslang affected the worship of God's people:
Jonathan Edwards said the same thing of the revival in Northampton:
The cause of this effect of revival upon worship has been termed a visitation. People speak of how God came down to visit His people in accordance with Isaiah 64:1, "Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before You!" Again and again God is pictured as coming amongst His people. Formerly, they had perhaps known the edges of His ways, as they experienced His presence. There had been occasions when, in the midst of their worship, they may have found their souls soaring upward to God. But that is multiplied and magnified in days of revival, not only in the company of God's people but in the whole of a community. There is a consciousness of God which is, normally and generally speaking, absent.
When revival came to the Island of Lewis in Scotland, and some people I knew there spoke to me of it, they never spoke of revival coming to one area of the island or to another. Their conversation was always: "Did you hear that God came to Barvas? Have you heard that God visited Ness?" The whole community had the impression that God had come.
I remember one of the first people who was converted in Barvas saying to me; "We often cried to God to come. My parents, I remember; cried to God that He would come. But when God comes it is an awesome thing to be there." The presence of God Himself creates worship. So in true revival we primarily discover not unusual phenomena but the manifestation of God in awesome glory. The outcome of revival is true, God-centered worship which is not contrived in the slightest but is drawn out of men and women by God's Spirit.
The Seeking Father
One of the great New Testament passages on worship is John 4, which tells of the conversion of the woman of Samaria. (Subsequently there was an awakening in Samaria as the people came in great droves to see Jesus.) John 4 deals mainly with a seeking Savior. But behind. the seeking Savior, Jesus tells how there is also a seeking Father: the Father seeks worshipers to worship Him (v. 23).
It has been suggested that in John 4:20 the woman tried to distract Jesus from His uncomfortable probing of her moral life by saying, "Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem." However, it is not the subject of worship itself which was the diversion, or Jesus would not have elaborated on her comment as He did. In the context of the work of grace which was taking place in this woman's life, worship was the end and aim of everything. So while the woman surely was uncomfortable as Jesus began to face her with her need for repentance, worship was actually the very essence of what God was seeking in this woman's life, as it always is wherever the Spirit of God is disturbing and awakening sinners. Behind the seeking Savior thereis always the Father seeking worshipers.
God is not indifferent to whether we worship Him. He has made and redeemed us for this purpose. So whenever He revives His church, itis with this ultimate end in view. There is a sense in which there is nothing beyond this, because there is nothing beyond the glory of God for the believer. We can properly conclude, therefore, that the great aim of everything God is doing when He revives His church is worship.
God is not indifferent to whom we worship, nor is He indifferent to how we worship. In verse 24, Jesus says, "God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."
When the woman asked, "Sir, I can see that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem," she was heading right to this issue. "Which is right?" she was asking. "Should it be Gerizim worship?" That is where the Samaritans were worshiping.
What was the mark of Gerizim worship? Well, it was sincere, enthusiastic worship. It seems from what we can learn that it was worship the people probably very much enjoyed. Yet it was void of truth. For this reason, the Samaritans who worshiped at Gerizim, even after their temple was destroyed, rejected the greater part of the Old Testament and therefore worshiped in unbiblical ignorance. This is what Jesus meant when He said, "You Samaritans worship what you do not know" (v. 22). The Samaritans had their own priesthood, Scriptures and methods of worship. The essence of Gerizim worship was that it was divorced from truth because it was divorced from Scripture.
What was the mark of Jerusalem worship? It was precisely the opposite. It was worship according to the letter but without the Spirit, which is what Jesus meant when He quoted Isaiah 29:13 regarding it, "These people honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me" (Matt. 15:8). This aroused the concern and even the anger of Jesus. What these Jews said with their lips, their hearts did not corroborate. They went through the formality of worship with great orthodoxy, but their spirit was abstracted from the worship. Their spirit was not in it. They were not engaged with God.
What are the two great enemies of true worship throughout history? Are they not the errors of Gerizim and Jerusalem? Zeal without knowledge, on the one hand, and knowledge without zeal, on the other. Truth without spirit, or spirit without truth. According to verses 23 and 24, both things are necessary.
The important thing about acceptable worship is not that it is acceptable to us, but that it is acceptable to God. That is the primary thing about worship. The focus of our thinking in the modern world is upon what is acceptable to us. But Jesus is speaking about what is acceptable to God.
Rational Worship
True worship is rational. Another way of saying this is that true worship involves truth and is therefore a conscious mental activity. Not all our activities have this character. We breathe, for example. We do not breathe consciously, saying to ourselves, "Now I must breathe in; now I must exhale; now I must breathe in again." Breathing is something we do without conscious effort. It is not something into which we put our mind and thinking. Acceptable worship is not like this. It must engage our minds in the sense that our minds must be occupied in thinking of God's character and glory, reviewing His works and His Word, pondering the wonder of our redemption and remembering all that God has wrought for us in Jesus Christ. Our minds are to be occupied with this. God is a rational God who has made us rational creatures, and He has revealed Himself in His Word so that by engaging our minds we may come to know Him.
This is why the preaching and exposition of the Word of God are so closely related to worship. After Jesus said, "You Samaritans worship what you do not know," He added, "We worship what we do know" (v. 22). You will notice the reason: "For salvation is from the Jews." That is, salvation comes in the direct line of God's revelation in Scripture. Jesus was not speaking about any supposed exclusiveness of Jews as Jews. He was speaking about a revelation which God has given exclusively through His people in this manner. It is not a racial exclusiveness but a revelational fact that Jesus is speaking about. God has revealed Himself through the Jews. So worship should be according to their Scriptures.
For this reason it is a foolish thing for people to say, as some do, "I don't go to church to hear a man preaching; I go to worship God!" That sounds very superior and spiritual, butit betrays a profound misunderstanding both of worship and preaching. True preaching is not a display of a man's learning. It is not drawing attention to a man at all. Indeed, if when a man has preached the Word of God, people go out of the church saying, "What a marvelous man!", then he has failed disastrously. What they need to be saying is, "What a glorious, great and wonderful God we have! We were bowed down before Him today as the glories of His character were spread before us. We were taken up with Him. It was of God, we thought. It was His majesty and mercy, His grace and wonders, that captivated our souls." That is what true preaching does. So it is a foolish thing for people to say, "I don't go to church for preaching." If you do not go to church for preaching, your soul will never come into the glorious liberty of worshiping God.
That statement also displays a serious misunderstanding of worship, because true worship results from learning about God. Worship occurs as He reveals Himself. This is why it is a glorious thing for us to hear about the way God manifested Himself in preaching in revival times. Revival preaching provoked and produced this quality of worship. If you are exercised about the need for revival, you and I will be crying to God for a revival of biblical, Spirit-anointed and empowered preaching.
If you are going to worship God in truth, you will need to concentrate your mind. That is why it is important that you do not come to church in a sleepy condition. Saturday night has much to do with worship on the Lord's Day morning. If you come to church in an exhausted, soporific condition, unable to concentrate your mind, you are not going to know very much about worshiping God in truth because your mind will not be able to engage in it. If worship matters to you, you will care about what time you go to bed on Saturday night.
When you come into church on Sunday morning, you will not be rushing into church breathlessly and be grabbing a hymn book at the last minute. You will arrive quietly, wait before God and concentrate your mind upon Him. You will think of the glories of His grace. The Bible says, "Be still, and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10).
Worship also means that we will be concentrating on the words of the hymns. Hymn singing is not an opportunity for us to stand up to see who is in church and who is not. Such worship is a travesty. We sing, "A mighty fortress is our God ... (Ah, there is Mrs. Smith) ... a bulwark never failing ... (There's Mr. Jones)." God cannot be worshiped in truth in that way.
Worship from the Heart
True worship is also spiritual. It must involve and engage the heart. When Jesus spoke of worshiping in spirit, He was speaking about worship which is inward and spiritual as distinct from worship which is merely outward and physical. That is the significance of the phrase: "God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth" (John 4: 24). The woman thought that worship depends on the right environment or form. But Jesus emphasized that it really depends on having a heart that is right with God. That is being in the spirit. John was referring to this when He said, "On the Lord's Day I was in the spirit" (Rev. 1:10).
Notice that being in the spirit is not necessarily an emotional state. No doubt the worship of God will affect our emotions. But there are some emotional states in what passes for worship which are really centered on what the experience does for us, rather than on what it does for God. Similarly, it is possible to induce an emotional euphoria in our worship which is not really being in the spirit and can even be antithetical to that state. I am concerned when people say, as they do about certain occasions, "We want to have a meaningful worship experience." Generally I find that the concern is not so much on what this worship is going to do for God, but on what it is going to do for the worshiper.
Stephen Charnock, the Puritan, wrote these words, "When we believe that we should be satisfied rather than God glorified, we put God below ourselves as though He had been made for us and not we for Him." Worshiping in the spirit means that our spirits will be seeking God's honor, God's glory and God's pleasure, As we come into God's house, being in the spirit will cause us to say, "I rejoiced with those who said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord'" (Ps. 122:1). There I may bring Him pleasure. There I may honor my Savior. There I may exalt His great and glorious name. This is what I am here for. I am not here primarily to get a thrill.
This is like happiness, you see. If you seek happiness, you will never find it. But if you seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness, then all these other things will be added to you. The joy and glory of worship come when people are taken up with God. That is why, in days of revival, worship is especially glorious.
Active Worship
To worship in spirit as well as in truth, three things are necessary. First, you must be spiritually alive. Your spirit will never be drawn out after God nor will your heart leap up to Him in worship if you have never received spiritual life. If you have never been born from above, then you will never worship in spirit. That is why Jesus offered living water to the woman of Samaria. That is the beginning of worship. When the living water of eternal life springs up within you, you are enabled to worship. People who are spiritually dead can only engage in dead worship.
In my own denomination there are great conferences about worship. People have been concerned because so many have said, "What a dull, dead, drastic business this Sunday worship is!" They find it so boring they call a conference. They begin to scour the world for new forms of worship. They try to collect people who are "experts" in worship. They try to add color and drama to it. But, you know, it is all going to be dead in the end still, because people who are spiritually dead can only engage in dead worship. You need to be spiritually alive in order to worship God in the spirit.
Second, you need to be spiritually assisted. Jesus said, "Apart from Me you can do nothing." That is nowhere more true than in worship. To worship in the spirit is to know the gracious assistance of God the Holy Spirit quickening our spirit to desire Him and be zealous for His honor. Is this not what the psalmist means in Psalm 80:18, when he says, "Revive us [That is a great prayer for revival. But what follows?], and we will call on Your name"? "Revive us, and we will call on Your name." That is why the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of "grace and supplication" in Zechariah 12:10. That is why in Ephesians 5:18 being filled with the Spirit is linked with singing and making melody to the Lord in.our hearts (v. 19). To worship God we must be spiritually assisted. We need to cry to God for this in our worship.
Third, you must be spiritually active. You cannot worship God casually, carelessly or along with several other things. I was in a worship service in a church in Scotland some years ago when I discovered to my utter amazement that several ladies in the front row were knitting! To such a pass has worship in some parts of Scotland come! These women were not seeking to be offensive. They were not seeking even to be distracting. They merely thought that worship was something they could do along with other things.
You cannot do anything else and worship God in spirit and in truth at the same time. That is why we need to say to ourselves, as the Psalmist says, "Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise His holy name" (Ps. 103:1). Everything in me. All my powers. All my energies. All the gifts God has given me. Everything within me shall praise the Lord.
Scripture tells us that in heaven the worshiping creation sings with a loud voice, "Worthy is the Lamb!" (Rev. 5:12). Those of us who find it difficult to keep quiet when we are preaching may sometimes be tempted to use that as a reason for speaking with a loud voice, but it really refers to the whole of our energies, all our being going into the worship of God. Certainly that is so in heaven. There are no distractions in the worship of the church glorified. All creation is totally engaged in worshiping God. Why not here also? Every voice, every emotion, every energy, every affection, every gift and every part even of our body should be given to this.
