Ep.316: A Tour of God’s Love.

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

Psalm 48 takes a tour of Jerusalem, saying: 
    Walk about Zion, go round her,
    count her towers,
    consider well her ramparts,
    view her citadels . . . (vv. 12-13). 

The Message Bible uses a tourist image to translate Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3: 
   I ask God that . . . with all followers of Jesus you will take in
the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love.
      Reach out and experience the breadth!
      Test its length!
      Plumb the depths!
      Rise to the heights!
  Live full lives, full in the fullness of God (Eph 3:17-19). 

Yes. Take a tour of God’s love.  

The Oceania cruise company fills my mailbox with flyers. I can cure my problems with a warm-weather cruise to the Caribbean or Mediterranean. How about Around the World in 180 Days, for a bargain price of only $120,000 per couple.  I went to the Oceania website to see if I could stop the flood of mail. They they don’t make it easy. 

Meanwhile, I’m still on God’s mailing list. But I’m not sure how to sign up for a tour of his love. I follow the usual prescriptions–read the Bible, pray every day, meditate, attend church, fellowship with believers. But I don’t feel immersed in God’s love. I feel more like a camper, dipping my toes in a glacier-fresh lake, shivering against the plunge that would immerse me.

Is this God’s problem or mine? How can I, as Paul says, test the length and plumb the depths of Christ’s extravagant love? Is the experience of God’s love a gift he gives, or withholds? Sometimes, he takes me on amazing tours; sometimes he lets me sit under a vine and lament. 

God teaches me what I’m willing to learn. He’s patient with things I need to unlearn. He’s making a way for me to go deeper.

Pray with me.

Our father, you journey with us, not to reward us for being good, but to be our friend in bad times and good. 

You hear our prayers, but you give us what we need, not what we want. You sympathize with us when we feel forsaken. You rejoice with us when we feel loved. We sense your presence with us in a place beneath our flow of thoughts and feelings, beneath our pains and pleasures. 

Guide us by your Spirit. Make us true to your presence. Reveal to us the Christ who dwells in our hearts by faith (Eph 3:17). 

Now to you who can do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine, to you be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, now and forever (Eph 3:20-21).   

Amen. 

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

YouTube channel: Pray with Me – YouTube

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

In Ephesians 2, Paul says Jesus broke down the wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles (v. 14). What wall?

Israel became a nation when a company of Israelites escaped Egyptian slavery, wandered in the desert, waged war against the inhabitants of Canaan, and took the land for themselves. 

After that, the nation of Israel vacillated between friendship and hostility with neighboring Gentiles and their gods. God had instructed Israel to be a unique nation—eat the right foods, sacrifice the right animals, keep right holidays, and observe many cultural and moral commands. The prophets constantly reminded Israel to be faithful to their scripture and their God, but the people were fatally attracted to the politics and religions of other nations. They often forgot their unseen God.

In more recent times, a remnant of Jews who survived the horrors of World War II established a Jewish nation, waging war to drive out the Palestinian inhabitants and create a Jewish state. 

A wall of hostility, Paul says, between Jews and Gentiles. When Jesus stepped into the middle of that hostility, he annoyed both groups. His God was too liberal for the conservative Jewish religion. He disrespected the Romans by refusing to answer Pilate’s questions. In a rare instance of Jews and Gentiles working together, they crucified Jesus. And we call him a peacemaker? 

In what way did Jesus break down the wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles? 

Paul says that Jesus “created in himself one new humanity, thus making peace” (v. 15). It’s a lesson our world needs. We all belong to one human race and we see Paul locating the center of a peace-loving new humanity in Jesus.

Meanwhile the old humanity continues to build walls of hostility-–between Jew and Gentile, between Gentile and Gentile. Since Jesus’ time, we’ve had European pogroms, we’ve had the Crusades, we’ve had inter-Christian conflicts and wars. Today, many North American Christians are sorting themselves into hostile camps: conservative, pro-gun, pro-life, anti-vaxx tribes, and inclusive pro-choice liberal camps. 

Where is the united center? Are Christians building the wall of hostility that Jesus came to destroy?

Let’s pray. 

Our father, we bring to you a fractured Christendom, a world in disunity, and a creation groaning under the weight of disordered humanity. 

Is Jesus still breaking down walls of hostility? Where is the new humanity he created? 

We thank you for places where his new humanity destroys walls of hostility. In ourselves, as we grow in respect for fellow humans and creation. As we resist the urge to splinter our families and churches into tribes based on politics and vaccinations and minor points of doctrine. 

We thank you for every agency that brings healing and relief in our world; for those who serve Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and flood victims in Pakistan and war casualties in Ukraine. Your work goes on, breaking down walls that we keep building. 

