More on prayer

I wrote this in response to a post about prayer: one filled with praise and thankfulness due to an unanticipated blessing. But I thought it ran a little long and was a little rambunctious for a comment, so I offer it, instead, as a post on the Salt Mill.

Dear sister in Christ:

Thanks again for highlighting the promise and importance of prayer. When we are under the direct attack of Satan, and we know things are beyond our ability to control, we cry out in desperation and God hears.

But, as you point out, he is just as faithful to listen to our prayers every single moment of our lives! He hears our prayers better than we can pray them. How else do we explain the Scripture that tells us the Holy Spirit intercedes with utterings and groanings that we can't understand?

God knows us so intimately that he can keep track of the hairs on our head when we have no hope of even counting them once, much less keep track of how many fall or how many start anew each day. So it's no wonder that he can dwell in the (prayers of) praise of his people! We speak praise and God surrounds himself with it. But even more than that: God motivates it in us both through creation and through ministering to us and thereby permits us to join the intimacy that is the Trinity.

I have such great hope for our commitment to prayer because God exceeds my hopes. He is more than I could think to hope for. And when I pray: I can count on Him to one day account to me on exactly what he did with that prayer. I'm convinced he writes it down--would that journal of his thoughts and actions be the mother of all blogs??--and he will review it with us on that day.

I love the picture in Daniel where Daniel is told his prayer was answered as soon as he prayed it, but that it took time for the answer to be delivered. It means that prayer results in a love answer that is just as sweet as a lover's letter...and when it arrives it fills our consciousness and crowds everything else out...but we must wait patiently for it, never knowing when it will arrive, but assured that it will!

Satan...the despiser...fills that time with doubt, frustration, and accusation. Why does Satan do that? He desires the love we have for our Beloved! How else would an unsuitable suitor draw our attention from his better (and his Master)? And if he can't have that love, he at least wants to sour it...turning it into something that is worthless.

We must pray and hold on. We never need to vainly repeat a prayer, but instead we can fill in the time with reminders of God's love for his people: repeating verses and Psalms that demonstrate his character and renew our hope. We must not let go. But hold on!

And as we do that and as he faithfully ministers to our heart--turning it from granite back into living flesh. Over years and years, the passion of our first love binds us to the Bridegroom and we become acquainted as old lovers with each other and trust each other and long to be with each other like the white-haired man and his wife whispering in each others' ears while sitting on the park bench in front of the band playing in the gazebo.

I think that's the picture that should be in our mind as we consider and act on Paul's admonition to pray without ceasing: lovers that can't stand to be parted, to be silent, to stop speaking with love and affection for each other. As I said before, he knows us so well that he hears our prayers better than we pray them.

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Vision and religion

You've probably heard it said "When there is no vision, the people perish." It's a King James translation of a phrase that is more literally transliterated "in/when there is none vision he (is not) bridled the people (om)." If we continue the translation of the verse we call Proverbs 29:18, the couplet completes "and he keeping 'Torah' (is) happy him".

The waw (and) between the pieces of the couplet is not really a conjunction as much as a storytelling connector. It isn't uncommon to see a string of MANY thoughts connected together with waws. And many of the Proverbs are constructed as couplet comparisons with one half illustrating the other. To understand the Bible, it really helps at times to go back to the original language so we can throw out mistranslations we've run into. This verse is one of those.

So what's the complete thought? Well...having and following the Law is being compared to being unbridled. For the modern reader (or even the postmodern one), the comparison to being an undomesticated pack animal probably doesn't appeal. But this reading doesn't really deal with the Hebrew word chazon.

Generally, Hebrew nouns are based on root words that are verbs. The root for this one is chazah and Brown, Driver, & Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament claims it typically has poetic usage relatively akin to our behold. So it is something more than simple sight.

Another, related word is the male singular chozeh for seer. From that you get a clearer concept that the vision is supernatural in origin.

What's interesting about this? Well...while we can't strictly draw a parallel between the two portions of the couplet, there is a hint that Torah is divine revelation or at the very least is understanding on the same level as a "seer's" vision...i.e. supernatural or divine.

Why is this important? We can't actually construct a vision for God's people. It must come from God. I can't even discuss the word "vision" without thinking of Rob Zinn's leadership of Immanuel Baptist in San Bernardino (now Highland) California. As a very young pastor he proclaimed that God was leading him to grow Immanuel from the size it was when my dad arrived as associate pastor (circa 1978) to a membership of 5,000. Given the story of the feeding of the five thousand, given a church with about 500 active members, and given church growth theory that favored new starts and new congregations (i.e. "missions"), Rob was taking Immanuel in a decidedly distinct direction.

Now there were already "mega" churches like North Phoenix in the SBC in the late 70s and early 80s. So it doesn't seem as startling to someone east of California. But California can still be fairly characterized as a pioneer missions area because of the low demographics of evangelical Christians in the state.

But what struck me about the situation was that not only was Rob being very specific about what God was leading him to lead Immanuel to do, but he supported it with passage after passage where God dealt in specific details and numbers. Rob wasn't afraid to state these specifics because he trusted that the same God that led him to reveal them to the congregation would fulfill the vision that he was laying before this (then young) pastor.

I can't say this for sure, but I think it made Dad shiver when Rob did that. Now my opinion of my dad is colored by affection and history. The affection probably puts him on a pedestal he doesn't entirely deserve. And the history is--shall we say--a tempering addition to that viewpoint. As I've grown I've come to know my dad for who he actually is rather than who I thought he was. And along the way he has admitted to faults in each of several periods of our family's life.

So to say I thought Dad "shivered" when Rob would make comments like that isn't to say Dad didn't believe. Dad's quite practical. If Rob said "we're going to have 5,000 members", Dad would break it into time periods and Sunday School classes, and auditoriums, and worship services. Then he would say "we have to do this" to make the vision work. And Rob would lead the church to do exactly that.

I remember the excitement...ok...it was really boredom...of standing out on the slab of the new worship center at 1314 Date Street and...you've got it...watering the concrete so it wouldn't cure too quickly and crack. Let me tell you: a slab of concrete requires vision. It's REALLY HARD to see a building when you have a slab of concrete, even if you're somewhat handy with blueprints.

What's even harder is realizing that the building is just a proxy for the spiritual event that God has planned in advance and is bringing into existence. It's people who are reached who become class members who have never TOUCHED much less opened a Bible in their lives (yes...this really happens in California.) And then you see them become fervent witnesses for the truth that has transformed them. And--after I left--I heard some of them became teachers of the classes that they used to sit in.

I became convinced of the power of specific guidance for people because of that process. And in my career I have--time and time again--helped projects succeed by clarifying the vision of what would be most useful to the customer and creating a plan for getting there.

But as I think about the Southern Baptist Convention of today, I have to admit I'm worried. It isn't that God has left the building...he's still quite visibly involved in things like our mission efforts. While I can get pretty jaded over the bickering that has been the most consistent result of the Conservative Resurgence, I only have to step into the Northwest Baptist Convention office that Dad works in to dispel my frustration. Not only do the work with many denominations to help guide their churches in practical planning and in training the people of those churches, but in the basement there is a real live satellite campus of Golden Gate at work!

In fact, Jeff Iorg was the executive director at that very facility before he was selected as the current president of GGBTS. And after a more recent executive director came and went, former GGBTS president Bill Crews came in as the interim director of that Convention.

All of the guys I've mentioned know West Coast missions and evangelism. They have each lived at the very edge of the world spiritually as they have served on mission in California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. I'll argue that most of what I've learned in life about energetic, enthusiastic leadership either came from one of these four men or I WISH it had come from them!

Yes...I ramble when I write...and I'm sure you're wondering where I'm going with this. So here it is:

We don't need a fresh vision for reaching the world for Jesus Christ. The one we have remains alive and vibrant. If you want to be where the bickering stops, generally you need to be where the work is perceived as being vital. If you're in a town where there is more than one Baptist church, maybe it's time to consider going to a town where no one preaches the Good News of Jesus Christ.

If you do that, and if you serve God faithfully, I guarantee you that the only thing that will overwhelm you is how enormous and eternal our opportunity is to participate in God's vision for saving the world.

I pray that the churches who call themselves Southern Baptist will reignite with an outpouring of the Holy Spirit so that we would recommit ourselves to boldly...no FOOLISHLY...seek to win the world for Jesus Christ. As much as I admire the concepts of the Cooperative Program, of the IMB and NAMB, of the Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong Mission Offerings, I worry that all of that is making life too complicated and preventing every single Christian from vibrantly and enthusiastically befriending non-believers, evangelizing, discipling, and baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Whether we are led to do that in our Jerusalem, our Judea, our Samaria, or to the ends of the earth, there is something about being directly involved in teaching people about Jesus that breaks down barriers and overcomes bickering and infighting.

And if there are some that insist on continuing the bickering and infighting when there is work to be done, I offer Jesus's comment to the young man that offered to follow Jesus as soon as he buried his father and mother:

"Let the dead bury the dead."

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In response to Boyd Luter

Dr. Boyd Luter has a series of posts (first thoughts, part I, part II, part III) he has titled Serious Thinking Towards an SBC Reform Agenda. As I read these, I wanted to respond, but those of you who know me are aware that I can be awfully verbose. So I thought I'd offer a more full response here and excerpt it at his blog:

I admire the effort you're going through, Boyd. But I want to offer you a mind blowing suggestion: the more Christians that participate, the more effectively the Spirit can exercise heavenly control over the Convention. The Annual Meeting works in precise counter-purpose to God's preferred method of leadership by limiting the number who can participate and thereby collecting political power into too few hands.

How do I prove that? That's easy: remember when the people of Israel wanted a king? Reading God's response leaves us with the impression that God was almost wounded by the desire of the people. He warns them that insisting on centralized human leadership in the form of a visible ruler--as opposed to the system of distributed leadership during the period of the Judges when he would raise up leaders to solve specific problems--will draw them away from him.

As Les suggested, the proportions attending the Convention need to reflect reality. Just as there should be a healthy representation of pastors and laypeople from small churches to reflect the 83% of the 40,000 SBC churches that have 200 or few members, there also ought to be as many brand-spanking new Christians brought along and taught about the associations, the state conventions, and the national conventions as they are present in the demographics of the church. (Don't worry, with the three-year rule, we avoid prematurely appointing them to leadership roles...and we can count on temperate leadership to carefully balance between the enthusiasm of younger brothers and sisters and the wisdom and experience of our older saints.)

As we add these new people, they will ask the right questions. And their questions will lead us towards God. I fully trust God to use our newest Christians not only to more effectively reach the lost (no one knows more unbelievers than a recent convert), but they also are more likely to direct initiatives aimed at speaking to the world instead of just to believers.

They're more likely to have a heart for helps-oriented work as well. They will have come into the faith believing that nothing is impossible with God. They'll have compassion for those that have been marginalized and they will be fierce to oppose Satan's marginalization of unbelievers through Satan's efforts to censor those unbelievers' lives of lifesaving knowledge.

New believers also bring a healthy dose of skepticism to convoluted theology and doctrine. They tend to reject things that sound wrong. We would seek unity around a simpler theology and doctrine--still filled with the majesty, glory, and riches of heaven--that is less human centric and less prideful. I know in your previous writings that you mentioned encountering precisely this pride as part of your work as a Christian educator. So I suspect you know where I'm coming from on it.

But the main thing that I think needs to happen is this: no thought gets written down without prayer. No proposal gets made without prayer. No person is forwarded without prayer. We need to invite all Southern Baptists to pray for God's involvement in addressing these issues. I even want those that would do everything in their power to stop this initiative to go fervently before the Throne of Heaven in prayer (right now! As you read this!)

I am convinced that God is waiting. Just as God already had the answer when Daniel prayed, but it took time for the answer to arrive, so God also has his answer already prepared for us. He has insights for us. He has passion for us. He has--yes--cleansing for us. He has already decided to send it to those of us who will seek his face and fully commit ourselves to honoring him and to doing things HIS way.

Reform doesn't start over there. Revival doesn't start over there. It starts over here. There is no problem that God doesn't already have a solution for. He heard the cries of his people in Egypt and freed them from slavery. He hears our concerns and he is listening intently. The solution is at hand. It is ready to be sent.

Let's go before his Throne and beseech him for what he already has ready. Let's band together in this. Let's leave no one out. Let's marshal every father, every mother, every daughter, every son. When we fully commit to doing it God's way and remain faithful in that commitment, he will fully commit to us. Until then, he's waiting to see what we will do.

I'm all in favor of looking at the Convention's specifics. But I'd rather the change is a change of heart and not of law. I'd rather it is because God wrote his word upon our hearts and not because we mattered to come up with a more ingenious way to get the political upper hand.

We need leaders that are sensitive to the Holy Spirit and can be counted on to always make the right choices. The only way that any of us can be like that is by divine guidance. So we need to pray these leaders into place. Each of us should choose a handful of people that we know God has used to bless the lives of others and that we know are capable of being led by God in this way. They will not be perfect and they will not have arrived. Many may even stumble before our eyes and our hopes may seem dashed by their human weakness.

But commit to pray for your handful of saintly leaders daily. And stick with it. Never, ever, ever, ever give up. Commit to never missing a day in prayer for them and for Southern Baptists. Toil in the prayer closet for God's full and visible participation in delivering us from the morass we've gotten ourselves into. If Jesus could pray until he sweat blood, we're going to have to realize that our salvation was accomplished through that committed prayer. And we're going to have to struggle with God (Israel!!) so he can conform us to his expectations...to the very likeness...the eikon...of Christ Jesus.

Heavenly Father:

I pray that you would empty every one of us of every scintilla of pride and conceit. I pray that you would hound us into prayer with you daily. I can write what I have written absolutely stone cold afraid that I am unable to fulfill what I advise others to do. I write it not because I know I'm up to it, but because I know YOU deserve this reverence and this worship.

There is a great work to be done, Lord, and the harvesters are few. We appeal to the Lord of the Harvest not only to send more harvesters, but that you would open up the floodgates of heaven and pour out your spirit so that we really will ALL be harvesters. Many need to be saved. Many need discipling. We have fallen down in the past in properly instructing--primarily through the example of leading out in front of new Christians--and the result is what has happened over the past few decades.

Our growth has stopped. We fight over insanity. We carefully watch each dollar to make sure it only goes to people that are unified with US. We don't seem concerned at all if you are with them, only if they are with us.

God...change US. Do whatever it takes. If persecution is the answer, send Satan to chastise us back to you. Don't give up on us until you have accomplished in us precisely what you intend to and until our unity is perfected in the complete knowledge of Christ Jesus.

Lord you don't need us to accomplish your will. But you have made us your friends and shared with us your plan. You have put us in the center of it. Only you have a more important role than you have given us, and you've committed to bless what we do...no matter how little we do.

We need to pray to you. We need to all pray to you. We need to quit contending and pray.

It's in the name of OUR Bridegroom that we of the Bride lift our prayers to you!

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A hopefully thoughtful exposition on inerrancy

This is in response to comments made on Wade Burleson's blog. Since my response is so long, I thought it would be appropriate to post it here in case Wade prefers to delete my comment. It's kind of my summary of the concept of inerrancy...

I'm going to ramble for a bit. Hopefully you won't jump to any conclusions about where I'm going until you wander to the end:

I think our claims about inerrancy need to be modulated by a realistic view of the origin of the bound books we carry around that have the word "Holy Bible" on the spine.

I can easily point you to passages--such as Jesus's handling of the adulterous woman in John 7:53 through 8:11--that must be declared erroneous. Those passages do not exist in the earliest manuscripts (a fact proclaimed both in many translations and checkable by visiting biblegateway.com)

And since they do not consistently appear in ALL manuscripts, at least SOME of the manuscripts MUST be wrong...either by "omission" or "commission" of including the text. If you agree with this comment, you either need to rip out those passages or carefully consider what I'm about to say next.

What about a claim of inerrancy for the original manuscripts? How do you administer that claim through copying and translation? The typical Southern Baptist is uninterested in hearing anything with respect to inerrancy other than this: "The Holy Bible I am carrying is without error." Yet I offer that most of those Bibles carry the potentially erroneous passage I mentioned before.

This isn't the same kind of claims that our atheist friends press when trying to offer errors: they point to such things as the claim of the ratio between the circumference of certain columns and the diameter being presented as 3 instead of pi. And our gloss of explanations in dealing with their concerns typically are both patronizing and defensive. The result is that it looks like we are spinning the word "error" to mean what we're comfortable having it mean rather than the common English usage of the word.

Hence the word inerrant is in many ways misleading. We can't make that kind of quality claim either regarding any of our manuscripts in hand nor regarding any of our translations. We make it regarding the original manuscripts not because the Bible makes that claim (it doesn't), but because it provides us theological comfort to consider those manuscripts to be without error.

I'll offer that it is a LOT like Justice Potter Stewart's famed comments on obscenity: unable to define it rigorously, he noted that he would recognize it when he saw it. Inerrancy is not a word with clear, applicable meaning. It is a fuzzyheaded concept that lacks precision and lacks application.

