The Ruling Elder & the Ministry of Prayer
When I was first saved, I loved talking to God and seeing Him work. I still do. Yet, I now see that there is a lot to be gained from a little structure, like actually having a regular quiet time where I pray the Bible.
I was almost 30 and had been in the Marine Corps for about a decade when God abruptly entered my life in a Damascus Road type of experience. The spiritual change was immediate, but my ignorance of spiritual things was entrenched. I knew nothing about God except that He was real, He was personal, and that I was His. These basic realizations made prayer the most natural thing in the world for me.
From the point of my conversion forward, I wanted to do everything in my life by reference to God, and so I needed to be constantly talking to Him. I was naïve and overwhelmed, but I had not yet thought that I could pray wrongly. It was clear to me that God was God and I was not; therefore, I had no problem with deferring to Him, no real desire to get my own way, and no inclination to ask merely for the benefits package. However, as I learned more and became increasingly exposed to private and public prayer, I realized that my way of doing it had some deficiencies.
How did this realization hit? First, I read about true prayer in the Bible. Second, I observed or experienced some issues with prayer, particularly with Session and in corporate prayer gatherings. Third, I recognized that the biblical condemnations of praying wrongly might apply in different ways to committed Christians.
Below are some of the errors in prayer that I have witnessed or fallen into over the course of Christian life. My hope is that this brief list highlights some things all of us – and especially us ruling elders – need to be careful about while trying to serve the church.
Hypocrisy
The first of these “prerrors” (if I can coin the term) is hypocrisy. In Matthew 6:5, Christ warns us not to pray like the hypocrites, who are people who like to be seen publicly as holy and righteous. Because they are looking for public approval, they do not gain God’s approval. I do not think I have seen an awful lot of hypocritical grand-standing in PCA churches, but I have experienced a different problem with hypocrisy as an elder. The problem on my mind is that the awareness of my own tendency toward hypocrisy can paralyze me.
My sin makes me want not to pray, especially publicly, because I am aware of the all-too-present danger of hypocrisy. I know intellectually that this paralysis can only happen if I am listening to the enemy and not to God, so I have found a couple of practices that help with addressing this. I have to first constantly remind myself that when the paralysis strikes, it is because I am adopting a works-oriented view of myself. Of course I am not good enough on my own to earn God’s approval. Christ alone is perfectly righteous, but I enjoy that perfect righteousness of Christ as my own through faith in Him. To allow remaining sin to cripple me in my walk and duties is concomitant to denying that my name is written on His hand. Then I think about 1 John 1:9, which says that “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Reminding myself that I am judged by Jesus’ performance and not my own, and confessing my sins without reservation, have helped me deal with my feeling of hypocrisy and to pray publicly without this paralyzing self-focus.
Vanity
The second prerror is vain repetition. God denounces this in Matthew 6:7, where Christ cautions His disciples against imitating the babbling of Gentiles and pagans, who say meaningless words and have meaningless practices. By contrast, the Christian is here called to pray with faith and trust, enjoying a freedom of expression like that which exists between a child and a loving father who already knows that child’s needs.
-
Growing in Grace
You have grown in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You are not the man or woman you once were. You are more mature than once you were—more like Christ, more in tune with your heavenly Father, more manifestly a child of His care. Your delight in righteousness has developed. Your sensitivity to sin has increased. Your wish to please God is fuller and more finely developed. It’s not just growing up. That cannot account for it all. It is growing up in all things into Him who is the Head, Jesus Christ.
When someone is converted, there is an immediate and radical change. From the inner man outward, everything changes. For some people, perhaps converted from a more openly wicked life, that shift has effects that are obvious to others. Like the Gadarene demoniac, the sinner is now found clothed and in his right mind, and everyone can tell the difference. For others, although the inward shift is equally radical and equally absolute, the outward evidence is not so marked. Perhaps they had lived a more moral life or were brought up under the healthy restraint of a gospel home.
But either way, conversion is only the beginning. From that point on, the believer—typically within the fellowship of a faithful church and under the care of godly undershepherds—should be growing “in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).
