“Enable us, Lord, as husband and wife to shine like the sun and moon, and our children as stars, so gloriously and powerfully with the light of holiness, that our house may be your lesser heaven.”

It is one of the most important habits that any married couple can form. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most rare. For a husband and wife to live well together before the Lord, they must pray together. For a couple to honor God in their marriage, they must be as intimate spiritually as they are physically. At times it can be difficult to know what to pray or how to pray. This prayer by George Swinnock is a wonderful model of a prayer a couple can (and perhaps should) pray together.
Lord, who are the guide of all relationships, may our marriage befit those married to the Lord Christ. Like Abraham and Sarah, may we be famous for faith; like Isaac and Rebecca, may we live in dearest love; like Zachariah and Elizabeth, may our walk be blameless.
May the meditation of each other’s frailty spur us to greater fidelity. May you be our guide, and Scripture our compass. Whatever stony paths we walk on earth, may we enjoy a comforting sunshine from heaven. And since you have tied this knot between us, may we do nothing which might loosen it through angry thoughts or quarrelsome deeds.
Read More
Related Posts:

When our hearts and minds are in danger of being unnerved by the prospect of evangelism, we need to marinade our perspective in the assurance Jesus gave that a Helper would – and now has – come who would be the very ‘Spirit of truth’, sent from God the Father to stand alongside us in bearing witness to Christ. In that sense, no matter what our abilities or experience, we will only ever be Junior Counsel to the Senior Advocate that God has given in presenting the world with the case for Christ. 

Some years ago I was given the opportunity to move from my home in Northern Ireland and spend two years living and studying in Oxford. I had been offered a place to read for a theology masters at the university, as well as a position on an evangelism training programme run by a Christian apologetics centre in the city that I would do alongside my academic studies. I can remember being utterly flattered and enchanted by the opportunity: Here I was being invited to study at arguably the world’s most prestigious university; to be taught and mentored by people whom I regarded to be among the world’s leading Christian evangelists and apologetic thinkers. Yet when the romantic fantasies of Oxford’s dreaming spires faded and I sobered up to what the practical realities of going would demand, the inconvenient truth that the whole enterprise was actually a huge risk dawned on me rather uncomfortably. There was the professional and financial risk: Living and studying in Oxford would cost tens of thousands of pounds and going would mean abandoning both a job I enjoyed and an stable income, as well as having no guarantees of future employment once my studies were complete. There were the academic and psychological risks: Would I have the ability and resilience to cope with the intellectual and emotional challenges of so rigorous an academic environment? There was the relational risk: Due to circumstances beyond our control, my wife was unable to join me in Oxford for the first year. What pressures might this bring to our fledgling marriage and would we be able to cope? And there was even the faith risk: I had heard horror stories of deeply sincere believers who had had their faith shipwrecked when studying theology at top secular universities. How would my faith fair in the inevitable crucible of being confronted with ideas and arguments contrary to what I had hitherto believed?
As I crossed the Irish Sea heading for Oxford that September morning I had no idea what the answers to these questions would be. There were no guarantees that it would all work out positively, no assurances that I would not need to come home after one term to search for a new job and face the embarrassment of needing to explain the situation to people – some of whom had financially supported my going. Thankfully, none of these fears were realised and what transpired into the five years that my wife and I spent in Oxford proved to be the most beneficial and formative season of our lives so far. Yet it was an experience that we would never have known had we not been prepared to embrace the opportunity in spite of the inherent risks. As I left Ireland for Oxford that first day, all I had was an open door of opportunity, the promise that God would be with me, and a sense that this was what the Lord wanted me to do even though it didn’t come with any certifications that it would all work out. But it was enough. Like Moses (Ex. 3:12), I would have to discover in retrospect that this was precisely what God wanted me to do – and not because the entire experience was smooth or simple!
In many ways, Christian evangelism is a lot like this. There is simply no getting around the fact that public witness to Jesus is an inherently risky affair – no matter how gifted or experienced we might be. There is simply no guarantee that people will react positively to the Gospel or, indeed, to us as bearers of it. Jesus forewarned his disciples that even though God himself had specifically chosen them to bear his fruit in the world, many in that world would both hate and even persecute them on account of his name (Jn. 15:16-16:4). When they then began their witness to the world there were, of course, many who became followers of Jesus. Yet the New Testament is also painfully honest that they were also regularly maligned, misrepresented, socially ostracised and even imprisoned for communicating a message considered an offence to most Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor. 1:23). If the absence of risk or the guarantee of a positive response had been a prerequisite for the apostles taking up the Great Commission they would have never left the Upper Room in Jerusalem. But, instead, they were utterly convinced that God has demonstrated His appointment of Jesus Christ as Lord and they were left in no uncertain terms by that Jesus that they have been given a mandate to take the message of His Lordship to the world, whatever the personal cost or risks. They were, therefore, fully persuaded that Christianity was public Good News. In their own words: ‘we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard’ (Acts 4:20).
Nothing much has changed on this front in the two thousand years since their witness: Jesus is still Lord and his command that his disciples publicly witness to the Gospel remains unchanged. Yet doing so continues to harbour various kinds of risk. There is the reputational risk: that once people discover our Christianity they will inevitably think less of us, either because we are in their eyes irrational, or just plain weird, or even because we are committed to certain values or ethics that they consider to be, at best, on the wrong side of history or, at worst, dangerously dehumanising. There is the professional risk: the legitimate concern that any conversations with colleagues about faith could be interpreted as proselytising and land us in trouble with the Human Resources department. There is also what we might call the counterproductive risk to the Gospel: this is the concern that some people have that, if they do try to evangelise, they fear that they will do such a bad job of it that they will actually be counterproductive to someone’s openness to Christianity – perhaps only confirming rather than debunking stereotypes – and, ultimately, creating more work for the Holy Spirit by compounding the confusion or scepticism of the person they share the Gospel with through their limitations and mistakes.  Add to these dynamics the new phenomenon of cancel culture, where any individual can be socially no-platformed because of something they said or did decades ago (even if it wasn’t in any way controversial at the time!), as well as the ways we have been perennially educated to approach the risks of Covid-19 over the last year. It’s probably no wonder then that the Risk Gap remains one of the biggest impediments we have to engaging in evangelism.
So what can we do to avoid allowing these inherent risks in Christian evangelism to hinder us from sharing the Good News of Jesus with others?
First, we need to continually remind ourselves that even though evangelism doesn’t come with a guarantee of success, it does come with the guarantee of God’s help and presence. Jesus personally promised that as you ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…’, He will be ‘…with you always, to the very end of the age’ (Matt. 28:18-20). When our hearts and minds are in danger of being unnerved by the prospect of evangelism, we need to marinade our perspective in the assurance Jesus gave that a Helper would – and now has – come who would be the very ‘Spirit of truth’, sent from God the Father to stand alongside us in bearing witness to Christ. In that sense, no matter what our abilities or experience, we will only ever be Junior Counsel to the Senior Advocate that God has given in presenting the world with the case for Christ. We are, therefore, never alone in witnessing endeavours. Whether it’s in the staff room, at the gym, in the Sixth Form Centre, in university halls, at the pub with colleagues after a long working week, on the sports field, or around the kitchen table, the moment we open our mouths to communicate Jesus the most experienced, empowered and effective evangelist God ever has – or ever will – give the world is by our side supporting and enabling us. In fact, even if we should find ourselves unexpectedly hauled before authorities because of our faith, Jesus commands us that we are not to be anxious about how we will defend ourselves or what we shall say, “for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very moment what you ought to say” (Luke 12:11-12).
Read More

