Begin where you are. This simple sentence, tucked away in C.S. Lewis’s book Letters to Malcolm, has the potential to transform your prayer life. In four basic words, it ties together a biblical vision of prayer that avoids two errors that often smother our thanksgiving and adoration of God and hinder our requests to him, especially in relation to earthly blessings and goods. Consider these errors, and whether you recognize them in your own life.

The first I’ll call worldly prayers. Such prayers, though offered by a Christian, are in reality no different from those that an unbeliever might pray. Twice in Matthew 6, Jesus draws a contrast between the prayers and aims of the Gentiles and the prayers and aims of his followers.

When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matthew 6:7–8)

Do not be anxious, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. (Matthew 6:31–32)

Jesus criticizes both the manner of unbelieving prayers (empty phrases and many words) and the aims of unbelieving prayers (anxiously seeking earthly provision and material goods). Christ’s warning implies that his followers can wrongfully imitate unbelievers at precisely these points. We can seek material blessings as our highest goods, anxiously craving and desiring them. And then, we can attempt to manipulate God into providing us these blessings, treating him like a butler who exists solely to supply our earthly needs and preserve our earthly happiness.

False Spirituality

In reaction against the danger of worldly prayers, some Christians fall into a second error, which we can call false spirituality: a pious refusal to pray for earthly goods at all. Because we see the danger of worldly prayer around us, we begin to regard praise and communion with God as the only true forms of prayer.

The only blessings we thank him for are spiritual blessings, the kind set forth in Ephesians 1. Thus, we praise him that he chose us, predestined us for adoption, redeemed us by Christ’s blood, forgave us for our trespasses, and sealed us with his Holy Spirit, all to the praise of his glorious grace. Likewise, the only requests we make to him are for spiritual goods — for holiness, for help to walk in his ways, for filling with the Holy Spirit.

Clearly, such prayers are good prayers. The falseness comes from the word only. We may not use this word directly, but we may still subtly begin to operate according to it. The only requests that truly please God are those for spiritual things. The only thanksgiving that truly honors him is gratitude for spiritual blessings.

This attitude ignores the plain and simple fact that Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). What’s more, it ignores the litany of passages in the Psalms where the psalmists seek God for deliverance from earthly enemies, ask him to supply earthly needs, and render him thanks for earthly kindnesses. The Bible is filled to the brim with thanksgiving and supplication for earthly provision and blessing.

And so, to avoid both errors, we offer spiritual prayers for earthly goods. And “begin where you are” can help.

From Pleasure to Thanks

Lewis commends this principle as a way of fostering worship and adoration. We often find that spiritual blessings, being invisible, feel abstract to us. However much we may want to summon a heart of worship for God’s attributes, character, and saving acts, our hearts struggle to get off the ground. Lewis’s principle encourages us to begin with the concrete and the present.

The earthly blessings that surround us, however minor, are present to us in ways that help us to begin. A warm shower, shoes that fit, a satisfying breakfast of biscuits and gravy, indoor heating in the middle of winter, the laughter of your children, a hug from your spouse — all of these are concrete blessings, extended to you with kindness from God. “His mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9).

“Direct your attention to the mercies that press upon you at every side, and see them for what they are.”

Thus, Lewis says, rather than try to conjure up feelings of adoration directly, direct your attention to the mercies that press upon you at every side, and see them for what they are. They are beams of glory, striking our senses, giving us pleasure, and inviting us to chase them back to the sun. Every pleasure, Lewis says, can become a channel of adoration when we experience the pleasure and then frame it rightly as a message of kindness from our generous Lord.

Lewis, therefore, encourages us to attend to our pleasures and then to give thanks for them — to say, “How good of God to give me this,” elaborating on this with all the concrete specificity we can muster. “Thank you, Lord, for the smoothness of the table, the softness of my socks, the sweetness of the honey, the silliness of my son, and the wisdom and compassion of my wife.”

From Thanks to Adoration

Then, having given thanks, we follow the sunbeam back to the source, turning thanksgiving into adoration. “Such earthly blessings, O Lord, are simply the far-off echoes of your own bounty and goodness. These are but the fringes of your ways, and at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

From our first breath in the morning to our last conscious thought as we rest our head on our pillow, Lewis encourages us to receive God’s earthly kindness, to give thanks for God’s earthly kindness, and then to leap from that gratitude to the heights of worship, weaving in the spiritual blessings of redemption, forgiveness, and sanctification all along the way.

“The higher does not stand without the lower,” Lewis reminds us (87). And that’s why we must begin where we are.

One must learn to walk before one can run. So here. We — or at least I — shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best, our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have found Him so, not have “tasted and seen.” Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are “patches of Godlight” in the woods of our experience. (91)

Daily Bread, Heavenly Bread

The same principle applies to our requests. Though the Gentiles seek for earthly goods (food, shelter, clothing), Jesus does not tell us to cease praying for such gifts. Instead, he exhorts us to “seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33), and then to pray for our daily bread.

We see this in the Lord’s Prayer itself. The request for daily bread is sandwiched between “Hallowed be your name” and “Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.” In other words, our requests for earthly provision are framed and animated by our desire for the sanctifying of God’s name and the coming of his kingdom.

Framing the prayer for earthly provision in this way enables us to avoid the foolishness of unbelieving manipulation that Jesus condemns. How many of us have earnestly desired some earthly good, but instead of asking God directly for it, have asked instead for some spiritual good in hopes that he’ll see our spiritual request and throw in the earthly good for good measure? Is this not the equivalent of piling up empty phrases and many words in order to trick God into giving us what we really want? Is there not a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of such pious prayers?

Instead, begin where you are — with the desires and needs and anxieties that you actually have. The daily needs are real, and we are taught to ask for them directly. Bring them before God honestly, with no pretense or fakery. No doubt, our earthly desires are often excessive or misplaced. But the best way to reorder them is to bring them to God and let him do the moderating and refining.

“Prayers for daily bread lead naturally (or supernaturally) to prayers for heavenly bread, for the bread of life.”

In this way, we can begin where we are, but unlike unbelievers, we can press beyond where we are. We don’t seek merely the earthly provision; we seek God’s kingdom first, above all, as our highest good. Thus, as with gratitude, we ask for the earthly good, and then we press through the desire for the earthly good to a deeper desire for the heavenly good. Prayers for daily bread lead naturally (or supernaturally) to prayers for heavenly bread, for the bread of life.

Your Heavenly Father

Finally, don’t miss what ties all of these prayers together — the goodness of our heavenly Father. Why don’t we pile up empty and manipulative words for what we need? Because our heavenly Father knows what we need before we ask (Matthew 6:8). Why don’t we anxiously pursue earthly goods? Because our heavenly Father knows that we need them all (Matthew 6:32).

And this presses home the goodness of beginning where we are and asking for daily bread. Just the other day, I was burdened by an earthly problem. I could see no earthly way out of it. And so, I bowed my head and asked God for help. “I don’t know what to do, Lord. You will have to do something. Make a way.” Thirty minutes later, the answer came, clear as a bell.

Had I not prayed for the provision, I might have missed out not only on the blessing (since God does truly answer prayer) but also on the kindness and care of “our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). When I begin where I am, I pray to him who knows my needs before I ask, and who tells me to ask anyway, because he loves to give good gifts to his children (Matthew 7:11).

Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning out there to everyone listening. Thanks for listening to the podcast. We start the week with a question from an anonymous listener, who writes in to ask this: “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for APJ! My question is this: Can you tell me if Paul says in Colossians 2:12 that faith causes regeneration? Or is it the other way around? Does regeneration cause faith? I can’t make sense of this text, but it seems to answer this question. I’d love your help. Thank you!”

Well, Colossians 2:12 is a very precious verse for me personally, not because it describes how I was raised from spiritual death to life in Christ, but because it became a crucial text for me at a moment in my life, in Germany, fifty years ago this year. In a time of controversy over baptism, this verse, Colossians 2:12, shed light for me on the question. Would I be a Baptist and continue to believe that only believers should be baptized, or would I shift and embrace infant baptism?

Colossians 2:11–12 says,

In [Christ] you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith [underline that phrase] in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.

So, baptism represents death with Christ in burial and new life in Christ through resurrection as we come up out of the water. Verse 12 says this resurrection with Christ in baptism happens “through faith.” That little phrase, “through faith,” is one of the decisive reasons why I remained a Baptist — though I was the only Baptist in the class among Lutherans in Germany — and why I do not think the New Testament teaches the baptism of infants who do not yet exercise faith.

What Comes First?

But the person asking this question is wondering whether Colossians 2:12 teaches that this faith causes regeneration — that is, causes the new birth. The answer to that is no, it doesn’t teach that, and it doesn’t teach the opposite — namely, that the new birth causes faith.

That question is simply not addressed in this verse — not as far as I can see, anyway. You have “been buried with [Christ] in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God.” It’s not addressed. It’s like saying, “I was buried after a cave-in in the mine, and I got out through a tunnel.” But that statement “through a tunnel” doesn’t tell you who built the tunnel. Did I dig it, or did someone dig it for me? None of that is addressed in this verse.

But I assume the person asking this question wants to know more than just “Nope, the verse doesn’t have anything to do with that. See you later.” That’s probably not why this person wrote to us. They’re interested, I assume, in the doctrine — that is, the teaching, the reality, not just the verse. Namely, does faith bring about regeneration, or does regeneration by the Holy Spirit bring about faith?

Born Again to Belief

Now, here’s my answer: I don’t think there is a single verse, a single passage, in the Bible that teaches that faith causes or brings about regeneration, or the new birth. But I think there are many texts that teach that the new birth precedes and brings about faith — in other words, texts that teach the new birth, or regeneration, is the gracious, free, sovereign work of God prior to our new life in Christ, which creates that life and brings about faith.

“The new birth, or regeneration, is the gracious, free, sovereign work of God.”

So let me give some passages that teach this and then say why I think it’s so important. First John 5:1 says, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.” Not “everyone who believes will be born of God,” but “everyone who is now believing has already been born of God.” It’s the new birth by God that brings about the believing.

Or John 1:12 says, “To all who did receive [Christ], who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God.” Then he explains what he just said, how that believing came about, in the next verse, verse 13: “. . . who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” In other words, the new birth, which he wants to underline several ways, did not come about from the powers of the flesh, nor from human willing. It came about from God. We didn’t will ourselves alive. God, not man, brings about the new birth, which provides the spiritual life that believes.

Or Acts 13:48, when the Gentiles heard Paul’s gospel, “they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord.” It says, “As many as were appointed to eternal life believed,” not the other way around — not “as many as believed were then appointed to eternal life.” But as many as God had already appointed for eternal life, those are the ones who believed, because God grants his elect the gift of faith.

Or Ephesians 2:8–9 says, “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

If we had time, we could look at Philippians 1:29. I’m going to list these so that people can just stop the recording right here and look them all up, because I said there were many:

Philippians 1:29
2 Corinthians 4:4–6
John 3:7–8
John 6:44, 65
2 Timothy 2:25
1 Corinthians 1:23–24

Why the Order Matters

But I think I will let folks do their own work on that — track those down, decide if they agree — and close by giving some reasons, maybe three, why this is so important. Because some people might say, “Good grief. What difference does it make — believe and have life, either way, first or second?” Well, here’s why it matters.

1. Realistic About Sin

First, it makes us realistic and so reminded about the power of sin, if we believe that we must be raised from the dead before we can believe. If we think that we can provide the decisive power in the moment of our conversion — to pass out of spiritual death that cannot please God, into spiritual life that sees and treasures Christ in faith — we simply do not yet have a right view of the power and depth and horror of our own sinful depravity.

“Left to ourselves, apart from sovereign grace, we will be dead and blind forever.”

Paul says in Romans 8:7–8, “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” In other words, the fallen condition of every human is the frightening, desperate moral inability to change his own nature. Left to ourselves, apart from sovereign grace decisively changing us so that we treasure the glory of Christ, we will be dead and blind forever.

We do no one any service by treating the condition of the fallen human heart in a way that’s not true by implying people can create their own faith when they are dead in their trespasses and sins.

2. Alive to Grace

Here’s the second reason this really matters. Unless we realize that God takes the initiative and provides the decisive power for us to wake from the dead and see Christ as true and glorious, we will never sing amazing grace with the kind of understanding and affection that we ought to. We’ll never know the greatness and the sweetness of the grace of God unless we know that new birth was his totally sovereign, undeserved gift when we were dead. We just won’t know what it means to be saved.

3. Hopeful in Prayer and Witness

Here’s the third and the last one I’ll mention. Really, it’s two, but I’m combining them into one. If you know that the new birth is the sovereign work of God, a gift of grace, you will have both hope in your praying and hope in your personal witnessing (so prayer and evangelism).

You will have hope to pray as you ought and witness to lost people as you ought. You will realize that you cannot cause anyone to believe who is dead in their trespasses and sins and who’s blind to the glory of Christ. But if you believe that God has ordained prayer and witnessing as the means of his own sovereign act in raising people from the dead, then you will be able to pray and to share the gospel with hope and with earnestness.

So no, Colossians 2:12 does not teach this, nor does it contradict this. But many other passages of Scripture do teach the glorious truth that God is the one who regenerated dead sinners and who gave us faith.

Of the multitude of feasts celebrated in the popular culture of medieval Europe — wherein lie some of the key roots of the modern West — only two remain in popular North American culture today: Saint Patrick’s Day (March 17) and Saint Valentine’s Day (February 14). With Saint Patrick, we have two important texts by Patrick himself that reveal the true man. But who was Saint Valentine?

The name was a popular one in the Roman world, for the adjective valens expressed the idea of being vigorous and robust. In fact, we know of about a dozen early Christians who bore this name. Our Saint Valentine was an Italian bishop who was martyred on February 14, 269, after a trial before the Roman emperor Claudius Gothicus (reign 268–270). According to the meager accounts that we have, Valentine’s body was hastily buried, but a few nights later some of his associates retrieved it and returned it to his home town of Terni in central Italy. Other accounts list him as an elder in Rome. One embellishment has him writing a letter before his death and signing it, “your Valentine.”

“Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life.”

What seems clear, though, from all that we can determine, is that Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life for his commitment to Christ. For Christians to adequately remember Saint Valentine, then, we would do well to consider what it meant to be a martyr in the early church.

Witnesses and Martyrs

Our word martyr is derived from the Greek martys, originally a juridical term that was used of a witness in a court of law. Such a person was one “who has direct knowledge or experience of certain persons, events or circumstances and is therefore in a position to speak out and does so.”1 In the New Testament, the term and its cognates are frequently applied to Christians, who bear witness to Christ, often in real courts of law, when his claims are disputed and their fidelity is tested by persecution.

The transition of this word within the early Christian communities from witness to what the English term martyr” entails serves as an excellent gauge of what was happening to Christians as they bore witness to Christ. In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the apostles that they are to be his “witnesses” (martyres) in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth. At this point, the word does not have the association of death, although in Acts 22:20 we do read of the “blood of Stephen,” the Lord’s “witness” (Greek martyros), being shed. But it is really not until the end of the writing of the New Testament canon that the term martys acquires the association with death.2

At the very close of the apostolic era, the risen Christ in Revelation 2 commends his servant Antipas, his “faithful witness,” who was slain for his faith at Pergamum, “where Satan dwells” (Revelation 2:12–13). Pergamum, it should be noted, was a key center of emperor worship in Asia Minor, and the first town in that area to build a temple to a Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. It may well have been Antipas’s refusal to confess Caesar as Lord and worship him that led to his martyrdom.3 It has been estimated that by the mid-first century, eighty or so cities in Asia Minor had erected temples devoted to the cult of the emperor.4

The word martys seems thus to have acquired its future meaning first in the Christian communities in Asia Minor, where the violent encounter between church and empire was particularly intense.5 In this regard, it was certainly not fortuitous that Asia Minor was “unusually fond” of the violent entertainment of the gladiatorial shows. There was, in fact, a training school for gladiators at Pergamum. Along with fascination with such violence, there would have been a demand for victims over and above the requisite gladiators. Thus, recourse was had to Christians, among others.6

And so, the word martys became restricted in its usage to a single signification: bearing witness to the person and work of Christ to the point of death. Stephen and Antipas were the first of many such martyrs in the Roman Empire.

