http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15193980/should-we-be-motivated-by-degrees-of-reward

Recently, as I watched my eleven-month-old make a mad dash for the open dishwasher, it struck me as remarkably similar to how we can approach God in prayer. Our hearts, like my son’s hands, desire to have, hold, and enjoy. Earthly objects appear good and precious before us. We reach for them through prayer — unaware of whether we reach for a spoon or a knife.

The God to whom we pray is our sovereign and kind Father. He cares whether his material gifts do service or harm to his children’s souls, and he truly knows the difference between spoons and knives, bread and stones, fish and serpents (Matthew 7:9–11). So, whenever necessary, his love says, “No.” His hands gently pull us back, shutting the door.

All the while, he assures us that he is not a Father who delights to withhold but to fulfill — fully, finally, and forever, with the only Object in all existence that can really satisfy us: himself (Psalm 16:11). Here I am; here is fullness of joy. What you wanted would have hurt you by giving you less of me. Fear not. I have not withheld myself. You shall be full.

But we are often too busy wandering around the base of a dishwasher to hear him.

Pray for God

Do you feel like one prayer after another is going unanswered? Is prayer an exercise in disappointment, sorrow, or even bitterness — not faith, fellowship, and joy? Jesus sees you, and he wants to free you from experiencing prayer as frustration. But to do that, he will ask you to stop asking mostly for more of his gifts. He will ask you to ask ultimately for more of him.

He says the same to all his sheep: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Goods and kindred will not do. The good shepherd does not make us lie down in green pastures so that we can become sick on grass. Times of comfort, along with valleys of death, are for communion with Christ. He alone knows how much is too much — of both ease and affliction.

Our prayer life reveals whether our spiritual taste buds prefer certain circumstances above everlasting satisfaction in Christ, the Bread of Life and Living Water (John 6:35; 4:10). As J.I. Packer puts it, “I believe that prayer is the measure of the man, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is, so that how we pray is as important a question as we can ever face” (My Path of Prayer, 56). Does prayer mostly leave us hungry for any goods we didn’t get? Or, whatever the outcome, is it satisfying enough for us to know that as we pour out our hearts in prayer (Psalm 62:8), we pour them out to a Father infinitely more invested in those hearts than even we are?

Our nearsighted, half-hearted requests do not surprise him. He has given us a way to steer our prayers and, with them, our desires aright: “Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full” (John 16:24). In When I Don’t Desire God, John Piper paraphrases Jesus’s words this way: “In all your asking look for the fullness of joy in me. In this way all your asking will glorify me” (148). Whatever you request, request it with an eye to lasting delight — request it with an eye to getting more of me, whatever else you may get.

In response to prayers for God to glorify himself by satisfying us in himself, his answer is as timeless as his Son: yes. Jesus says so: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7). If whatever you wish is that your joy would be full — that you would get God, come what may — that wish will be granted. It simply will.

“Prayer cannot survive by prayer alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Not by a genie, but by a Father who gave his only Son so that you could and would believe in him (John 3:16). Be satisfied in him. Trust him. Treasure him. Genies give gifts. God gives himself (even in his gifts). He gives exceeding joy and gets exceeding glory for being our exceeding joy. The more we pray to this end, the more our prayers will be answered, and the less we will sit sullen and confused before an over-rubbed lamp (or before a dishwasher, in my son’s case).

Hear to Speak

Notice the all-important if in Jesus’s words in John 15:7: “If . . . my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” If our prayers are going to power joy in Christ, Christ’s words must power our prayers. And if his words are going to power our prayers, we must open our Bibles.

So often, our prayer-problems (and therefore our joy-problems) begin not with delayed speech but with impaired hearing. Whether in the midst of Eden or east of it, humans have never started conversations with God, but he with us. Stop at any point in redemptive history, and you will find God already there — speaking.

Every atom in existence, especially those that form you and me, can be traced back to the One who said, “Let . . .” When Adam and Eve fell and then tried to flee, God’s voice chased after them: “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). Though he cast humankind from his holy presence, still he would not cease to reveal himself to us. Now he would do so “by the word of the Lord” (1 Samuel 3:21). In time, this Word would miraculously take on flesh and dwell among us (John 1:14). Today, anytime Christians pray in faith, it is because Christ the Word already dwells richly in us by his Spirit.

So, prayers spoken in faith do begin not with our mouths but with our ears and remain in lifelong orbit insofar as the Scriptures, and therefore the Son, remain at the center of the Christian solar system. Prayer cannot survive by prayer alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4).

Psalm 56 illustrates this powerful pattern of God’s words drawing out our words. As David composed this poem, he lay captive to the Philistines. Yet David’s danger strengthened, rather than squashed, his resolve to pray: “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you” (verse 3). David is afraid, so David is praying. And the reason David is praying is because David has been hearing: “In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me?” (verse 4). The praiseworthy word of God is the basis for David’s deep trust in God. And so he prays.

