A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

by D.A. Carson

we know elderly folk who, so far as we can tell, are not suffering from any serious organic decay, yet as old age weighs down on them they nevertheless become more and more bitter, caustic, demanding, spiteful, and introverted. It is almost as if the civilizing restraints imposed on them by cultural expectations are no longer adequate. In their youth, they had sufficient physical stamina to keep their inner being somewhat capped. Now, with reserves of energy diminishing, what they really are in their inner being is coming out.

In a culture where so many people are desperate for good health, but not demonstrably hungry for the transformation of the inner being, Christians are in urgent need of following Paul’s example and praying for displays of God’s power in the inner being. In short, Paul’s primary concern is to pray for a display of God’s mighty power in the domain of our being that controls our character and prepares us for heaven.

The picture becomes clearer if we think of an analogy. Picture a couple carefully marshaling enough resources to put together a down-payment. They buy their house, recognizing full well that it needs a fair bit of work. They can’t stand the black and silver wallpaper in the master bedroom. There are mounds of trash in the basement. The kitchen was designed for the convenience of the plumber, not the cook. The roof leaks in a couple of places, and the insulation barely meets minimum standards. The electrical box is too small, the lighting in the bathroom is poor, the heat exchanger in the furnace is corroded. But still, it is this young couple’s first home, and they are grateful. The months slip past, then the years. The black and silver wallpaper has been replaced with tasteful pastel patterns. The couple has remodeled their kitchen, doing much of the work themselves. The roof no longer leaks, and the furnace has been replaced with a more powerful unit that also includes a central air conditioner. Better yet, as the family grows, this couple completes a couple of extra rooms in the basement and adds a small wing to serve as a study and sewing room. The grounds are neatly trimmed and boast a dazzling rock garden. Twenty-five years after the purchase, the husband one day remarks to his wife, “You know, I really like it here. This place suits us. Everywhere we look we see the results of our own labor. This house has been shaped to our needs and taste, and I really feel comfor...

Illustration of a couple buying a house.

Make no mistake: when Christ first moves into our lives, he finds us in very bad repair. It takes a great deal of power to change us; and that is why Paul prays for power. He asks that God may so strengthen us by his power in our inner being that Christ may genuinely take up residence within us, transforming us into a house that pervasively reflects his own character.

All the blessings God has for us are tied up with the work of Christ.

To depreciate the supply is to depreciate Jesus; to doubt the provision God has made for us is to doubt the provision God has secured in his Son.

The devil himself can recite the Apostles’ Creed, and doubtless confesses its truth, yet he has personally experienced nothing of its transforming power.

Because some wings of the church have appealed to experience over against revelation, or have talked glibly about an illdefined “spirituality” that is fundamentally divorced from the gospel, some of us have overreacted and begun to view all mention of experience as suspicious at best, perverse at worst. This overreaction must cease. The Scriptures themselves demand that we allow more place for experience than that.

love of Christ rarely comes to the person who is not spending much time in the Scriptures.

Paul assumes that we cannot be as spiritually mature as we ought to be unless we receive power from God to enable us to grasp the limitless dimensions of the love of Christ. We may think we are peculiarly mature Christians because of our theology, our education, our years of experience, our traditions; but Paul knows better. He knows we cannot be as mature as we ought to be until we “know this love that surpasses knowledge.”

all things being equal, unless a child is reared in a home where love and discipline surround every step, that child will not attain emotional maturity.

It takes nothing less than the power of God to enable us to grasp the love of Christ. Part of our deep “me-ism” is manifested in such independence that we do not really want to get so close to God that we feel dependent upon him, swamped by his love. Just as in a marriage a spouse may flee relationships that are too intimate, judging them to be a kind of invasion of privacy when in reality such a reaction is a sign of intense immaturity and selfishness, so also in the spiritual arena: when we are drawn a little closer to the living God, many of us want to back off and stake out our own turf. We want to experience power so that we can be in control; Paul prays for power so that we will be controlled by God himself. Our deep and pathetic self-centeredness is precisely why it takes the power of God to transform us, if we are to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge and grow to the maturity the Scriptures hold out before us.

Afraid of drawing close to God because it threatens our micro-sovereignty.

“It needs the whole people of God to understand the whole love of God,” writes John Stott.3 In fact, it is hard to imagine any individual Christian genuinely growing in this regard yet unconcerned about fellow believers. It is inconceivable that a genuine, deepening grasp of the love of Jesus Christ could remain entirely privatized.

