http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15177550/can-slaves-of-christ-have-another-master

Calloused knees. Prayer closet. Answered prayers. Prayer warrior.

These four phrases don’t exactly trigger me with spiritual PTSD, but they do represent markers in my journey of moving from prayer-guilt into the grace of praying. For many years, I felt more like a D-student in the school of prayer than a beloved son in the presence of God. I was afraid to not pray, but I had very little delight in actually praying.

As a young believer in the late sixties, the joy of my new life in Christ was palpable and plenteous. But pretty soon, I started to feel the pressure of a new burden to “get it right.” I had consistent quiet times, underlined verses in my Bible (in three different colors), and engaged in Scripture memory. I fellowshipped, witnessed, and prayed. Unfortunately, these crucial spiritual disciplines functioned more as a means of guilt (or pride) than as a means of grace. Many of God’s good gifts are misused and disused until they become rightly used. This is certainly true of prayer.

A part of the problem — no, the biggest issue — was that I began the Christian life with a limited understanding of what happened when God gave me faith to trust Jesus and hid my life in his Son. I was certain of going to heaven when I died, but I knew little of what God thought about me while I lived.

United Forever with Christ

In Christ, all riches were already deposited into my account, but I was clueless about them. I knew Jesus died for my sins and that I was fully forgiven. But only years later did I come to understand my union with Christ, the imputation of his righteousness, and my adoption into God’s family — to name a few of the glorious benefits of our life in Christ.

I don’t blame anyone for not teaching me about union with Christ. I’m just eternally grateful I finally learned about it, came to rest in it, and now live out of its glorious implications. It wasn’t a game changer, but an everything changer — not a new day, but a new forever.

“The effort I now invest in praying has become a delight, not a burden.”

Our union with Christ is the foundation and fountain for knowing God, and the spiritual disciplines — including prayer (when shaped and fueled by the gospel) — are the means by which we deepen our knowledge of God and learn to “glorify and enjoy him forever.” Though the gospel has freed us from all earning, it certainly doesn’t free us from all effort. But the effort I now invest in praying has become a delight, not a burden.

Moving on from guilt and fear, I now focus on three callings that have radically transformed how I engage in prayer.

Fellowship with Your Father

“Fellowship with your Father” is exactly how my spiritual father, Jack Miller, reframed prayer for me, keying off of Jesus’s glorious invitation to say, “Our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). How many times did I hear (and need to hear) Jack say, “Scotty, our Father wants to spend time with you more than you are even confident and comfortable in his presence. He loves you. You’ll never shock him, and he’ll never shame you. He knows your need is greater than you realize, and his provision for you in Jesus is exponentially more than you have yet grasped.”

Indeed, the gospel frees us from thinking of prayer as a way to get God’s attention — an effort to convince him of something we need or something we want him to do. Prayer is God’s nonstop welcome to us — a grace-subpoena into his presence (Hebrews 4:16).

“The gospel frees us from thinking of prayer as a way to get God’s attention.”

Our Father is always initiating and resourcing our communion with himself. As we spend both quality and quantity time with him, all the incomplete and wrong notions we’ve had about him get exposed and expelled. He also re-parents us through unrushed time in his presence. Abba is the Father we always wanted, and he alone can be to us what no human father could ever be.

The better we know God as our Father, we more we begin to embrace how big and good his prayer-answer vocabulary actually is. Answered prayer is no longer equated with a yes to our petitions. We begin to rest in our Father’s multiple wise answers, like no, not yet, and yes, but not exactly as you are asking. The burden is off our shoulders. We can ask with abandon and trust with even greater abandon. Our Father is always doing all things well, even when he doesn’t do all things easy. Our Father’s no is sweeter than any yes we can imagine — or demand. We start giving more yeses to him rather than “needing” yeses from him.

Jack also made it abundantly clear to me, “The more you fellowship with your Father, the more you will rejoice in his plan for the nations and live as his partner in world evangelism.” Jack could not think of prayer, the gospel, and our Father without seeing and rejoicing in the day when God’s every-nation family will stream into the New Jerusalem.

Behold Jesus’s Glory

The apostle Paul’s words are as riveting as they are compelling: “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Many centuries earlier, King David expressed a similar heart orientation and single passion — even making it his number-one prayer request: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4).

Prayer as contemplation of Jesus’s glory reorients us away from prayer as consternation about getting results. Adoration of Jesus must not be relegated to the first letter of ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. Adoration is the meaning and essence of each and every other aspect of life. Indeed, fixing our gaze on Jesus isn’t a warm-up exercise to prayer; it is prayer.