Our own voices will cry out like David, “God, I trust you!” to the degree that our hearts grasp the utter trustworthiness of God like David. Also like David, only God’s own voice can draw such trust and its attendant prayerfulness out of us. When we try to pray from thin air, our minds feel fuzzy, and our voices are quick to crack. But when we pray in response to and alongside God’s voice — it’s like going from ten thousand feet above sea level to standing on the shore. Our prayers will enjoy enough oxygen to last a lifetime.

Impossible Prayers

Whether we’ve walked with God for one year or fifty, no one is above lessons in prayer. Just as the first disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray (Luke 11:1), so should we. Left to ourselves, our prayers tend to trail the path of unbelieving prayers, requests that flow from hearts interested only in getting gifts (James 4:3), not in getting the Giver himself within every gift (James 1:17).

If we want our prayers to be a means to unshakable soul-joy, we will ask God to do what he wants within all our wants. And if we want God’s wants to become ours, we will learn the words and lean into the Spirit of the only Man who desired and delighted in God perfectly all the days of his life.

If we pause for a moment to check the pulse of our own delight in God, we may be tempted to tremble with the twelve disciples. “Who then can be saved?” (Matthew 19:25). But such fear is only for those who would refuse the God-appointed means to making the impossible possible: prayer. Ultimately, we cannot think, read, or even meditate our way to joy in God. Joy in God is a gift from God. If we are to have it, we must ask God for it. We must pray.

As we imperfectly pursue him, he will perfectly answer our prayers for earthly circumstances and material goods. We will watch him direct scalpels and OBs, provide last-minute funds and 24/7 friends. We will marvel as he restores broken marriages, returns wayward children, and resets quarreling churches. May we never doubt our Father’s eagerness to hear from us and give to us (Matthew 7:11).

But our Father is not mostly concerned with preserving his children’s comforts. No, he is dead set on safeguarding his children’s souls. The Hound of Heaven will not be reduced to Earth’s Vending Machine (or a Divine Dishwasher). Hallelujah! We cannot tell whether what we request is a spiritual razor blade or a rich blessing. But our sovereign and saving God can. He will give only what is good for us and glorifying to him — everything we need for our joy in him to be full.

We nixed the name “Fellowship Hall.”

Our church purchased the building three years ago. “Fellowship Hall” had been the name we inherited for the other big room. Recently, in the process of doing some renovations, we needed to formalize a name for each room. The sign now reads, “Chapel.”

The word fellowship has fallen on hard times in many churches, like the word encourage — emptied of its power by casual overuse. Trivialized, you might say.

We scrapped fellowship from the name not because the biblical reality of fellowship is waning in importance. Quite the contrary. We want our church to reclaim the electric reality of fellowship in the New Testament and not have the term die the slow death of Christian domestication.

Fellowship Bigger Than Us

Perhaps the word can seem hollow if we have lost the concept of fellowship as a means of grace, with the end of enjoying Jesus.

That we have means of grace in the Christian life implies some end, some goal, some target. In other words, “means” means means to some end. The means are not the end. And if we leave the great end undefined, lesser ends come to replace it. Lesser ends like growth. Nor is godliness or holiness the goal, vital and precious as they are.

“Knowing and enjoying God himself, in the God-man, Jesus Christ, is the goal, the end, of Christian fellowship.”

Rather knowing and enjoying God himself, in the God-man, Jesus Christ, is the goal, the end, of Christian fellowship. The final joy in any truly Christian habit of grace is, as Paul writes, “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). “This is eternal life,” Jesus prayed — and this is the goal of the means of his grace — “that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). And as J.I. Packer writes, “The more strongly one desires an end, the more carefully and diligently one will use the means to it” (Honouring the People of God, 274).

Of those means, God’s word and prayer are often emphasized for their crucial place in the Christian life. Rightly so. But in the age of the individualist modern self, a third vital means — like a forgotten middle child — needs more attention: fellowship.

Something More Than Friendship

Christian fellowship — our holy commonality of sharing in one Savior, through one Spirit, as one body — goes far deeper than games and a potluck. In the New Testament, fellowship is less the Christian Super Bowl party, and more like the players themselves huddled on the field, calling the next play.

Perhaps few of us realized how vital fellowship was as a means of grace until COVID hit. Many languished unexpectedly, and some of our churches still feel the fallout. We tend to underestimate how much our souls are fed, and stay healthy, through the regular rhythms of in-person corporate worship and face-to-face fellowship. Especially in an age of enormous technological advances which keep us in touch with those who are remote, while quietly undermining ties with those most proximate. Our devices have increased our sheer count of “friends,” while stripping our lives of real, flesh-and-blood friendships.

New Testament fellowship is far deeper than common human friendships. Fellowship, at its best, is comprised of deeply committed relationships, that is, covenant allegiance through thick and thin, through pain and inconvenience and awkwardness and annoyance. This has long been a challenge for Americans who, when they rally together, have often done so in defense of individual rights, liberties, and our personal pursuits of happiness.