What makes worship, above all, is when God comes down among His people. One of my dear friends, who was involved in the Lewis revival and who is now exercising a most fruitful ministry in Scotland, told me that the great difference that the revival made in the church was that there was an overwhelming sense of God at the center of everything. That is what makes worship a spiritual reality. What a difference it would make if God were to manifest Himself to us! Then we would find our worship transformed. We would find ourselves prostrated before Him, and people coming in would say, Surely God is here."
That is the ultimate in evangelism: people find others bowed before God and say, "Surely God is among you," and fall down on their faces and also worship Him. May God prepare us thus for heaven.
Author
Dr. Eric J. Alexander serves as pastor of St. Georges-Tron Church, Glasgow, Scotland. This article, from Tenth (1982), was an address given at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in 1982. The conference will celebrate its twentieth anniversary in 1993, meeting in both Wheaton, April 22-25, and in Philadelphia, April 29-May 2. Write to the Editor, Reformation & Revival Journal, for a brochure and details.
The end of all true revival of religion, and indeed of every true work of grace, is the offering to God the worship, honor, praise and glory which is due to His great name.
In terms of revival we can think of the church in two aspects: first, in its moribund condition in need of revival, and second, in its revived state in times of revival. But there is a third picture the Scriptures give us. It is of the church in its glorified condition in heaven. As we read about it, as in Revelation 5, for example, we recognize that the glorified church has as its great business and constant activity the offering to God the glory and honor that are His due. The whole of its preoccupation is with God in His infinite glory, and it cries concerning His worth, "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!"
The significant thing is that whenever the church is quickened here on earth, that revival is marked by an increasing approximation to the worship of the church in glory. William McCulloch wrote how the revival at Cambuslang affected the worship of God's people:
What was most remarkable was the spiritual glory of this solemnity. I mean the gracious and sensible presence of God amongst His people. Many of God's dear children declared that they were abundantly satisfied with the goodness of God in His ordinances, and filled with joy and peace in believing. An extraordinary power of the divine Spirit accompanied the Word preached.Another observer, Ebenezer Erskine, told how revival quickened what he called "the carcass of worship."
Jonathan Edwards said the same thing of the revival in Northampton:
The goings of God were then seen in His sanctuary. God's day was delight, and His tabernacles were amiable. Our public assemblies were then beautiful. The congregation was alive in God's service, everyone earnestly intent on public worship, every ear eager to drink in the words of the minister who was preaching. The assembly in general were from time to time in tears while the Word was preached, some weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors. Our public praises were then greatly enlivened. God was then served in our psalmody in some measure in the beauty of holiness. It has been observable that there has been scarce any part of divine worship wherein good men amongst us have had "grace to be drawn forth and their hearts so lifted up in the ways" of God, as in singing His praises in those days.When God Comes
The cause of this effect of revival upon worship has been termed a visitation. People speak of how God came down to visit His people in accordance with Isaiah 64:1, "Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before You!" Again and again God is pictured as coming amongst His people. Formerly, they had perhaps known the edges of His ways, as they experienced His presence. There had been occasions when, in the midst of their worship, they may have found their souls soaring upward to God. But that is multiplied and magnified in days of revival, not only in the company of God's people but in the whole of a community. There is a consciousness of God which is, normally and generally speaking, absent.
When revival came to the Island of Lewis in Scotland, and some people I knew there spoke to me of it, they never spoke of revival coming to one area of the island or to another. Their conversation was always: "Did you hear that God came to Barvas? Have you heard that God visited Ness?" The whole community had the impression that God had come.
I remember one of the first people who was converted in Barvas saying to me; "We often cried to God to come. My parents, I remember; cried to God that He would come. But when God comes it is an awesome thing to be there." The presence of God Himself creates worship. So in true revival we primarily discover not unusual phenomena but the manifestation of God in awesome glory. The outcome of revival is true, God-centered worship which is not contrived in the slightest but is drawn out of men and women by God's Spirit.
The Seeking Father
One of the great New Testament passages on worship is John 4, which tells of the conversion of the woman of Samaria. (Subsequently there was an awakening in Samaria as the people came in great droves to see Jesus.) John 4 deals mainly with a seeking Savior. But behind. the seeking Savior, Jesus tells how there is also a seeking Father: the Father seeks worshipers to worship Him (v. 23).
It has been suggested that in John 4:20 the woman tried to distract Jesus from His uncomfortable probing of her moral life by saying, "Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem." However, it is not the subject of worship itself which was the diversion, or Jesus would not have elaborated on her comment as He did. In the context of the work of grace which was taking place in this woman's life, worship was the end and aim of everything. So while the woman surely was uncomfortable as Jesus began to face her with her need for repentance, worship was actually the very essence of what God was seeking in this woman's life, as it always is wherever the Spirit of God is disturbing and awakening sinners. Behind the seeking Savior thereis always the Father seeking worshipers.
God is not indifferent to whether we worship Him. He has made and redeemed us for this purpose. So whenever He revives His church, itis with this ultimate end in view. There is a sense in which there is nothing beyond this, because there is nothing beyond the glory of God for the believer. We can properly conclude, therefore, that the great aim of everything God is doing when He revives His church is worship.
God is not indifferent to whom we worship, nor is He indifferent to how we worship. In verse 24, Jesus says, "God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."
When the woman asked, "Sir, I can see that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem," she was heading right to this issue. "Which is right?" she was asking. "Should it be Gerizim worship?" That is where the Samaritans were worshiping.
What was the mark of Gerizim worship? Well, it was sincere, enthusiastic worship. It seems from what we can learn that it was worship the people probably very much enjoyed. Yet it was void of truth. For this reason, the Samaritans who worshiped at Gerizim, even after their temple was destroyed, rejected the greater part of the Old Testament and therefore worshiped in unbiblical ignorance. This is what Jesus meant when He said, "You Samaritans worship what you do not know" (v. 22). The Samaritans had their own priesthood, Scriptures and methods of worship. The essence of Gerizim worship was that it was divorced from truth because it was divorced from Scripture.
What was the mark of Jerusalem worship? It was precisely the opposite. It was worship according to the letter but without the Spirit, which is what Jesus meant when He quoted Isaiah 29:13 regarding it, "These people honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me" (Matt. 15:8). This aroused the concern and even the anger of Jesus. What these Jews said with their lips, their hearts did not corroborate. They went through the formality of worship with great orthodoxy, but their spirit was abstracted from the worship. Their spirit was not in it. They were not engaged with God.
What are the two great enemies of true worship throughout history? Are they not the errors of Gerizim and Jerusalem? Zeal without knowledge, on the one hand, and knowledge without zeal, on the other. Truth without spirit, or spirit without truth. According to verses 23 and 24, both things are necessary.
The important thing about acceptable worship is not that it is acceptable to us, but that it is acceptable to God. That is the primary thing about worship. The focus of our thinking in the modern world is upon what is acceptable to us. But Jesus is speaking about what is acceptable to God.
Rational Worship
True worship is rational. Another way of saying this is that true worship involves truth and is therefore a conscious mental activity. Not all our activities have this character. We breathe, for example. We do not breathe consciously, saying to ourselves, "Now I must breathe in; now I must exhale; now I must breathe in again." Breathing is something we do without conscious effort. It is not something into which we put our mind and thinking. Acceptable worship is not like this. It must engage our minds in the sense that our minds must be occupied in thinking of God's character and glory, reviewing His works and His Word, pondering the wonder of our redemption and remembering all that God has wrought for us in Jesus Christ. Our minds are to be occupied with this. God is a rational God who has made us rational creatures, and He has revealed Himself in His Word so that by engaging our minds we may come to know Him.
This is why the preaching and exposition of the Word of God are so closely related to worship. After Jesus said, "You Samaritans worship what you do not know," He added, "We worship what we do know" (v. 22). You will notice the reason: "For salvation is from the Jews." That is, salvation comes in the direct line of God's revelation in Scripture. Jesus was not speaking about any supposed exclusiveness of Jews as Jews. He was speaking about a revelation which God has given exclusively through His people in this manner. It is not a racial exclusiveness but a revelational fact that Jesus is speaking about. God has revealed Himself through the Jews. So worship should be according to their Scriptures.
For this reason it is a foolish thing for people to say, as some do, "I don't go to church to hear a man preaching; I go to worship God!" That sounds very superior and spiritual, butit betrays a profound misunderstanding both of worship and preaching. True preaching is not a display of a man's learning. It is not drawing attention to a man at all. Indeed, if when a man has preached the Word of God, people go out of the church saying, "What a marvelous man!", then he has failed disastrously. What they need to be saying is, "What a glorious, great and wonderful God we have! We were bowed down before Him today as the glories of His character were spread before us. We were taken up with Him. It was of God, we thought. It was His majesty and mercy, His grace and wonders, that captivated our souls." That is what true preaching does. So it is a foolish thing for people to say, "I don't go to church for preaching." If you do not go to church for preaching, your soul will never come into the glorious liberty of worshiping God.
That statement also displays a serious misunderstanding of worship, because true worship results from learning about God. Worship occurs as He reveals Himself. This is why it is a glorious thing for us to hear about the way God manifested Himself in preaching in revival times. Revival preaching provoked and produced this quality of worship. If you are exercised about the need for revival, you and I will be crying to God for a revival of biblical, Spirit-anointed and empowered preaching.
If you are going to worship God in truth, you will need to concentrate your mind. That is why it is important that you do not come to church in a sleepy condition. Saturday night has much to do with worship on the Lord's Day morning. If you come to church in an exhausted, soporific condition, unable to concentrate your mind, you are not going to know very much about worshiping God in truth because your mind will not be able to engage in it. If worship matters to you, you will care about what time you go to bed on Saturday night.
When you come into church on Sunday morning, you will not be rushing into church breathlessly and be grabbing a hymn book at the last minute. You will arrive quietly, wait before God and concentrate your mind upon Him. You will think of the glories of His grace. The Bible says, "Be still, and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10).
Worship also means that we will be concentrating on the words of the hymns. Hymn singing is not an opportunity for us to stand up to see who is in church and who is not. Such worship is a travesty. We sing, "A mighty fortress is our God ... (Ah, there is Mrs. Smith) ... a bulwark never failing ... (There's Mr. Jones)." God cannot be worshiped in truth in that way.
Worship from the Heart
True worship is also spiritual. It must involve and engage the heart. When Jesus spoke of worshiping in spirit, He was speaking about worship which is inward and spiritual as distinct from worship which is merely outward and physical. That is the significance of the phrase: "God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth" (John 4: 24). The woman thought that worship depends on the right environment or form. But Jesus emphasized that it really depends on having a heart that is right with God. That is being in the spirit. John was referring to this when He said, "On the Lord's Day I was in the spirit" (Rev. 1:10).
Notice that being in the spirit is not necessarily an emotional state. No doubt the worship of God will affect our emotions. But there are some emotional states in what passes for worship which are really centered on what the experience does for us, rather than on what it does for God. Similarly, it is possible to induce an emotional euphoria in our worship which is not really being in the spirit and can even be antithetical to that state. I am concerned when people say, as they do about certain occasions, "We want to have a meaningful worship experience." Generally I find that the concern is not so much on what this worship is going to do for God, but on what it is going to do for the worshiper.
Stephen Charnock, the Puritan, wrote these words, "When we believe that we should be satisfied rather than God glorified, we put God below ourselves as though He had been made for us and not we for Him." Worshiping in the spirit means that our spirits will be seeking God's honor, God's glory and God's pleasure, As we come into God's house, being in the spirit will cause us to say, "I rejoiced with those who said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord'" (Ps. 122:1). There I may bring Him pleasure. There I may honor my Savior. There I may exalt His great and glorious name. This is what I am here for. I am not here primarily to get a thrill.
This is like happiness, you see. If you seek happiness, you will never find it. But if you seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness, then all these other things will be added to you. The joy and glory of worship come when people are taken up with God. That is why, in days of revival, worship is especially glorious.
Active Worship
To worship in spirit as well as in truth, three things are necessary. First, you must be spiritually alive. Your spirit will never be drawn out after God nor will your heart leap up to Him in worship if you have never received spiritual life. If you have never been born from above, then you will never worship in spirit. That is why Jesus offered living water to the woman of Samaria. That is the beginning of worship. When the living water of eternal life springs up within you, you are enabled to worship. People who are spiritually dead can only engage in dead worship.
In my own denomination there are great conferences about worship. People have been concerned because so many have said, "What a dull, dead, drastic business this Sunday worship is!" They find it so boring they call a conference. They begin to scour the world for new forms of worship. They try to collect people who are "experts" in worship. They try to add color and drama to it. But, you know, it is all going to be dead in the end still, because people who are spiritually dead can only engage in dead worship. You need to be spiritually alive in order to worship God in the spirit.
Second, you need to be spiritually assisted. Jesus said, "Apart from Me you can do nothing." That is nowhere more true than in worship. To worship in the spirit is to know the gracious assistance of God the Holy Spirit quickening our spirit to desire Him and be zealous for His honor. Is this not what the psalmist means in Psalm 80:18, when he says, "Revive us [That is a great prayer for revival. But what follows?], and we will call on Your name"? "Revive us, and we will call on Your name." That is why the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of "grace and supplication" in Zechariah 12:10. That is why in Ephesians 5:18 being filled with the Spirit is linked with singing and making melody to the Lord in.our hearts (v. 19). To worship God we must be spiritually assisted. We need to cry to God for this in our worship.
Third, you must be spiritually active. You cannot worship God casually, carelessly or along with several other things. I was in a worship service in a church in Scotland some years ago when I discovered to my utter amazement that several ladies in the front row were knitting! To such a pass has worship in some parts of Scotland come! These women were not seeking to be offensive. They were not seeking even to be distracting. They merely thought that worship was something they could do along with other things.
You cannot do anything else and worship God in spirit and in truth at the same time. That is why we need to say to ourselves, as the Psalmist says, "Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise His holy name" (Ps. 103:1). Everything in me. All my powers. All my energies. All the gifts God has given me. Everything within me shall praise the Lord.
Scripture tells us that in heaven the worshiping creation sings with a loud voice, "Worthy is the Lamb!" (Rev. 5:12). Those of us who find it difficult to keep quiet when we are preaching may sometimes be tempted to use that as a reason for speaking with a loud voice, but it really refers to the whole of our energies, all our being going into the worship of God. Certainly that is so in heaven. There are no distractions in the worship of the church glorified. All creation is totally engaged in worshiping God. Why not here also? Every voice, every emotion, every energy, every affection, every gift and every part even of our body should be given to this.
What makes worship, above all, is when God comes down among His people. One of my dear friends, who was involved in the Lewis revival and who is now exercising a most fruitful ministry in Scotland, told me that the great difference that the revival made in the church was that there was an overwhelming sense of God at the center of everything. That is what makes worship a spiritual reality. What a difference it would make if God were to manifest Himself to us! Then we would find our worship transformed. We would find ourselves prostrated before Him, and people coming in would say, Surely God is here."
That is the ultimate in evangelism: people find others bowed before God and say, "Surely God is among you," and fall down on their faces and also worship Him. May God prepare us thus for heaven.
Author
Dr. Eric J. Alexander serves as pastor of St. Georges-Tron Church, Glasgow, Scotland. This article, from Tenth (1982), was an address given at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in 1982. The conference will celebrate its twentieth anniversary in 1993, meeting in both Wheaton, April 22-25, and in Philadelphia, April 29-May 2. Write to the Editor, Reformation & Revival Journal, for a brochure and details.
Monday 26 February 2018
Prayer and the Sovereignty of God
By Curt Daniel
Sooner or later, every believer in the sovereignty of God's grace comes face-to-face with a two-edged theological problem that has great practical implications. One edge is this: "If God is really sovereign, then why pray?" In other words, why should we pray if God has already predestined whatever will come to pass? Will He not do whatever He pleases anyway without consulting us? The second edge is this: "If we are commanded to pray, how can it be said that God is sovereign and has foreordained everything that will happen?" How do we reconcile divine sovereignty and human responsibility in this thorny dilemma? And how do we pray with real feeling and passion with a clear view of God's sovereignty?
These are not merely questions for ivory-tower theologians. Anyone who has not wrestled with this question has not waded far into the ocean of divine sovereignty or the mysteries of prayer. It behooves us to take another look at an old but ever-present problem.
Prayer is talking to God in the right way. Demons and unbelievers talk to God, but not in the right way. Blasphemy can hardly be called prayer. It takes a believer to pray to the true God. Probably the best concise definition of prayer is the answer to Question 98 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: "Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of His mercies."
Prayer is both a duty and a privilege. God commands us to pray. "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thess. 5:17; Matt. 7:7; Luke 18:1; Phil. 4:6; Heb. 4:16). Prayer is part of the revealed will of God. Consequently, not praying is a sin (1 Sam. 12:23). In addition to the many commands to pray, we are exhorted to imitate the many examples of those who pray (e.g., James 5:16-18).
Prayer is also a privilege. God's children have been granted access into the throne room of their Father (Heb. 4:16). This privilege has not been extended to all men; it belongs only to those who belong to Christ by faith. It is one of the highest privileges a Christian has. God, of course, did not have to grant this privilege. He could have deigned to conduct the business of running the universe all by Himself without the slightest thought of consulting us. After all, He did just that in formulating the eternal decrees (Eph. 1:11; Rom. 11:34). But in His providence, He grants the privilege of prayer to His children. "This also I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them" (Ezek. 36:37). God lets us pray. This must be firmly understood as we examine the matter of prayer and the sovereignty of God.
In Reformed tradition, it has been customary to divide prayer into four categories. Each has its own peculiar problems regarding the sovereignty of God. First, there is confession. We are commanded to confess our sins (1 John 1:9). The truly penitent believer will acknowledge that he has sinned against God and will turn from his sin. Psalm 51 is the model prayer of confession. David acknowledged that he had sinned, and he did not shift the blame on to Bathsheba. Nor did he blame Adam. Calvinists need to be careful lest they subtly shift the blame on to the total depravity that is still resident in their mortal bodies. More important, we must never pray in anyway that suggests that God is to blame for our sin. Such is abhorrent to the holy God and to the sanctified conscience. How would one ever do such a thing? By hinting that his sin had been foreordained by God. It is, of course, true that God has foreordained all things and in a mysterious way ordained that sin would come into being (Isa. 45:7). He foreordained the crucifixion of Christ, which was the most evil sin in history (Acts 2:23; 4:28). But those who carried out that deed could not have pleaded innocence because it had been foreordained. Confessional prayer, then, submits to divine sovereignty but does not use it to excuse one's responsibility.
Second, there is the prayer of supplication, or requesting what we need from God. This is related to the third, namely, intercession, in which we request things for other people. Most of the rest of this study will concern the particular problems involved in these aspects of prayer. The fourth category is praise and adoration. It is the "Thank-you" that follows the "Please" of the first three aspects. It, too, is part of the revealed will of God. We are frequently commanded to praise the Lord. But the problem arises: "If God is already perfect in glory, how then can we contribute to His glory by praise and worship?" The answer belongs to the realm of the secret things of Deuteronomy 29:29, but we do know that such praise glorifies God (Ps. 50:23). Let no believer in divine sovereignty refuse to worship the Lord with the feeble excuse that God is already perfect in glory. Such an attitude is not humility, but presumption. The same applies to the refusal to glorify God, because God has predestined that He will receive glory from all things in the end anyway (Rom. 11:36). The Lord commands us to render to Him praise in return for His sovereign bestowal of grace (Eph. 1:6). Nothing should more characterize a believer in sovereign grace than exuberant worship of our heavenly God.
Now let us address some of the problems relating to supplicatory and intercessory prayer. One of the problems is whether God has given us a blank check with the command to pray. Does the privilege of prayer mean that God promises to answer all our prayers? If so, then being sovereign, He is certainly able to answer and effect such prayers.
Some Christians think that God has given such an unconditional promise in His revealed will. They appeal to verses such as Matthew 7:7-12; 18:19; John 14:13; 15:7; 16:23; and 17. Their prayers are remarkably like the one in Mark 10:35, "Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask of You." This approach is common in the so-called "Name it, Claim it" movement, which one wag has renamed the "Blab it, Grab it" movement.
But this approach is all wrong. It does not truly recognize divine sovereignty. It fails to balance the above texts with texts which lay down other principles and conditions. James 1:6, for example, says that our prayers must have faith. Verses 7 and 8 explicitly say that we will not be heard without faith. Then James 4:3 warns us against praying with greedy motives. Such motives are more common in our prayers that we realize or will admit. They are like the words of an old song from the 1960s, "O Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz." One wonders how prevalent it is in the "Name it, Claim it" movement. Still other texts tell us that our prayers must be coupled with obedience to God's will (John 9:31; 1 John 3:22). This does not mean that we earn things in prayer by obeying God's will. Nothing could be further from the truth. It does mean that we cannot expect anything from God if we are not willing to obey Him.
True prayer submits to God's authority. Right prayers are "requests" (Phil. 4:6), not demands. Demanding things from God treats Him as our servant, not our sovereign. It whistles to Him as our bellhop, rather than submitting humbly to Him as our King. Christians should be careful even in the use of imperative verbs when we pray. It might be better if we used the word "please" in our prayers. Manoah gave us a good example in Judges 13:8,15. One wonders whether Jean Calvin, the Frenchman, employed the phrase, "S'il vous plait" (If You please) in his prayers.
The awkward disciples employed the blank check approach in Mark 10:35. Notice how the Lord gently rebuffed them in verse 40: "But to sit on My right or on My left, this is not Mine to give; but it is for those for whom it has been prepared." God had already foreordained who will sit where, and so their prayers did not submit to the predestination of divine sovereignty.
Still another principle that offsets this misuse of prayer is found in the several instances in which God explicitly told one of His people not to pray for such-and-such (Deut. 3:26; Jer. 7:16; 11:14; 14:11; Ex. 32:10; Jer. 11:11-12; 15:1; Hos. 5:6; 1 John 5:16). It is God's prerogative as our sovereign to lay down conditions on the privilege of prayer which He gives.
On the other hand, Scripture indicates that there are some things which God has promised to supply if we present our requests in the right manner. The key verses are 1 John 5:14-15. These refer to the will of God. But this is not the secret will of predestination, but the revealed will of precept. The gist is this: If we pray in faith in the name of Christ with an obedient and selfless heart for things which God has commanded us to have, then we can be assured that He will grant them. It is like Augustine's prayer, "Give what Thou commandest and command what Thou will."
Take the matter of wisdom. We are commanded to have wisdom. "Be wise as serpents" (Matt. 10:16). But we are born fools without wisdom. Is God commanding us to make bricks without straw? No, He offers to give us the straw. James 1:5 says, "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him." This is praying aright with a view to the sovereignty of God in His revealed will. He commands us to have what only He can give; therefore He promises to give it to those who request it properly.
The problem is that we do not know how to pray rightly (Rom. 8:26; Luke 11:1). Jesus said to the disciples, "You do not know what you are asking" (Mark 1 0:38). We confuse our needs with our greeds (James 4:3). God rarely gives us our greeds, except to punish us (Num. 11:4, 20). It takes wisdom to know the difference, so we should ask for wisdom to know how to pray aright for what we need. It is presumption to demand or claim what God has not promised. Humility is not the refusal to ask in faith for what God has commanded and promised in His revealed will. It would be presumption to think that God commands us to ask for what He can give, but then is unwilling to bestow it.
There are other misconceptions about prayer that are based upon a fundamental misunderstanding about the sovereignty of God. First, "God does nothing but in answer to prayer." This is patently false. The truth is, God does almost everything irrespective of prayer. He governs the universe in all its details with no regard to prayer. How many of us pray that God keep the moons orbiting around the planet Saturn? We do not know enough about the universe to pray that the Lord keep it going. The same is true in His providence with man. Take creation. Did God answer anyone's prayer when He created the world? Moreover, the Lord does many, many things in our lives regardless of prayer. He does them by sheer grace. This is seen, for instance, in common grace for unbelievers who never pray and in special grace for the elect before they pray.
Second, "Pray that God saves a person, but does not intrude upon his free will." But no man has free will. Man's will is enslaved to sin (John 8:34). He will never be saved unless God intervenes into his will. The Lord does just that, and not only in salvation (Prov. 21:1). The sovereign God intervenes, interrupts, and intercepts our fallen wills. That is an inside secret, as it were, to the glory of praying with a view to the sovereignty of God. Even an Arminian should recognize the futility of his feeble formula. Christians rarely pray, "Lord, save my loved one, but do not interfere with his free will." No, we all pray, "Lord, save him! Do whatever has to be done!" Praying under the sovereignty of God means praying that God do what only God can do.
A third misconception is, "We should believe like Calvinists but pray like Arminians." This is as incorrect as the notion that we should evangelize like Arminians and believe like Calvinists. Why not evangelize and pray like Calvinists?
A fourth misconception is this: "I am praying for God's will." It is right that we pray for God's help in discerning His will, but this statement is usually an excuse to avoid doing what the revealed will explicitly states. Such a person usually is not studying his Bible to learn the will of God. He should stop praying and start studying, or, better yet, pray while he reads the Bible. This misunderstanding underlies many of the popular theories about divine guidance. Too many think that God guides us by feelings and impressions, rather than by Scripture.
Fifth, "God answers everyone's prayers." Scripture says otherwise. God does not answer those who pray without faith, repentance, in the name of Christ, and so on. Specifically, God does not answer the prayers of the unregenerate. Since the reprobate are permanently unregenerate, God never answers the prayers of the reprobate. Their prayers are insults to God. They do not pray with any regard to divine sovereignty.
A more general misunderstanding surrounds the popular phrase, "Prayer changes things." Of course, it does not change God's secret will (Num. 23:19), nor does it change His essence (Mal. 3:6). It will not do, then, to use this ditty or even the more sanctimonious one, "Prayer changes God and God changes things." It would be more appropriate to say with Robert Lewis Dabney, "Prayer is not intended to produce a change in God, but in us." Calvin commented, "It was not so much for His sake as for ours." When we pray, we change our wills to conform with God's revealed will. Behind that process, we should observe that God is changing us.
But what about the examples of Abraham and Jonah? Did not Abraham haggle with God and force Him to change His mind about Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18:22-33? Look again. God still destroyed those cities as He had intended and announced to Abraham (James 2:23). God did not choose to give repentance to the Sodomites, and without that they were fuel for the fire.
What about Jonah and Nineveh? The argument suggests that God threatened Nineveh with destruction, the Ninevites talked God out of it by prayer, and so God did not carry out His threat. This misunderstands what really happened. For one thing, had the Lord unconditionally promised to destroy Nineveh, it would certainly have been destroyed. God always keeps His unconditional promises. The fact that God did not carry out the promise tells us that it was a conditional promise. Scripture gives us several such examples. It was as if God had said through Jonah, "I will destroy you unless you repent" (Luke 13:3). As the book unfolds, we see that the Ninevites did in fact repent, so they were spared. It was certainly not because Jonah prayed for them. Had they not repented, God would certainly have destroyed them like Sodom and Gomorrah. Notice that they prayed with a view to the sovereignty of God in 3:9. They threw themselves on God's mercy, which is the appropriate attitude of prayer. Thus, they showed that they submitted to His authority, His sovereignty, His revealed will. Look deeply and you will see that God gave them that repentance and faith in the first place. That was because He had ordained to do so. It was not in answer to Jonah's prayer, because Jonah did not want them to be spared.
Most of our discussion so far has concerned prayer and the sovereignty of God with regard to His revealed will. Now we must look at prayer and the secret will, both in predestination and providence. The first principle we need to recognize is that God did not predestine anything because He foresaw that we would pray for it. He did not consult with anyone in the formulation of the decrees. He only consulted Himself (Eph. 1:11; Rom. 11:34).
One should never pray in a way that seeks to persuade God to change His decrees. Of course, the Lord would not change them anyway. It is impertinence to ask that He alter the unalterable. A decree is an oath; would one dare ask God to break His oath? Moreover, the Almighty issued the decrees out of His infinite, perfect wisdom. To pray against the decrees is to impugn the wisdom of the sovereign. A person who prays this will receive a rebuke, not an answer to his request.
Naturally, few persons would ever explicitly dare to pray such insubordinate prayers, except in gross ignorance or blatant arrogance. Unfortunately, gross theological ignorance is rampant in our churches, and so we hear occasional examples of prayers which are not in keeping with the secret will of God. A few examples should suffice. One is the prayer that God save the whole world. But even the Lord Jesus did not pray for the entire world (John 17:9), and He always prayed perfectly (John 11:42). Yet, we should pray for the conversion of the lost. We can pray for anybody, but not for everybody. Why? Because we know that God has not chosen all men to be saved, but He has chosen some and has not told us who they are. To pray that God save literally everybody is as contrary to the sovereignty of God as to pray for the salvation of the Devil (and some Christians have even done that, presumably in grossest ignorance).
Similarly, we ought not to pray that the Lord reverse the decree of reprobation; For example, do not pray that God release someone from hell. Those in hell are there because they are reprobate; to pray for a release is to pray that God reverse the decree of reprobation.
Then there is the business of "claiming" a person for Christ. We have no license to do this, either in our prayers or in our evangelism. This even applies to our own children. Even paedo-baptist believers in covenant theology discuss this point. But 1 Corinthians 7:16 says, "How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband?" One simply cannot know whether any person in particular will ever be saved, for the simple reason that God has not decided to tell us who the unconverted elect are. We should not grumble about this; there is wisdom in His decision, and we need to submit to it. One can know that another is elect, but only after that person has given proof of regeneration (Eph. 1:3; 1 Thess. 1:4-5; 2:13; 2 Thess. 2:13). On the other hand, we cannot know who any of the reprobate are until they confirm it by final impenitance unto death.
Likewise, we cannot pray that God change the date of Christ's return, for that has already been decreed (Acts 1:7). Revelation 22:20 is not a prayer that Christ return earlier than decreed, but the earnest desire that is in every true saint that Christ return in his lifetime. God has already set the date and has not deigned to reveal it to us (Matt. 24:36). We can deduce that God has not yet called His elect to Himself, for Christ will not return until all the elect are called in, even as God did not send the rains until He had led all the animals into the ark (Gen. 7; 2 Peter 3:9). It would be more appropriate to increase our evangelism to hasten that day than to pray idly for it to advance because we are sick of this world (2 Peter 3:12). This was the tenor of Christ's words in Acts 1:7-8.
Actually, there are several parallels between prayer and evangelism with regard to divine sovereignty. In his excellent little book, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, J. I. Packer shows that the two are biblical and therefore compatible. Among his many useful observations are two that can apply to prayer. First; we evangelize because God commands us to. We pray because God commands us to. Second, we evangelize because God uses our evangelism to call in His elect. We pray because God uses our prayers to call in His elect.
God is the First Cause of all things (Rom. 11:36), but like a master billiards player, He uses second causes. One of them is evangelism and another is prayer. Human responsibility in general is a second cause (Phil. 2:13-14). We are responsible to pray, and prayer is a means of providence. God uses our prayers, when prayed aright, to carry out His sovereign purposes. Of course He is not bound by prayer, but neither does His sovereignty require that He act without prayer. Scripture and experience testify to this point.
When we begin to look at it like this, a new vista opens up. Calvinism does not kill prayer, as some of our Arminian friends charge. The exact opposite is true. The fact that we pray assumes that we believe in the sovereignty of God, even implicitly. Alva McLain, hardly a Calvinist by most definitions, saw this and observed, "The doctrine of divine sovereignty should be an incentive to pray, for the only kind of a God who can answer prayer is a sovereign God."
For an example of this principle, one may compare 1 Timothy 2:1-2 with Proverbs 21:1. Paul exhorts us to pray for our rulers; Solomon tells us that God holds the hearts of the rulers in His hand. This is not limited to civil rulers, by the way. God directs the wills and minds of all men. This is one of the beauties of Reformed theology, for it opens a hitherto ignored window on prayer.
A "free will" Arminian is inconsistent. A. M. Toplady used to say that a praying Arminian is a self-contradiction. Conversely, a non-praying Calvinist is also inconsistent. If he believes in the sovereignty of God, his lack of prayer can only be attributed to lack of concern.
There is another useful principle in all this. Jonathan Edwards put it like this: "When the people of God are stirred up to prayer, it is the effect of His intention to show mercy."
When one prays rightly, he should deduce that the Lord has poured out upon him the "spirit of supplication" (Zech. 12:10). AW. Pink wrote, "The God who has determined to grant a blessing also gives a spirit of supplication which first seeks the blessing." If God stirs us to pray, it indicates that He is about to work in connection with those prayers. Of course, one should not simply wait for that stirring. As in evangelism, our duty is to pray at all times, in season and out.
Then there is importunate prayer and the sovereignty of God (Luke 11:5-13; 18:1-8). Our persistent praying does not force God's hand. God is still sovereign, but He has commanded us to pray and keep on praying. What is more, He has ordained that He will bestow some blessings only in reply to persistent prayer. D; Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say that God sits in a hayloft and lowers down a rope. The blessing is tied to the rope at the top, and He calls down and says, "Start pulling." One or two tugs will not pull it down. But when we keep praying aright and God is so pleased, He kicks over the blessing and we pull it down.
The Calvinist should never resemble the Hyper-Calvinist who shows his laziness and presumption by saying, "God will call in His elect whether I offer the gospel to them or not." We ought never think that we are blameless if we believe that God will do things whether we pray or not. Such an attitude is fatalism, not faith. Charles Hodge commented, "A fatalist cannot consistently pray." Prayer takes faith, not Stoic resignation to the inevitable. True, God shall carry out His purposes. But be forewarned that if you think that God foreordained your lack of prayer, remember that He also foreordained chastening for those who do not pray when they should.
A few words should be said in this context about the phrase "Thy will be done" as it pertains to prayer. Some believers resort to it in the wrong way to cover up a poor prayer. But it is a biblical phrase and is found twice in Scripture - both times on the lips of the Savior Himself. The first instance is in Matthew 6:10 in the Lord's Prayer. Now to which ''will'' of God does this refer? Obviously the revealed will, as recognized by most Reformed commentators on the passage (e.g., Hendriksen, Pink, Watson, and Kelly). Hendriksen comments: "It is the ardent desire of the person who sincerely breathes the Lord's Prayer that the Father's will shall be obeyed as completely, heartily and immediately on earth as this is constantly being done by all the inhabitants of heaven."
Thus, it is a submission to the revealed will with the prayer that others submit also. It cannot refer to the secret will, for that is accomplished by all in heaven, earth and hell. There is no warrant to pray, "Thy secret will be done." The accent to that prayer is strange. The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it like this: "We pray that God, by His grace, would make us able and willing to know, obey, and submit to His will in all things, as the angels do in Heaven" (Question 103). This is much the same as the submission of faith (James 1:6) and obedience (1 John 3:22) that is requisite for true prayer. Therefore, the phrase indicates submission, not apathy, to the sovereignty of God.
The Savior used the phrase also in His prayer in Gethsemane in Matthew 26:39. Again, it indicates submission to the revealed will, not apathy in light of the secret will. Christ had received a command from His Father to lay down His life (John 10:18). He kept the Father's commands in toto (John 4:34; 5:30; 6:38; 17:4). Christ realized that the elect would perish if He did not keep this command. Moreover, He Himself would have perished had He not kept the command, for disobedience would have meant sin and sin brings judgment. The Lord Jesus submitted, and so should we.
One more point deserves mention regarding prayer and the sovereignty of God. The sovereign God already knows what He will do. He knows what is best. He even knows what we will pray, for He has foreordained everything (Matt. 6:8). Then why pray? Augustine gives us the answer: "God does not ask us to tell Him our needs that He may learn about them, but in order that we may be capable of receiving what He is preparing to give." This was echoed even in the words of Thomas Aquinas: "Neither do we pray in order that we may alter the divine plan, but rather that we may obtain what was divinely planned to be given in answer to prayer." For a Catholic scholastic, that is good Calvinism!
So, then, prayer is a duty and a privilege. It includes much mystery and requires much faith. It is not theologically incompatible with the sovereignty of God in either the secret or revealed will. Thomas Manton wrote, "It must be conformable to His revealed will and with submission to His secret will; not contrary to His Word, nor against His decrees." Amen.
Author
Curt Daniel is a teacher and author who resides in Dallas, TX.
Recommended Reading
Sooner or later, every believer in the sovereignty of God's grace comes face-to-face with a two-edged theological problem that has great practical implications. One edge is this: "If God is really sovereign, then why pray?" In other words, why should we pray if God has already predestined whatever will come to pass? Will He not do whatever He pleases anyway without consulting us? The second edge is this: "If we are commanded to pray, how can it be said that God is sovereign and has foreordained everything that will happen?" How do we reconcile divine sovereignty and human responsibility in this thorny dilemma? And how do we pray with real feeling and passion with a clear view of God's sovereignty?
These are not merely questions for ivory-tower theologians. Anyone who has not wrestled with this question has not waded far into the ocean of divine sovereignty or the mysteries of prayer. It behooves us to take another look at an old but ever-present problem.
Prayer is talking to God in the right way. Demons and unbelievers talk to God, but not in the right way. Blasphemy can hardly be called prayer. It takes a believer to pray to the true God. Probably the best concise definition of prayer is the answer to Question 98 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: "Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of His mercies."
Prayer is both a duty and a privilege. God commands us to pray. "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thess. 5:17; Matt. 7:7; Luke 18:1; Phil. 4:6; Heb. 4:16). Prayer is part of the revealed will of God. Consequently, not praying is a sin (1 Sam. 12:23). In addition to the many commands to pray, we are exhorted to imitate the many examples of those who pray (e.g., James 5:16-18).
Prayer is also a privilege. God's children have been granted access into the throne room of their Father (Heb. 4:16). This privilege has not been extended to all men; it belongs only to those who belong to Christ by faith. It is one of the highest privileges a Christian has. God, of course, did not have to grant this privilege. He could have deigned to conduct the business of running the universe all by Himself without the slightest thought of consulting us. After all, He did just that in formulating the eternal decrees (Eph. 1:11; Rom. 11:34). But in His providence, He grants the privilege of prayer to His children. "This also I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them" (Ezek. 36:37). God lets us pray. This must be firmly understood as we examine the matter of prayer and the sovereignty of God.
In Reformed tradition, it has been customary to divide prayer into four categories. Each has its own peculiar problems regarding the sovereignty of God. First, there is confession. We are commanded to confess our sins (1 John 1:9). The truly penitent believer will acknowledge that he has sinned against God and will turn from his sin. Psalm 51 is the model prayer of confession. David acknowledged that he had sinned, and he did not shift the blame on to Bathsheba. Nor did he blame Adam. Calvinists need to be careful lest they subtly shift the blame on to the total depravity that is still resident in their mortal bodies. More important, we must never pray in anyway that suggests that God is to blame for our sin. Such is abhorrent to the holy God and to the sanctified conscience. How would one ever do such a thing? By hinting that his sin had been foreordained by God. It is, of course, true that God has foreordained all things and in a mysterious way ordained that sin would come into being (Isa. 45:7). He foreordained the crucifixion of Christ, which was the most evil sin in history (Acts 2:23; 4:28). But those who carried out that deed could not have pleaded innocence because it had been foreordained. Confessional prayer, then, submits to divine sovereignty but does not use it to excuse one's responsibility.
Second, there is the prayer of supplication, or requesting what we need from God. This is related to the third, namely, intercession, in which we request things for other people. Most of the rest of this study will concern the particular problems involved in these aspects of prayer. The fourth category is praise and adoration. It is the "Thank-you" that follows the "Please" of the first three aspects. It, too, is part of the revealed will of God. We are frequently commanded to praise the Lord. But the problem arises: "If God is already perfect in glory, how then can we contribute to His glory by praise and worship?" The answer belongs to the realm of the secret things of Deuteronomy 29:29, but we do know that such praise glorifies God (Ps. 50:23). Let no believer in divine sovereignty refuse to worship the Lord with the feeble excuse that God is already perfect in glory. Such an attitude is not humility, but presumption. The same applies to the refusal to glorify God, because God has predestined that He will receive glory from all things in the end anyway (Rom. 11:36). The Lord commands us to render to Him praise in return for His sovereign bestowal of grace (Eph. 1:6). Nothing should more characterize a believer in sovereign grace than exuberant worship of our heavenly God.
Now let us address some of the problems relating to supplicatory and intercessory prayer. One of the problems is whether God has given us a blank check with the command to pray. Does the privilege of prayer mean that God promises to answer all our prayers? If so, then being sovereign, He is certainly able to answer and effect such prayers.
Some Christians think that God has given such an unconditional promise in His revealed will. They appeal to verses such as Matthew 7:7-12; 18:19; John 14:13; 15:7; 16:23; and 17. Their prayers are remarkably like the one in Mark 10:35, "Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask of You." This approach is common in the so-called "Name it, Claim it" movement, which one wag has renamed the "Blab it, Grab it" movement.
But this approach is all wrong. It does not truly recognize divine sovereignty. It fails to balance the above texts with texts which lay down other principles and conditions. James 1:6, for example, says that our prayers must have faith. Verses 7 and 8 explicitly say that we will not be heard without faith. Then James 4:3 warns us against praying with greedy motives. Such motives are more common in our prayers that we realize or will admit. They are like the words of an old song from the 1960s, "O Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz." One wonders how prevalent it is in the "Name it, Claim it" movement. Still other texts tell us that our prayers must be coupled with obedience to God's will (John 9:31; 1 John 3:22). This does not mean that we earn things in prayer by obeying God's will. Nothing could be further from the truth. It does mean that we cannot expect anything from God if we are not willing to obey Him.
True prayer submits to God's authority. Right prayers are "requests" (Phil. 4:6), not demands. Demanding things from God treats Him as our servant, not our sovereign. It whistles to Him as our bellhop, rather than submitting humbly to Him as our King. Christians should be careful even in the use of imperative verbs when we pray. It might be better if we used the word "please" in our prayers. Manoah gave us a good example in Judges 13:8,15. One wonders whether Jean Calvin, the Frenchman, employed the phrase, "S'il vous plait" (If You please) in his prayers.
The awkward disciples employed the blank check approach in Mark 10:35. Notice how the Lord gently rebuffed them in verse 40: "But to sit on My right or on My left, this is not Mine to give; but it is for those for whom it has been prepared." God had already foreordained who will sit where, and so their prayers did not submit to the predestination of divine sovereignty.
Still another principle that offsets this misuse of prayer is found in the several instances in which God explicitly told one of His people not to pray for such-and-such (Deut. 3:26; Jer. 7:16; 11:14; 14:11; Ex. 32:10; Jer. 11:11-12; 15:1; Hos. 5:6; 1 John 5:16). It is God's prerogative as our sovereign to lay down conditions on the privilege of prayer which He gives.
On the other hand, Scripture indicates that there are some things which God has promised to supply if we present our requests in the right manner. The key verses are 1 John 5:14-15. These refer to the will of God. But this is not the secret will of predestination, but the revealed will of precept. The gist is this: If we pray in faith in the name of Christ with an obedient and selfless heart for things which God has commanded us to have, then we can be assured that He will grant them. It is like Augustine's prayer, "Give what Thou commandest and command what Thou will."
Take the matter of wisdom. We are commanded to have wisdom. "Be wise as serpents" (Matt. 10:16). But we are born fools without wisdom. Is God commanding us to make bricks without straw? No, He offers to give us the straw. James 1:5 says, "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him." This is praying aright with a view to the sovereignty of God in His revealed will. He commands us to have what only He can give; therefore He promises to give it to those who request it properly.
The problem is that we do not know how to pray rightly (Rom. 8:26; Luke 11:1). Jesus said to the disciples, "You do not know what you are asking" (Mark 1 0:38). We confuse our needs with our greeds (James 4:3). God rarely gives us our greeds, except to punish us (Num. 11:4, 20). It takes wisdom to know the difference, so we should ask for wisdom to know how to pray aright for what we need. It is presumption to demand or claim what God has not promised. Humility is not the refusal to ask in faith for what God has commanded and promised in His revealed will. It would be presumption to think that God commands us to ask for what He can give, but then is unwilling to bestow it.
There are other misconceptions about prayer that are based upon a fundamental misunderstanding about the sovereignty of God. First, "God does nothing but in answer to prayer." This is patently false. The truth is, God does almost everything irrespective of prayer. He governs the universe in all its details with no regard to prayer. How many of us pray that God keep the moons orbiting around the planet Saturn? We do not know enough about the universe to pray that the Lord keep it going. The same is true in His providence with man. Take creation. Did God answer anyone's prayer when He created the world? Moreover, the Lord does many, many things in our lives regardless of prayer. He does them by sheer grace. This is seen, for instance, in common grace for unbelievers who never pray and in special grace for the elect before they pray.
Second, "Pray that God saves a person, but does not intrude upon his free will." But no man has free will. Man's will is enslaved to sin (John 8:34). He will never be saved unless God intervenes into his will. The Lord does just that, and not only in salvation (Prov. 21:1). The sovereign God intervenes, interrupts, and intercepts our fallen wills. That is an inside secret, as it were, to the glory of praying with a view to the sovereignty of God. Even an Arminian should recognize the futility of his feeble formula. Christians rarely pray, "Lord, save my loved one, but do not interfere with his free will." No, we all pray, "Lord, save him! Do whatever has to be done!" Praying under the sovereignty of God means praying that God do what only God can do.
A third misconception is, "We should believe like Calvinists but pray like Arminians." This is as incorrect as the notion that we should evangelize like Arminians and believe like Calvinists. Why not evangelize and pray like Calvinists?
A fourth misconception is this: "I am praying for God's will." It is right that we pray for God's help in discerning His will, but this statement is usually an excuse to avoid doing what the revealed will explicitly states. Such a person usually is not studying his Bible to learn the will of God. He should stop praying and start studying, or, better yet, pray while he reads the Bible. This misunderstanding underlies many of the popular theories about divine guidance. Too many think that God guides us by feelings and impressions, rather than by Scripture.
Fifth, "God answers everyone's prayers." Scripture says otherwise. God does not answer those who pray without faith, repentance, in the name of Christ, and so on. Specifically, God does not answer the prayers of the unregenerate. Since the reprobate are permanently unregenerate, God never answers the prayers of the reprobate. Their prayers are insults to God. They do not pray with any regard to divine sovereignty.