The result for the thinking person is for them to be left with the sense that the term "inerrant" means to trust without thinking. To the thinking person, the spiritual claim of inerrancy can sometimes covers a multitude of uncareful thought that ranges from inappropriately treating biblical language as both too literal AND (thinking of the Song of Songs) as too symbolic. It can lead us to misread the book of Ecclesiastes (and perhaps most of the book of Proverbs) as being divine guidance when some of it is just insightful human analysis. And it CAN lead us to substitute rules for thinking and ritual for faith.

I can easily pardon nonbelievers for being disappointed by our poor reasoning in adopting the rubric "inerrant" and the Rube Goldberg contraption of explanation that supports it.

On the other hand, Rex's comment illustrates--as Dave has accurately pointed out--that the original conservative resurgence was about TWO things:

1. Whether all of God's written word is (and can be treated as) trustworthy.

2. Whether the employees of the Convention would be held accountable to teaching about the Bible and about faith as as if the Bible is fully trusthworthy

The purpose of the CR was to make the claim (ignore the language and semantics because they REALLY are confusing if not misleading) that you can read the entire Bible--including most attempts at faithful translations and perhaps even paraphrases--with the HOPE/FAITH that God intended it to be transmitted to us exactly as it was and with the additional HOPE that the Holy Spirit will somehow administer the reading of that Word in such a way that the essential truth will be apparent to us.

Are there errors in the Bibles we carry? Almost certainly. How does God overcome those errors? He created a story that has parts of the Bible interconnect with other parts in a deeply woven fabric of redemption. Parts that take on errors must be compared to parts that remain substantially error free to understand and interpret the words that we have. This--combined with the time period over which the materials of the Bible were written and collected--gives us a way to avoid both cultural myopia that has made its way into some of the prescriptive guidance and adoption of false doctrine.

So...while I disagree with Rex's comments about the truth being true and untruth being untrue, I see the point he is making as this: let's recognize the depth of the conundrum that must be fought through for a believer to come to the point that they can trust the Bible that way. We don't need to beat them over the head with the word inerrant. We need to guide them into all portions of the Bible so they can see how the pieces fit together into a coherent whole.

That means you have to read the history in places like Samuel, the Kings, the Chronicles, and even Ezra and Nehemiah in order to understand the prophecies in the major and minor prophets. And you have to glimpse the typology of the Old Testament rituals to fully understand Jesus's sacrifice.

The higher criticism of the 19th and 20th century brought the entirety of the text into such disrepute that no one knew which parts to trust and which parts to reject. And any system of hermeunetics that admits to any Scripture being essentially in error puts all readers, all worshippers, all preachers, all teachers, and all theologians into the role of deciding for ourselves which parts to keep and which parts to throw away.

When my dad--arguably a moderate--made that argument to me for the first time, I realized why it is important to treat the Bible as "inerrant" even if I find a tremendous amount of intellectual sloppiness in the word itself. I am putting my trust in an invisible God that he has provided a reliable revelation of himself that--if I will eat the scroll--will lead me to a complete understanding of Him.

But we need to remember the SECOND point of the Conservative Resurgence (thinking also of how Dave concluded his just previous post): while there is a certain amount of flexibility in concluding exactly how God administers the plan of salvation, at the heart of it the Bible must be treated as a reliable text in order for us to have any unity at all. Without the Bible being treated as reliable literally anything goes. And it did.

But treating the Bible literally can be done in a way that builds bridges and avoids violation of conscience. If my brother Rex has not reached the point in his life where God has convinced him as completely as he has me regarding the full truth of Scripture, I still can love him as a brother and I believe God can still save him. I believe God WILL save many whose theology is defective because at the end of the day and at the heart of the matter they put their ONLY trust in God...and specifically in Jesus Christ...for deliverance.

But the problem that Wade points to with the entirety of his blog and that Dave re-illustrates is that only a central, unified core of doctrine can be permitted to be taught by the Convention and her entities. The discussion is and should be on which parts are acceptable to be taught as singular truth and which parts can be taught as, essentially, doctrinal opinion. A very simple illustration of that can be seen in the varying Southern Baptist views on the doctrines of grace (especially the doctrine of eternal security of the believer) v. free will-based conversion.