God Gave Us Each Other

Hebrews’ twin texts on fellowship as a means of grace speaks into the challenges of our generation. As we see in Hebrews 3 and 10, life and health and perseverance in Christian faith is a community project. Our hearts harden, and our faith fails, as we distance ourselves from the fellowship.

“Life and health and perseverance in the Christian life is a community project.”

But when we stubbornly stay connected, and deepen those connections, we not our find our own hearts staying soft, and our faith enduring; we also taste the joy of being Christ’s means of grace to each other. It is marvelous and deeply satisfying to be human instruments of the Spirit’s keeping work in the church. Both passages in Hebrews show us the benefit of receiving grace and giving grace in the covenant fellowship of the local church.

The first of the twins we might see as cast in more negative terms, but both texts work together, with the second being more expressly positive in thrust.

Watch Out for Each Other

In Hebrews 3, the writer quotes from Psalm 95 to spur his readers to Christian perseverance, and then pivots to this immediate application to the church as a whole, not just individuals:

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. (Hebrews 3:12–13)

Look out, watch out, take care of each other — be vigilant over your brother’s soul, not just your own. The church body as a whole is to watch out for some (“any”) whose hearts may be cooling. And the stakes could hardly be any higher. An “unbelieving heart” is not just unfortunate, but evil. It leads to falling away from the living God — that is, from spiritual life to spiritual death. The preventive measure, or the remedy, says Hebrews, is at least twofold.

First is the daily charge to vigilance. Why daily? Well, for one, Psalm 95 says “today.” We are not promised tomorrow. If you recognize hardness of heart in yourself or a brother, address it right away, today. Such watching out for own souls, and others, needs to happen at the daily and weekly level (rather than monthly or yearly). Hearts harden in subtle increments, a day at a time, not all at once. The good news is that it’s preventable, and doesn’t just happen to you without some process. The bad news is that the increments can be difficult to discern, and snowball over time. But regular attentiveness keeps us from a pattern of hardening. Fellowship is a means of God’s grace that interrupts the cooling of our hearts.

The second emphasis is the power of words: “exhort one another.” This word for exhort (Greek parakaleo) appears as “comfort” or “encourage” in other contexts (as in Hebrew 10:25). At its heart is the idea of helping one another with words — with helping words that take various forms in different contexts, whether rebuking a hard heart, comforting a tender conscience, or encouraging a humble faith. This is a call to come alongside a brother or sister in the faith and be a human instrument of the Spirit’s keeping work through our words.

In other words, we might say to the struggling saint, Hear God’s voice in your brother’s voice! And to the whole body, watching out for the some, Be God’s voice in the ear of your brother, to keep his heart from hardening and unbelief — to stay soft and believing.

Provoke Each Other

The other twin, then, Hebrews 10:24–25, expands on the vision, now cast in more positive terms:

Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

Now, as Hebrews 3 has its positive charge to take up helping words, so Hebrews 10 includes the warning against “neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some.” Here again is the some from Hebrews 3 (who were falling away), which the whole body together watches out for, and cares for, through the ministry of words (“encouraging one another”).

Striking in Hebrews 10 is this charge to “consider how to stir one another up” — or literally, “consider one another for the provoking of love and good works.” There’s no “how” in the original. Rather, the object or focus of the saints’ contemplation is “one another.” Consider one another . . . It’s a personal charge, and assumes that saints know each other specifically and with some depth — enough to contemplate what particular words might be pressed into service, not just to inspire humans or Christians in general, but to stir up love and good works in particular struggling saints.

Here helping words are designed by one saint to stir up, or provoke, Christian affection and action in another saint. This is a good provoking, not bad — not to anger but to love; not to evil but to good; not to bitterness but to joy. And being God’s voice to your brother does not mean the mere parroting of Scripture, but knowing your brother, on the one hand, and being informed by Scripture, on the other, to then speak as God’s voice, fallibly and in your own words, what needs to be said, as a means of grace, to your brother, to incite him to love and good deeds.

And it is not insignificant that Hebrews 10:24 mentions the assembly, the gathering (“meet together”). Corporate worship is a singularly important means of grace in the Christian life, combining the three essential elements we’ve noted: word, prayer, and fellowship. All three come together in the gathering. At the weekly level, this is the single most important means of grace in the Christian life.

Today and ‘the Day’

In the Christian life, every day matters. And every Sunday matters, with its rhythms of fellowship. Keeping ourselves, and others, in the faith does not call for herculean efforts, but regular upkeep. Routine vigilance, watching out for the souls of others, leads to losing less of the some, and to “all the more” grace as we anticipate the Day of Christ’s return drawing near.

Fellowship as an irreplaceable means of grace in the Christian life offers us two priceless joys: receiving God’s grace through the helping words of others and giving his grace to others through our own. Jesus does not call us to “hold fast” alone, as if we didn’t need the fellows he gives. But we help each other hold fast and thrive.

Whether fellowship is the namesake of a room at our church or not, we will do well to reclaim this reality as a vital means of God’s ongoing grace, and perhaps all the more after the trials of recent years.