THE SIMPLE ACT OF STARTING

In terms of developing a life of prayer, the single most important step that we can take is the first one. I think that sometimes we overestimate our importance in the act of prayer, while at the same time severely underestimating God's grace and activity in the prayer. This is the attitude that leads to the belief that to truly pray, the individual must do it "right" or the whole activity will be botched. It is also the attitude that prevents many from even beginning to learn to pray.
So the best piece of advice I can give is to say simply this: begin. Do not worry about doing it wrong. It isn't our business to know how to pray, it is our business to let God teach us. If you are a seasoned vet at prayer, the following might be somewhat useless to you, but if you are, like me, a beginner, then may I offer a couple of things to keep in mind:
1) God is active when we pray. I think we need to learn to cultivate an attitude that recognizes that we are not to be the more active/vocal partner in prayer dialogue. This is a hard discipline to develop because learning to recognizing God's voice is difficult and frustrating and a life-long process. That being said, let God lead. Do not feel like you need to fill the entire prayer with chatter. Even in silence, God is at work in you as you let yourself be open to His leading Spirit. Prayer is communion with the living God; who are we to thing that the activity depends on our activity? We are not the lead partners in the prayer-dance.
2) God honors even broken prayers. As I said above, it is not our business to know exactly what to pray for. The hard truth is that we are sinful, limited beings, and God's perspective is not ours. Therefore, it is not an inappropriate thing to admit to God that you are unsure of what to say. The Bible says that God's Spirit intercedes on our behalf when we are overwhelmed an unable to discern the best thing to pray for. Even the most pitiful, uninformed prayer is a blessing to God if it is offered in honesty, with open hands. It is an important thing to learn to pray for our prayers.
3) The goal of prayer is God. This is a personal soapbox of mine. I don't like the idea of prayer having as its core purpose submitting our requests to God. We should not pray because through praying we tell God what we want. We pray because in prayer, we encounter God Himself. Communion with the divine is our chief end. In prayer we are exposing our deepest selves to the governance of sovereign God, letting our hard hearts be shown sensitive to the will of our loving Father. We pray so that God will tell us what He wants.
Hopefully these things are helpful to you in establishing a habit of prayer in your life with Christ. Obviously, there is far more that could be said about prayer, and eventually we must move past these humble beginnings. But the important thing here is to begin. Do not delay, simply come before the God of grace and begin. As you do, you might want to share some of your joys, frustrations, experiences or anything else on here or with someone you trust.
"Lord, teach us to pray."

A PRAYER FOR BEGINNINGS

Our Heavenly Father,

You alone are God, you alone are good. We were dead in our sin and you bought our salvation with the sacrifice of your beloved son, Jesus Christ. May you be glorified forever for who you are and what you've done.
But God, if we've been saved and our sin is removed forever, it's hard to understand why we still live the same way we always have. Why is there such a large gap between who you call us to be and who we actually are? Lord, unless you save us, this is who we are. Please save us.
As we, Journey Church, begin this new season of growth and transformation, we give it all to you. We acknowledge that we are powerless to help ourselves, powerless to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Your Spirit at work in us is our only hope. We give ourselves to you. Take us and root out the false gods and evil tendencies that cling to their ownership of our souls. Pour your living water into us and enrich our inner beings. Make us receptive and soft to your convictions and guidance. Don't leave us as we are. God transform our souls.
We lift all up to you in the name and power of Jesus Christ,
Amen

RESURRECTION?