A more general misunderstanding surrounds the popular phrase, "Prayer changes things." Of course, it does not change God's secret will (Num. 23:19), nor does it change His essence (Mal. 3:6). It will not do, then, to use this ditty or even the more sanctimonious one, "Prayer changes God and God changes things." It would be more appropriate to say with Robert Lewis Dabney, "Prayer is not intended to produce a change in God, but in us." Calvin commented, "It was not so much for His sake as for ours." When we pray, we change our wills to conform with God's revealed will. Behind that process, we should observe that God is changing us.
But what about the examples of Abraham and Jonah? Did not Abraham haggle with God and force Him to change His mind about Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18:22-33? Look again. God still destroyed those cities as He had intended and announced to Abraham (James 2:23). God did not choose to give repentance to the Sodomites, and without that they were fuel for the fire.
What about Jonah and Nineveh? The argument suggests that God threatened Nineveh with destruction, the Ninevites talked God out of it by prayer, and so God did not carry out His threat. This misunderstands what really happened. For one thing, had the Lord unconditionally promised to destroy Nineveh, it would certainly have been destroyed. God always keeps His unconditional promises. The fact that God did not carry out the promise tells us that it was a conditional promise. Scripture gives us several such examples. It was as if God had said through Jonah, "I will destroy you unless you repent" (Luke 13:3). As the book unfolds, we see that the Ninevites did in fact repent, so they were spared. It was certainly not because Jonah prayed for them. Had they not repented, God would certainly have destroyed them like Sodom and Gomorrah. Notice that they prayed with a view to the sovereignty of God in 3:9. They threw themselves on God's mercy, which is the appropriate attitude of prayer. Thus, they showed that they submitted to His authority, His sovereignty, His revealed will. Look deeply and you will see that God gave them that repentance and faith in the first place. That was because He had ordained to do so. It was not in answer to Jonah's prayer, because Jonah did not want them to be spared.
Most of our discussion so far has concerned prayer and the sovereignty of God with regard to His revealed will. Now we must look at prayer and the secret will, both in predestination and providence. The first principle we need to recognize is that God did not predestine anything because He foresaw that we would pray for it. He did not consult with anyone in the formulation of the decrees. He only consulted Himself (Eph. 1:11; Rom. 11:34).
One should never pray in a way that seeks to persuade God to change His decrees. Of course, the Lord would not change them anyway. It is impertinence to ask that He alter the unalterable. A decree is an oath; would one dare ask God to break His oath? Moreover, the Almighty issued the decrees out of His infinite, perfect wisdom. To pray against the decrees is to impugn the wisdom of the sovereign. A person who prays this will receive a rebuke, not an answer to his request.
Naturally, few persons would ever explicitly dare to pray such insubordinate prayers, except in gross ignorance or blatant arrogance. Unfortunately, gross theological ignorance is rampant in our churches, and so we hear occasional examples of prayers which are not in keeping with the secret will of God. A few examples should suffice. One is the prayer that God save the whole world. But even the Lord Jesus did not pray for the entire world (John 17:9), and He always prayed perfectly (John 11:42). Yet, we should pray for the conversion of the lost. We can pray for anybody, but not for everybody. Why? Because we know that God has not chosen all men to be saved, but He has chosen some and has not told us who they are. To pray that God save literally everybody is as contrary to the sovereignty of God as to pray for the salvation of the Devil (and some Christians have even done that, presumably in grossest ignorance).
Similarly, we ought not to pray that the Lord reverse the decree of reprobation; For example, do not pray that God release someone from hell. Those in hell are there because they are reprobate; to pray for a release is to pray that God reverse the decree of reprobation.
Then there is the business of "claiming" a person for Christ. We have no license to do this, either in our prayers or in our evangelism. This even applies to our own children. Even paedo-baptist believers in covenant theology discuss this point. But 1 Corinthians 7:16 says, "How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband?" One simply cannot know whether any person in particular will ever be saved, for the simple reason that God has not decided to tell us who the unconverted elect are. We should not grumble about this; there is wisdom in His decision, and we need to submit to it. One can know that another is elect, but only after that person has given proof of regeneration (Eph. 1:3; 1 Thess. 1:4-5; 2:13; 2 Thess. 2:13). On the other hand, we cannot know who any of the reprobate are until they confirm it by final impenitance unto death.
Likewise, we cannot pray that God change the date of Christ's return, for that has already been decreed (Acts 1:7). Revelation 22:20 is not a prayer that Christ return earlier than decreed, but the earnest desire that is in every true saint that Christ return in his lifetime. God has already set the date and has not deigned to reveal it to us (Matt. 24:36). We can deduce that God has not yet called His elect to Himself, for Christ will not return until all the elect are called in, even as God did not send the rains until He had led all the animals into the ark (Gen. 7; 2 Peter 3:9). It would be more appropriate to increase our evangelism to hasten that day than to pray idly for it to advance because we are sick of this world (2 Peter 3:12). This was the tenor of Christ's words in Acts 1:7-8.
Actually, there are several parallels between prayer and evangelism with regard to divine sovereignty. In his excellent little book, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, J. I. Packer shows that the two are biblical and therefore compatible. Among his many useful observations are two that can apply to prayer. First; we evangelize because God commands us to. We pray because God commands us to. Second, we evangelize because God uses our evangelism to call in His elect. We pray because God uses our prayers to call in His elect.
God is the First Cause of all things (Rom. 11:36), but like a master billiards player, He uses second causes. One of them is evangelism and another is prayer. Human responsibility in general is a second cause (Phil. 2:13-14). We are responsible to pray, and prayer is a means of providence. God uses our prayers, when prayed aright, to carry out His sovereign purposes. Of course He is not bound by prayer, but neither does His sovereignty require that He act without prayer. Scripture and experience testify to this point.
When we begin to look at it like this, a new vista opens up. Calvinism does not kill prayer, as some of our Arminian friends charge. The exact opposite is true. The fact that we pray assumes that we believe in the sovereignty of God, even implicitly. Alva McLain, hardly a Calvinist by most definitions, saw this and observed, "The doctrine of divine sovereignty should be an incentive to pray, for the only kind of a God who can answer prayer is a sovereign God."
For an example of this principle, one may compare 1 Timothy 2:1-2 with Proverbs 21:1. Paul exhorts us to pray for our rulers; Solomon tells us that God holds the hearts of the rulers in His hand. This is not limited to civil rulers, by the way. God directs the wills and minds of all men. This is one of the beauties of Reformed theology, for it opens a hitherto ignored window on prayer.
A "free will" Arminian is inconsistent. A. M. Toplady used to say that a praying Arminian is a self-contradiction. Conversely, a non-praying Calvinist is also inconsistent. If he believes in the sovereignty of God, his lack of prayer can only be attributed to lack of concern.
There is another useful principle in all this. Jonathan Edwards put it like this: "When the people of God are stirred up to prayer, it is the effect of His intention to show mercy."
When one prays rightly, he should deduce that the Lord has poured out upon him the "spirit of supplication" (Zech. 12:10). AW. Pink wrote, "The God who has determined to grant a blessing also gives a spirit of supplication which first seeks the blessing." If God stirs us to pray, it indicates that He is about to work in connection with those prayers. Of course, one should not simply wait for that stirring. As in evangelism, our duty is to pray at all times, in season and out.
Then there is importunate prayer and the sovereignty of God (Luke 11:5-13; 18:1-8). Our persistent praying does not force God's hand. God is still sovereign, but He has commanded us to pray and keep on praying. What is more, He has ordained that He will bestow some blessings only in reply to persistent prayer. D; Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say that God sits in a hayloft and lowers down a rope. The blessing is tied to the rope at the top, and He calls down and says, "Start pulling." One or two tugs will not pull it down. But when we keep praying aright and God is so pleased, He kicks over the blessing and we pull it down.
The Calvinist should never resemble the Hyper-Calvinist who shows his laziness and presumption by saying, "God will call in His elect whether I offer the gospel to them or not." We ought never think that we are blameless if we believe that God will do things whether we pray or not. Such an attitude is fatalism, not faith. Charles Hodge commented, "A fatalist cannot consistently pray." Prayer takes faith, not Stoic resignation to the inevitable. True, God shall carry out His purposes. But be forewarned that if you think that God foreordained your lack of prayer, remember that He also foreordained chastening for those who do not pray when they should.
A few words should be said in this context about the phrase "Thy will be done" as it pertains to prayer. Some believers resort to it in the wrong way to cover up a poor prayer. But it is a biblical phrase and is found twice in Scripture - both times on the lips of the Savior Himself. The first instance is in Matthew 6:10 in the Lord's Prayer. Now to which ''will'' of God does this refer? Obviously the revealed will, as recognized by most Reformed commentators on the passage (e.g., Hendriksen, Pink, Watson, and Kelly). Hendriksen comments: "It is the ardent desire of the person who sincerely breathes the Lord's Prayer that the Father's will shall be obeyed as completely, heartily and immediately on earth as this is constantly being done by all the inhabitants of heaven."
Thus, it is a submission to the revealed will with the prayer that others submit also. It cannot refer to the secret will, for that is accomplished by all in heaven, earth and hell. There is no warrant to pray, "Thy secret will be done." The accent to that prayer is strange. The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it like this: "We pray that God, by His grace, would make us able and willing to know, obey, and submit to His will in all things, as the angels do in Heaven" (Question 103). This is much the same as the submission of faith (James 1:6) and obedience (1 John 3:22) that is requisite for true prayer. Therefore, the phrase indicates submission, not apathy, to the sovereignty of God.
The Savior used the phrase also in His prayer in Gethsemane in Matthew 26:39. Again, it indicates submission to the revealed will, not apathy in light of the secret will. Christ had received a command from His Father to lay down His life (John 10:18). He kept the Father's commands in toto (John 4:34; 5:30; 6:38; 17:4). Christ realized that the elect would perish if He did not keep this command. Moreover, He Himself would have perished had He not kept the command, for disobedience would have meant sin and sin brings judgment. The Lord Jesus submitted, and so should we.
One more point deserves mention regarding prayer and the sovereignty of God. The sovereign God already knows what He will do. He knows what is best. He even knows what we will pray, for He has foreordained everything (Matt. 6:8). Then why pray? Augustine gives us the answer: "God does not ask us to tell Him our needs that He may learn about them, but in order that we may be capable of receiving what He is preparing to give." This was echoed even in the words of Thomas Aquinas: "Neither do we pray in order that we may alter the divine plan, but rather that we may obtain what was divinely planned to be given in answer to prayer." For a Catholic scholastic, that is good Calvinism!
So, then, prayer is a duty and a privilege. It includes much mystery and requires much faith. It is not theologically incompatible with the sovereignty of God in either the secret or revealed will. Thomas Manton wrote, "It must be conformable to His revealed will and with submission to His secret will; not contrary to His Word, nor against His decrees." Amen.
Author
Curt Daniel is a teacher and author who resides in Dallas, TX.
Recommended Reading
- Kelly, Douglas, If God Already Knows, Why Pray?, Brentwood: Wolgemuth and Hyatt, 1989.
- Palmer, B. M., Theology of Prayer, Harrisonburg: Sprinkle Publications, 1980.
- Sproul, R. C., "Prayer and God's Sovereignty," James M. Boice, ed., Our Sovereign God, pp. 127-36, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1977.
- Spear, Wayne, The Theology of Prayer, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1974.
- Pink, A. W., The Sovereignty of God, pp. 203-20, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1977.
Private Prayer
By Joel Nederhood
Morning by morning, O Lord, You hear my voice; morning by morning I lay my requests before You and wait in expectation (Ps. 5:3).
Those who develop the habit of private prayer follow Jesus in a very special way. The Bible says, "Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went off to a solitary place, where He prayed" (Mark 1:35).
This was Jesus' habit. Luke tells us that, the night before He called His followers and chose 12 disciples, Jesus "went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God" (6:12).
The beautiful thing about being a Christian is that those who follow Christ. can follow Him to the private place of prayer and can talk therewith their Father in heaven. In this they may imitate their Savior in an extremely significant manner.
But what about this private prayer? I have a feeling that many Christians don't know very much about it. Even those of us who know the secret of private prayer remember times when we called ourselves Christ's followers but didn't often follow Him to a private place to pray.
Those who do not know the joys and the power of private prayer must long for a deeper, more private relationship with God. Many of you who are reading this right now know something about Christianity, but you know virtually nothing about time spent alone in conversation with God. I don't mean that you don't pray. Of course you do. But your prayers are extremely brief. Once you have cried out in your need; you don't know what else to say. The simple fact is that you spend very, very little time in actual prayer to God.
Don't be satisfied with that. A little booklet called The Kneeling Christian says that prayerlessness is the secret of your failure. Often we talk about the secret of success, but what is the secret of the failure of gloomy, despondent, "unsuccessful" Christians? They do not speak freely about their Savior. They do not turn over their burdens to Him. They sometimes fall into gross sin. In their hearts, they harbor envy and anger and greed and all sorts of emotions that have no place in the lives of those who claim to follow Christ. Not one of us can claim that he or she has not experienced failure as a Christian. What is the secret of our failure? Our prayerlessness.
So we must follow Christ in prayer. We must look back across the centuries and see Him rise early in the morning and make His way to the solitary place where He prayed. We must follow Him to our own private place and there learn the reality of private prayer. It is a discipline, but, like every discipline, it yields freedom.
Prayer is beautiful, and, if we are willing to let it, it can transform our lives. In this article, I wish to address whether we pray or not, where we pray, when we pray, what we pray for, how we pray (i.e., whether audibly or silently), what helps we need for our prayer, and what we should expect from private prayer. I write especially for those who have already confessed their sins and fled to Christ for salvation. I know that there are always readers who have not yet surrendered themselves to God's saving grace - they have not asked Jesus to be the Lord of their lives. I hope, however, that, if you are not yet a Christian, you will continue to read about the blessings of private prayer. It could be that God will work in you and give you a holy jealousy so that you will not be able to rest until you enjoy private prayer yourself. I assure you that Jesus Christ wants nothing more than to have you come to Him in faith so that you can learn the glory of this holy exercise.
There are some people who believe in Christ but who don't pray very much, because they tend to feel that it is really not very necessary to pray. If you ask them how they feel about prayer, they say something like this: "After all, God is in charge of everything anyway, and He will do what He wants, so why bother praying?" Then they say that God knows their needs anyway, that there's no use telling Him about things He already knows. They pray occasionally, but they don't arrange their lives so that they can have a time of private prayer.
I understand their feelings, and I am very thankful that the Bible contradicts them. In Luke 11, we have the record of Jesus' disciples asking Him to teach them to pray. He does teach them - He gives them what we now know as the Lord's Prayer. He also does more. He indicates that they should use the avenue of prayer, that they should not hesitate to approach God and make their needs known to Him, because God does hear and answer prayer.
Jesus told His disciples several brief parables - special stories - in connection with prayer in Luke 11. (Why not look them up and read them?) They all can be summed up in this statement: "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; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened" (vv. 9-10).
So let there be no question about whether we should pray. God is greater than our logic, and when it comes to the things of the Spirit, we must not be logical but biblical. Jesus not only teaches us to pray, but also encourages us in the strongest possible language to practice prayer. Those who do not arrange their lives so that they can enjoy the advantages of private prayer miss out on the full wonder of what it means to be a Christian.
Surely we should pray. About this there is no doubt whatsoever. But where? In a sense, location makes no difference. There is a form of continual prayer, which I cannot get into now, that Christians should be involved in all the time. That kind of prayer obviously can and should be done everywhere. But when it comes to private prayer, the kind by which we follow Christ to the solitary place, it is good to have a special place to pray.
In Matthew 6:6 Jesus tells us, "When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen." Each of us should have a special room to go to in order to pray. I realize that many of us just don't have a room that we can use, because our apartments are too crowded. Some of you who are reading this little article are living in barracks or even in cell blocks. Privacy is very precious, and, unfortunately, many people these days have a hard time finding any.
If you are in a situation in which privacy is scarce, you will have to use your ingenuity to try to find some somewhere. Maybe you'll have to go out into the garage, or storeroom, or somewhere in the basement. If you have a room available to you, that is the ideal place to go. And I strongly suggest that you have your private prayer in the same place as much as possible. It should be a place where you cannot be observed or heard, and where you cannot hear all the sounds of what is going on elsewhere.
Privacy is not just incidental in this kind of prayer. Private prayer must be between yourself and God. You should not discuss your prayers a great deal with others. Prayer is powerful when it is not affected in any way by the judgments of others.
Now, finding a private place can be related to your time of prayer, for some places are often more private at one time than at another. When should you pray? Well, there is a sense in which faith-filled people pray all the time - they try to live in obedience to God and to think about His will for their lives, so what they do and say is a form of prayer. But private prayer - the kind of prayer Jesus clearly practiced and recommended that you practice - when should you have such prayer?
In answering this question, you must make allowances for the fact that people differ with respect to when they are most alert. We should remember that there are morning people and night people. It would be unrealistic to suggest that night people have their private prayers in the morning. One very fine Christian I know says very frankly that his faith is very imperfect before 9 a.m., especially before he has his first cup of coffee.
Even so, there is reason to believe that, when the Bible talks about private prayer, it considers that in many cases there will be morning prayers. Jesus' solitary prayers were early morning prayers and prayers that went on through the night. Apparently, the important thing about the matter of time is that private prayer works best in a time of stillness. And it is not necessary to limit such praying only to one time of day. Psalm 15:17 says, "Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and He hears my voice."
There are, however, several advantages that come with early-morning prayers. First,the stillness of the time before dawn helps in private prayer. Second, and this is even more important, our own minds are still uncluttered by the events of the day; Then, too, when we rise early to call upon the Lord, it is often the easiest time to find a private place.
In connection with this, I also want to mention that private prayer should be of some substantial duration. Jesus spent extended periods of time in private prayer. If you are new at praying in private, you may wish to start with five or ten minutes, but, before long, fifteen minutes will probably become a minimum for you. You will look forward to days when you don't have to go to work, holidays and the like, when you can spend more time praying. Yes, there should be a time set aside that is approached carefully and arranged deliberately so that you do not pray quickly and then rush away as soon as possible. You may need some kind of clock that helps you make sure you get up on time and that signals when you should conclude your prayers (because there are other things that must be done).
Many of you will have to arrange your lives so that you can get up on time to have your private prayers. This may mean that you will have to go to bed earlier in the evening, but all this is part of the discipline of prayer, a discipline that ultimately yields liberation.
How should you conduct your private prayers? Should they be audible or silent? It is possible to pray to God silently. When you have good control, your thoughts can march through your mind as efficiently as if you were speaking out loud. But you often do not have good control of your mind, do you? People who pray silently in the early morning are very apt to find themselves becoming drowsy and confused; when they are through, they may wonder what they have actually prayed about. In general, then, your time of private prayer is a time to formulate your prayers audibly. It is important, as well, to arrange your thoughts and to speak sensibly and coherently to the Lord. Many times, combinations of silent and audible prayer may work out well. The important thing is that you maintain your attention and do not think that you are praying when you are actually in the process of falling asleep.
Therefore, it is also important that you have proper posture in prayer. When it comes to prayer posture, no one has found an improvement on kneeling. For many, this is surely the posture of choice in private prayer. It would be a mistake to try to pray while lounging in one's favorite easy chair. That is quite counterproductive.
Now the important question - what should you actually pray for, or pray about, during your time of private prayer? I cannot begin to answer this question in such a brief article, for there are so many subjects to pray about that will come up in your private prayers over a period of time, especially as you become more and more accustomed to having this special time with God each day.
You must remember, though, that the primary idea in Private Prayer prayer is asking. When Jesus' disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, He taught them a prayer that was made up of requests. In Luke 11, we read that He encourages them to pray by saying that those who ask for things will receive them. In private prayer, you can lay all your needs before the Lord. It is a time to pray for others, as we all are obligated to do. Often God brings difficult circumstances into our lives or the lives of those who are very precious to us so that we will learn to lean on Him in prayer. This is what Psalm 5:3 expresses when it says, "In the morning I lay my requests before You and wait in expectation."
In your private prayers you will find that, along with your requests, you will also naturally offer praise and thanksgiving to God for all His mercies to you. One cannot experience the joy of private prayer without being moved to praise God for His goodness. You may find yourself calling out, in the words of Psalm 145, "I will exalt You, my God the King; I will praise Your name for ever and ever .... Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom" (vv. 1,3).
There will also be your confession of sin. The person who meets God in private prayer grows to see himself or herself as the chief of sinners. There is nothing like private prayer for humbling people. The sins of others recede into the background, and prayers see themselves for what they really are. It is a time to bare your heart before the Lord and to ask Him once again - you always end up asking for something, you see - to cleanse you and to fill you with His Spirit.
In addition to all of this, you will need helps in order to get the full benefit of private prayer. You will need the Bible. Often when praising God, it is best to use the words He gives us in His Scripture. You should have it open before you as you pray, and, over a period of time, you will learn to look to special places for the words you want - to tell God how much you love Him and how much you want to magnify His name. In the Bible, too, are words of confession - Psalm 51 tells us about our own unworthiness. You may want to write passages on cards and use them as you pray. Over a period of time, those words will be burned into your memory. Surely you need God's Word right there with you in your solitary place.
It is also good to have a prayer list - to make sure that you remember all you should remember when you come to God; As you pray more and more, you will realize that you have a great responsibility to pray for others and that you can do this best by having some kind of list. There will be in stances in which you should pray for specific things for special people. And as you pray for the salvation of certain people whom God has put on your heart, you may find it helpful to have a special card for each person.
When you pray for someone who has cancer, for example, you should not simply ask God to bless that person, but pray that He will destroy cancer cells in that person's body. You should pray as specifically as you can for people. You owe it to them; Those who belong to Christ have this high priestly responsibility.
The blessings that accompany private prayer are too numerous to list. I will conclude with a brief consideration of a few of the more obvious ones.
There is the joy of anticipation - you are always able to look forward to meeting God in that private place, and you know that there you will again be able to cast your burdens on Him. There is also the peace that passes all understanding. When you bring to God your deepest needs and the needs of others, you can feel the calm that comes from knowing that He is in control, and that you can trust Him. There are so many situations in life over which we have no control, but we can pray about them. Another blessing is this: as you learn the discipline of private prayer, you will know that one of the reasons these situations have happened is that God is heeding your request. Private prayer is an overwhelming privilege, and it is there for anyone who humbles himself before the Lord and learns to pray.
In our private places, we are in the presence of our loving Father, and we realize that He is preparing us for eternity - when we will be able to talk to God face to face.
Our continual prayer needs to be, "Lord, teach us to pray." We have much to learn. We need to overcome our tendencies to put all sorts of things ahead of our need to pray. We need God's help in arranging our lives so that we really do pray. And when we come to the private place, we need to be taught the wonder and glory of talking with such an awesome God!
Author
Dr. Joel Nederhood, a minister of the Christian Reformed Church, serves as radio minister of The Back to God Hour, a weekly broadcast of his denomination. This article is an edited version of a radio address given by Dr. Nederhood in January 1986. Helpful messages by Dr. Nederhood can be secured by writing:
The Back to God Hour
6555 W. College Drive
Palos Heights, IL 60463
Morning by morning, O Lord, You hear my voice; morning by morning I lay my requests before You and wait in expectation (Ps. 5:3).