As we marinate in the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus, we are changed — we become more like Jesus, which is the goal of our salvation (Romans 8:28–30; 1 John 3:1–3). Our hope is fueled, because we discover more fully what the Scriptures mean when they declare Jesus to be the emphatic Yes! to every promise God has made (2 Corinthians 1:20). Our praying becomes less about claiming God’s promises and more about seeing how God’s promises claim us — and all of history. We think less about becoming prayer warriors, and we rest in Jesus as the prayer-warrior extraordinaire — ever living to make intercession for us and in us by the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 7:25; Romans 8:26).

Adoring Jesus also deepens our intimacy with him and intensifies our longing to be with him in eternity — the better-by-far-ness Paul writes about in Philippians 1:23. It also fuels our courage to go with Jesus into a life of missional living and loving. We cease thinking of doing anything merely for Jesus; rather, we begin to live as those who do everything with Jesus. Only Jesus can, and is, making all things new. Prayer frees us to find our place in his story, now that we’re already in his heart.

Listen to the Spirit’s Testimony

Lastly, thinking of prayer as listening to the Holy Spirit’s testimony helps us include in our prayer times not only talking but hearing. In Romans 8, Paul highlights just how vital this aspect of our fellowship with God actually is: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs” (Romans 8:16–17). The Spirit is always preaching the gospel to us — nonstop, 24/7. As we linger over God’s word, do we take time to listen?

In fact, it is by the Spirit’s voice we most clearly hear God singing over us with great rejoicing (Zephaniah 3:17). How is this so? Because the Spirit is always making much of Jesus and is constantly applying his finished work to our hearts. As we experience the wonder of God’s great delight in us, we move more fully into the true blessedness of the convicting voice of the Spirit, the voice that is now and forever void of any condemnation (Romans 8:1). Confession and repentance become a way of life and a liberating joy.

Unfortunately, too much of the time we allow other noises and voices to drown out the Spirit’s voice. We tune the frequency of our hearts to our fears, disappointments, and anger. We indulge the whispers, shouts, and lies of the devil. We let the siren songs of our world and our lusts mute the peace-giving, joy-fueling, hope-enlarging testimony of the Spirit. We pay to hear an out-of-tune kazoo band, while the triune God has graciously made us members of his every-nation orchestra that gets to play and enjoy the grand symphony of the gospel.

Let’s get still and know that our God is God (Psalm 46:10). He does all that he pleases, all the time and everywhere (Psalm 115:3). Hallelujah, it has pleased him to make us his beloved daughters and sons through the work of Jesus.

Audio Transcript

Happy Fourth of July to those of you in the United States. This holiday is a big one here, of course, and one that reminds me of many episodes on this podcast, Pastor John, where you have delved into the church-state separation controversy, political activism, Christian patriotism, US flags in the sanctuary, things like that — all sorts of topics we’ve covered in this realm. I attempted to digest all those episodes into one summary you can find (hopefully it’s handy for you) in the APJ book on pages 47–56.

Citizenship in a country like America is a wonderful grace, a common grace. On a day like this one, I am reminded of the apostle Paul and his Roman citizenship, which afforded him certain privileges and protections, and we see those come up all over Acts (Acts 16:35–40; 22:22–29; 23:26–27; 25:13–27; etc.). Paul’s passport is always showing up in Acts because his nationhood was useful. It was a common grace he returned to and claimed. We too have a ton of privileges, Pastor John, and protections in being American citizens. We cannot take them for granted. And so, on a day like today, it is good to celebrate them. So, Pastor John, what are your thoughts today as you ponder this common grace of citizenship, and how we got it?

I have little doubt that the lavish blessings of common grace that we enjoy in America are rooted in the pervasive cultural transformation that came from centuries of Christian influences in Europe and America. I don’t doubt that. And just by way of thanksgiving on this special day (and we should be thankful), the kind of common grace I have in mind are things like this — and the list is short and could be many times longer.

America’s Uncommon Gifts

I have in mind a stable government, whose processes so far have freed us from anarchy and mob rule, which are so destructive. You can just look at certain countries in the world today and imagine how horrible it could be.

I have in mind the freedoms we still enjoy to gather for worship and for all kinds of discussions that may or may not support the present persons and policies in power, without fear of the gestapo breaking in.

I have in mind the moral and legal forces that still hold sway that make people trust contracts when they sign them (and banking and currency) without fear of pervasive bribery or graft undermining the entire working of business and industry and personal finance — as is the case in so many countries that can’t do anything because everything breaks; it doesn’t work because of graft and corruption.

