Be Yourself in Prayer

Some good counsel and advice on prayer can be found in this piece by Stephen Miller - Be Yourself in Prayer (at Desiring God)

Sometimes it seems as if many believers feel the need to alter who they are when they come to God in prayer, particularly when others are around. As if God will not hear them if they are themselves, they play characters, hoping to be more acceptable to God and others.

I have personally struggled over the years with what to say and how to say it when I pray. I’m in good company. Even the apostles asked Jesus to teach them to pray. And with kind, compassionate patience in his voice, he taught them to pray simply, humbly, confidently, according to God’s word, and for God’s glory.

You could sum up Jesus’s teaching into a few guiding principles.

1. Slow Down and Be Okay with Silence

There is no need to use filler language to take up every ounce of space in prayer, as if the Lord can’t handle the silence or doesn’t have time to listen. You don’t have to speed through like an auctioneer. I can’t imagine how I would react if someone came up to talk to me like, “Stephen Miller, just… just Stephen, we should just go to lunch together, Stephen Miller. Just let’s just go grab… just a burger, Stephen. Stephen, I know you like a good burger from time to time, Stephen Miller. Stephen, just then we could just grab a frozen custard, Stephen Miller.” I know that I am not God, but in my flesh, I might be too weirded out to get a burger with that guy. If we would naturally react to someone talking to us that way, why do we feel the need to speak that way to God? He knows our hearts. Slow down. Be okay with pauses. Perhaps God wants to speak to you in the silence.

2. Pray to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

God is Trinity. One God, three distinct persons, each person fully God. It is truly a great mystery, and I don’t know that we will ever understand it this side of Heaven. Yet each person within the Trinity is distinct. The Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Spirit. We rightly relate to God as a Trinity, adoring and thanking and pleading with Father, Son, and Spirit in our prayers. Yet while doing this, it can be easy to get confused and begin to thank the Father for dying on the cross and so on and so forth.

While God knows what we mean and sees past our broken prayers, this has got to confuse people who are listening to our prayers, trying to pray along in agreement. When you pray, consider the person of the Trinity to whom you are praying. The Father sends the Son to be the Savior of the world. The Son came obediently, died in our place, rose from the dead, then sent his Spirit to convict of sin, to convince of truth, and to equip and empower us. So as we pray, pray with that in mind.

3. Use Normal Language

My great Grandpa was a firm believer that the only inspired word of Scripture was the King James Version. When he quoted scripture (and he could quote most of the Bible I think), it was always KJV. While he was one of the biggest spiritual influences in my life, it was odd to me when he began to pray out loud, because he prayed in old English. “Our Gracious Heavenly Father, Thou hast bestowed upon us this bountiful feast and the glory belongest to Thou and Thou alone. Wouldst Thou blesseth this meal by Thine own good pleasure…” Then, once he said amen, he would resume speaking in modern language. When you pray, there is no need to speak like someone from a bygone era in order to sound more spiritual or reverent. Use normal language, and pray like yourself.

4. Use Your Normal Voice

We have all heard the hyped-up emotional vocal inflections of a man trying to sell a prayer the way a voice-over actor sells a product. He may talk like Ron Burgundy in real life, but as soon as he begins praying, his voice takes on a reflective Enrique Iglesias whisper that sounds a bit like being on the verge of tears while trying to woo someone into making an emotional decision. We should pray with all of our emotions and affections, but it must be sincere and authentic. If you’re moved, be moved, but be real about it. No need to alter your voice or manufacture emotion. God knows our hearts better than we know ourselves.

5. Keep It Short and Simple

Our prayers can be simple and still faith-filled. I often say that God can use a three-minute worship song as much as a nine-minute worship song. The same is true of prayer. God won’t hear us any more because of our long-windedness. Prayer isn’t a love bank where many words equal a more substantive deposit. Our prayers don’t have to be long or eloquent. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he taught them a short prayer that exemplified the vertical (glorifying God) and the horizontal (edifying others) aspects of prayer. When praying with others, aim to build them up with short, thoughtful prayers, and if you feel the need to pray longer, go to God “in secret” (Matthew 6:6).

It’s never too late to be yourself. God is looking for a relationship with us, not whomever it is that we are trying to act like when we come to him. Prayer starts with our adoption in Christ. That’s why Jesus taught us to begin with God as “Our Father.” There is an intimate reverence there — a humble familiarity.

