How to pray in pain

“Cry aloud before the Lord, O walls of Jerusalem! Let your tears flow like a river. Give yourselves no rest from weeping day or night. Rise during the night and cry out. Pour out your hearts like water to the Lord. Lift up your hands to him in prayer,” (Lamentations 2:18-19).

Jerusalem has fallen. The people have been taken into exile. The Temple is destroyed. The walls of the city are demolished. And the prophet Jeremiah, the one who for so many years warned and pleaded and threatened the people of God, now laments with a broken heart the destruction that has come upon them. The language he uses in Lamentations is open and frank. He teaches us to cry aloud to God in our pain and to be honest before him in all situations; particularly when the pain of sin has caught up to us. We learn that we need not ever hold back the expression of our hearts from God.

For the Judean people, their pain was the result of sin.  It was sin that led to their destruction. The people now felt abandoned by God. Their pain and loss were almost beyond bearing. And Jeremiah mourned the tragedy. We must understand that unchecked sin always leads to devastating consequences. It may not seem that way at first, but ultimately sin brings sorrow and loss. Restoration can only begin in the midst of mourning and admitting the truth to God. This is what leads to God rebuilding our lives.

Many of the Jews believed that God would never bring destruction upon them no matter what they did.  Sometimes we can fall prey to this kind of dangerous denial too.  We take our theology of grace and election too far and assume it means we now have carte blanche before the Lord. No matter what we do, we think, grace will cover it all.  Lamentations provides a check to this foolishness and reminds us of our responsibility before God. He is still a holy, holy, holy God. We cannot assume that the Lord will protect his own at all cost and simply turn  his eye away from their sin.

Yet we know that God is not aloof to our pain.  The God who brought destruction because of sin is the same God who bore the judgment of that sin on the cross of Jesus Christ. God is not against us, but is for us and has forever demonstrated his love in the cross of his Son. His great purpose in each of our lives is to conform us to the image of Jesus. This means that he will perform a thorough work of purging us from sin and shaping us to reflect the One who has borne our sin and our sorrows.  The great hope we have is that no sin is so great that it puts us beyond the reach of God.  He is ever- ready to amend us and restore us and transform us when we turn to him with all our hearts.

So turn to him today. Be honest in your pain. Where there is sin, confess it and thoroughly turn from it.  Receive God’s mercy and cleansing.  And allow the restoration to begin.

What are you waiting for?

Wait, wait, wait.  All three of our readings today encourage us to wait.  We are waiting with Job as he wrestles with God and his checked out friends.  Isaiah speaks to the Israelites a message of comfort; the seige from the outside aggressors is coming to an end soon.  Wait and trust it is coming. James challenges the church to wait patiently for Christ’s return.

Waiting is so hard.  Few of us know how to wait well.  What is waiting, anyway?  When I hear that word, my mind races to a hospital waiting room.  I feel a slight tinge of angst.  The word wait connotes sitting helplessly while life runs out of control.  In reality, waiting is not passive at all.  Miriam Webster defines the verb to  wait as “to stay in place in expectation, to look forward expectantly, to be ready and available.”  Waiting is often a crucial way that we become stronger in our faith.  James gives terrific advice on how to wait.  He likens our waiting to the farmer expecting his crop to mature.  In the midst of hardship, we can know good things are coming; we just can’t see them yet.  The fields have been tilled and prepared, the seeds have been planted, the ground watered and nurtured.  The plants will come.  Provision will make its way forth.

In the meantime, seek out the counsel of wise mentors.  Find those who have traveled the path you are on with faithfulness.  Job wrestled with God but he stayed the course with Him and God brought about a strong finish for him in the end.  While you are waiting, clean up your act.  Choose your words carefully and speak simply.

While you’re waiting, connect with the body of believers and pray with them.  Invite them to bear your burdens with you.  If things are going well, then offer praise to God for that.  Praise him corporately.  Psalm 22 tells us that God inhabits the praises of his people.  If you want to see more of God, just start singing and praising him. Praise is a powerful way to pray.

If things are going poorly, have the church pray with you.  Develop your prayer life.  Many of us believe prayer is simply asking God for something.  It is so much more than that.  Prayer is an ongoing dialogue where we speak and then we listen.  It is a soaking in of His presence; it is the nourishment for our Spirit.  It is the place of abiding deeply with Christ.  It is how we remain grafted in to the vine so that we grow.    Prayer is living intentionally with our spirit focused on Him.  We listen for Him to speak all around us through nature, through the Church, through other believers, through Scripture.  Pray through writing; write to him and listen for what He gives you to write down.  We listen for him to speak directly to us as well.  We remove any obstacles to hearing Him throughout the day. Praying God’s will is a powerful thing.  Waiting on God is hardly a passive way of living.

In our waiting, James also tells us to  ask forgiveness for our sins.  We allow the Holy Spirit to quicken our hearts to recognize when we’ve turned away from him in any way.  We stop what we’re doing and return to him.  We confess our sins to each other.  Confession is a powerful tool in our waiting.  It clears the roadway that we travel with Christ.  We have assurance that if we confess he will forgive us. 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”  We don’t get this assurance from just anyone…we get this from Christ whose blood provided our payment.  Not everyone will forgive you when you make a mistake, but God always will when you confess to him.  James tells us in 5:16: “Make this your common practice:  Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.”  Isn’t this what every person is looking for whether they know it or not…to be whole and healed?  Healing and wholeness often come in the waiting.

 

Just Pray

The first thing I want you to do is pray.  Pray every way you know how, for everyone you know.” 1 Timothy 2:1.

Prayer is at the heart of what a God centered life looks like.  It is in its simplest form, having a conversation with God.  Talking to Him, listening to Him, engaging with Him.  Seeking His thoughts about things going on around us first prevents us from operating from our self oriented ones.  I cannot over emphasize the importance and power of prayer.  Paul talks about it over and over through his letters.  It creates an unshakable foundation to build our lives upon.  It articulates to God that we sincerely believe in Him and that we love Him.  It opens the door of our minds to His presence and allows Him to have continual access to shaping us.

If we say we believe in Him yet we don’t have conversation with Him, what does that say about us?  Can you imagine falling in love with someone, marrying this person, and then just not speaking to them? Ever?  Not listening to them? Ever?  Asking them to stay outside on the doorstep until you have ten minutes to invite them in?  Worse yet, not even living together but simply calling on the phone when life is completely out of control. “Things are bad, please send money.”

Many of us treat our relationship with God this way.  He is far off and distant and not engaged.  We operate through life in a deistic reasoning but never engaging with the all powerful living Creator of the Universe.  Others of us treat God as the repair guy we call when things around our house of faith are broken.  Some see Him as an authoritarian figure looming heavy over us.  He demands relentless perfection we cannot achieve.     None of these are accurate depictions of God.

The more you read Scripture, the more God reveals his true self to us.  The clearest picture we have of Him is in Jesus Christ.  The Gospels show how Jesus lived, breathed, walked and ate with us!  He talked, laughed, loved, cared and shared himself.  He healed, carried and forgave us.  He was God in human form.  And now His Spirit is in each of us that receives him and believes in Him.  If you have believed His message and have received him, His Spirit is alive in you!

What keeps you from talking to Him?  Fears? Worries?  He wants to hear those. He wants to alleviate them. And He can.  Disappointments?  He already knows about it.  Tell him more. Listen to His thoughts and gain his perspective.  Hurt and anger?  He can handle it.  He is so much bigger. Express it to Him.   Bitterness?   What is the point of holding on to that?  He already carried our offenses on Himself when He was crucified.  Those are dead and gone unless you continue to resuscitate them and feed them. Apathy?  He is the author of Love itself.  Ask him for more of His love.  He loves loving us!  Anxiety?  Breath.  Breath Him in deeply.  Keep breathing.  He will slow down the spinning and set the pieces of your life in order.  Just allow Him.

As you walk in conversation with Him, listen closely.  He wants to share His thoughts with you.  Bring every concern, every person, every leader you can think of to Him.  Bring every situation in your life to Him and trust Him to bring about good for you and others in these.  Even when you can’t see it up front. Trust His heart that He loves you, He hears you and He has great plans for you.  Yield to gratitude when you don’t understand. He will bring you peace. Walk every step with him every day.  He will meet you wherever you are.  Just pray.

No one left behind

Have you ever been to a party, concert, speaker, conference or other event and thought of other people you wished were with you right then? It gnaws at you for a bit. “Shoot, I wish she was hear to hear this!” or, “Oh my goodness, he would absolutely love this.”   Then when you reconnect with these loved ones you get so excited about what they missed and you download the whole event with them.  Knowing full well that the magic is over and they are simply being polite allowing you to gush on and on.  I always wish I had a “restart” button and could go back in time and invite these friends to join me.

In this last chapter of 1 Thessalonians, Paul continues sharing with this church what Christ’s return is going to be like.  He has already explained that those who have already died will rise up first and then the rest of us will join them in the clouds to meet Jesus himself.  It will be a huge reunion.  A big party.  An incredible event.

Then he explains that this is not a date to put on the calendar.  No one knows the hour.  Unlike that event you meant to invite your friend to, we don’t know when this big fiesta is going to happen.  Over the years many leaders have tried to predict the date.  The date they predict comes and goes and we’re all still here standing around. I always wonder why they ignore this passage.  No one knows when Jesus will return.  But we do know that this party is coming.  And we won’t get a chance to return and tell our friends about it.  We must go ahead and invite them now.

Many of us have friends and family that simply won’t hear our pleas to receive Christ.  It can be discouraging.  May I encourage you?  My brother was raised in a Christian home and received Christ at an early age.  As he grew up; though, he moved away from the faith of his childhood.  He lived out Solomon’s mantra in Ecclesiastes, “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die.”  He partied hard.  We all prayed for him.  He was respectful of the rest of the family but not budging on the choices he had made.  In his early thirties, something changed.  God’s Spirit moved him and while flipping TV channels one night he heard a famous evangelist teaching and he gave life to the Lord.  His was a radical conversion; he quit alcohol, women and with a few weeks found a church home.

Another man I know didn’t even grow up in the faith.  He had one year of Catholic high school.  He was wild as a teenager, full of rebellion and running as hard as he could away from pain.  His mother received Christ and began praying for her son.  She gathered other women in her Bible study to begin praying for her son.  A few years later, her son had a radical encounter with Jesus Christ in the middle of a Grateful Dead show in Washington, DC.  He did a 180 and today is preaching, teaching and leading others to changed lives.  You may already know my husband, Chris. He is living proof that no one is too far away from the Father’s love to come home to His arms.

While I”m all for sharing the message of faith in our words (my husband does this a LOT), I think our lives and actions speak even louder.  These may not seem convincing, may even seem passive.  But others are watching.  They pay more attention than you think.  Throughout Thessalonians, Paul paints a picture of what a life radically changed by God’s Spirit looks like.  If you don’t think you can live this way, just ask Him to fill you with His love.  The more you receive his love, the less room you have for the other stuff that gets in the way.  The other stuff is what convinces our family and friends that our faith is useless.  Many years ago I heard a great reminder from the music group DC Talk:

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today…is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is simply what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.

So invite friends and families…strangers too, to this incredible celebration that is coming.  Invite them through your quiet, committed prayers for them and your own converted lifestyle.

Do you realize what God offers?

“This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.”

Paul tells us in Ephesians 3 that we don’t have to be afraid of God anymore.

That doesn’t mean God has changed. He is still holy, awesome, extraordinary, magnificent, and exists in inapproachable light. He radiates pure power. In a word he is glorious.  Nothing dark can come near him. The disobedient and rebellious gain no admittance and have no hope of entry into his presence. The “good” can never be good enough to overcome the distance that separates Him.  Those who try to approach God based on their own credentials (whatever one might think those to be — family of origin, intelligence, morality, religiousness, etc), will be turned away.

Yet, Paul reiterates that we who have trusted Christ need not fear. We don’t have to cower or grovel. We don’t have to fret that he might not accept us. We don’t have to wonder if he hears us when we pray. When we approach God on the basis of Christ’s credentials — his righteousness, goodness, sinlessness —  we are met with acceptance.  We can come boldly before him. We can approach him with confidence because Christ’s favored status gains us access to God. It’s like being a VIP or having an “all-access” backstage pass.  You see, with God the old adage holds: It’s not what you know, but Who you know that matters.

You really are accepted in God’s Beloved Son. So come to him boldly and with freedom to receive what he desires to give you.  And what is that? Paul, in prayer, articulates it this way:

“I ask God to strengthen you by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.” (Eph 3:16-19 The Message)