Knees Are for Praying

All the books out there on prayer, how to pray, what to pray, yet we still seem to come up against times and seasons when we don’t quite know what to pray or how, feeling like our praying is getting us nowhere, fumbling about as if, if we just knew the secret code, the password, all would be opened to us: prayer as incantation.  Like Popeye said, there at Sinbad’s cave: “Open sez me!”

Many of us, including me, follow a more or less set pattern in praying: things in our lives, in the lives of some other people near to us, maybe a few things going on in the world.  These are not bad prayers.  God is never bored with our prayers.  God also gives us the call to prayer, the blessing of prayer, because He wants us to listen as well as to speak.  “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but my ears you have opened” (Ps 40:6).  An open ear is able and ready to hear.

All through the prophets, God remarks how His people have a listening problem.  How shall we hear the Spirit as we pray?  I think, sometimes, this happens when we stop thinking about praying: the how, the what, the when or where.  Focus on why: God loves you; God invites you; God has a blessing, a Word to impart.  And when I say Word, remember: God speaks to us in many ways.  Our Spirit-touched intuition can listen on many levels.

Maybe at some point you’ve also been in a conversation that left you feeling more like a spectator than a participant.  God would rather we permit Him to be a participant in our praying, not a spectator, an auditor only.  Paul writes that the Spirit “helps us in our weakness” (8:26).  We might not need much reminding of our weakness—we’ve tried relying on our own strength; we’re always in need of the Spirit.  I need Thee every hour.  There’s no one so strong in this world that he or she can’t be brought to his or her knees.  As long as we’re on our knees—pray.  Not so much the give-me-this, give-me-that praying as the be with me, be my rock, You are my salvation kind of praying.

It’s not as if we have no help.  In the agonizing moment, we’re certain of the help we need: strength, courage, peace, health, happiness, money.  Money can’t buy us love—not that that ever stopped us—but there seem to be many still, even in the churches, who live, and sometimes even pray, as if money could buy them happiness: safety, security, insulation from life’s coarse abrasions.  It isn’t happiness we need above all.  It’s God.  A sermon is not so much the occasion to say something new as for a reminder.  Happiness is not the best treasure in this life.  When we’re unhappy—and we sure do know how to be thoroughly unhappy!—we then go and feel sorry for ourselves and wonder why life must be so unfair.  There’s not time to get into that today.  Today, remember, the Spirit is with us to guide us, faithfully, all the way through.  So many enjoy the old hymn “Blessed Assurance”: the next time life has got you down, sing it.

The Spirit conducts us to God who listens, who loves us and will do all things for us . . . that are “in harmony with God’s own will” (8:27 NLT).  When I was younger, I prayed for things, many things, actual things, objects: give me this, give me that.  I said please.  I was very persistent!  I guess I felt those things were important, would make me so happy.  And after all, why ever would God above all not want me to be happy?  But over time I began to realize—and this was the Spirit, beloved—that God wasn’t so concerned with my happiness as with my holiness, my walk with the Lord in His righteousness.  Righteousness, holiness—a vital relationship: this brings the joy of peace, the peace of Christ.  Happiness . . . it comes and goes: sand through our fingers.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve spent more time praying for change in myself.  It’s still, basically, give me this, give me that: courage, strength, renewed zeal, humility, charity.  I’ve also been praying for loved ones.  Lately, I’ve been praying for those I don’t even know, but God knows them: they are my brothers and sisters in Christ in far corners of this world I’ll never see, but God sees.

What is in harmony with God’s will?  Thy Kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth.  As we forgive others, so also forgive us—which is a pact we have with God: the other, unspoken clause is this—if we do not forgive another, then do not forgive us.  May Your Word and Your way prevail, in me and in this broken, rough world.  Amen.  This is in harmony with God’s will.

God searches our hearts, as the Bible reminds us several times.  He sees all and asks us to lift all to Him: allow God to take, touch, bless, heal, and bring a rich harvest out of our dry, powdery soil.  We feel down; sometimes, we even make some efforts to cheer up.  Oh, life gets us down, but what brings us down, at heart, is us.  And what can be done about that?  The Spirit knows, beloved.  The Spirit lifts us, lifts our hearts to God, so that God may bless us.  There is a point in our Communion service when I exhort us to lift our hearts to the Lord.  We do not do that in our own strength.  It is the Lord.  He gets us into the shop to open the hood and get to work on our spirit.  Each of us, including me, has a spirit in need of work.  I daresay many of us have known someone with a broken spirit, some can even seem broken beyond repair.  With you, I so wish I could just snap my fingers or cry out to God, and the man, the woman, the child, would be restored, whole, and at peace: a glorious miracle.  A world of brokenness, all around us.  And beacons of hope, light in the darkened place—you, and me.  We aren’t called to be heroes; we’re called to be disciples.

A few weeks ago, I posted a Bible verse to our church facebook page.  A man, not at all connected to us, responded, in capital letters: BS.  Through this stretch of Romans, Paul says all manner of things that will strike some as crazy, others as presumptuous, and still others as just plain ignorant, insensitively ignorant.  As if what does he know?  Who does he think he is!?  How dare he.  Just today, we heard another of those crazy, presumptuous, insensitively ignorant things so typical of Paul: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (8:28).  All things.  All things?  You sure you want to go there?  But wait.  Did Paul say all things will be good?  Rotten things happen!  Paul says, in all things—no matter how rotten—God works for good.  God takes the trash and brings treasure out of it.  Paul is telling us that there is hope because there is also the powerful love of God.  People make a nightmare hellish mess out of life together; we’ve all suffered for it.  It’s not as if God is doing nothing about it.  “Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him” (Is 64:4).  Joseph tells his aghast, shame-faced brothers, “you meant it for evil”—you wanted to hurt and harm me, and you sure did!—but God was also at work, taking all the hurt and anger you were directing at me, and turning it to higher, holier, healthier purpose.  Because God is God, He can bring good out of even the worst.  He can bring a blessing—costly!

We love the little gifts people give, those I’m thinking of you and want to do a little something nice for you gifts: beautiful!  We also sense when a gift is costly.  We have the cross ever before us, in church and as Christians walking our journey.  In Roman days, the cross was a sign of the greatest infamy, anguish, and shame.  It didn’t get much worse than the cross, beloved.  So why do we lift it high?  Because, “in all things, God works for good for those who love Him” (8:28).  God is taking it, turning, reshaping it, for a blessing—out of difficulties, strength, out of problems, wisdom, out of dangers, courage, through helping those around us, love.[1]  If you want to grow in love, make a habit of helping others, whether you happen to feel like it or not.  The cross was meant for evil, the abolition of God;

God took it from our hands and redirected it to highest, holiest purpose: salvation, the exhibition of the grace and glory of God, turning the ways and wisdoms of the world upside down, to show forth His way, His wisdom.  God means to be glorified, beloved—the universe testifies to His glory—and there is nothing and no one to stop Him from doing so.

We have been called; that’s our only explanation, our only justification for why we are here, why we believe, why we cherish God’s Word, why we have faith.  We “have been called according to His purpose” (8:29): not your purpose or plans, not mine.  By any measure or standard of this world, God never should have chosen me; by the measures and standards of this world, His having chosen me only shows how foolish and probably ignorant God is: if He really knew anything about me, He never would have chosen me.  Do you understand what I’m saying?  Now, Devon gets concerned when I talk like this.  I’m trying to be rigorously candid, open with you.  There are those who know exactly what I mean.  I know myself.  I don’t subscribe to the Whitney Houston school of theology: the greatest love of all isn’t loving me.  This doesn’t mean I hate myself.  It means I am always battling against the default of making me the center of my life, the peak of my existence.  It means I look to God.  My Shepherd shall supply all my need.  His grace is sufficient.