Those who develop the habit of private prayer follow Jesus in a very special way. The Bible says, "Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went off to a solitary place, where He prayed" (Mark 1:35).
This was Jesus' habit. Luke tells us that, the night before He called His followers and chose 12 disciples, Jesus "went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God" (6:12).
The beautiful thing about being a Christian is that those who follow Christ. can follow Him to the private place of prayer and can talk therewith their Father in heaven. In this they may imitate their Savior in an extremely significant manner.
But what about this private prayer? I have a feeling that many Christians don't know very much about it. Even those of us who know the secret of private prayer remember times when we called ourselves Christ's followers but didn't often follow Him to a private place to pray.
Those who do not know the joys and the power of private prayer must long for a deeper, more private relationship with God. Many of you who are reading this right now know something about Christianity, but you know virtually nothing about time spent alone in conversation with God. I don't mean that you don't pray. Of course you do. But your prayers are extremely brief. Once you have cried out in your need; you don't know what else to say. The simple fact is that you spend very, very little time in actual prayer to God.
Don't be satisfied with that. A little booklet called The Kneeling Christian says that prayerlessness is the secret of your failure. Often we talk about the secret of success, but what is the secret of the failure of gloomy, despondent, "unsuccessful" Christians? They do not speak freely about their Savior. They do not turn over their burdens to Him. They sometimes fall into gross sin. In their hearts, they harbor envy and anger and greed and all sorts of emotions that have no place in the lives of those who claim to follow Christ. Not one of us can claim that he or she has not experienced failure as a Christian. What is the secret of our failure? Our prayerlessness.
So we must follow Christ in prayer. We must look back across the centuries and see Him rise early in the morning and make His way to the solitary place where He prayed. We must follow Him to our own private place and there learn the reality of private prayer. It is a discipline, but, like every discipline, it yields freedom.
Prayer is beautiful, and, if we are willing to let it, it can transform our lives. In this article, I wish to address whether we pray or not, where we pray, when we pray, what we pray for, how we pray (i.e., whether audibly or silently), what helps we need for our prayer, and what we should expect from private prayer. I write especially for those who have already confessed their sins and fled to Christ for salvation. I know that there are always readers who have not yet surrendered themselves to God's saving grace - they have not asked Jesus to be the Lord of their lives. I hope, however, that, if you are not yet a Christian, you will continue to read about the blessings of private prayer. It could be that God will work in you and give you a holy jealousy so that you will not be able to rest until you enjoy private prayer yourself. I assure you that Jesus Christ wants nothing more than to have you come to Him in faith so that you can learn the glory of this holy exercise.
There are some people who believe in Christ but who don't pray very much, because they tend to feel that it is really not very necessary to pray. If you ask them how they feel about prayer, they say something like this: "After all, God is in charge of everything anyway, and He will do what He wants, so why bother praying?" Then they say that God knows their needs anyway, that there's no use telling Him about things He already knows. They pray occasionally, but they don't arrange their lives so that they can have a time of private prayer.
I understand their feelings, and I am very thankful that the Bible contradicts them. In Luke 11, we have the record of Jesus' disciples asking Him to teach them to pray. He does teach them - He gives them what we now know as the Lord's Prayer. He also does more. He indicates that they should use the avenue of prayer, that they should not hesitate to approach God and make their needs known to Him, because God does hear and answer prayer.
Jesus told His disciples several brief parables - special stories - in connection with prayer in Luke 11. (Why not look them up and read them?) They all can be summed up in this statement: "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; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened" (vv. 9-10).
So let there be no question about whether we should pray. God is greater than our logic, and when it comes to the things of the Spirit, we must not be logical but biblical. Jesus not only teaches us to pray, but also encourages us in the strongest possible language to practice prayer. Those who do not arrange their lives so that they can enjoy the advantages of private prayer miss out on the full wonder of what it means to be a Christian.
Surely we should pray. About this there is no doubt whatsoever. But where? In a sense, location makes no difference. There is a form of continual prayer, which I cannot get into now, that Christians should be involved in all the time. That kind of prayer obviously can and should be done everywhere. But when it comes to private prayer, the kind by which we follow Christ to the solitary place, it is good to have a special place to pray.
In Matthew 6:6 Jesus tells us, "When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen." Each of us should have a special room to go to in order to pray. I realize that many of us just don't have a room that we can use, because our apartments are too crowded. Some of you who are reading this little article are living in barracks or even in cell blocks. Privacy is very precious, and, unfortunately, many people these days have a hard time finding any.
If you are in a situation in which privacy is scarce, you will have to use your ingenuity to try to find some somewhere. Maybe you'll have to go out into the garage, or storeroom, or somewhere in the basement. If you have a room available to you, that is the ideal place to go. And I strongly suggest that you have your private prayer in the same place as much as possible. It should be a place where you cannot be observed or heard, and where you cannot hear all the sounds of what is going on elsewhere.
Privacy is not just incidental in this kind of prayer. Private prayer must be between yourself and God. You should not discuss your prayers a great deal with others. Prayer is powerful when it is not affected in any way by the judgments of others.
Now, finding a private place can be related to your time of prayer, for some places are often more private at one time than at another. When should you pray? Well, there is a sense in which faith-filled people pray all the time - they try to live in obedience to God and to think about His will for their lives, so what they do and say is a form of prayer. But private prayer - the kind of prayer Jesus clearly practiced and recommended that you practice - when should you have such prayer?
In answering this question, you must make allowances for the fact that people differ with respect to when they are most alert. We should remember that there are morning people and night people. It would be unrealistic to suggest that night people have their private prayers in the morning. One very fine Christian I know says very frankly that his faith is very imperfect before 9 a.m., especially before he has his first cup of coffee.
Even so, there is reason to believe that, when the Bible talks about private prayer, it considers that in many cases there will be morning prayers. Jesus' solitary prayers were early morning prayers and prayers that went on through the night. Apparently, the important thing about the matter of time is that private prayer works best in a time of stillness. And it is not necessary to limit such praying only to one time of day. Psalm 15:17 says, "Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and He hears my voice."
There are, however, several advantages that come with early-morning prayers. First,the stillness of the time before dawn helps in private prayer. Second, and this is even more important, our own minds are still uncluttered by the events of the day; Then, too, when we rise early to call upon the Lord, it is often the easiest time to find a private place.
In connection with this, I also want to mention that private prayer should be of some substantial duration. Jesus spent extended periods of time in private prayer. If you are new at praying in private, you may wish to start with five or ten minutes, but, before long, fifteen minutes will probably become a minimum for you. You will look forward to days when you don't have to go to work, holidays and the like, when you can spend more time praying. Yes, there should be a time set aside that is approached carefully and arranged deliberately so that you do not pray quickly and then rush away as soon as possible. You may need some kind of clock that helps you make sure you get up on time and that signals when you should conclude your prayers (because there are other things that must be done).
Many of you will have to arrange your lives so that you can get up on time to have your private prayers. This may mean that you will have to go to bed earlier in the evening, but all this is part of the discipline of prayer, a discipline that ultimately yields liberation.
How should you conduct your private prayers? Should they be audible or silent? It is possible to pray to God silently. When you have good control, your thoughts can march through your mind as efficiently as if you were speaking out loud. But you often do not have good control of your mind, do you? People who pray silently in the early morning are very apt to find themselves becoming drowsy and confused; when they are through, they may wonder what they have actually prayed about. In general, then, your time of private prayer is a time to formulate your prayers audibly. It is important, as well, to arrange your thoughts and to speak sensibly and coherently to the Lord. Many times, combinations of silent and audible prayer may work out well. The important thing is that you maintain your attention and do not think that you are praying when you are actually in the process of falling asleep.
Therefore, it is also important that you have proper posture in prayer. When it comes to prayer posture, no one has found an improvement on kneeling. For many, this is surely the posture of choice in private prayer. It would be a mistake to try to pray while lounging in one's favorite easy chair. That is quite counterproductive.
Now the important question - what should you actually pray for, or pray about, during your time of private prayer? I cannot begin to answer this question in such a brief article, for there are so many subjects to pray about that will come up in your private prayers over a period of time, especially as you become more and more accustomed to having this special time with God each day.
You must remember, though, that the primary idea in Private Prayer prayer is asking. When Jesus' disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, He taught them a prayer that was made up of requests. In Luke 11, we read that He encourages them to pray by saying that those who ask for things will receive them. In private prayer, you can lay all your needs before the Lord. It is a time to pray for others, as we all are obligated to do. Often God brings difficult circumstances into our lives or the lives of those who are very precious to us so that we will learn to lean on Him in prayer. This is what Psalm 5:3 expresses when it says, "In the morning I lay my requests before You and wait in expectation."
In your private prayers you will find that, along with your requests, you will also naturally offer praise and thanksgiving to God for all His mercies to you. One cannot experience the joy of private prayer without being moved to praise God for His goodness. You may find yourself calling out, in the words of Psalm 145, "I will exalt You, my God the King; I will praise Your name for ever and ever .... Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom" (vv. 1,3).
There will also be your confession of sin. The person who meets God in private prayer grows to see himself or herself as the chief of sinners. There is nothing like private prayer for humbling people. The sins of others recede into the background, and prayers see themselves for what they really are. It is a time to bare your heart before the Lord and to ask Him once again - you always end up asking for something, you see - to cleanse you and to fill you with His Spirit.
In addition to all of this, you will need helps in order to get the full benefit of private prayer. You will need the Bible. Often when praising God, it is best to use the words He gives us in His Scripture. You should have it open before you as you pray, and, over a period of time, you will learn to look to special places for the words you want - to tell God how much you love Him and how much you want to magnify His name. In the Bible, too, are words of confession - Psalm 51 tells us about our own unworthiness. You may want to write passages on cards and use them as you pray. Over a period of time, those words will be burned into your memory. Surely you need God's Word right there with you in your solitary place.
It is also good to have a prayer list - to make sure that you remember all you should remember when you come to God; As you pray more and more, you will realize that you have a great responsibility to pray for others and that you can do this best by having some kind of list. There will be in stances in which you should pray for specific things for special people. And as you pray for the salvation of certain people whom God has put on your heart, you may find it helpful to have a special card for each person.
When you pray for someone who has cancer, for example, you should not simply ask God to bless that person, but pray that He will destroy cancer cells in that person's body. You should pray as specifically as you can for people. You owe it to them; Those who belong to Christ have this high priestly responsibility.
The blessings that accompany private prayer are too numerous to list. I will conclude with a brief consideration of a few of the more obvious ones.
There is the joy of anticipation - you are always able to look forward to meeting God in that private place, and you know that there you will again be able to cast your burdens on Him. There is also the peace that passes all understanding. When you bring to God your deepest needs and the needs of others, you can feel the calm that comes from knowing that He is in control, and that you can trust Him. There are so many situations in life over which we have no control, but we can pray about them. Another blessing is this: as you learn the discipline of private prayer, you will know that one of the reasons these situations have happened is that God is heeding your request. Private prayer is an overwhelming privilege, and it is there for anyone who humbles himself before the Lord and learns to pray.
In our private places, we are in the presence of our loving Father, and we realize that He is preparing us for eternity - when we will be able to talk to God face to face.
Our continual prayer needs to be, "Lord, teach us to pray." We have much to learn. We need to overcome our tendencies to put all sorts of things ahead of our need to pray. We need God's help in arranging our lives so that we really do pray. And when we come to the private place, we need to be taught the wonder and glory of talking with such an awesome God!
Author
Dr. Joel Nederhood, a minister of the Christian Reformed Church, serves as radio minister of The Back to God Hour, a weekly broadcast of his denomination. This article is an edited version of a radio address given by Dr. Nederhood in January 1986. Helpful messages by Dr. Nederhood can be secured by writing:
The Back to God Hour
6555 W. College Drive
Palos Heights, IL 60463
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