I actually admire Rex for digging into the Bible to make his points. His post that ends "and so Acts Chapter 15 begins" is a classic example of this. I'm glad to have him around and I think we can tolerate his not yet perfected knowledge of the Bible and of Christ Jesus...as long as he can tolerate ours. ;)

Greg Harvey

P.S. I tremble in fear at the thought that this post is both too long and too off-topic to be hosted in Wade's comment section for this post. I intend to post it on my blog and leave Wade with the freedom to delete it here if he so chooses.

P.P.S. If you got to the postscript intending to take issue with something I wrote, I'll respectfully ask that you not try to divide and conquer my points. I'll also offer that if you follow the link to my blog you can either respond there or look at my profile and respond to my email address and engage me in a more substantive discussion than I will willingly have on Wade's site.

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From personal experience...

I posted this as a comment on another blog, but since it got passed along to my dad (and has a reference to him), I thought I should add it to the Salt Mill. Note the Salt Mill-style experience that we dealt with around my dad's birthday each year while we were on the mission field:


I will offer a missionary kid's perspective on the most important ministry Southern Baptists have with respect to the work of the International Mission Board and her missionaries. I'm sure as you read that, you'll think of the Cooperative Program, the Lottie Moon offering, Global Impact weekends.

You might even remember a specific missionary that you've helped with meeting specific needs. Or perhaps you have had the blessing (as I have) of having a missionary or missionary couple appointed from within your Sunday School department, Bible Fellowship class, or cell group. All of these are tremendous ministries that make a huge difference as we support our IMB.

But I'll offer that there is one thing that your International Mission Board, your Board of Trustees, and your missionaries covet above ALL of these. It's a simple thing that we can do. It takes commitment and dedication, but it isn't hard. Done right, you will pour yourself into it and then you will have to accept by faith that God WILL use it to grow HIS Kingdom.

I'm, of course, talking about prayer. In a spiritual war, the greatest weapon we have is spiritual prayer to a God who the Bible declares is a spirit who must be worshipped in spirit and in truth. I can tell you story after story that I've heard of how prayer for missionaries changed lives and changed the world.

Instead I'll just share one very small personal experience. My dad's birthday is December 3rd. Each year that we were in Indonesia, around December 3rd my dad and our family came under additional spiritual assault. One year first my dad was violently ill and then all four children "caught" what he had on and around his birthday. We were in awful shape and our family was near the end of its wits.

The one thing that kept him going and got us through was the knowledge that dear saints were opening prayer guides, reading his name, and praying for him. The presence of the Holy Spirit was more evident to us in those days and we gave glory to God in dismal circumstances because of the faithfulness of his children in praying for us and because of the mystery of prayer and how God uses it.

As the Board of Trustees prepares to meet, I hope that each of us that reads Wade's blog--even if you are only reading one article in it and one comment--will commit ourselves to praying for this wonderful enterprise that God has called us to as Southern Baptists.

Pray for the leaders of the IMB who shepherd a 5000+ flock of ministers. Pray for the trustees that seek to provide Godly, biblical oversight and guidance. Pray for the staff that supports and nourishes those missionaries.

But, and I say this with great anticipation that you will hear me and join me in it, pray especially for each family who has been transplanted by the Almighty from comfort and security into a new land where God intends to grow new Christians for his own glory. Pray fervently and boldly for them that the Holy Spirit would imbue their diligent, faithful work with the dynamic power only the Holy Spirit can bring.

Pray also for yourself that you would be given an unstoppable zeal for missionary effort. Pray that God would bless you with consistency and with a stewardship of obvious resources that can be brought to bear in Kingdom efforts. Pray to be ready and pray to be sent to your own Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, even to the ends of the earth. Pray to be passionate and determined, loving and kind in linking arms with your missionary brethren around the world.

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Does God Answer ALL Prayers...Part 2

I appreciate that my brothers Bob and David came gently to God's rescue in the comments to my previous post. I love them both deeply because of their eagerness both here and on other blogs to live their faith out loud with comments they have made.

I promised David that I would quickly address what I am saying and hopefully show him something I'm trying to get at that he and Bob intuitively know, but in their expressions of deep faith in God's Providence and in God's responsiveness to us we Christians often miss.

