Peace on Earth, Good-Will to Men

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." (Matthew 5:9)

With the confluence of the Advent season and mass shootings occurring at (what should be) alarming rates, I am reminded of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "Christmas Bells." It was penned during a time of great personal pain for Longfellow. As the Civil War raged, Longfellow lamented the loss of his wife to a terrible accident and the near-fatal injuries his son had sustained in battle. He described the dissonance within his own heart at hearing Christmas bells wring out, "Peace on earth, good-will to men!" while his own experiences demonstrated anything but.

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

But even as Longfellow's circumstances truly were terrible, they would not get the final word. Instead, he turned his attention to what he knew to be true about the loving God who superintends those circumstances:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

This Christmas season, may the bells (and all the other trappings) of Christmas remind us that just as Jesus came once, he is coming again. And when he does, he will set all things to rights, for it is his heart that there should be "peace on earth, good-will toward men." In a world filled with so much Wrong, I can think of no greater encouragement than the knowledge that the Right will indeed prevail!

But let's take it a step further, shall we? For if this idea of "peace on earth, good-will to men" is important to Jesus, then it should also be important to those of us who are his followers. Therefore, let us take tangible steps to promote peace, to demonstrate good-will:

• Love your neighbor, even when they're not very lovely
• Forgive those who have wronged you, even though they don't deserve it
• Seek reconciliation with those with whom you are at odds
• Focus less on how we've been wronged (be it as individuals or as a group) and spend more time prayerfully considering where we might have been wronged by others
• Humbly seek forgiveness from others regardless of whether they're willing to admit the wrong that they've done
• Pray (really pray) for those who are your enemies 
• Show respect to everyone, as those who bear the image of God, even if you disagree vehemently with them on the most fundamental and important of issues

In doing these types of things, we will truly be followers of Christ, those who are about "peace on earth, good-will to men."

Stott on Having a God-Directed View of Prayer

"It will be seen that the fundamental difference between various kinds of prayer is in the fundamentally different images of God which lie behind them. The tragic mistake of Pharisees and pagans, of hypocrites and heathen, is to be found in their false image of God. Indeed, neither is really thinking of God at all, for the hypocrite thinks only of himself while the heathen thinks of other things. What sort of God is it who might be interested in such selfish and mindless prayers? Is God a commodity that we can use to boost our own status, or a computer that we can feed words into him mechanically."

John Stott
The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

Give us this day our daily bread...

"The prayer for bread in this petition should be allowed to remain, first of all, a prayer for bread. At times in the church's exposition this bread has been turned into spiritual bread...It is possible to be more spiritual than God. Why would Jesus who fed his five thousand not want us to pray for the feeding of our six billion? And while Jesus says that man does not live by bread alone, he is too realistic to say that man does not live by bread at all."

Frederick Dale Bruner
Matthew: A Commentary, Volume 1: The Christbook, Matthew 1-12

Calvin on Why We Pray

“But if God knows what things we have need of, before we ask him, where lies the advantage of prayer? If he is ready, of his own free will, to assist us, what purpose does it serve to employ our prayers, which interrupt the spontaneous course of his providence? The very design of prayer furnishes an easy answer. Believers do not pray, with the view of informing God about things unknown to him, or of exciting him to do his duty, or of urging him as though he were reluctant. On the contrary, they pray, in order that they may arouse themselves to seek him, that they may exercise their faith in meditating on his promises, that they may relieve themselves from their anxieties by pouring them into his bosom; in a word, that they may declare that from Him alone they hope and expect, both for themselves and for others, all good things. God himself, on the other hand, has purposed freely, and without being asked, to bestow blessings upon us; but he promises that he will grant them to our prayers. We must, therefore, maintain both of these truths, that He freely anticipates our wishes, and yet that we obtain by prayer what we ask. As to the reason why he sometimes delays long to answer us, and sometimes even does not grant our wishes, an opportunity of considering it will afterwards occur.”

John Calvin

Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, volume 1

Tim Keller on Prayer

"To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule--it is a failure to treat God as God."

Tim Keller
Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

Revival vs. Revivalism

I really appreciated this video with Bryan Chapell, Kevin DeYoung and Rick Phillips discussing the topic of "revival and revivalism."
Should Christians Pray for Revival? from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Stanley Gale on Prayer and God's Sovereignty

"Prayer is a means by which God enfolds us int the outworking of his eternal plan. Prayer is God's means for God's ends. God executes his plan and accomplishes his purposes through the mediation of our prayers as his people. Prayer is intended by God to engage us in the accomplishment of his purposes for his own glory and goals.

"We can say that in praying we can expect God to do something he would not have done had we not prayed, not to limit God but to exalt the glory of his unfathomable providence that governs all causes, mediate and immediate. In other words, to suggest God waits on our prayers does not make God smaller. It makes him bigger than we could ever possibly fathom. Who is like God, governing means and ends, including the acts and prayers of his creatures, without violating their free agency and still maintaining their responsibility and culpability?

"We can take it even a step further: God's sovereign plan not only does not invalidate responsible action, it establishes it because that is the way God has designed things. Our prayers are not intruders on God's plan but instruments in that plan."

Stanley D. Gale
Why Do We Pray?

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Ryken on Prayer and God's Sovereignty

"Imagine for a moment that God is not sovereign in grace, but that salvation ultimately depends on the sinner's own choice. How then should we pray? Do we say, 'Dear Lord, I realize that there may not be much that you can do about this, but if there is, please help my friend somehow to become a Christian'? Of course, no one actually prays this way: the very idea is absurd. But what makes it so absurd is that, deep down, every Christian believes in the sovereignty of God's grace. When we pray for sinners to be converted, therefore, we ask God to do something for them that we know they are utterly incapable of doing for themselves. We ask God to invade their minds, change their hearts, and bend their wills so that they will come to him in faith and repentance. In short, in our intercession we depend on God to save them."

Philip Ryken

What is a True Calvinist?

A Prayer for the Body

Almighty God,

who heaven and the highest heavens cannot contain,

whose greatness cannot be captured in mere words,

whose perfect holiness can hardly be comprehended...

On our own we come before you

as finite creatures,

whose own words consistently reveal an overvalued self-worth,

and the depths of whose sin we hardly can fathom.

But thankfully, we do not come before you on our own.

Rather we come before you in the name of our Lord,

washed clean of our sin by the blood of Christ Jesus,

robed in His righteousness alone.

So now, instead of enemies, rightfully the objects of your scorn and wrath,

            we come before you as beloved children,

            recipients of grace,

            joint heirs with Christ your Son.

As such may we conformed to His likeness:

May our minds dwell on that which is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent and praiseworthy;

May our feet be swift to walk in those good works which you have prepared for us.

May our mouths proclaim good news of happiness, and publish salvation; saying to the people of God: "Your God reigns."

May our hands be holy, as they are raised before you in prayer.

May our hearts be glad, and our whole being rejoice; for we dwell secure in your love.

And may it all be so, by your grace and for your glory,

For we ask it in the matchless name of Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Sinclair Ferguson on the Praying Church

The other day Ligonier posted a portion of a 2008 interview with Sinclair Ferguson. In it Ferguson discussed what most troubled him about the Church in our day. I found his words instructive and convicting.

Again there is the lack of prayer and of the Church praying. This is to me the most alarming, for this reason: we have built apparently strong, large, successful, active churches. But many of our churches never meet as a congregation for prayer. I mean never! What does that indicate we are saying about the life of the Church as a fellowship? By contrast, the mark of a truly apostolic spirit in the church is that that we give ourselves to prayer and the Word together (Acts 6:4). No wonder “the Word of God continued to increase and the number of the disciples multiplied” (Acts 6:7). If this is so, it should not surprise us that while many churches see growth, it is often simply reconfiguration of numbers, not of conversion. I greatly wish that our churches would learn to keep the main things central, that we would learn to be true Churches, vibrant fellowships of prayer, Gospel ministry and teaching, genuine mutual love. At the end of the day, such a Church simply needs to “be” for visitors who come to sense that this is a new order of reality altogether and are drawn to Christ.

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Calvin on the Asylum of Prayer

"We are not made of iron, so as not to be shaken by temptations. But this is our consolation, this our solace -- to deposit, or (to speak with greater propriety) to disburden in the bosom of God everything that harasses us. Confidence, it is true, brings tranquility to our minds, but it is only in the event of our exercising ourselves in prayers. Whenever, therefore, we are assailed by any temptation, let us betake ourselves forthwith to prayer, as to a sacred asylum."

John Calvin
Commentary on the Epistle to the Philippians (chap. IV. 6.)

A Word for Preachers...Eric Alexander on Prayer's Role in Preaching

"So there is a world of difference between true biblical preaching and an academic lecture or a rhetorical performance. We are utterly dependent on the grace and power of the Holy Spirit. Thank God, he uses the weak things of this world to confound the mighty, and the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are (1 Cor. 1:28). This is why it is absolutely essential to marry prayer to the ministry of the Word. In our ministries prayer is not supplemental; it is fundamental.

"Of course we subscribe to the principal that this work is God's work, not ours.' We subscribe to that because we are biblical Evangelicals, but the logical corollary of that statement is that prayer is a fundamental issue in the ministry of the Word, as in every part of our labor, and not, as we tend to make it, a supplemental matter."

Eric J. Alexander
What is Biblical Preaching?

Praying through the Psalms

"By using the Psalms, you will find that instead of seeing God as a cosmic vending machine, you will grow to know him as your Father in heaven. You will drink deeply of his grace. You will find your nourishment in his truth. Prayer becomes about something more than information. It fosters transformation."

Stanley D. Gale
Why Do We Pray?

J.D. Greear on the "Sinner's Prayer"

J.D. Greear offers some real helpful, balanced perspective in a recent article in Christianity Today entitled, Should We Stop Asking Jesus Into Our Hearts?

Belief and repentance are the only prescribed biblical instruments for laying hold of salvation. They might be expressed in a "sinner's prayer," but they are fundamentally postures of the heart toward God. It is possible to pray a sinner's prayer and not have repented and believed. It is also possible to repent and believe without articulating such a prayer.

He continues,

Salvation (is) obtained by simply resting on the two "facts" God had promised about Jesus: he was crucified as the payment for our sins; he was resurrected as proof that God accepted the payment. Just as Abraham was saved by believing God would keep his word, I was saved by believing he had. 

 Click here to read the whole article.

(HT: David Crabb)

How Are Our Prayers & God's Soverignty Related?

Recently I've been working through the Basics of the Faith series of booklets published by Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing. I've found that the booklets in this ever-growing series (now numbering 30+) are extremely accessible and helpful in giving overviews of their various topics.

In reading Stanley D. Gale's Why Do We Pray?, I came across this nugget that I thought I'd share:

"How do our prayers relate to God's eternal plan? The answer is that God has ordained our freely offered, honestly expressed petitions as his appointed means to accomplish his eternal purposes."

Somehow, in a way I don't (can't?) fully understand, God's power is at work in and through my prayers, not working independently from God's sovereignty, but rather as an agent of it. So let us pray!

A Quick Thought on Prayer

This morning I was considering the words of 1 John 5:14-15:

And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.

There are those who take such passages of Scripture and use them to develop a "prosperity gospel" that essentially preaches, "Trust God, and you will become healthy and wealthy." This is far from wise.

Rather, what we are promised here (and in many other similar passages) is that if our will is aligned with  God's, then we will receive those things for which we ask in prayer. If we really believe this to be true, then whenever we come before the Lord in prayer, our first and foundational petition can be none other than "Father, conform my will to that which is your own."