They tell me it's spring. That's what it says on my calendar; March 21st, "First Day of Spring." Well, it's April 10th now, and I'm looking out my front window and I feel a little deceived. It may be officially spring, but from where I'm sitting, it sure looks like winter. The sky is gray and the ground is white. There are no leaves on the trees. The grass is still brown. From my perspective, we are still living in winter.
Winter, in a certain sense, is characterized by death. At least to me, when I think of the winter I think of the death of the living vibrancy that inhabits summer. Winter is a cold, dull, quiet, even death that consumes the entire landscape. It is beautiful, in its own way, but by the time April hits, winter feels mighty old. The winter of the soul is very much the same. We are Christ-followers, we've heard and believed that death has been defeated in Jesus; in His resurrection. Life has come! Death is undone! The only problem is, from where I stand, I still see a whole lot of winter, and sometimes very little spring.
Maybe I'm just a pessimist, seeing only the negative aspects of a fallen world, and not recognizing enough the redemption at work around me and in me. To be fair: I have seen life overcome death in people around me, in myself. I've seen addictions die, hatred dissolve, hard hearts melt like ice in the sun. I've seen life come to houses where once only death lived.
Sometimes though, I look out and all I see is the winter. You've probably been there. How do we reconcile the tension between death seen and resurrection hoped for? This is a continuation of last week's message from Malcolm and blog subject. How do we hold both the Already and the Not Yet in healthy tension?
Jesus said to Martha in John 11:25-26, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?
Jesus' very presence IS the resurrection. Do you believe this? How do you live this truth out when death seems so prevalent?

LIFE BETWEEN THE BOOKENDS

"So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin." - Romans 7:25

Paul, who wrote the above passage, understood the tension of living saved, but living sinful. You see, Jesus did in fact die to release us from the prison of sin. Even while He was pinned to the cross, He cried out, "It is finished." His work was finished. At the moment of His death, the curtain in the temple that separated the holiest part of the temple from the rest was torn in two. This ripping of fabric symbolized the entrance of a new era where religious institutions were no longer required to access the presence of God. Direct communion with Holy God became a reality in the person of Jesus Christ.
But (and it is a big but, as Malcolm pointed out on Sunday), our present lives don't always appear to reflect these truths. In fact, some would say that they rarely, if ever do. If Christ crucified my sin, and I am free from it forever, and I have direct access to God's Holy presence, why does evil still run rampant in my life? In my world? Why do I still sin? Why do I still crave false gods instead of the One True God? Why do I still struggle with the same temptations and frustrations and aches year in and year out? It would appear that there is a contradiction between my theology and my frame of experience.
My theology professor used to call this tension life between the bookends. Looking both backwards and forwards we see certain victory. The past shows us the reality that it is, indeed, finished. Christ's blood washes my sin. Once for all time. Looking ahead to the promise of victory in the future, we look forward to the final, total, complete redemption that comes with Christ's return. Right now, this present day, however, we live between the bookends. It is what the Bible refers to as the "Last Days." The Already Not Yet. In this time, we are seeing the beginnings of salvation. We ache for the end.
How do you balance this tension of life between the bookends? How do you reconcile the two? Where does your hope lie? How can we walk this path together?

THE WAY OF THE CROSS

It's not a pretty picture. Our modern representations of it are nice and sentimental, sure, but they ignore the real horror of it. The cross is a despicable thing. It was the most painful, humiliating undignified death that a person could die in Jesus' day. As Troy talked about on Sunday, this cross was no sanitary, polished thing. It was shame and foolishness and death and filth and all the worst of the criminals and evil men were subjected to it. The cross is sin and death. Jesus became those things for our sake, for our good. His love motivated Him (fully God) to allow Himself to be subject to the worst death available. He became literally God-forsaken on the most godforsaken instrument of torture there was.
Sure, I'm being sensationalistic, melodramatic, even crass to some. What could possibly be the purpose in being so graphic about Jesus' death on the cross? Mel Gibson got the same questions about "The Passion". It's uncomfortable to be so blatantly confronted with the violence and gore of the cross. It's uncomfortable, but we need to know because we need to count the cost, realistically. Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." (Matthew 6:24). We hear those words and they are almost meaningless. We say things like taking up our cross and denying ourselves means taking out the garbage or emptying the dishwasher, even when it's not our turn. But imagine you are one of the disciples, listening to these words for the first time. You've walked down the roads; you've seen the criminals dying on their crosses. You are all too familiar with the horror, pain and shame of the cross. But here is Jesus saying, take up your cross and follow. Embrace your instrument of torture and follow me. The disciples didn't have the luxury of taking Jesus' words metaphorically.
Honestly, this is an uncomfortable passage. I'm not sure what it looks like for me to take up my cross and follow Jesus. What I am sure of is that we need to know what we are getting ourselves into. We need to be realistic about the nature of discipleship. Dietrich Boenhoffer said that grace is the free gift that costs us everything. We need to count the cost.
What does it mean to walk the road of the cross? How do you respond to Jesus words? How can we obey such a radical commandment?