It is the hope you have in the Lord Jesus that enables you to persevere, to endure to the end. Knowing the glory that he has stored up for us, the home he has prepared for us, the welcome that is waiting for us from the Lord Christ himself. Knowing that all who are joined to the Son have that promise of joy in our Father’s presence, of eternal pleasures with him. This is what can keep us going, enduring, in serving the Lord and serving others.

1 Thessalonians 1:2-3:
We always thank God for all of you, mentioning you in our prayers.
We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

There can be a view of the apostle Paul that he is this huge head full of theological concepts like predestination and election, mortification and sanctification, and a heart that is two sizes too small. That he cares about lofty ideas, but not really about people.
It’s certainly true that in the Lord’s unique gifting of Paul, as well as his providence in the training the apostle had even before he came to Christ, Paul does have this immense God-given wisdom, so that his Spirit-inspired letters have been a guide to God’s people for close to two thousand years.  His God-breathed writings have been used by the Lord to keep Christ’s church on the rails for two millennia.
But the idea that Paul didn’t care about people is just blown away, all the way through his letters and the book of Acts. I love it in Acts 20 when Paul is saying goodbye to the Ephesian elders, and we’re told ‘They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him. What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again.’
This isn’t how you respond to a man who doesn’t care about people. This is how you respond to someone who loves people so much that he is delighted to share not only his words, but his whole life with them – in order that they might see the truth and the goodness and the beauty of his Saviour. This weeping on the beach is how you respond to someone who is able to say, in all seriousness, ‘we ALWAYS thank God for ALL of you, mentioning you in our prayers’.
This is a man who cares about people, knowing that in God’s glorious and glorifying plan of salvation, it is PEOPLE that Christ came to rescue. And in these verses, we see a man who cares for and gives thanks for specific people. A people he cares for deeply. There’s three specific things he gives thanks for in the Thessalonian believers. And you’ll see that they relate to that trio of Christian virtues that are in First Corinthians 13, and come up many times in Paul’s writings – faith, hope, and love.
Let’s look briefly at each one – and may they fuel our prayers.
Work Produced by Faith
Paul and his companions were continually remembering before God how the Thessalonians worked, and that these good works they did were produced by their faith in Christ. Coming from a Catholic upbringing, where I genuinely thought I needed to work really hard in order to be in with a shot of God’s favour and mercy and grace, it was so precious to me when I realised the truth of the gospel. When I realised that we are made right with God by faith, apart from works. It took away so much uncertainty and anxiety, about whether I’d been good enough. Whether I’d done enough. Perhaps I felt a little something of what the Reformer Martin Luther felt when he discovered the gospel of grace, and said: “I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”
But of course, because we’re saved by faith apart from works, that doesn’t mean there’s no place for works.
Read More
Related Posts: