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Jesus is not only creation’s agent but its goal:
We are so busy pressing on to the next item on the agenda that we choose not to pause for fuel.
Paul will allow a married couple to turn aside from their obligation to meet each other’s sexual needs, but only on three conditions: (1) there must be mutual consent; (2) the purpose must be that they wish to devote themselves to prayer; (3) the suspension must be temporary, for an agreed time, after which the marital obligations must be reaffirmed.
Prayer is more important than sex.
at the end of the day, if you are too busy to pray, you are too busy. Cut something out.
Hidden behind this excuse are two presuppositions that are really quite monstrous. The first is that the acceptability of my approach to God in prayer ought to be tied to how I feel.
We don't pray because we are trusting in our righteousness instead of Christ's.
The second unacceptable presupposition behind this attitude is that my obligation to pray is somehow diminished when I do not feel like praying. This is to assign to my mood or my feelings the right to determine what I ought to do.
We don't pray because we put ourselves in the place of God.
as far as Jesus is concerned the real question is not whether or not God answers prayer but whether or not we have the faith to persevere;
To fall back on the excuse that we feel too dry or the like is merely to admit that we do not exercise the kind of faith that perseveres.
Faith that doesn't pray doesn't persevere.
When God finds us so puffed up that we do not feel our need for him, it is an act of kindness on his part to take us down a peg or two; it would be an act of judgment to leave us in our vaulting self-esteem.
many of us do not want to pray because we know that disciplined, biblical prayer would force us to eliminate sin that we rather cherish. It is very hard to pray with compassion and zeal for someone we much prefer to resent.
Shame encourages us to hide from the presence of God; shame squirrels behind a masking foliage of pleasantries while refusing to be honest; shame fosters flight and escapism; shame engenders prayerlessness.
Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher’s sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity.
Society propagates "life" on demand. Who determines our priorities and schedules?
Mediocre duplicity seems to be the true condition of the Church.
From God’s perspective, such Christians are “adulterous people” (4:4), because while nominally maintaining an intimate relationship with God, they are trying to foster an intimate relationship with the world.
we cannot justify our relative prayerlessness by saying that those who are peculiarly effective are more gifted than we.
Few of Paul’s prayers have greater potential to help us surmount the hurdles of spiritual dryness and lack of faith than the one in Philippians 1:9–11.
the love for which Paul prays is not an end in itself but a means to an end.
To discern and approve what is excellent Christians must be characterized by this abounding love.
The ever-increasing love for which Paul prays is to be discriminating. It is to be constrained by “knowledge” and “depth of insight.”
Paul simply assumes that unless your love is abounding more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, you will not be able to discern and approve what is best.
Paul does not envisage mere maintenance of the Philippians’ faith, but positive improvement in their discipleship,
Growth not just maintenance.
At what points in your life do you cheerfully decide, for no other reason than that you are a Christian, to step outside your “comfort zone,” living and serving in painful or difficult self-denial?
They are the kinds of choices that cannot be made on the basis of mere law. They spring from a heart transformed by God’s grace.
Part of the problem we ministers in the West face when we butt up against this challenge is that, while we know we have been called to the ministry of the Word and prayer, several notable pressures impose themselves, pressures so persistent they end up shaping our values and therefore our schedules.
Some clergy bury themselves in endless activism. Through no one’s fault but their own, they give themselves to endless work, always keeping busy but never carving out time to study, think, meditate, and pray.
Once our priorities are straight, we will learn to relegate tasks to their appropriate rank according to the values of Scripture. Delegate some things; cancel others.
Is our unfruitfulness proportionate to our prayerlessness?
The church is to see itself as an outpost of heaven. It is a microcosm of the new heaven and the new earth, brought back, as it were, into our temporal sphere.