When I’m attempting to be rigorously candid about myself, there may indeed be those who don’t understand what I’m talking about; I call them blessed.  Would that I could see the world as they do, and others, also.  Maybe they are looking with eyes much closer to Christ’s than mine.  I’m a Calvinist, among other reasons, because that account of human nature seems most accurate, to me.  Is it fun, bubbly, and sweet?  No.  But it’s true.  The beautiful, bright, and joyful I find all in God who calls me, and has claimed me, not because I happen to be me but because He is who He is; praise His holy name.

My glory, Christ, my King and my God—Paul pulls the veil aside here, just enough to give us a glimpse of wonder: “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.  And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified” (8:29-30).  A lot is packed in there!  Nothing is being  left out, nothing forgotten.  In your Bible time, beloved, in your meditations, spend time with these two verses.  God has always already known whom He would claim, those He has chosen for His kingdom.  It’s never a surprise to God when yet another sinner comes to faith.  It’s never the case that one sinner and another, in and despite their sin, with no assistance or help from God, freely chooses God.  No one can choose God without the help of God; it’s God who enables us to want Him; it’s God who decides.  We decide because God has decided.

People can get hung up on this word “predestined”: Mark Twain had all sorts of devilish glee with the term.  The term makes it sound as if choice and free will are illusions, as if a sinner could well make the excuse that God doesn’t want him, or her, the proof being his or her sinning: since I keep sinning, God must not want me; or, God must not want me, because I keep sinning.  Like God foreknowing, God predestining involves God making a sovereign, uninfluenced decision prior to anyone saying or doing a thing.  Oh, but God has always known what we would do and chose us based on that.  No.  That also makes God’s choice dependent upon us, upon what we do, rather than Him, His a sovereign, uninfluenced decision.  God is not merely some passive observer; God is under no obligation to reward our attempts at good behavior.  God is not waiting anxiously for our decision.  It’s God’s decision and always has been.

Predestination is another way of asserting that your election and my election to salvation is not the result of our virtuous living: no reward, no earned wages.  God does not owe us.  We do not win our salvation.  It’s not the case that those who rack up the highest score win salvation while all the also-rans roast in hell.  God makes His choice for His reasons, uncountable ages before any of us ever said, did, or thought one thing; God chose apart from anything we might say, think, or do.  But God knew ahead of time all the good we would do!  Yes, and He also already saw all the sin, including the sins we’re so glad nobody saw.

Our upward call in Christ is to call others to be built up together in Christ, by encouraging one another in holiness: this is the disciple’s way—encouragement, praise God!  In holiness, praise God!  Christ is holiness.  Paul is saying all those in Christ, by grace through faith, are being transformed—oh, by what feel like slow stages to us, but sure increments nonetheless.  Being transformed into the likeness of Christ, becoming holy.  When Paul writes of the redemption of our bodies, this conformity to Christ is part of what he has in mind.  God has replaced and is now replacing our likeness to Adam with likeness to Christ who is the fullness of God.

We live, move, and breathe as embodied persons, not disembodied spirits.  The renewal of our mind will show in what we do, and do not do, with, through, by means of our bodies.  We, deformed, are being reformed by the power of God.  Not by our own power.  It isn’t by our personal, inherent zeal, wisdom or knowledge that we are making ourselves holy.  Zeal, wisdom, and knowledge are gifts of the Spirit.  Through the Spirit, we in Christ are being made holy, being cultivated in faith by the Master Gardener.

We sang “Blessed Assurance” about a month back.  If you have ever taken time to think about the lyrics, you might just remember that the second and final verses open with the phrase “perfect submission”: as though perfect submission is perfectly blessed.  Submission—it’s not a word our society values, quite the opposite, as God knows.  Christ offered his sacrifice of perfect submission to the will, way, and Word of God.  And look what it got him.  In Christ, we also are becoming people who offer our sacrifice of submission.  The opposite of submission, of course, is resistance, is defiance.  God knows all about that, too.

[1] Frank v. God.  Stewart Schill, dir.  BBA Studios.  2014.