Prayer is naturally one of the most spiritual things we can do as believers, so we don’t need to add anything extra to over-spiritualize it. We can simply come as deeply joyful sons and daughters with reverent awe that we have been rescued by a God who loves us and hears us.

The Practcality of Beauty

Throughout the Psalms, and in many hymns and contemporary worship songs, God is described as "beautiful." What does that mean, and what practical effect can consideration of God's beauty have in our lives. From God's Beauty For the Bored, Busy and Depressed at "Desiring God":

...We must have God’s beauty.

So what does God’s splendor have to do with my daily life right now — in my busyness, in my temptations, in my boredom, and in my spiritual dryness? I recently sat down to talk with Dane Ortlund, who serves as the Bible publishing director at Crossway.

Beauty and Busyness

First, God’s beauty soothes our busy and anxious hearts.

“The beauty of God’s tender mercy calms me down, lets me breathe again, slows my heart’s frantic scurrying about,” Dane said. “There is so much ambiguity in living as a moral being. In all my anxiety, he is an undeterred and gentle Father who has adopted and justified me. Edwards really felt that. Especially when you read his sermons or letters, there’s an aroma you smell. He really felt safe and loved and calmed because of God and his gentle care for him as a Father.”

Beauty and Temptation

Second, God’s beauty fills the affections of our heart, which is essential if we are going to meet our foes of sin and temptation with success. “The world tells me that selfish indulgence in lust is where the fun is,” Dane said. On the contrary, “Edwards writes all over the place about quietly enjoying the beauty of God, and communing with him in his Son, who is the mighty and radiant friend of sinners like me. To use a word Edwards delightfully used, enjoying God happifies us.”

One of the crucial battles of the Christian life is discovering the true ugliness of sin and exposing its destructiveness. “Sin is the enchanting allure of what is going to kill you,” Dane said. “I can’t help but jump into the water of sin and get slammed against the rocks of judgment and hell and death. I have no willpower to stop. I cannot stop myself. I need a higher loveliness, a more compelling beauty. I am only going to do what I love to do, and I will be that way forever. I cannot function any other way. I have a beauty-thirst that must be quenched, no matter what.”

We all do. “The sixty year old who leaves his wife for a younger woman, the teen looking at porn, the banker checking his personal accounts every hour, the pastor feeding his soul on the nicotine of congregational approval — all of these are taking a doll, putting makeup on it, treating it like a spouse, and expecting it to love you like a spouse, when the real person is in the next room wanting to love you truly.”

Beauty and Boredom

Just as God’s beauty confronts our anxieties and our temptations, so also it confronts the spiritual hazards of our boredom.

One year ago, ESPN reported the tragic story of Christopher Lane, a college baseball player who was jogging down a street in Duncan, Oklahoma. Three teens drove up behind him in a car and shot him in the back, senselessly killing the athlete. When the teens were later arrested and asked to explain their actions, they said they did it because they were “bored.”

As Martyn Lloyd-Jones said it: “Sin is always, in some sense, a life of boredom.”

How To Fret

Do you worry? Do you fret? That's a little like asking "Do you breathe?" Since we all do it, here's a good piece by Jonathan Parnell at Desiring God- Three Facts For Your Fret:

We tend to fret.

It is a fact about creatures that we are derivative beings who can’t ultimately control the world around us. We have questions about whether we should do this or that, and about what might happen if we do this or that, which quickly turns into worries about how badly this or that might turn out. Before long, we’re in the storm of outright anxiety. It begins to bear down on us with hurricane-force winds — all the facts and would-be’s, the haywire of things gone sideways, and our incapacity to determine results. What are we supposed to do?

Remember God. That is what we are supposed to do. We remember that these worries are as ancient as our earliest forefathers, and that God has been in the business of answering them since the beginning, and better, that the way he answers them is not by ignoring the complexity, but by stepping into it. In short, we should know we’re not alone, that God hears, and that God works in the middle of our mess.

1. You’re Not Alone

The psalms are incomparable in making this point. Not only do they show us again and again that God cares, but they, in one sense, come alongside us to feel what we feel. We can forget sometimes that the psalmists were real people like us, and that their situations were as literal as anything we’d experience. We shouldn’t lose that in the poetry. When David says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” (Psalm 23:4), we should remember that actual enemies were trying to kill him. Now, that’s a beautiful metaphor — the valley and the shadow and all that — but it works only because death was seriously all around him.

The psalms are real life, and that’s why they help us. Whatever circumstances we are going through, as different as they might be from the psalmist’s so many years ago, there are wonderful similarities. Psalm 37 stands out.

The psalm opens: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers!” (Psalm 37:1). Again, “Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil” (Psalm 37:8). The point is that we don’t worry. Granted, there are various reasons for why any of God’s people might worry over the course of centuries, but the command not to worry and the basis of not worrying are the same. Whatever worries we have, we are not alone. Our brothers and sisters have been there.

2. God Hears You

A psalmist is writing about fret, which means it’s happened before. But also, and more specifically, the psalmist is exhorting God’s people about fret, which means God knows what’s going on. God isn’t a stranger to this. He has heard his people then, and he hears us now.

The psalms as a whole make this wonderfully clear. It is even thematic, as I think we can see in the first few psalms. What begins to stand out when we read the first handful together is that David has this unremitting confidence in God’s nearness — that God listens to him and cares. “I cried aloud the the Lᴏʀᴅ, and he answered me from his holy hill” (Psalm 3:4); “The Lᴏʀᴅ has set apart the godly for himself; the Lᴏʀᴅ hears when I call to him” (Psalm 4:1, 3); “O Lᴏʀᴅ, in the morning you hear my voice” (Psalm 5:3); “The Lᴏʀᴅ has heard the sound of my weeping. The Lᴏʀᴅ has heard my plea; the Lᴏʀᴅ accepts my prayer” (Psalm 6:8–9).

This is the great reminder that even in the thick of our fret, we never find God “indifferent or helpless or caught by surprise.” And that even when it seems like no one else hears, that our friends have all deserted us, we can turn the page with David to Psalm 38:9, “O Lord, all my longing is before you; my sighing is not hidden from you.” God hears, always.

Living Repentance

What does it mean to really repent? Was Martin Luther right when he said all of the Christian life is repentance? Read Where Hazy Repentance Goes to Die by Jonathan Parnell at Desiring God:

If a cloud of ambiguity hovers around our understanding of repentance, it might have to do with how we understand faith.

We’re reminded of Luther’s introductory words, unfolding into 94 other theses nailed to the door at Wittenberg: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said ‘Repent,’ he intended that the entire life of believers should be repentance.”

Our entire lives repentance? In one sense, we understand what he means. We should continually be turning from sin toward Jesus. The one great business of the Christian life is, as John Flavel puts it, to “preserve our souls from sin and maintain sweet communion with God.” In other words, we mortify and vivify, we put off and put on.

But our entire lives? Even if we sign off on this theologically, chances are that few of us make this the practical work of our Christian existence, at least not explicitly. Few of us would answer, if asked to describe what it means to be a Christian, “You repent all the time.” Sure, we repent. When we sin — when we areconvicted of our sin — we repent. But it’s probably a far cry from our “entire life.”

Luther says, though, that Jesus intends our entire lives to be about repentance. And he’s on to something. So what do we do?

If It’s All in Our Heads

My sense is that the measure of opaqueness we feel in Luther’s statement likely corresponds to how much we view the nature of faith as primarily intellectual rather than affectional. In other words, we’ll never grasp repentance as an all-of-life ordeal so long as we see faith as a mental adherence to facts about Jesus, even if we consciously agree that the facts are wonderful and glorious. Reason being, we can hold a lot of different facts in our minds that co-exist without the slightest trouble. If faith was just facts, if believing in Jesus meant theoretically agreeing with what he says about himself, then we won’t necessarily sense any problem with theoretically agreeing with several other things. We can simultaneously hold Jesus as Treasure in our minds while we dig for rubies somewhere else. The word for this kind of Christianity is nominal (in name only).

Mental agreement that Jesus is glorious is like affirming the statement that honey is sweet. As much as you might agree on paper, it still doesn’t stop you from eating other things. We can crunch on salty cashews without changing our minds about the honey. And we don’t necessarily feel like the cashews are something we need to forgo in order to eat more honey. To suggest we should would seem strange. If faith is all in our heads, repentance is still opaque.

Seeing Is Embracing

But faith is mainly affectional, not intellectual.

Bible Neglect

Do you ever find yourself neglecting the Bible? Some good and encouraging thoughts from Tony Reinke at Desiring God with reference to a John Piper sermon on this subject.

We assume every Christian has a Bible that looks like this one — worn down, marked up, and paired with a journal stuffed with multicolored spiritual reflections.

But that’s often not true. Many Christians find it difficult to get into a daily habit of Bible reading. So this week John Piper addressed four common causes of Bible neglect in the Christian life, like: “I don’t read my Bible because . . .

• . . . it seems so irrelevant to my life.”
• . . . I don’t have time.”
• . . . I go to church every Sunday.”
• . . . I find it confusing.”

What follows is a slightly edited (and abridged) transcript of his answers.

Reason 1: “I don’t read my Bible because it seems irrelevant to my life.”

This is a very common hang-up. Many Christians neglect the Bible because it doesn’t seem relevant in an average day of life and work. So why do I need to read my Bible every day? Pastor John’s response.

One thing I know in response to this question, another thing I don’t know. What I know is that the Bible is relevant to this person’s average day where he lives and works. What I don’t know is what are his personal goals in life and work. And the reason that matters is that you can have goals at work or in life which will put you so out of sync with the Bible that you find the Bible to be annoying or condemning or boring, because its teaching runs in a different direction from the direction you are going.

I know the Bible is relevant to this person’s daily life. He says he doesn’t feel like it is. I know it is. The Bible says, “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The Bible says: “render service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord” (Ephesians 6:7–8).

So here are ten questions to ask about work.

Question 1: Are you ever tempted to grumble or complain at work? Philippians 2:15–16 is relevant, and shows a glorious way to live without grumbling.

Question 2: Are you ever tempted to be greedy at work and take something that is not yours? The Bible has lots to say about covetousness and greed and stealing and how to be so content in Christ that you are free at work to be generous.

Question 3: Are you ever tempted to be worried or anxious at work? Everyone is. And the Bible talks about this fear almost as much as it does anything. The most common command in the Bible is “fear not.” For anybody who has any fears at work, the Bible is relevant.

Question 4: Are you ever tempted to brag or boast or draw attention to yourself and to your superiority in some area? The Bible is full of wisdom about pride and humility and the effect it has on relationships.

Question 5: Are you ever tempted at work to be angry with anybody? Do you deal with temper issues? Are there strained relationships because you are frustrated with other people? The Bible deals over and over again with the issue of anger and goes a lot deeper in that issue than any psychology can today.

Question 6: Are you ever tempted to cut corners at work, to punch out early, to come in late, to work half-heartedly? The Bible is also relevant to the quality of our work.

Question 7: Are you ever tempted sexually at work by lust? The Bible is full of relevant material on a robust view of sexuality that puts it all in a good perspective and a proper place.

Question 8: Are you ever tempted to feel sorry for yourself at work, to lick your own wounds because someone spoke evil of you, or because you got passed over for a promotion? The Bible is shot through with dynamics of life that help us deal with self-pity.

Question 9: Do you ever struggle with guilt at work, feelings that just come over you that are a vague sense that you are not as good as you should be, or maybe you really failed at something you should have succeeded at by your own standards? Accept the ultimate remedy given in the Bible for guilt.

Question 10: Are there lost people at work that you care about, that you don’t want to go to hell? Where are you going to get help for dealing with them in the hope of giving them life except in the Bible? And where are you going to get strength and courage and boldness and wisdom for how to do it?

The Bible is relevant for the life and work of any man. But really it comes down to this. Does he want to see the greatest treasure in the universe? Does he desire to know Jesus and enjoy Jesus more than anything? Does he love people so much that he grieves over the fact that they don’t know Jesus and will be lost forever without him? That is the question. If Jesus is supreme in this person’s life, if the passion is to know him above all, if the passion is to desire him and enjoy him and treasure him more than anything, if the passion is to bring as many people with you as you can into that experience, then you can’t live without the Bible. It is the most relevant book in the world.

Reason 2: “I don’t read my Bible because I don’t have time.”

This is another very common struggle Bible readers face, and this question came from a mom with young kids who feels like there’s no time in the day for clear-headed, uninterrupted time in Scripture. In response, Pastor John turned the tables to address the husband’s role in serving his wife, and offered these six bits of counsel.

One, set a tone of discipline and order in the home so that children are not running wild, but are submissive and obedient and self controlled. Partner with her in getting these kids under control with naps and bedtimes and meal times that are ordered times around which days can be built. My impression is that way too many parents today think their children should be allowed to control the atmosphere of the house. That is a big mistake at lots of levels, I think. So, Dad, step up, partner with your wife in establishing routines and expect obedience to her and to your authority.

Two, Dad, establish playtime with the kids every day. It will obviously change with the ages and so on, but give your whole attention to these kids every day at some point during which time your wife is free. For us, for many years, that was right after supper for about an hour.

Three, build retreats into her life so she gets a half-day or a full day every now and then. You figure out how often you can arrange for the children. You take them on Saturday morning all morning. Get periodic extended retreat times alone where she (and then you) can deal with the living God.

Four, lead your wife in the word so that her desire never wavers because of your example of pursuing treasure and sweetness in the word with her.

Five, give her adult conversation about important things including things from Scripture, so that she doesn’t lose perspective what all this time with the kids is for.
Six, pray for her. Husband, pray that your wife will find the motivation and discipline to enjoy God’s word.

Indulgent

From Jon Bloom at Desiring God - Lay Aside the Weight of Self Indulgence:

We are all self-indulgers. The whole lot of us. Let’s just admit it upfront and help each other fight.

Biblical self-indulgence is feeding the “passions of the flesh” (1 Peter 2:11). It’s indulging ourselves in any pleasure that is harmful to our souls, that does not spring from faith (Romans 14:23).

Recognize the Danger

Self-indulgence is spiritually dangerous to us because it’s a form of idolatry. It’s something we turn to instead of God for happiness. It dulls our spiritual tastes and curbs our spiritual appetites (Proverbs 27:7). If we don’t take it seriously, it can, like Solomon’s wives (1 Kings 11:1–3), turn our hearts away from God.TweetSelf-indulgence comes in all shapes and sizes. We can all name obvious or “gross” kinds (like those listed in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10). But perhaps for most of us the more dangerous indulgences are those that appear outwardly respectable. These are insidious because it is not the actions themselves that are sinful but our heart motives in doing them. So we may appear to do good while secretly indulging in pride (pursuing self-glory), greed or gluttony (too much of a good thing), negligence (should be doing something else), or lack of love (failing to serve someone else). This is what Jesus was talking about when he said,
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.” (Matthew 23:25)

Feel the Weight

But whether gross or “respectable,” self-indulgence is a hard sin for us to fight because it’s hard for us to want to fight it.

At the moment of indulging, it doesn’t feel like an enemy. It feels like a reward that makes us happy. And it feels like a relief from a craving that insistently begs for satisfaction. But after indulging, defeat hangs like a heavy yoke around the neck of our souls. This makes running our race of faith difficult (Hebrews 12:1).

If an indulgence has become a habit, then we live with this heavy weight of defeat. And though we may repent and confess our sin each time and know that the Father forgives us in Christ (1 John 1:9), the demoralizing effect of repeat defeat is still heavy.

Jesus doesn’t want us to live with this weight of defeat but in the freedom he purchased for us (Galatians 5:1). He wants us to lay it aside (Hebrews 12:1). It’s a matter of obedience — and joy!

What Fuels Self-Indulgence

To fight self-indulgence, we need to know that what fuels it is a promise we believe.
If you ask yourself what promise you’re believing that’s fueling your indulgent behavior, you might not be able to articulate it right away. In fact, you might be tempted to think, “It’s not about believing a promise. It’s not rational at all. It’s an instinct, a craving. It’s about just saying ‘no.’” Well, just saying “no” has a place in the fight. But it will never get to the heart of indulgence. Often our governing beliefs are so much a part of us that we aren’t consciously aware of them. They reside at a deeper heart (or subconscious) level and it can take some probing to bring them to light.

Not only that, but our Adversary doesn’t want us to consciously experience temptation as a process of promise — belief — action. Too much thinking on our part might tip his hand. He wants us to experience it simply as a pleasurable invitation to happiness.
And that’s what fuels self-indulgence: the promise of happiness, however brief. And though we typically experience this promise as a strong, visceral craving, it’s the promise that gives the craving its power.

The Real Power for Change

So, wherever we have a persistent pattern of self-indulgence that we just can’t seem to conquer, what we are dealing with is our own unwillingness to let go of a promised happiness. If we simply try to address our craving we likely won’t see long-term change. Because it’s not our craving that’s so strong. What’s strong is our belief that we will be less happy if we pass up the indulgence. Belief governs cravings.....

More at the link.

Home to Your Heart

From "Desiring God" website- Bring the Bible Home to Your Heart:

We all want to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22).

Who wants to feel the failure or share in the shame of being pegged like one “who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror . . . and goes away and at once forgets what he was like” (James 1:23–24)? It would seem like Bible application is an essential spiritual discipline to consciously pursue every time we encounter God’s word — but that depends on how we define “application.”

The key question we need to answer is what effect should regular Bible intake have on our hearts and lives — and how does it happen?

God’s Word Is for You

For starters, we should be clear that aiming to apply God’s words to our lives is grounded in the good instinct that the Bible is for us. Optimism about life application makes good on these amazing claims that all the Scriptures are for Christians:

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17).

“Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did. . . . [T]hey were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Corinthians 10:6, 11).

“Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4).

The whole Bible is for the whole church. We have good Scriptural warrant to come to God’s words expecting them to be understandable and applicable. We should make good on Puritan preacher Thomas Watson’s counsel,

Take every word as spoken to yourselves. When the word thunders against sin, think thus: “God means my sins;” when it presseth any duty, “God intends me in this.” Many put off Scripture from themselves, as if it only concerned those who lived in the time when it was written; but if you intend to profit by the word, bring it home to yourselves: a medicine will do no good, unless it be applied. (Spiritual Disciplines, 57)

Yes, take every word as spoken to yourself, with this essential anchor in place: Seek to understand first how God’s words fell on the original hearers, and how it relates to Jesus’s person and work, and then bring them home to yourself. Expect application to your life as God speaks to us today through the Spirit-illumined understanding of what the inspired human author said to his original readers in the biblical text.

Specific Applications for Every Day?

So then, is it right to think of “application” as an everyday means of God’s grace? Is this a spiritual discipline to be pursued with every Bible encounter? The answer is yes and no, depending on what we mean by application.

Some good teachers have claimed that every encounter with God’s word should include at least one specific application to our lives — some particular addition, however small, to our daily to-do list. There is a wise intention in this: pressing ourselves not just to be hearers of God’s word, but doers. But such a simplistic approach to application overlooks the more complex nature of the Christian life — and how true and lasting change happens in a less straightforward way than we may be prone to think.....

More at the link.

5 Benefits of Corporate Worship

From David Mathis at Desiring God - Five Benefits of Corporate Worship 

Worshiping Jesus together may be the single most important thing we do. It plays an indispensable role in rekindling our spiritual fire, and keeping it burning. Corporate worship brings together God’s word, prayer, and fellowship, and so makes for the greatest means of God’s ongoing grace in the Christian life.

But thinking of worship as a means can be dangerous. True worship is fundamentally an experience of the heart, and not a means to anything else. So it’s important to distinguish between what benefits might motivate us to be regular in corporate worship, and what focus our minds and hearts should pursue in the moment.

According to Don Whitney, “There’s an element of worship and Christianity that cannot be experienced in private worship or by watching worship. There are some graces and blessings that God gives only in the ‘meeting together’ with other believers” (Spiritual Disciplines, 92). Surely, many more could be given, but here are five such “graces and benefits” that we experience uniquely in the context of corporate worship....

He goes on to list the five benefits of corporate public worship as:

1. Awakening
2. Assurance
3. Advance
4. Accepting Another's Leading
5. Accentuated Joy

You can read the full article at the link

Do Not Give Up On Joy

Don’t Give Up on Joy at Desiring God

You don’t have to wallow in sadness.

Ben Stuart says this realization was one of the greatest gifts God gave him in his fight against sadness. He learned from the Psalms that we could push back against sad feelings with the truths of God’s word. We can fight back for joy in God.

In this three minute video, Ben talks about three weapons in the fight against sadness and encourages us to hang in there.

Don’t Give Up on Joy from Desiring God on Vimeo.

Preach the Gospel to Yourself

Is your self=talk full of gospel truth? From David Mathis at Desiring God

No one is more influential in your life than you are. Because no one talks to you more than you do.

So observes Paul Tripp — and in doing so, he accents our need to daily preach the gospel to ourselves.

In our sin, we constantly find our responses to life in our fallen world to be disconnected from the theology that we confess. Anger, fear, panic, discouragement stalk our hearts and whisper in our ears a false gospel that will lure our lives away from what we say we believe.

The battleground, says Tripp, is meditation. What is it that is capturing your idle thoughts? What fear or frustration is filling your spare moments?

Will you just listen to yourself, or will you start talking? No, preaching — not letting your concerns shape you, but forming your concerns by the gospel....

Preach the Gospel to Yourself from Desiring God on Vimeo.

Fired Up From Meditating

Love this! "Warm Yourself at the Fires of Meditation" from Desiring God:

We were made to meditate. God designed us with the capacity to pause and ponder. He means for us to not just hear him, but to reflect on what he says.

It is a distinctively human trait to stop and consider, to chew on something with the teeth of our minds and hearts, to roll some reality around in our thoughts and press it deeply into our feelings, to look from different angles and seek to get a better sense of its significance.

