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God rebukes his people and his priests because “they did not say, ‘Where is the LORD?’” A sure sign of their wandering hearts is that no one is in God’s face. No one takes hold of God and pulls.
We live in a deeply broken world. If the pieces of our world aren’t breaking your heart and you aren’t in God’s face about them, then you’re becoming quietly cynical.
For the first time in my life I saw two things clearly: Our family was headed toward ruin, and I was powerless to stop it. So I prayed with some desperation, “God, you have got to save our family. We are headed for trouble. We need Jesus.”
CHAPTER 23 UNDERSTANDING HOW LAMENTS WORK
The Israelites lamented because they longed for a better world, the way the world is supposed to be. They believed in a covenant-keeping God, one who keeps his word.
When you lament, you live simultaneously in the past, present, and future. A lament connects God’s past promise with my present chaos, hoping for a better future.
A lamenter “rouses himself to take hold of” God. That’s what a lament does: It takes hold of God.
Isaiah’s faith drives this lament. He believes three things about God: First, God is sovereign. He can do something. Second, God is love. He is for me. He wants to do something. And finally, God is a covenant-keeping God. He is bound by his own word. He will do something.
The prophet never stops asking because he never stops believing. His asking changes tone, and his reasons change, but he doesn’t let go of God. Like Jacob, he wrestles with God. He takes hold of God and pulls. This lack of acceptance of the status quo is what makes laments so fierce.
At the end of the book of Job, God honors feisty Job with his demanding laments and rebukes the three friends who’ve made critiquing Job’s laments into a profession. God delights in welcoming messy, broken hearts.
What’s the difference between a complaint and a lament? Three differences stand out. First, a lament is directed toward God. In Numbers 20, the Israelites complained not to God but to Moses. A lament is faith. A complaint is rebellion.
Finally, laments almost always circle back to faith.
To summarize: Good lamenting is appropriate; it goes somewhere; it is simple and honest. Bad lamenting is magnified, endless; it is complicated by bitterness, self-pity, escapes, and denial.
When we suffer, we long for God to speak clearly, to tell us the end of the story and, most of all, to show himself. But if he showed himself fully and immediately, if he answered all the questions, we’d never grow;
“I . . . have felt the presence of God, and these memories alone are what keep me from checking out.” Memories like that can encourage us, but if the experience becomes an end in itself, then God becomes an object for my pleasure.
One trusts that God is weaving a larger story; the other does not.
If we don’t get passionate with God in the face of disappointment, like the Canaanite woman, then cynicism slips in, and our hearts begin to harden.
To live in our Father’s story, remember these three things: Don’t demand that the story go your way. (In other words, surrender completely.) Look for the Storyteller. Look for his hand, and then pray in light of what you are seeing. (In other words, develop an eye for Jesus.) Stay in the story. Don’t shut down when it goes the wrong way.
CHAPTER 26 HOPE The End of the Story
Hope is a new idea in history, a uniquely Christian vision.
Stoic philosophers sought to be moral in a meaningless world. Life was a tragedy. They toughed it out. Epicureans just had fun; life was a comedy. They coined the phrase “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
Some writers suggest that God focuses simply on us knowing him. That is just another version of the despair chart (see chapter 21). He is also concerned about our situation.
CHAPTER 27 LIVING IN GOSPEL STORIES
Whenever you love, you reenact Jesus’ death.
Consequently, gospel stories always have suffering in them. American Christianity has an allergic reaction to this part of the gospel. We’d love to hear about God’s love for us, but suffering doesn’t mesh with our right to “the pursuit of happiness.”
If we pursue joy directly, it slips from our grasp. But if we begin with Jesus and learn to love, we end up with joy.
CHAPTER 28 USING PRAYER TOOLS
The bottom line is we don’t write down our prayer requests because we don’t take prayer seriously. We don’t think it works.
One prayer system many people have found helpful is ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication). But systems can become rote, desensitizing us to God as a person. We can become wooden or mindless as we pray.
True for me
But all of us create systems with things that are important to us.
Here are the overall guidelines I use when creating a prayer card. The card functions like a prayer snapshot of a person’s life, so I use short phrases to describe what I want. When praying, I usually don’t linger over a card for more than a few seconds. I just pick out one or two key areas and pray for them. I put the Word to work by writing a Scripture verse on the card that expresses my desire for that particular person or situation. The card doesn’t change much. Maybe once a year I will add another line. These are just the ongoing areas in a person’s life that I am praying for. I usually
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Faced with the impossible task of converting the resistant Lisu, he learned two kinds of prayers: big and small.[1] If you think back to the Hope–Reality chart (see chapter 21), the big prayers focus on the hope line and the little prayers focus on the reality line. We need both kinds of prayers.
The hard part of writing out prayer cards isn’t the time. It is our unbelief. We seldom feel unbelief directly—it lurks behind the feelings that will surface if we start to write out prayer cards, feelings like “This is so corny” or “I feel straightjacketed” or “What good will it do?”
CHAPTER 30 PRAYER WORK
If Satan’s basic game plan is pride, seeking to draw us into his life of arrogance, then God’s basic game plan is humility, drawing us into the life of his Son. The Father can’t think of anything better to give us than his Son. Suffering invites us to join his Son’s life, death, and resurrection. Once you see that, suffering is no longer strange.
Notice the three-step pattern: planting, waiting, and then working again at the harvest. Jesus’ description of how the kingdom works is alien from how many of us pray.
Second, if we do pray, we don’t watch and wait. We want the answer now.
Finally, we don’t recognize the harvest when it comes. We are so cut off from an agrarian society that we forget that Jesus’ image of reaping is hard work.
Our “prayer doesn’t work” often means “you didn’t do my will, in my way, in my time.”
God answered my prayer for gentleness in Bob’s life by my serving Bob while he went through a lengthy time of suffering. Bob’s sufferings flowed over into my life. According to Paul, that is the essence of ministry: “For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (2 Corinthians 1:5). Suffering opens the door to love. Suffering reaps a harvest of real change.
CHAPTER 31 LISTENING TO GOD
During longer times of prayer such as this, I meditate and pray through passages of Scripture. Sometimes I am simply still before God, slowing down so I can become more aware of the direction of my life and my heart. I’ll ask, How is God speaking into my life? What is God doing?
Where Christians Go Wrong Let’s explore two common ways Christians go wrong when it comes to hearing God’s voice in their lives and how we can correctly discern when God is speaking to us. 1. “Word Only”—Going Wrong by Not Listening
When the Spirit convicted me, he was personalizing the Word to my heart. “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6).
What is at stake here is developing an eye for the Shepherd. I need to tune in to my Father’s voice above the noise of my own heart and the surrounding world
2. “Spirit Only”—Going Wrong by Elevating Human Intuition
Paul wants us to keep our eye on the Head, the Good Shepherd, not on the means of communication.
To correctly discern when God is speaking to us, we need to keep the Word and Spirit together.
Listening to and obeying God are so intertwined in biblical thought that in the Hebrew they are one word, shama‘.
There is nothing secret about communion with God. If we live a holy life before God, broken of our pride and self-will, crying out for grace, then we will be in communion with God. It is really that simple.
