Keller on Prayer

I'm really looking forward to reading Tim Keller's new book on prayer entitled Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. Here's some excerpts from an interview with Keller by Tony Reinke:

Question 1: Prayerlessness

Among Christians today, how widespread is prayerlessness — and what does that reveal about our spiritual health?

We know from empirical secular studies that everyone in our Western society today has less solitude. There is less and less of our days or our months or our weeks in which we are unplugged, when we are not listening to something or talking to somebody or texting. This is due to the pervasiveness of social media, the Internet, and various sorts of electronic devices. In the past, most people couldn’t avoid solitude. But now there isn’t any.

This is anecdotal, but everybody I talk to seems so busy, and is communicating so incessantly, and around the clock, that I do think there is more and more prayerlessness. There is less and less time where people go into a solitary place to pray. And I am sure that we are more prayerless than we have been in the past, and that says our spiritual health is in freefall.

Question 2: Praying the Psalms

Your new book is clear: a profitable prayer life is impossible without solitude, but it’s also impossible without God’s word. You explain a time in your life when you were driven by desperation to pray, and so you opened the Psalms and prayed through them. Explain how you did this and what you learned from this season.

I am glad to talk about that. I came to see that the Psalms are extremely important for prayer. Perhaps that is because I read a book some years ago by Eugene Peterson called Answering God. He makes a strong case that we only pray well if we are immersed in Scripture. We learn our prayer vocabulary the way children learn their vocabulary — that is, by getting immersed in language and then speaking it back. And he said the prayer book of the Bible is the Psalms, and our prayer life would be immeasurably enriched if we were immersed in the Psalms. So that was the first step. I realized I needed to do that, but I didn’t know how.

Then I spent a couple of years studying the Psalms. At one point, I realized that there were a fair number of the Psalms that seemed repetitious or difficult to understand, so I couldn’t use them in prayer. So I decided to work through all 150 of them. I used Derek Kidner’s little commentaries on the Psalms (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries), Alec Motyer’s commentary on the Psalms (The New Bible Commentary, 21st century edition), and Michael Wilcock’s commentarieson the Psalms (Bible Speaks Today).

I worked through all 150 Psalms and wrote a small outline and a small description of what I thought the Psalm was basically about, and key verses that I thought were useful for prayer. Using nine-point font, I basically broke out all 150 Psalms on about 20 pages, which I now use in the morning when I pray.

By the way, I use the Book of Common Prayer schedule. I read Psalms in the morning and the evening, and then I pray. Sometimes I actually pray the psalm, but many times I just read the psalm and then pray. I do this morning and evening and get through all 150 Psalms every month. So that is what I learned and that is what I do now.

I love this intentional and disciplined approach. I presume over time you found Peterson’s point to be true, that this practice shaped your prayer language?

Yes. That is the reason why you don’t have to literally take the psalm and turn it into a prayer, though that can often be powerful. Just reading all the Psalms every month all the way through, and then praying after reading a psalm, changes your vocabulary, your language, your attitude.
On the one hand, the Psalms actually show you that you can be unhappy in God’s presence. The Psalms, in a sense, give you the permission to pour out your complaints in a way that we might think inappropriate, if it wasn’t there in the Scriptures. But on the other hand, the Psalms demand that you bow in the end to the sovereignty of God in a way that modern culture wouldn’t lead you to believe.

Alec Motyer said the Psalms are written by people who knew a lot less about God than we do, and loved God a lot more than we do. And by that, he meant that because they didn’t know about the cross, there are a number of places where you could say they don’t know as much about God’s saving purposes as I do now. But, he says, even though many of the psalmists don’t know God as well as we do, they loved God more than we do....

Much more at the link.

Tempered Zeal

HT: Radio Free Babylon

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Prophet Sharing Plan

Does your church have a "prophet sharing plan"?

HT: Ed Stezer

Hearts More Deeply Gripped By Reality

"At the root of all our disobedience are particular ways in which we continue to seek control of our lives through systems of works-righteousness.

The way to progress as a Christian is to continually repent and uproot these systems the same way we become Christians, namely by the vivid depiction (and re-depiction) of Christ’s saving work for us, and the abandoning of self-trusting efforts to complete ourselves.