The biblical name for this art is meditation, which Don Whitney defines as “deep thinking on the truths and spiritual realities revealed in Scripture for the purposes of understanding, application, and prayer” (Spiritual Disciplines, 48). And it is a marvelous means of God’s grace in the Christian life.

Meditation Made Christian

Since we were made to meditate, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that world religions have seized upon the activity, and new schools try to make use of its practical effects, whether to cultivate brain health and lower blood pressure. Christian meditation, however, is fundamentally different than the “meditation” popularly co-opted in various non-Christian systems. It doesn’t entail emptying our minds, but rather filling them with biblical and theological substance — truth outside of ourselves — and then chewing on that content.

For the Christian, meditation means having “the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16). It is not, like secular meditation, “doing nothing and being tuned in to your own mind at the same time,” but it is feeding our minds on the words of God and digesting them slowly, savoring the texture, enjoying the juices, cherishing the flavor of such rich fare. Meditation that is truly Christian is guided by the gospel, shaped by the Scriptures, reliant upon the Holy Spirit, and exercised in faith.

Man does not live by bread alone, and meditation is slowly relishing the meal.

Meditation Day and Night

aybe it’s the multiplied distractions of modern life, and the increased impairments of sin’s corruption, but meditation is more the lost art today than it was for our fathers in the faith. We are told, “Isaac went out to meditate in the field toward evening” (Genesis 24:63), and three of the more important texts in the Hebrew Scriptures, among others, call for meditation in such a way that we should sit up and take notice — or better, slow down, block out distractions, and give it some serious consideration.

The first is Joshua 1:8. At a key juncture in redemptive history, following the death of Moses, God himself speaks to Joshua, and three times gives the clear directive, “Be strong and courageous” (Joshua 1:6, 7, 9). How is he to do this? Where will he fill his tank with such strength and courage? Meditation. “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night” (Joshua 1:8).

God means not for Joshua to be merely familiar with the Book, or that he read through sections of it quickly in the morning, but that he be captivated by it and build his life on its truths. His spare thoughts should go there, his idle mind gravitate there. God’s words of instruction are to saturate his life, give him direction, shape his mind, form his patterns, fuel his affections, and inspire his actions.

Friend of Sinners

Jesus was called a "friend of sinners." Are you? Am I? From a great post by Jonathan Parnell at Desiring God

...If Jesus was a friend of sinners, we should be too, it seems — somehow, someway. And instantly, this discussion can drift into a much bigger one about Christians and culture and all that. But instead of going there, let’s just talk friendship for a minute. Friendship, which is not without its implications, is more practical and relevant than a primer on the church’s posture in society. So in that light, here are three tips on being a friend of sinners.

1. Be okay with marginal.

In the example of Jesus, we need to be all right with marginal all the way around. Be okay with associating with the marginal, the poor, the destitute — those often overlooked in society (Luke 7:22). Go there. Be with this people. Serve them. Learn from them. And be okay with being thought marginal yourself (Matthew 19:6–9), or non-progressive or backwater or against sexual modernity — whatever they are saying these days about the Christian conscience. The truth is that many of our neighbors, especially in urban contexts, will think we’re weird. Or stupid. Or close-minded. Or judgmental. Or just simply out of touch with the new post-Christian world.

Popular opinion will continue to cast Christian ethics as outdated and antithetical to the development of the American self. We’ll often find ourselves, in the coffee shop, on the light-rail, at the theater, to be the only ones there who don’t think same-sex “marriage” is the coolest thing since sliced bread. The number of those who share our convictions, or are open to listening, may continue to dwindle. And, really, this is fine. It’s okay. Our calling doesn’t live or die by societal acceptance.

2. Aim to love, not be liked.

We must nail this down. The aim of our charge is love, not popularity (1 Timothy 1:5). Jesus constantly infuriated the popular ideals of his day. They knew his teaching contradicted their own, and rather than like him and wrap their arms around him in happy tolerance, they tried to shut him up (Mark 12:12). “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household” (Matthew 10:25).

Jesus wasn’t a fan favorite. They crucified him, remember? The leaders and the people. Not to mention that alongside Jesus’s reputation for shady associations was the utter absence of popularity baiting. “Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances . . .” (Mark 12:14). This means Jesus didn’t let the crowd’s facial expressions dictate his message. Or pageviews. Or book sales.