That is this: while we "faith" God completely regarding the answering of prayer, I have found there are times when he doesn't answer the prayer. It isn't yes. It isn't no. And it isn't "wait". An example of this is in the book of Job. God chose not to answer Job's continuing complaints. Now I GUESS you could say he chose to make Job wait. But I think it's a little more accurate to say God decided to go hands off so Satan could wring Job out.

We often say that a non-answer should be interpreted as a "no" (or a "wait"), but we have no proof that God intends it that way. And this is especially hard to hear for people who are in the Grinder. Instead of being told "wait for God to answer your prayer", they need to hear what you're experiencing may not be a result of your incomplete faith and it may not even be God's answer to your prayers. He could be permitting you to be tested and choosing NOT to answer your prayers right now.

I realize you could argue that point with me and we could get into a deep discussion on semantic distinctions. But there's an even more likely possibility that most Christians don't even consider:

God's answer to our prayers often are the requirements that Christians love each other and bear each others' burdens. So when we fail to live the faith that has been handed down to us, especially when the Holy Spirit motivates US to act to answer those prayers, our sin may cause God's response to go unheeded and undelivered.

If you're like I am, you'll think about that statement for a moment or two. You'll start to respond back to me that I have it wrong, that God still answered the prayer. Then you'll fall on your face grieving before God for occasions when you failed to follow the Spirit's leading to meet a need.

My friend felt isolated and abused because of a Christian experience as an MK where externals and legalism SOMETIMES were substituted for love. In one particularly horrific example, at least 9 MKs were sexually molested by a missionary who was a pedophile. The response of the missionaries and of the mission board was naive and therefore incomplete, allowing the missionary to remain on the field and to continue molesting children for at least 20 years. My friend carries both anger and guilt about that situation as I do because we feel betrayed--looking back--by how that happened, that it was happening around us (specifically to a sibling of one of us), that we could do nothing about it (I informed my parents about some of the things I had heard and they chose not to act on it), and that God remained "silent".

My best explanation for what happened...for God's silence in the situation...is the one I've offered: God motivated these spiritual giants--our parents--to act and they chose to ignore God's leadership. Because of that more children were harmed. God's failure to act wasn't the source of harm. He didn't ignore the prayers and pleadings. But in this case...because of human failure...his response went undelivered. For those that were being harmed, it felt like God failed them and it felt like unanswered prayer.

My friend continues to have deep faith struggles in part because of the focus on externals he experienced (which he felt were manipulative and not Christ-like or loving) and with his memory of the situation I've described.

I hope you'll see where I'm coming from and why I responded to him the way I did.

greg.w.h

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Does God answer all prayers?

A friend asked me:

"Greg, do you believe God answers all prayers?"

I took time to think through his question and to try to provide a response based on my recent life experiences. I'd like to share that with those that might be reading this blog:

"I want to directly answer your question, but I have to think through it a little first out loud: Prayer is a conversation. In our conversation with other people,what would you think of a person that is always asking for favors as a matter of conversation? I know my kids do this with us sometimes. Their only interaction at times is to ask for stuff(food, games, toys, etc.)

One recurring theme has been "I'm bored" which is asking--in essence--the favor to be entertained. So I threw the question back at the person that "was bored", my youngest daughter. I asked her to make a list of activities that she thought would be fun (ignoring her comment about being bored, of course). She came back with five. I challenged her to make a list of one hundred. Her first response and Jen's first response was that 100 activities were too many.

Then she, her older sister and Jen went off and came up with 100 activities. Just the pressure to think of new ones was essentially creative for them. And, yes, there were some repeats, but in most cases they exhausted the repeat ideas and had to think of something else.

That list has supercharged the three youngest kids. Now instead of saying "I'm bored", they ask for help in choosing an item from the list. Timothy--our youngest who can't read--is especially enthusiastic.

Imagine our conversations with God being exactly like that. We come to him asking for him to fix an 'itch' that we have like "I'm bored." Or "I'm unhappy". Or "I'm lonely." How many times is the most direct fix for those situations precisely what won't meet the need?

Am I lonely because there are no other people in the world? And if God were to put someone in my path, would I even notice? Or is the problem--our REAL need--self-absorption? So I think sometimes God waits on us to work through exactly what it is we need. And there are other times when he answers directly what we asked for. And still others where he puts something in our path that goes to the heart of our REAL need...maybe not even the one we've been praying for.

Are all prayers answered? I don't know. Does God listen and care about each person praying to him? I think so...especially if that person is dealing with God seriously and honestly."

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