That means, of course, that Christians constitute a kind of intrinsic missionary community. Our proper citizenship is in heaven; positionally, we have already been seated with Christ in the heavenlies (Eph. 2:6). But until the consummation, we live out our lives down here, a heavenly, missionary outpost in a lost, dying, and decaying world. We are to see ourselves as an outpost of a new heaven and a new earth in an old world that stands under the judgment of God. This means that when Paul prays this prayer, he is praying for nothing less than revival. He is praying that Christians might be,
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Out of this fresh experience of the grace of God powerfully working in our lives, evangelism becomes not only a passion but immeasurably more fruitful.
“I was born again in the fires of revival, and I do not intend to die in the ashes of its memory.”
although Paul’s prayer for what is excellent is equivalent to praying for revival, what he is doing is praying.
Seeking revival in prayer, not by external devices.
do not tie your joy, your sense of well-being, to power in ministry. Your ministry can be taken from you. Tie your joy to the fact you are known and loved by God; tie it to your salvation; tie it to the sublime truth that your name is written in heaven. That can never be taken from you.
Here then is a practical test as to whether the excellence I pursue is really for the glory and praise of God or for my own self-image. If the things I value are taken away, is my joy in the Lord undiminished? Or am I so tied to my dreams that the destruction of my dreams means I am destroyed as well?
we are sufficiently perverse that we can find reasons for not praying no matter what perspective we adopt. Consider missions. If you believe that God “elects” or chooses some people for eternal life, and does not choose others, you might be tempted to conclude that there is no point praying for the lost. The elect will infallibly be saved: why bother praying for them? So you have a good reason not to pray. If on the other hand you think that God has done all he can to save the lost, and now it all depends on their free will, why ask God to save them? He has already done his bit; there’s very
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Easy to find reasons not to pray based on theological convictions. Danger for Calvinists. Danger for Arminians.
Something has gone wrong in our reasoning if our reasoning leads us away from prayer; something is amiss in our theology if our theology becomes a disincentive to pray.
the Bible assumes both that God is sovereign and that people are responsible for their actions. As hard as it is for many people in the Western world to come to terms with both truths at the same time, it takes a great deal of interpretative ingenuity to argue that the Bible does not support them.
Why commit yourself to working where there is so much to discourage, and so little fruit? He gently rounded on me: “I stay,” he said, “because I believe with all my heart that God has many people in this place.”
God does not stand behind good and evil in exactly the same way. In other words, he stands behind good and evil asymmetrically. He stands behind good in such a way that the good can ultimately be credited to him; he stands behind evil in such a way that what is evil is inevitably credited to secondary agents and all their malignant effects.
I suppose that if he is to communicate effectively with us, he must graciously stoop to use categories that we can understand.
The perverse and the unbeliever will appeal to God’s sovereignty to urge the futility of prayer in a determined universe; they will appeal to passages depicting God as a person (including those that speak of his relenting) to infer that he is weak, fickle, and impotent, once again concluding that it is useless to pray. But the faithful will insist that, properly handled, both God’s sovereignty and his personhood become reasons for more prayer, not reasons for abandoning prayer. It is worth praying to a sovereign God because he is free and can take action as he wills; it is worth praying to a
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Because it is God who has worked in them, Paul has not stopped thanking God; because it is God alone who sovereignly and graciously continues to effect such transformation, he is the one who must be petitioned to continue his good work.
God’s sovereign grace in our lives must not serve as a disincentive to prayer, but as an incentive, just as it is for Paul: “For this reason . . . I keep asking . . . the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father . . .” (1:15, 17).
when he asks God for something, very frequently Paul addresses God or describes God in terms that are related to the request.
In particular, Paul’s prayer to God is that we might have the insight needed to grasp certain crucial truths.
The Spirit reveals; we must have our spiritual faculties attuned to receive what God reveals by his Spirit.
God’s valuation of his people is established by his valuation of Christ.
Paul cannot be satisfied with a brand of Christianity that is orthodox but dead, rich in the theory of justification but powerless when it comes to transforming people’s lives.
It is far easier to accept the mysteries of divine sovereignty when the divine love is as great as the divine sovereignty.
the “inner man” is what is left when the outer man has wasted completely away.
somehow they live as if they already have one foot in heaven.