O God, teach us to feed the hungry, to accept strangers, to be true to your words of life, to think more of others and less of ourselves, to destroy walls instead of building them.

Bring quickly the time when the new humanity in Christ replaces this old humanity. 

Amen. 

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

YouTube channel: Pray with Me – YouTube

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

In Ephesians 2, Paul says, “You are saved by God’s grace through faith, not by anything you do. It’s a gift, not something you worked for” (Eph 2:8-9).

Then Paul says, “[God] created each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the work he has prepared for us to do” (Eph 2:10, Message Bible, paraphrased).

What is Paul saying about faith and works? Is his message, “Right. We got the saved bit out of the way. The next step is to get busy! From now on, it’s the work you do that counts!” 

A classic evangelical formula is that we are saved by grace, then we work from a motive of love to express thanks for salvation. I find this a daunting standard, because it requires me to have pure motives.  Mine are anything but! 

It’s a long time since I was saved. I continue to be thankful, but the euphoria of first love is past. God leads me through darkness as well as light. Sometimes life is ice cream and joy, sometimes it’s sandpaper and discipline. Jesus calls me to an abundant life.He also calls me to to lose my life, to carry a cross. If you put a meter on how thankful and how motivated I am each day, that’s not a reliable indicator of anything! 

Another problem with my motives is that they are not always clear. Proverbs asks, “Who can say, ‘I have kept my heart pure; I am clean and without sin’” (20:9). When I work for God, is my motive thankfulness? Is it half-hearted duty? Am I trying to manipulate God into answering my prayers? Proverbs’ says to me, Unanswerable question. Who can understand their motives? 

Paul says, “We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph 2:10). I have a lingering sense that I’ll never get it all done. As Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, puts it, “God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind I will never die” (Bill Watterson). 

I need to discern which good works God has prepared for me to do, and which should be done by others. It’s not always easy to tell! Like Calvin, I’ll never catch up, so I choose instead to live into my uncertainty. To make choices about what to do. I hope that God who saved me by grace will also view the work I do, and the work I don’t do, with grace. 

My motives are obscure, even to myself. But God works in that obscurity to purify my motives and set me in the right direction. Hebrews tells us that God’s word is a two-edged sword, piercing to divide joints and marrow, soul and spirit; it exposes the thoughts and motives of the heart (Heb 4:12). 

Let’s pray. 

Our father, as Paul said to those who are saved by grace, Work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you (Phil 2:12). When we were experiencing the joy of first love, we had no idea how much our motives needed sorting and cleansing and healing. 

We thought we were working for you, but we were working for ourselves! We were trying to build your kingdom, but we were building our own. We thought our work was transforming us into your image, but we discovered our goal was to transform you into our image.  

O father, sort out our confused lives. Unmix the motives. Discard the rubbish. Strengthen what comes from faith, until all our work is in your vineyard, and none in our own.   

Amen. 

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

YouTube channel: Pray with Me – YouTube

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

God’s grace is a favorite theme with Paul—he cites it 86 times in the New Testament. In Ephesians he says when we were dead in sin, God was rich in mercy—he saved us by his grace (Eph 2:4-5). 

When Jesus was a corpse in a grave, God brought him back to life. Paul says God does the same for us. When we were dead in sin, he made us alive with Christ, not because we deserved a new life, but because he is rich in mercy. 

For me, grace points to the good things God has done. He freed me from introspective self-absorption, from addictive habits, from my short-sighted view of life. He’s invited me to journey on an endless road of love, viewing the marvelous landscape of his goodness.  

I respond to God’s grace in three ways. 

First, I choose not to focus on negatives that appear to marginalize grace—on people God hasn’t healed, on wars and famines he hasn’t stopped, on pandemics he permits to migrate and mutate their way through the world. Instead, I focus on what God has done–on his world that produces food and sunsets for 8 billion, on his offer of forgiveness for all who ask. 

A second way I approach grace is to receive it, to accept the grace that accepts me just as I am. God doesn’t focus on my sin or load me with expectations of instant goodness. Though I don’t live up to his standard, God receives me and forgives me. I extend the same grace to God: though he is not achieving my standard of excellence for healing diseases and creating world peace, I approach him with thankfulness instead of anger, with hope instead of hate, with grace instead of resentment.  

The third part of receiving grace is for me to be patient with the process. Sometimes grace is a refreshing rain on my dry and thirsty life. Other times, it is a desert that draws me to pray for water.  

Let’s pray. 

Our father, Paul the apostle of grace told us about your goodness. He shaped his life and letters around your generosity, not around his complaints. He looked at his life in a mirror of healing. He saw the church through a lens of hope, our broken world through eyes of promise. 

O father, change our vision until we see your grace as Paul did. 

Amen. 

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

YouTube channel: Pray with Me – YouTube