CHRIST: THE KING AND THE KINGDOM

"Regnum Dei Deus est" ("The Kingdom of God is God") - Origen.

More and more every year I realize that God's desire for us is exeedingly simple; too simple, indeed, for muddy-minded and convoluted humans like us. We turn every little thing, including religion, into a debate or a competition or a test of worth. But what I am continually learning (being taught is more appropriate, really) is that to God, religion is very simple. If I could sum up the entire duty and responsibiliy of the individual in regards to relationship with God, it would not be a statement at all, but rather a question. My question for you is: "Do you just want to be with Jesus?" Do you simply want to walk beside Him, live with Him, learn from Him, spend time with Him? Do you want to be with Jesus?
It's really too bad, because in many cases, my answer to these questions is, "no." No, I want someone to give me what I ask for, someone to take away my guilty feelings, some sense of security in the grand scheme of the world. I want a friend who will love me, accept me and support me, but not one who will challenge me or convict me; not a friend who will ask me to change behaiviors that are wrong. I have a feeling that I am not alone in my misplaced devotion here.
If you really want to know what the Kingdom of God is like; if you really, honestly want to know what it is like to live in the Kingdom of God, then spend time with Jesus. Look at Him and you will see the Kingdom. If the Kingdom of God is the place where God's effective will is carried out, then Jesus IS the Kingdom of God. His central message, as well as His central prayer was, "Father, your Kingdom come. Your will be done." Walk beside Jesus and walk like Him, and you will find the Kingdom of God is closer than you think. Pretty soon, you will start to discover it within yourself.
"In the presence of Jesus is found the presence of the kingdom. Just as in Jewish doctrine, the Torah [law] didn't so much come from heaven as the Torah is itself heaven. In the same way in Christian doctrine, Jesus is Himelf the kingdom. Just as Jesus is the One who Was, and Is, and Is to Come, so the kingdom has come, is coming, and is now here. The kingdom of God is the presence of Jesus." - Leonard Sweet, "The Three Hardest Words".

THE THRONE INSIDE

"Before the Lord God made man upon the earth He first prepared for him a world of useful and pleasant thisngs for his sustanance and delight. In the Genesis account of creation these are called simply "things". They were made for man's use, but they were meant always to be external to the man and subservient to him. In the deep heart of the man was a shrine where nonE but God was worthy to come. Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him. But sin has introduced complications and has made those very gifts of God a potential source of ruin to the soul. Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and things were allowed to enter. Within the human heart things have taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God is crowned there no longer, but there in the moral dusk stubborn and aggresive usurpers fight among themselves for first place on the throne.
This is not a mere metaphor, but an accurate analysis of our real spiritual trouble..." (A.W. Tozer, "The Pursuit of God").
I am drawn to Tozer's "Throne Room" imagery used to describe the human heart and condition. Within each of us exists a throne, and whomever or whatever sits upon that throne is the entity that rules us. That entity is served as god and first priority. Troy used this image of a central shrine on Sunday when he was talking about David's life. I would agree with Troy; David's life is a classic study of a human letting himself be ruled by different masters. In many cases, David had it right. Indeed, he seemed to grasp the idea of relationship with God more that anyone else in the Old Testament. The Bible describes David as a "man after God's own heart". He knew intimacy with his creator and was a willing servant to that creator's will. As we know, however, David let someone other than his God sit on the throne of his heart. Bathsheba became his god, and in the end he served her and was ruled by his lust for her to the point of becoming an adulterer and murder.
Within each of us exists unimaginable potential for both holiness and utter depravity. I think that the primary difference between sinner and saint is the object that is found to be sitting on the throne of the soul. Whatever sits on that throne gets our allegience. When God is in occupation, He rules with love and grace. When things sit upon that throne, they dominate and beat hearts into submission.
Who, or what, is sitting in the throne room inside of you? Where does your allegiance lie? AS Bob Dyla so aptly put it, "you gotta serve somebody". Who gets the priority in your life? How have you seen God at work when He has occupied the cental shrine of your life?