Hello, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray With Me.”

Today we look at three verses in Isaiah, in which God said to Israel,
“When you spread your hands in prayer,
   I hide my eyes from you.
When you offer many prayers,
   I will not listen.
Your hands are full of blood!
   Stop doing wrong.
Learn to do right.” (Isaiah 1:15-17)

That sounds serious. If you do wrong, God will hide his eyes from you and he won’t listen to your prayers. It also works in reverse: if you quit doing wrong and start doing right, God starts listening to you again. What could be simpler? If you want a better prayer life, get your act together and do right.

When St. Augustine, who lived about 300 years after Christ, was thinking about becoming a Christian, he prayed about his sex life, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” (Augustine, Saint, and Maria Boulding. The Confessions. New York: Vintage Books, 1998, VIII,17, p.198, paraphrased). In modern language he would say, “Lord, help me lose my sexual addiction and learn self-control. But not yet.”  Do you think God listens to that kind of prayer? Augustine said to God, “I was afraid you might hear me immediately and heal me . . . of the morbid lust which I was more anxious to satisfy than to snuff out” (Augustine and Boulding, p. 198).

Isaiah and Augustine raise two important questions about prayer:
1. First, a general question: Does God always stop listening to prayers from people
caught deep in sin?
2. And second, a personal question: How do we know if God has quit listening to us
because of our sin?

In the New Testament, James says, “We all sin in many ways” (James 3:2), so if God never listens to those who sin persistently, we might as well quit praying right now. If we have sins we aren’t prepared to give up, or addictions so entrenched that we can’t evict them, what can we do? I like St. Augustine’s approach. Instead of hiding from God until he could change manage his addiction, he spoke to God about his love of sin and his desire for holiness.

The personal question raised by Isaiah and St. Augustine goes like this: “What does God think of me? Has he quit listening to my prayers because of my sin?” Is God’s word to Israel also his word to me: “Even when you offer many prayers, I will not listen”?

If you want to know what God thinks about you, ask him! You could say “God, do you think the bit of scripture I need most right now is Isaiah’s angry pronouncement, “I am not listening because your hands are full of blood”? Or should I listen to Christ’s compassionate invitation, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened” (Mat 11:28)? It can also be helpful to ask a more mature Christian about your situation. But choose your counsellor carefully. If you talk to someone who thinks God is generally angry and unhappy with humans, guess what answer that person will give you.

Let’s pray.
Our father, we are troubled by sins that infect our lives, by impure motives, by a worldview where we think you sit in stony silence waiting for us to improve. We invite you into these crazy mixed up lives of ours, into our selfish motives, into our unmanageable behaviour. Speak to us the word that will set us free. Show us the next step to grow in love for you and our neighbours. Change our heart’s desire, until all we desire is you.
Amen.

I’m Daniel on the channel “Pray with Me”.

Hello, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray With Me.”

Today we look at the Book of Proverbs. First, some context.

There are five books of poetry or wisdom literature in the Old Testament. They are Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. Here’s a summary of their themes.

I call the Book of Job “The Mystery of Faith” because God and Satan agreed to take away everything Job had except his life, to see if his faith would stand up. But nobody told Job or his friends about the plan, so they were in the dark, trying to figure out the meaning of Job’s string of disasters. They were stuck in a living mystery. The friends’ simple explanation that God rewards good and punishes evil simply did not apply to Job. Job’s angry demand that God explain himself was met with silence. Today, God still does stuff without explaining it to us, and too get confused. This is the mystery of faith.

The next book, Psalms, are “The Emotions of Faith” because they express the full range of human emotion — anger at God, fear of enemies, feeling discontent, sad, abandoned, depressed, despairing. They also express joy, wonder, excitement, thankfulness, hope, and love. The books of Job and Psalms display all the wonder and diversity of creation and the mystery of human experience in a random collection of metaphors and word pictures, a wide assortment of stories and pictures.

Another book of poetry is Ecclesiastes. It begins, “Meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless” (Eccles 1:2). That is a harsh statement about life. I think the original meaning is a bit softer, like this: “A puff of air, a breath of wind. Everything is vapour, just smoke and mirrors. What do we gain from our labor?” (1:3). The answer given is, “No matter how hard you work and how much stuff you collect, you end up buried in the ground, a meal for worms” (Eccles. 2:18-21). Who wins? You or the worms? Ecclesiastes teaches that neither work nor wisdom nor wealth nor pleasure will change our lives from that elusive breath of wind into something substantial. Not even faith will change the reality that your next breath could be your last. I call Ecclesiastes “The Fragility of Faith”. Faith receives a breath or a spirit we do not see to sustain an inner life that cannot control. Ecclesiastes’ advice for such a life is: “Don’t take yourself so seriously, don’t get depressingly philosophical, don’t be a workaholic. Life is short. Spend it with the people you love, enjoy good food, work hard, worship God. He will sort it out in the end”  (Eccl. 7:15-18; 9:7-10).

The last book of poetry is Song of Solomon, which I call “The Ecstasy of Faith” — the enjoyment of faith, that is, not the drug. It starts out, “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth — for your love is more delightful than wine.” Sounds like someone is headed for ecstasy. Even though God’s name does not appear in in this poem, the Christian church interprets it as an allegory of the love between humans and God.

You may have heard someone say, “All religions are basically the same because they all say, “Do good to others and worship God.’” Countering this reductionist view of religion, the books of poetry describe the Mystery of Faith, the Emotions of Faith, the Fragility of Faith, and the Ecstasy of Faith. Clearly, the poets promote an experience of God that is more complex than the simple command to do good.  

That’s how the books of poetry present religion . . . until you read the Proverbs, the book in the middle, after the mystery and the emotions of faith, before the fragility and ecstasy. Proverbs paints the religious life as black-and-white, good-and-evil, wise-and-foolish. No mystery here, no unnecessary emotion, nothing fragile or exciting. Just simple commands to do good and avoid evil. Reading only the three proverbs that use the word “pray”, we hear:
– The Lord detests the sacrifice of the wicked, but the prayer of the upright pleases him (15:8)
– The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous (15:29).
– If anyone turns a deaf ear to God’s instruction, even their prayers are detestable (28:9).

Clear, simple, straightforward, black and white moral teaching. God listens to you if you’re good, he rejects you if you’re bad. I call Proverbs “The Behaviour of Faith.” Yes, like other religions, the Bible promotes a moral standard. But in biblical religion, it’s only one part of the deal, not the central tenet of faith.

Let’s pray.
Our father, we have imagined that the most important thing in our faith is good behaviour. But the wisdom literature promotes not just a moral code, but a lifelong journey of faith, facing into the mystery of God, experiencing the depths of human emotion, bringing fragility and ecstasy and moral behaviour into a living relationship with you. Help us reject the religion of behaviour management. Help us embrace the many complexities of faith. And as we embrace a life of faith, may we discover that we are embracing you, and that you are embracing us.
Amen.

I’m Daniel on the channel “Pray with Me”.

Hello, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray With Me.”

Today we look at Job, a wealthy, God-fearing man, for whom life had worked out very well. I too am God-fearing, but I’m not wealthy like Job, and my life holds together with shoestring and bubblegum. But Job, he was the real thing.

Job was so together that one day Satan said to God, “I suppose know that the only reason Job serves you is because you make him wealthy and comfortable.”  God replied, “Not so. Let’s make a test. You can take away everything he has except his life, and we’ll see.”

So in one stroke, Satan arranged to have all Job’s wealth stolen, his sons and daughters killed in an accident (sucks to be them in this story), and his health taken away. Job ended up on an ash heap scraping his boils with broken pottery. Three friends came round to visit him. They sympathized with him for seven days, and then started a discussion about Job’s downfall. Since none of them had overheard the conversation between God and Satan, they were all guessing about how to make sense of his disaster.

Do you feel that way about your life sometimes? That God and Satan are both messing about in your life, and you think Satan’s winning, and you’re not sure why?

Job and his friends had a debate. The proposition was, “Job’s disaster is due to his sin.”  Job argued against, insisting that he hadn’t sinned. Job’s friends argued that God always punishes evil and rewards good, so Job’s disaster was clearly God’s punishment for evil thoughts or actions. Job disagreed. He reaffirmed that he had kept God’s laws, so God couldn’t be punishing him. As the debate progressed through 28 chapters of Job, the arguments become more shrill, more fierce, more extreme. The friends launched personal attacks on Job’s character, and Job responded by tweeting that they were poor comforters. It was almost like modern political discourse, with mud slinging and character attacks and general unpleasantness.

Finally, a young man named Elihu stepped in and said, “They told me that wisdom comes with age, but the four of you have proved that it doesn’t. Here’s how I see it: Job is claiming he’s righteous and you friends are claiming that he’s evil. But none of that can be proved. Maybe there’s some mystery in the way God works. Maybe Job isn’t quite as righteous as he things. Maybe you friends are wrong about of God; maybe he’s doing something different than just punishing evil and rewarding good.. Maybe God is bigger than you imagine. Maybe his ways are not as simple as you think.”

After Elihu’s speech, God came in a storm of whirlwind and lightning. He said to Job, “Time out. You want to argue with me about how righteous you are, but that’s not a game I play. I’m the creator of heaven and earth, I made the seas and land and animals and seasons, and it all works together. Who are you to question my judgment?” And Job was humbled. He apologized for shouting about how poorly God treated him. He quit demanding an explanation for his disaster. He said to God,
    “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand . . .
     My ears had heard of you
           but now my eyes have seen you.
     Therefore I despise myself
            and repent in dust and ashes.”

That’s the story of Job. Now what about his prayer life? Through the experience of disaster and arguing with his friends about about God, Job’s prayer life grew in an interesting way. He moved from from demanding that God explain things, to a quiet acceptance that he could not understand or explain God’s ways. Job learned to be satisfied that God was God and Job was human.

Let’s pray.
Our Father,
With Job we want you to explain the cause of our pain and tell us how to fix it.
With Job we rail against you and call you to account.
Like Job’s friends, our friends and churches often don’t understand how you work, and they give us bad advice.
Help us in the days of our trouble never to stop speaking to you, even when everything we say is complaining; and bring us through our troubles to a place where we worship and love you.
Amen.

I’m Daniel on the channel “Pray with Me”.