We must go back again and again to the gospel of Christ-crucified, so that our hearts are more deeply gripped by the reality of what he did and who we are in him,"

— Tim Keller, Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (New York, NY: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2003), page 61

HT: Of First Importance

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.

Future Vision

HT: Ziglar.com

The Bridge Over Death

Glory to You, Lord Jesus Christ!
You built Your cross as a bridge over death,
so that departed souls might pass
from the realm of death to the realm of life.

Glory to You!
You put on the body of a mortal man
and made it the source of life
for all mortal human beings.
You are alive!

Your murderers handled Your life like farmers:
they sowed it like grain deep in the earth,
waiting for it to spring up and raise with itself a multitude of men.

We offer You the great, universal sacrifice of our love,
and pour out before You our richest hymns and prayers.
For You offered Your cross to God
as a sacrifice in order to make us all rich.

- Ephrem the Syrian, 306-373

quoted in On the Way to the Cross

HT Trevin Wax

What's Good or Bad About Theology?

What is the difference between "good" and "bad" Theology? I like this definition form my friend Carey at "The Grumpy Theologian":

...If we dig back into the history of Christianity we find that periodically ideas pop up that are denounced as incompatible with the non-negotiables of the faith. If we dig a bit deeper we find that the most common reasons for these denunciations are pastoral. Docetism (Jesus was divine but not human), Ebionism (Jesus was human but not divine), Arianism (Jesus was neither human nor divine), and a number of other heretical "-isms"are denounced because their teaching has implications that obscure Christ's mediation between God and humanity. In other words, these doctrines are false because they point their adherents' eyes away from the Jesus of the Bible to a different Jesus, one built on human speculation rather than divine revelation. The consequences of believing a false Gospel are catastrophic if we listen to the New Testament (and we must do that listening if identifying ourselves as "Christians" is to mean anything substantive). Bad theology is bad most fundamentally because it is bad for the soul. It points hope toward things that ultimately disappoint (which is what happens when we try to make gods for ourselves out of anything other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) or it crushes hope altogether. False hope and no hope are both bad for the soul.

So far, so good, but what does this suggest about how we should go about doing goodtheology? Let me make a suggestion: Good theology is good for the same reason that bad theology is bad. Both have to do with how they function in pointing us to God. Bad theology is bad because it mis-portrays God and thus hinders our growing closer to Him as He really is. When our relationship to God is stunted by bad theology we suffer from soul starvation--an impoverished theology leads to an impoverished spiritual life. Now let's consider the flip-side of that statement. Good theology is good because it points us to God as He truly is (or, more properly, "Is"). Good theology facilitates transformative encounter with God and fosters ongoing, life-giving relationship with Him...

More worth reading at the link.

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Seeking Illumination

From Radio Free Babylon

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Authentic

Are you acting, or are you authentically who God wants you to be? From Lisa Great at Charisma:

Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock are actors/actresses who can convince you they are the character they are portraying because they have mastered the art of acting. But as soon as they step out of character, who they really are is seen by those who are behind the scenes. Some of these people have track records off set that make them even more respectable, while others have some personal issues that have discounted their character.

Religion is a master at teaching people how to say the right thing, act the right way and make people believe you are doing better than you really are. Some people put on Golden Globe performances when in church, talking to other Christians or even when praying, but not even a Golden Globe performance can fool the God of heaven and earth.

King David was called a man after God's own heart, not because he mastered the act of religion and right living, but because he allowed the authenticity of his heart to be seen by God and others. Listen to something he said in Psalm 22:2-3 (NASB), "O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but I have no rest. Yet, You are holy, O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel." David allowed his true feelings to be spoken, so what he believed about God could rise above his circumstances.

When we shut people down by not letting them share what they are really thinking and feeling, there is no way for them to tap the into the well of salvation that gushes with living water. Religion wants to silence your voice, but God wants to hear your voice. Your pain, your struggle, your trial, your authenticity is someone else's victory.

If we are going to reap the harvest, we have to be willing to listen to people's pain so the promise is real to them, not just the right words. This has to start in the church, and from there it will flow to the nations. Authenticity builds trust and when someone trusts you, they will be authentic around you.

Are you an actor or authentic? Others know, but do you?