Neronian Persecution

One of the most memorable clashes between church and empire was what has come to be called the Neronian persecution. In mid-July 64, a fire began in the heart of Rome that raged out of control for nearly a week and gutted most of the city. After it had been extinguished, it was rumored that the emperor Nero (reign 54–68) himself had started it, for it was common knowledge that Nero wanted to level the capital of the empire in order to rebuild the city in a style in keeping with his conception of his own greatness. Conscious that he had to allay suspicions against him, Nero fixed the blame on the Christians.

The fullest description that we have of this violence against the church is from the Roman historian Tacitus (about 55–117), who describes the execution of these Christians as follows:

To scotch the rumour [that he had started the fire], Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor; and the pernicious superstition was checked for a short time, only to break out afresh, not only in Judaea, the home of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home.

First of all, those who confessed were arrested; then, on their information, a huge multitude was convicted, not so much on the ground of incendiarism as for hatred of the human race. Their execution was made a matter of sport: some were sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and savaged to death by dogs; others were fastened to crosses as living torches, to serve as lights when daylight failed. Nero made his gardens available for the show and held games in the Circus, mingling with the crowd or standing in his chariot in charioteer’s uniform. Hence, although the victims were criminals deserving the severest punishment, pity began to be felt for them because it seemed that they were being sacrificed to gratify one man’s lust for cruelty rather than for the public weal.7

A number of Christians — including the apostle Peter, according to an early Christian tradition that seems to be genuine8 — were arrested and executed. Their crime was ostensibly arson. Tacitus seems to doubt the reality of this accusation, though he does believe that Christians are rightly “loathed for their vices.” Tacitus’s text mentions only one vice explicitly: “hatred of the human race.” Why would Christians, who preached a message of divine love and who were commanded to love even their enemies, be accused of such a vice?

Well, if one looks at it through the eyes of Roman paganism, the logic seems irrefutable. It was, after all, the Roman gods who kept the empire secure. But the Christians refused to worship these gods — thus the charge of “atheism” that was sometimes leveled at them.9 Therefore, many of their pagan neighbors reasoned, they cannot love the emperor or the empire’s inhabitants. Christians thus were viewed as fundamentally anti-Roman and so a positive danger to the empire.10

‘Blood of Christians Is Seed’

This attack on the church was a turning-point in the relationship between the church and the Roman state in these early years. It set an important precedent. Christianity was now considered illegal, and over the next 140 years the Roman state had recourse to sporadic persecution of the church. It is noteworthy, though, that no emperor initiated an empire-wide persecution until the beginning of the third century, and that with Septimius Severus (reign 193–211).11 Nonetheless, martyrdom was a reality that believers had to constantly bear in mind during this period of the ancient church.

“Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish.”

But persecution did not always have the effect the Romans hoped for. Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish. As Tertullian (born about 155), the first Christian theologian to write in Latin, put it, “The more you mow us down, the more we grow: the blood of Christians is seed.”12 And as he said on another occasion: “whoever beholds such noble endurance [of the martyrs] will first, as though struck by some kind of uneasiness, be driven to enquire what is the matter in question, and, then, when he knows the truth, immediately follow the same way.”13

Surpassing All Earthly Loves

It was during the Middle Ages that the various stories of Saint Valentine circulated and were embellished, solidifying the remembrance of him as a martyr. But it was a medieval writer, Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s–1400), who explicitly linked romantic love to Saint Valentine in a poem entitled “Parliament of Fowls” that described the gathering of a group of birds on “seynt valentynes day” to choose their mates.

To what degree Chaucer influenced the later link between Saint Valentine’s Day and lovers is not exactly clear, but as early as the fifteenth century lovers were sending each other love notes on Saint Valentine’s Day. Of course, with the rise of the commercial cultures of the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this practice was commodified and became an important part of the commercial world we see today. There is nothing inherently wrong with modern commercial traditions, but Saint Valentine’s Day is a good day to also remember that there is a love that surpasses all earthly loves: our love for our great God and our Savior, his dear divine Son, Jesus.