Every Nation Day of Prayer

I recently received Scotty Smith's book Everyday Prayers. It is a compilation of Scripture-centered and gospel-saturated prayers that Scotty has written through his personal study of and meditation on God's word. With this being National Day of Prayer, I found Scotty's prayer for today to be extremely helpful. It is adapted from a prayer posted a couple years ago at the Heavenward, his blog hosted by The Gospel Coalition, and further adapted (as I found after posting this) in today's post. Here's how it reads in the book:

After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” Revelation 7:9-10

Loving Father, on this “national day of prayer” it's easy to think of several things to bring before you. First of all, I praise you for heavenly citizenship. Thank you for making me a citizen of the realm from which I eagerly await the return of the true King, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He's already reigning, and one day he will return to transform all things—including my body to be like his glorious body (Philippians 3:20-21). What comfort and what joy that good news brings!

Secondly, as broken as our country is, I’m very thankful to be an American citizen. I praise you for the many freedoms we still enjoy and the multiplied privileges that go with being a citizen of this great nation. I bring our sitting president before the occupied throne of heaven, and I ask you to be at work in his heart and through his hands.

As with all “kings,” you set them up and you sit them down at your discretion, so I trust you for the accomplishment of your sovereign purposes through our president, in keeping with the eternal wisdom of your heart. I don’t look for a lasting city in our country but for the City builder and maker is God—that would be you!

Lastly, the more I understand the gospel, the more I find it easy to pray in light of John's vision of the "every nation" day of prayer. Oh, for the day when men and women from every nation, tribe, people and language will be wearing the white robes of grace-secured salvation, while waving palm branches of praise and shouting in perfect harmony, "Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:10).

Because that day is coming, free me to be a better citizen of two countries until the kingdom of God arrives in fullness and the King of glory arrives in splendor. I pray in his sovereign and saving name. Amen.

A Prayer for Year's End

        
               YEAR'S END

O LOVE BEYOND COMPARE,
Thou art good when thou givest,
     when thou takest away,
     when the sun shines upon me,
     when night gathers over me.
     Thou hast loved me before the foundation of the world,
     and in love didst redeem my soul;
Thou dost love me still,
     in spite of my hard heart, ingratitude, distrust.
Thy goodness has been with me another year,
     leading me through a twisting wilderness,
     in retreat helping me to advance,
     when beaten back making sure headway.
Thy goodness will be with me in the year ahead;
I hoist sail and draw up anchor,
With thee as the blessed Pilot of my future as of my past.
I bless thee that thou hast veiled my eyes to the waters ahead.
If thou hast appointed storms of tribulation,
     thou wilt be with me in them;
If I have to pass through tempests of persecution and temptation,
     I shall not drown;
If I am to die,
     I shall see thy face the sooner;
If a painful end is to be my lot,
     grant me grace that my faith fail not;
If I am to be cast aside from the service I love,
     I can make no stipulation;
Only glorify thyself in me whether in comfort or trial,
     as a chosen vessel meet always for thy use.

From Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers & Devotions.

A Word for Preachers...Stott on the Relationship Between Prayer and Study

"All the time we shall be praying, crying humbly to God for illumination by the Spirit of truth. We shall repeat Mose's petition, 'I pray you, show me your glory' (Exod. 33:18) and Samuel's 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening'. (1 Sam 3:9, 10) Christian meditation differs from other kinds in being a combination of study and prayer. Some preachers are very diligent students. Their desk is piled high with theological works, and they give their mind to the elucidation of the text. But they hardly if ever pray for light. Others are very diligent in prayer, but hardly ever engage in serious study. We must not separate what God has joined."

John Stott
Between Two Worlds

Weekly Words of Wisdom...Calvin on Prayer

"We may conclude...that no prayers are lawful or rightly composed unless they consist of these two members: First, all who approach God ought to cast themselves down before him, and to acknowledge themselves deserving of a thousand deaths; next, to enable them to emerge from the abyss of despair, and to raise themselves to the hope of pardon, they should call upon God without fear or doubt, and with firm and stable confidence. This reliance upon God can have no other support than the nature of God himself, and to this he has borne ample testimony."

John Calvin
Commentaries on The Prophet Daniel, Volume 2