I have in mind reliable infrastructures that we simply take for granted. Electricity for virtually every home and apartment, with heat and air conditioning and refrigeration, and countless appliances that work at the flip of a switch. Indoor plumbing — imagine! Indoor plumbing! (And in Minnesota, that’s really good.) And invisible sewers that keep our streets from stench. (They were working outside my house some time ago, and they did this amazing relining of the sewer pipes without even digging them up — just incredible technology.) Hot and cold running water at the twist of a handle, and you can even drink it. You can drink it. Food supplies that almost magically show up every day on the shelves of thousands of stores because of countless processes of production and delivery. Roads and highways and trains and trams and buses and cars and air travel that, by the way, is astonishingly safe and reliable. An Internet that puts the world of information and commerce at our fingertips for almost everyone.

And Tony, I deleted a whole bunch, just to make this shorter. On and on we could go, and all this is true. Yes, though there are criminals at every level of society, from street drug dealers to white-collar fraud, the fact remains, for now, owing to the common grace of God in this land, in America, for the most part, things work amazingly.

I have an immigrant friend that I meet with almost every week to practice his English and to study Scripture, and we talk about his country of origin, where virtually nothing works. There’s no reliable infrastructure or economic system. The poor are kept poor because there’s no stable way for them to work themselves out of poverty in a system that is shot through with bribery and corruption and instability. A tiny layer of people at the top are rich enough to have multiple mansions all over the world, and they simply steal the country’s resources, with no effort to provide structures that enable people to make a living. And we both know, he and I, we know that will never change as long as the human heart of selfishness and greed dominates the culture.

Maintaining Perspective and Priority

So, what do I conclude from lavish blessings in America, rooted in a history of morality-shaping Christianity, and from hopeless brokenness in societies rooted in selfishness and greed and corruption? And lest anybody think I’m naive, of course I’m aware that there is ample selfishness and greed at every level of American society. But that’s not why America works. To the degree that those forces gain ground, to that degree will things simply break down, collapse, stop working. That may be where we’re going. I don’t know. So, what do I conclude from all this?

Not a Tool for Nation Building

Let me say again what I don’t conclude. I don’t conclude that we should think of the Christian gospel as the pathway to nation building or nation preservation. I don’t conclude that the church should define its priorities of ministry as nation building or culture transformation. Why not, since that is often the effect that they have? Two reasons.

“We’re not promised, in this age, the survival of any nation or culture.”

First, in the New Testament, the gospel was given to save sinners from the wrath of God, not from the collapse of the Jewish state or the Roman Empire. Jesus Christ came into the world to solve the biggest problem that exists in the world for everybody on the planet — namely, we will all perish eternally under the wrath of God if we are not saved by Jesus Christ, who reconciled us to God by his death in our place.

This is the most important news we have. No other religion has it. Jesus Christ — crucified, risen, and trusted — is the only hope for every person on the planet to be saved from eternal suffering. That’s the primary reason Jesus came into the world, and the message of the New Testament focuses on it. That’s the great problem of humanity. That’s the great glory of Jesus Christ. If we think of the Christian gospel in another way, and we promote the Christian gospel as a political tool for preserving a nation or transforming a culture, we will move away from the heart of the best news in the world, and the power of the cross will be lost.

The second reason that we don’t prioritize the gospel as nation building and culture transformation is that in that very process of prioritization of the wrong thing, we would undermine the very force of the gospel to transform cultures and build nations.

In the New Testament, the process of becoming godly, righteous, humble, courageous, loving people who are radically different from fallen human nature and from corrupt cultures — that process is profoundly personal and is a deeply spiritual warfare against Satan and against indwelling sin. Where the gospel takes a detour away from the prioritization of justification by faith and sanctification by the deeply personal process of spiritual warfare, the Christian church will reflect culture, not change it.

Faithful and Forward-Looking

So, what do I conclude? What can I say positively? With all our might, let us take the Christian gospel to all the unreached peoples of the world, and let us present the gospel in the most compelling way we can to the people around us, and let us seek to be so radically changed by the gospel that our lives are full of good deeds, which bring glory to our Father in heaven by showing that our treasure is not on this earth. These good deeds may or may not preserve a nation and build a culture.

We’re not promised, in this age, the survival of any nation or culture. C.S. Lewis said, “Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat” (The Weight of Glory, 46). What we are promised is meaningful lives of love in this world and eternal joy in the next — and that Jesus Christ, when he comes (and he is coming, personally, on the clouds), will create a new nation, a new culture, a new world that lasts forever. And so we pray, “Keep us faithful, and come, Lord Jesus.”