After those first striking moments in which, now that the believer is joined to Christ, there is a breach with sin, a process of maturation goes on. By degrees, sometimes faster and sometimes slower, the believer is conformed to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29). Paul labored in birth for his “little children” in Galatia until Christ was formed in them (Gal. 4:19). God’s obedient children are not to conform themselves to their former lusts, as they did in their ignorance, “but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Peter 1:14–16).
Have you known that reality of growing in grace? Do you experience it now? What might it look like and feel like? Perhaps you remember a friend you used to know, and you get a chance to meet up again. You get together, and after a few minutes you feel a disconnect—you are speaking past each other. You are referring to the same events but no longer looking with the same eyes. The old jokes aren’t so funny, the old memories are not quite shared any longer, the old perspectives don’t sit with you as they once did. It’s not that you don’t have any affection for your old friend, but you have moved on. There’s less common ground, and there is a marked bump in the road when you speak to your friend about your Savior.Read More
Related Posts: -
4 Ways to Respond When Christians Hurt You
In the house of God, Christians must learn to remember the identity of their brothers and sisters, humbly pray for their brothers and sisters, lovingly cover the sin of their brothers and sisters, and privately confront their brothers and sisters. As we do, we will see God’s grace healing and sustaining our relationships in ways that the world will never experience.
As the culture war rages on, there is another battle raging to which we must turn our attention. When I was a boy, my dad would sometimes tell me, “No one will hurt you so much as others in the church.” In my lifetime, this has generally proven to be true. Believers sometimes experience the greatest hurt in their relationships with other professing believers in the church at large.
When a professing believer hurts our feelings or reputation, how should we respond? Should we, in turn, demean that individual by telling others (whether privately or publicly), “I can’t stand him,” or “she’s such a mess” or “I’m not even sure that he or she is a Christian.” To our shame, most of us are guilty of having responded in such sinful ways. When someone hurts us, the instinct of our flesh is to hurt them back.
Thankfully, God does not leave us to our fleshly instincts to learn how to respond. Instead, He instructs us in very specific ways about how we should respond when someone does us harm. By virtue of our union with Christ—in His death and resurrection—we can learn to put the following into practice:
1. Remember the spiritual identity of the offending brother or sister.
The Scriptures differentiate between the children of God and unbelievers. Everyone who is united to Christ by faith has been adopted into God’s family. None of us deserves to be adopted into God’s family. It is the height of the spiritual blessings that God has conferred on us by grace. When we sin against others in the body, or when they sin against us, we are sinning against one of God’s beloved sons or daughters.
We are to view all professing believers as our brothers and sisters in Christ—as members of “the whole family in heaven and earth” (Eph. 3:14). Our actions are to accord with what we believe about the doctrine of adoption. If we are brothers and sisters in Christ, then we should “be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love” (Rom. 12:10), and we ought never “speak evil of one another” (James 4:11). If we viewed each other according to the doctrine of adoption, it would radically change the way that we respond when a brother or sister hurts us.
Read More
Related Posts: -
There Are Different Kinds of Tired
A day spent purposefully, a day spent in bringing glory to God by doing good to others—this is a day that will bring pleasure, even as it brings fatigue, this is a day that will bring joy, even as it brings weariness. This is a day you can close by sleeping the sleep of the just, a day you can close with God’s promise fixed in your heart.
There are different kinds of tired. There are different kinds of weary. There are different kinds of fatigue that may overwhelm the body and overcome the mind as the sun sets, as the skies grow dark, as day gives way to evening and evening gives way to night. There are different kinds of fatigue because there are different ways you may spend a day.
You may spend a day in idleness, in procrastinating your tasks, in ignoring your responsibilities. You may spend a day in indolent selfishness, in giving yourself over to laziness, slothfulness, shiftlessness. You may come to the end of a day having accomplished nothing meaningful because you have attempted nothing meaningful, having performed nothing significant because you set out to undertake nothing significant.
At the close of such a day your mind will be cloudy, your eyes drowsy, your body heavy. But your heart will be uneasy and your conscience will be troubled, for you will have squandered a day.
Read More
Related Posts:
