Lies to Unlearn

By Rankin Wilbourne, Lead Pastor

Since my September 18^th message on contentment, many people have written me about it. It struck a chord. The book I mentioned and quoted several times is The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, by Jeremiah Burroughs. It’s worth your time, as is reflecting again on Paul’s humility:

“I have learned,” he says, “in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.” (Philippians 4:11-12)

If that sounds impossible to you, notice that even Paul says in verse 11, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.” In other words, “I have learned that contentment in every condition is a great art, an art to be learned. I have not always been a content person. There was a time when I wasn’t, but now after all I’ve been through, I have learned.”

Even Paul had to learn this secret.

I am not a content man. I have not yet learned what Paul has. What I am learning from Jesus, Paul, the rest of the Bible, and other wise teachers is the path toward contentment.

If Paul learned how to be content, what did he learn? Before we can learn this art, there is first something we must unlearn: discontentment.

It’s easy for me to think of discontentment as a fact of life, even a virtue in disguise, a by-product of ambition. So it was altogether striking to go back and read the story of God’s people wandering in the wilderness. The people had been liberated from Egypt, but they are not yet where they want to be. They are waiting – in limbo.

Things aren’t going well, so they do what we do when we’re not happy. They grumble, they complain, they murmur. And here’s what’s striking: it really bothers God. I’ll give two of many examples:

The LORD says, “How long will this wicked community grumble against Me? I have heard the complaints of these grumbling Israelites.”  (Numbers 14:27)

Three times in one verse, God repeats “grumble” and “complain” to show His indignation:

You murmured in your hearts and said, “Because the LORD hated us He has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites.” (Deuteronomy 1:27)

Now what’s the big deal about complaining and grumbling? We all do it. Whether it’s traffic or your job or your life, where you are right now. “I thought I’d be married by now.”

We think the real problem is what we’re complaining about. But no, that’s just smoke, and where’s there’s smoke there’s fire. And the fire, what’s smoldering underneath our grumbling spirit, is something far more serious, even sinister. And all the more sinister is that we treat it as a trifle.

Your discontentment is not a minor inconvenience. Your discontentment is a grave sin against God. Because every time we complain or grumble about our circumstances, we accuse God – we belittle God’s character and God’s care.

You can hope, you can be upset, you can long for things to be different. But when we are discontent, if we are not crying out to God, we are complaining about God, whether we realize it or not.

That’s the big deal: discontentment. That’s the fire underneath the smoke of our grumbling. And fueling this fire of discontent is a steady fuel of four lies.

The Four Lies We Have to Unlearn

1. God is holding out on me

All the way back in the garden, this was Satan’s game with Eve: “If God were really good, He’d let you eat from that tree. He doesn’t want you to have that, because He doesn’t want what’s best for you. He’s holding out on you.”

In the wilderness the people said, “Because the LORD hated us, He brought us out of Egypt.” Same idea. “If God were really good to us, we wouldn’t be stuck here!”

Similarly, when we complain today – without crying out to God in prayer – you are smearing God’s character. God is not holding out on you; that’s a lie.

2. God owes me

Behind our discontentment is an assumption that we are entitled to happiness. It’s in our national fabric: that we are entitled to “life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” As if we have a right to happiness and therefore a right to be discontent.

Now this is going to be hard to hear, but it needs to be said: if we gave to God absolute 100% perfect obedience, every moment of our lives, we would only be giving Him what He deserves. At our best, we would have only done our duty.

And since we haven’t given God perfect obedience, God has treated us far better than we deserve.

I had a friend, an older man named Ken Camp, who just died. But what I thought about on the day of his funeral, what I always loved about Ken, was that he always greeted me the same way. I would say, “Hey Ken, how you doing?” And he’d always say the same thing: “Better than I deserve!”

Next time you complain, remember you don’t have a right to happiness. The only thing God owes us is justice. And everything in your life better than hell is the mercy of God.

3. If only

You ever play the “if only” game? You daydream, “If only I had that… then…”

Or “If only I had __________, then I could finally rest.”

Every great teacher from Buddha to Socrates has told us this is a lie. But we don’t seem to believe them. So God dedicated an entire book of the Bible so we might know that there is nothing under the sun that can satisfy our souls.

Imagine a man more brilliant that Albert Einstein, more wealthy than Bill Gates, more powerful than Barack Obama, the spiritual pedigree of Billy Graham, but more of a hedonist that Hugh Hefner. That’s King Solomon, who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes – who chased  “if only” in terms of power, money, sex, fame and learning – but who concluded, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!”

“If only” is a chasing after the wind. It’s a lie.

4. I know what’s best for me

When you worry, you are saying, “I know what’s best for me, and I’m worried God won’t get it right.”

One old writer put it in a word picture:

Are you not the King’s son?
Are you the daughter of the King of heaven and earth?
And yet so disquieted and troubled and vexed at what is happening to you,
As if the King’s son were to cry out that he is undone for losing his rattler, his toy!

In every disposition, God knows better than you do what you need.

I realize this is some strong drink. But since we are so “entitled,” it must be said directly. We will never learn how to be content unless we first unlearn our discontent.

Grumbling, complaining is just the smoke. You can’t put out that fire unless you turn off the fuel, the lies fueling your discontentment. Discontent is the worm in the apple that eats out the sweetness of what is already in your hands by distracting you with what you don’t have.

We treat it as a trifle but it insults the character of God. If you think God takes it lightly, go and read the story told in Numbers, Chapter 11.

Our hope is that these lies can be unlearned. And only then we can find contentment. Paul shares with us the great ‘secret’ he has learned: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)

Only through Christ, who must not only save me but strengthen me. Lord Jesus, strengthen me today, to bear what is beyond my strength. Uphold me today.

Click here to hear Rankin’s message on contentment. Click here to read Rankin’s blog post from last week on the ten “maxims” toward contentment.

9/11, Haiti, the Death of a Child - Pt. II

By Rankin Wilbourne, Lead Pastor

In the title of this post, I mention three tragedies in the same breath not because I think they are comparable. One of the myths we perpetuate is that sufferings can be compared. We can look down on others who haven’t “suffered like we have,” or we can dare to tell someone, even a relative stranger, “I know how you feel.” No.

There are national, even international, catastrophes that provoke anguished questions. And there are our private and semi-private griefs. After which, we wonder how others can just keep going on as if the world has not forever been changed. As a parent of young children, I find it hard to imagine anything more heart wrenching than losing a child. In this, Job’s friends did one thing well.

And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. (Job 2:13)

Saying nothing. Eventually, however, the questions still hang over us. When it comes to inexplicable tragedy, no one can give you the reason for why this is happening.

But Christianity does provide unrivaled resources for dealing with and walking through pain. Everyone makes a choice – no one is exempt from deciding how to deal with evil and suffering in the world and in our lives.

And more than any other choice you’ve got, Christianity gives you resources to endure suffering with courage and hope rather than bitterness and despair.

Consider Jesus. Jesus suffered, suffered terribly, and He died. And when you read the account of His suffering, something should stand out to you: His experience in contrast to what you would expect of a spiritual hero, compared to the way Buddha faced his death, or the way Socrates faced his, or even how martyrs did in the early church – like Stephen, in Acts 6. They were all confident and defiant and poised, but not Jesus. The Bible tells us that He was racked with agony. “My soul is surrounded with sorrow,” He says literally in Mark 14. He was sweating great drops of blood, pleading with His Father for some other way.

And at the end, unlike Stephen who called out confidently to God, Jesus cries out that He has been forsaken by God.

Now as terrible as death by crucifixion was – and it was the most grievous torture of the ancient world – why was Jesus more racked by His fate than others have been, even including His own followers?

Because while Jesus was a man, fully a man, He wasn’t just a man. Those same Gospel stories make it clear that Jesus was the man God became, when God became a man. He is the Son of God, who was present at the creation of the whole world and had lived for all eternity in communion with His Father, and had spent His entire earthly life with that bond. That’s why the prospect of the Cross was agonizing.

We understand how painful it is for a relationship to be severed. We understand intuitively that the pain is relative to the depth of the relationship. Tim Keller has often said, “To lose a friend is more painful than to lose a neighbor we barely know, and to lose a spouse or a parent or a child would be even more painful still.”

The pain is relative to the depth of the relationship. We grieve over losing an intimate relationship that has lasted for years. How much more for Jesus to lose the infinite love of the Father He had had from all eternity?

It would be infinitely unbearable – that’s why He resisted the cross. The death of Jesus was qualitatively different than any other death. The physical pain paled compared to the real cosmic abandonment.

But He went! And why did He go? He went as one of us for us – to suffer in our place.

And on that cross, He entered in. He dove down into the very bottom of the muck, the sins of the world, all the brokenness, all that separates humanity from its Creator. And He took it upon His own shoulders – in the darkness – to be cut off. ”My God…” The place we deserved to be.

See, God does not wave a magic wand over the sins and suffering of the world. He does not say it’s not a problem. He took the full weight of that problem onto Himself in Christ. As Peter Kreeft once put it: “That’s not God off the hook; that’s God on the hook of human suffering.”

In Jesus Christ, God experienced the greatest depth of pain. He became a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief that we might know we are never alone in ours: Immanuel.

That’s why I’m a Christian. No other religion or philosophy of life has the resources to address the depth of suffering experienced in this life. Only Christianity claims that God became fully human in Jesus Christ.

And therefore, God personally understands and knows and experiences firsthand despair, rejection, loneliness, poverty, grief, torture, abandonment – all the affliction of the world – and still does today. He dredged the very dark bottom to rescue us to pull us back up to Himself.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga puts it like this:

Some people say God can’t suffer; I think they are wrong. God’s capacity for suffering is proportional to His greatness and that is infinite… the infinite sorrow, as He takes upon Himself suffering we can’t fathom.

How can God bear all the pain and suffering in this world? He bore it; He came all the way down under the weight of it.

Friends, that is why we know we can trust Him, when we turn on the television or read the newspaper or when we quietly suffer. He was forsaken by His Father so that you might know you never can be, or will be, if you would but repent and believe in Him!

Far from undermining my faith, I could never believe in God were it not for the cross of Jesus. How could I have some sentimental, vague idea of a spirit, or a force? How could I commune with a God who was immune to our pain?

So then, Haiti, where was God?

Where He always is – on the throne of the universe, with sorrow and scars. We still don’t know the answer but we know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that He is not good. It can’t be that He does not love us. It can’t be that He doesn’t love the people of Haiti. It can’t be that He does not care what happens.

He takes it so seriously that He became it. That is a theology of suffering. That gives us deep consolation and courage and strength. Come what may: Immanuel.

This is the terrible secret of suffering: God can only be known through it because suffering is who God is.

I don’t like comparing tragedies because you can’t really. Like stories, you only have your own to work through. But like some of you, I’ve had to stand by and watch people I love die, watch their lives disintegrate – and a few of them by choice.

My dad died when I was 17. I was not a Christian, and I was angry – angry even at the God I did not believe in. Through years of navigating that sorrow, I wanted to turn away from God. But as GK Chesterton once asked, “In heaven’s name, to what?”

It wasn’t until I was exposed to what I’m talking about this morning: the Christian God is not some distant, cold, powerful deity. Powerful, yes, but power expressed in love; love that would suffer and does.

I met Jesus through my suffering. He understands what it’s like to lose a father. He understands betrayal, loneliness. He understands me, and this was my chance to turn toward God and say “YES.”

I still don’t know why, but my lack of understanding humbled me. It allowed me to desire God to be in the place where He belongs – at the center of my life rather than at the periphery. And I now knew I could trust that place to Him.

But a full-orbed theology of suffering can’t end here: we need something more than knowing God is with us. We need hope to believe that our suffering is not pointless, not in vain.

Here too Christianity offers resources that no other philosophy or worldview does: not just in the cross of Christ, but also in the fact of Jesus’ physical resurrection from the dead. Heaven is not the end of the individual’s life, nor merely a consolation for the difficulties of life. But it is material, physical, real – a restoration of real life as it was supposed to be! That is what lies ahead of us.

This means that every horrible thing that has ever happened will not only be repaired, but will somehow make the eventual glory and joy even greater.

CS Lewis puts it this way: “They say of temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”

The Bible puts it this way: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” (Romans 8:18)

This is not only saying that God works through pain to bring redemption, that God brings new life out of death, but also that the new life is sweeter for having passed through the pain. This is not a fairy tale, but a hard-won bloodied hope. It means that earthquakes and tsunamis, and miscarriages and cancer are not the final words.

He is not only the suffering God; He is the God who overcomes.

And one day, even in Port-au-Prince, everything will be as it is supposed to be, and it will be a far better world than if there had never been the need for relief and rescue, bravery and sacrifice.

In the climax of the Lord of the Rings triology, Sam Gamgee discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead, as he thought, but alive. And Sam says, “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?”

Christianity’s answer to that is YES. Everything sad is going to come untrue, and it will be somehow better and greater for having once been broken and lost.

That’s our hope: that’s our God. Today, let us turn back to Him.

Ten Maxims toward Contentment

On Sunday, September 18th, Rankin explored the path of contentment in his message I Just Want to Be Happy. He shared ten scripture-based “maxims” for learning contentment in our lives. As a resource to our community, the maxims are posted below. If you’d like to download a printable version, click here.

1. Better than I deserve

2. Count your blessings

3. Embrace today

4. Think about Heaven

5. Think about others who suffer

6. God is faithful

7. This is possible

8. Admit – I need help

9. Contentment in Jesus, not Jesus plus…

10. Draw down, today, on the Gospel

9/11, Haiti, the Death of a Child - Pt. I

By Rankin Wilbourne, Lead Pastor

In the wake of remembering 9/11 last Sunday and the emotions that remembrance stirred, several people asked about resources.

“Where was God?” is the most common question. And for those who don’t believe in the Christian God, suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest obstacle to the Christian faith. Their questions result in assumptions about God’s nature:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then God is impotent.

Is God able, but not willing? Then God is malevolent.

Is God both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

It’s not just a question reserved for the skeptical mind. Even among professing Christians, sensitive spirits must ask, “How can we reconcile evil and suffering with the goodness and love of God?”

And it’s not simply a philosophical question. When intense pain comes into our personal lives, we can’t help but ask, almost instinctually, “Why?” Personal suffering affects your personal relationship with God. No matter how nuanced or tactful counselors may be, suffering often causes you to question the goodness of God. “Can I trust a God who would allow this to happen to me? How can I? Why should I? Even if God has a reason.”

Jerry Sittser, a theology professor at Whitworth College, a man well acquainted with grief, puts it like this:

God may have promised unconditional love. But I wondered if I could trust a God who allowed or caused suffering in the first place. My loss made God seem distant and unfriendly, as if he lacked the power or the desire to prevent or deliver me from suffering. Though I believed that my transformation depended upon the grace of God, I was not sure I could trust this God.

Timothy Keller once said that the time to acquire a “theology of suffering” is before it comes into your life. If you wait until you are in the midst of it, it’s similar to having to perform emergency surgery in your first semester of medical school. You are simply not equipped and are easily overwhelmed. Trauma is overwhelming enough since almost by definition you can never be prepared for it. That being said, it is critical to address these questions.

Let’s start with perhaps the least important but the most obvious – the philosophical. I say least important because it is the “least consoling” to the one who is suffering, but it is nevertheless for your own peace of mind as well as your ability to answer those who ask.

Despite popular opinion, evil and suffering are not evidence against God. And most professional philosophers working today will admit this. There is a flaw in the traditional reasoning that if God is good and powerful, God would not allow pointless evil, and since there is pointless evil in the world, a good and powerful god must not exist.

The flaw in that line of reasoning is the assumption that the world is filled with pointless evil. It assumes, “if evil appears pointless to me, then it must be pointless.” That’s not only bad logic – it’s incredibly arrogant.  Just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something like this to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one.  To believe that “just because I can’t see any reason for suffering, there must not be any reason” is a leap of faith.

Why God allows evil and suffering in the first place – we don’t know. But that doesn’t mean God can’t work through evil for His good purposes. Tim Keller likes to put it like this: if you have a God great enough to be mad at because He hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have at the same moment a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to happen that you can’t know.

Yes, suffering is a problem for the one who believes in God. But it’s an even bigger problem for you if you are not a believer. CS Lewis argues: if you say “I can’t believe in God because the universe seems so cruel and unjust,” where did you get this idea of “just” and “unjust”?  What are you comparing the universe to when you call it unjust? If you say it’s from your own private idea of justice, then your own argument against God collapses. For your argument depends upon saying, “The world really is unjust.” Not simply that it didn’t please your private fancies.

Lewis is pointing out that this objection to God is based on a sense of how things ought to be. People ought not to suffer, die of hunger, be killed in earthquakes.

But if there is no God, if you are just a product of blind, evolutionary chance, then why are you so upset at nature taking its course? It’s natural: death, destruction, violence. In nature the lion eats the lamb – that is natural! On what basis then, can you say the world ought to be any other way? Suffering can appall you only if you have some sense that this is not the way it is supposed to be. But on what basis can you be appalled? Unless you are assuming the very thing you are denying: the reality of some beyond-nature, supernatural standard.

You simply don’t have a right to be upset about suffering if you reject God. Which means, if you reject Christianity, the fact that suffering does appall you means suffering is an even bigger problem for you than for the Christian.

It is bad reasoning to think that abandoning God somehow makes the problem of pain easier to handle.

“Okay,” you might respond, “it doesn’t disprove God, and it’s a problem for everyone. But that doesn’t get God off the hook. That doesn’t mean it is easier for me to trust God’s character.”

That doesn’t mean you’re not angry or upset. “God – if You’re God and You’re there, and You’re good: Why is this happening?”

So how do we respond? There are a couple of traditional religious answers.

In Luke 13:1-5, Luke reports a story, oddly enough, of a tower collapsing and killing several people.  What is fascinating about this passage is that these people make the same two assumptions most people make today when others suffer.

1. Those who suffer are just getting what they deserve as fallen creatures in a fallen world.

It is clear from the text that those who told Jesus about the Galileans assumed those people had suffered because they were evil. Every time there is a massive disaster today you hear voices saying the same thing. You heard it at 9/11, Katrina, Haiti. That there was some sin or flaw in these people – they brought it upon themselves.

How would Jesus respond to that? We happen to know – the same way he responded to that same assumption in Luke 13:2:

“Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans?
Because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you!”

While it is true that – compared to a perfect and Holy God – all of us fall short, and while it is true that to be bitter toward God because of your suffering assumes something false (that God owes you something), an even better question might be: “Why does God allow so much happiness?”  As John Piper once put it, “Why does God allow the sun to keep coming up every day over a world that ignores him?”

But still, while all that may be true, my old professor Diogenes Allen used to say, that still doesn’t account for the distribution or magnitude of evil. Why are these people suffering? And why do some suffer so much more than others? Is it because they are worse people?  “NO, I tell you,” Jesus says.

To assume it has to do with guilt is not only callous – the worst case of “blame the victim” – but it is to make the same mistake that Jesus’s questioners make, which is why Jesus says elsewhere: “God sends rain on the just and the unjust.”

And, we might add, earthquakes shake the just and the unjust. In Haiti, some violent criminals died and others were set free from prison by the disaster.

A second common response traditionally religious people make in the face of evil and suffering is to say that:

2. Suffering is merely the result of human free will.

God gave us freedom. And in giving us freedom, God created the possibility of evil.

But human freedom has nothing to do with apparently random acts – like tsunamis and earthquakes, cancer, and birth defects. Or, in Luke 13, the collapse of a tower on 18 people who happened to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Life is unfair. You can be obeying all the traffic laws and still be killed by a drunk driver. You can eat all the right food, exercise, and still have a heart attack. Jesus’ questioners were assuming something a lot of people still assume today when we or someone else suffers: There must have been a reason – in these people, in this man, in this woman – that caused God to afflict them, or allowed God to allow that.

No, I tell you! Not necessarily. Perhaps (John 5:14; 1 Corinthians 11.30) but not necessarily (John 9:3, the Book of Job).

I have seen Christians – who are suffering or whose loved ones are suffering – knock themselves out with this question: “What is God trying to teach me?”

It is one thing to say that God can use suffering to turn us back to Him, to make us depend on Him more, that for God to have allowed this, He must have a reason. But that doesn’t mean we can or ever would understand the reason. It doesn’t mean we will ever know why God allowed this, or that God was trying to teach you a particular lesson you weren’t getting.

We don’t know why, and we shouldn’t presume we do. One thing that you can be certain of in suffering is that this is your best shot in life to answer this question: “Do I love God for who God is? Or do I simply love God for the life God has given me?” That’s why the Bible calls them trials – because they try and test the genuineness of our faith (James 1:2-4).

The one question we all ask when we suffer is “why me?” Jerry Sittser suggests that the one question we should ask when others suffer is “why not me?” That happens to be what Jesus in Luke 13 wanted his questioners to consider: “Hey, why not you?” What is the difference between that tower falling on him and not me? The Haiti earthquake happened in Port-au-Prince and not Los Angeles: why not us?

Do we think that the people in Manhattan or Haiti are worse? Or that we are better than them?  “Think too of all who suffer as if you shared their pain,” the author of Hebrews advises (13:3) because one day you will.

So, Jesus gives this counsel: today, while you have the chance, before you perish, repent. That’s what Jesus says: “Are they worse? No, I tell you, and unless you repent, you too will likewise perish” (Luke 13:3). Stop focusing on the “why” of their tragedy. And focus on the greater, very real, threat before you today: not repenting. That’s what Jesus says to us.

In remembering the horror of 9/11, don’t merely be an empathetic spectator. See in this remembrance not only an opportunity to help those in need, but a call from God to turn your life back to Him, to repent, before the day your life is shaken.

Now, I’ve given you a philosophical response to the problem. I’ve shown you some inadequate but common religious responses. But let’s finally get down to it. All this philosophizing doesn’t get the Christian God off the hook for the world’s evil and suffering. “Why should I even want to repent, turn back toward a God whom I don’t know if I can trust in a world like this?”

To be continued next week… Wednesday at 4:00 pm.

Praying in Real Time and Real Space

By Rankin Wilbourne, Lead Pastor, and Jeremy Weese, Assistant Pastor

Over the last few weeks we have been asking questions together about prayer: What is prayer? Why do we pray? What is the purpose of prayer? On our sermons page, you can listen to the conversation again or for the first time.

Along that path of faith, littered with questions, fears, and hopes, we arrived here: We must ask, ask, and keep asking. And the first step in becoming a people of prayer is simply to begin praying.

So we set aside some time, find a quiet place, and try it.

But if you are like me, as soon as the noise around me is turned down, the noise inside becomes deafening. Anxieties, concerns, and to-do lists crowd our thoughts. The list of things to ask for is so long – things we need, things others need – yet as we begin to pray we don’t know how to ask for them. How do we pray for struggling marriages? For people who have lost a loved one? For our friend without a job, who is falling into depression? What do we ask for when we’re not sure what to ask for?

So we sputter to a halt, overwhelmed, discouraged. How do we pray in real time and real space?

First, remember where Jesus taught us to start: “Our Father.” We are praying to a person, but not just any person. We pray to our Father, who has demonstrated the lengths He is willing to go in His love for us; to our Father, who knows what we need; to our Father, who loves to give good gifts; to our Father, who has made a way for us to know Him and speak to Him. We don’t have to have perfect diction, the proper order, the correct words. We don’t even have to know what to ask for. That’s what it means to come to our Father.

Second, as we are learning to grow in prayer, I want to outline a tool I’ve learned from Paul Miller’s A Praying Life, an extremely helpful book.

But before I do, I want to make this distinction: this is a tool, not a technique. A tool is something we use in the pursuit of accomplishing something bigger; a technique is something we seek to perfect as part of accomplishing it. A tool is a hammer; a technique is a golf swing. If the hammer is doing its job, you forget it is even there – you are focused on the project, the end goal. And that is what I want this tool to be – something that we use to help us pray, but we forget it is even there as we talk with God.

Paul Miller recommends using prayer cards, one for each individual, or group, or area of growth. These can be more helpful than lists, because lists can get unwieldy, disconnected and overwhelming.

Prayer cards are easier to show than to explain.

Let’s say I wanted to have one for my friends Stephen and Charity.

Having a verse that connects to the person and situation helps us when we aren’t sure how to pray, as well as helping us learn to speak God’s words after Him.

On that card, I write short phrases to jog my memory of the situations in their lives, as well as ways they have asked me to pray for them.

Over time, the card will become fuller (even spreading onto the back of the card!). Some requests have dates associated with them; others will be more ‘big picture.’

This way, all your prayers for this person or situation will be gathered together in a snapshot. When praying for them, you don’t have to spend an hour on a card, just focus on one or two requests off of each.

And you don’t have to write out a card for each person. Perhaps you want to have a single card for your community group; your extended family; the church staff; the leaders of our state and country. Paul Miller gives us some ideas about what a prayer card “deck” might look like:

• family
• people-in-suffering
• friends
• friends and family who are seeking
• missionaries
• community group
• world/cultural issue
• work
• co-workers
• things I need to repent of
• hopes or big dreams

You may pray through some of the cards every time; others might be on a rotational cycle. What your prayer cards look like will reflect the uniqueness of your life, your family, your struggles. That is one of the things I love most about this tool – it provides structure while allowing for flexibility.

Whether you use this tool, or another one, the important thing is to pray. Pray. Speak with your Father, knowing that even as you pray you are getting the one thing you need above all else – God Himself.

Portrait of an Exile

9/4/11

Marshall Brown explores the book of 1 Peter, a letter written to Christians whom Peter calls “elect exiles.” Peter writes to provide encouragement, hope and instruction to those struggling to live faithfully in a hostile world.