We quickly learn that God is more interested in our holiness than in our comfort. He more greatly delights in the integrity and purity of his church than in the material well-being of its members. He shows himself more clearly to men and women who enjoy him and obey him than to men and women whose horizons revolve around good jobs, nice houses, and reasonable health. He is far more committed to building a corporate “temple” in which his Spirit dwells than he is in preserving our reputations.

Prayer-lessness is often an index to our ignorance of God. Real and vital knowledge of God not only teaches us what to pray, but gives us powerful incentive to pray.

demean him; to think of God in this way is itself tantamount to a call to pray.

It is possible to ask for good things for bad reasons. We may desire the power of God so to operate in our lives that we may become more holy; we may ask for power to grasp the limitless dimensions of the love of God—and yet distort these good requests by envisaging their fulfillment within a framework in which the entire universe revolves around our improvement. The root sin is the kind of self-centeredness that wants to usurp God’s place. How tragic then if our prayers for good things leave us still thinking of ourselves first, still thinking of God’s will primarily in terms of its immediate effect on ourselves, still longing for blessings simply so that we will be blessed.

One of the reasons why elderly people appreciate the psalms more than young people is because they have lived longer and experienced more, and therefore they can resonate with the wide range of experiences reflected there.

Clearly, Paul saw prayer as part of the Christian’s struggle. The word-group is often associated with the strenuous discipline of the athlete who struggles to prevail.

Paul understands real praying to include an element of struggle, discipline, work, spiritual agonizing against the dark powers of evil.

our failure to perceive more of what is going on in the demonic realm may sometimes owe less to our Christian heritage than to our deep indebtedness to a culture that assigns sociological, psychological, and economic reasons for everything.

because we are so insensitive to the possibility that these bouts of depression may be related to our calling as Christians, we may foolishly try to overcome them and cheer ourselves up by going shopping, going out with a friend, reading a book. How seldom do we think of Paul’s first recourse—his immediate desire to seek the face of the Lord Jesus in prayer.

To be invited to join this club or that board may increase the leader’s Christian influence and contacts. Indeed, probably most Christians will accept such invitations for precisely that reason. But in many cases accepting the invitation also serves to muzzle the Christian: there are now too many social conventions and obligations to make prophetic witness possible. The minister becomes domesticated, restrained by the leash of social prominence.

for one reason or another, Christian leaders will frequently discover that their ministry is simply not acceptable to some of those they seek to serve, and this opposition can be extraordinarily destructive.

The “baby-boomers” have come to power; the “baby-busters” are right behind them. In different ways, both groups tend to focus on one or two issues that are of enormous significance to them. These single-issue Christians, whether the issue is home schooling, the King James Version, a particular style of worship, the altar call as a test for orthodoxy, a particular model for outreach, a certain view of prophecy, become so fixated on their vision that they lose perspective and judge the ministry of others by twisted and reductionistic criteria.

We need to pray that God will send us undershepherds who are wise, spiritual, godly, disciplined, informed, prayerful, faithful to Scripture. But we also need to pray that their ministry will be acceptable to the saints.

my impression is that for every believer who offers this sort of sweeping, generalizing petition, there are several more who get so bogged down on relatively picky points related to their health, prosperity, or better, the challenges of the next Vacation Bible School or the fickleness of a teenaged son, that they utterly lose any sense of the sweep and direction of ministry. They do not dream dreams; they never really pray for revival; they never envisage the potential next phase of ministry and the steps that could be taken to get from here to there.

do you tie your requests to a larger vision?

Do these dreams affect your prayer life?

E. M. Bounds: “One of the constitutional enforcements of the gospel is prayer. Without prayer, the gospel can neither be preached effectively, promulgated faithfully, experienced in the heart, nor be practiced in the life. And for the very simple reason that by leaving prayer out of the catalogue of religious duties, we leave God out, and His work cannot progress without Him.”

To leave out prayer is to leave out God.

Suppose, for argument’s sake, that every time we asked God for anything and ended our prayers with some appropriate formula, such as “in Jesus’ name,” we immediately received what we asked for. How would we view prayer? How would we view God? Wouldn’t prayer become a bit of clever magic? Wouldn’t God himself become nothing more than an extraordinarily powerful genie, to be called up, not by rubbing Aladdin’s lamp, but by praying? “Please give me the ideal spouse, today. In Jesus’ name, Amen.” “Please raise up eighty-two more missionaries for Zaire, complete with their support, by the end of the week. In Jesus’ name, Amen.” What an easy and domesticated religion.

Part of this business of prayer is getting to know God better; part of it is learning his mind and will; part of it is tied up with teaching me to wait, or teaching me that my requests are often skewed or my motives selfish.