In a sense, there is a holy disregard for what outsiders think, but that’s not the whole story. In the Pastoral Epistles, Paul lays out that one of the qualifications to be an elder is that “he must be well thought of by outsiders” (1 Timothy 3:7). As David Mathiswrites, we care what others think because God cares. Ultimately, “we want outsiders to become insiders.” Jesus came to serve, not be served (Mark 10:45), and the same goes for us. We are in this world to serve, not be pampered. To love, not be applauded. To bless, not be notarized. So we should care about our reputation — to serve and love and bless — but that doesn’t mean trying so hard to be liked by everybody. Having a respectable reputation is one thing, trying to get everyone to throw their arm around us is another.

3. Put the gospel to work.

This means, first and foremost, that the most important thing we could ever say is that Jesus is Lord. He is the risen King of the universe, alive now and reigning in his mercy and love, commanding all people everywhere to repent and come home. This is amazingly good news, and it is controversial. If we believe this, and say it, some sinners won’t want to be our friends. Nevertheless, the news is still good. The truth is still compelling. Its beauty is never diminished.

A few of the most practical ways we might put the gospel to work as friends of sinners is captured by Tim Keller in Center Church. Leaning on Simon Gathercole’s outline of the gospel as Jesus’s incarnation, substitution, and resurrection, Keller considers three aspects in which the gospel impacts our lives. He calls it the “upside-down” aspect, the “inside-out” aspect, and the “forward-back” aspect — each of which are opposite the world’s way of thinking (46–48). Upside-down is rooted in the most glorious, humble event in history. God became a man. He suffered. He died. Our message and lives are marked by this relentless posture of servanthood. Inside-out gets at the great work Jesus did by taking our place on the cross. He died for us, sinners as we were, and was raised for us by sheer mercy — to bring us to God and accept us not based upon our works, but solely by his grace. This electing grace has no preconditions. It’s lavished on the worst of sinners and tidiest of Pharisees, giving us all the eyes of faith. Then the forward-back, the kingdom Jesus inaugurated by his victory over the grave, reminds us that we are destined for another world, a better one. Heaven will be on earth, but not yet. The world will be made completely new, but now we’re still working and waiting, loving the lost, telling God’s story.

When these truths touch our lives and are put to work in our relationships, we’ll be walking in the steps of our Savior. When this world-shaking wonder orders the way we, sinners saved by grace, think about those around us, sinners in need of grace, then, and only then, we’ll make for good friends. Then we’ll be good friends of sinners, like the true and better “friend of sinners.”

More at the link.

Singing The Stubborn Song

Love this! -"Our Holy, Stubborn Song" by Gloria Furman at the Desiring God site:

There’s something stubborn about singing praise to God.

We live in a fallen world. Things are not as they ought to be. How can our mouths be filled with praise in the midst of so much darkness?

Yet we sing.

We sing because we once followed the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2), but now the King has died for us and delivered us from the present evil age (Galatians 1:4).

We sing because “we know that we are from God,” even though “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).

We sing because our King chose us out of the world (John 15:19), and his grace is “training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age” (Titus 2:12).

Paul and Silas were beaten for their faith and thrown in jail. And there, in the darkness, they sang (Acts 16:25). Then a great earthquake shook the jail like a great bass drum reverberates through sound waves and shakes your heart.

The foundations of the church building may not shake when you sing, but the battle cry of love ripples through eternity and is heard by an unseen audience.

Overflowing Hearts

As someone who can hardly carry a tune in a bucket, it helps me to remember what our associate pastor often says about our congregational singing. In his Sydney accent he says, “We’re singing to God, yes, but we are also singing truth to each other.”

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16)

We are a people stubbornly fixed on the things that are unseen. The world sees affliction as evidence that our God is silent or absent. The prince of the power of the air imagines that he is gaining ground that belongs to Christ. But we hold fast to what God’s word says,

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:17–18)

C. S. Lewis once described the Church as “through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners” (Screwtape Letters).

Keith Getty and Stuart Townend called the church, “An army bold whose battle cry is ‘Love!’ / Reaching out to those in darkness” (O Church Arise).

Singing Loud

Maybe Buddy the Elf was on to something when he said, “The best way to spread Christmas cheer, is singing loud for all to hear.”

We are spreading the news that death will be swallowed up forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from the earth, for the Lᴏʀᴅ has spoken (Isaiah 25:8). The mouth of the Lᴏʀᴅ has spoken it, and we sing it loud for all to hear.

Terrible as an army with banners, we’re a singing people on our way to the city that is to come (Hebrews 13:14).

May others hear our holy, stubborn song and join along.