Tag: Prayer

Ep.206: Heart Problems.

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

Hebrews 3 warns the reader against unbelief, citing as an example Israel’s unbelief during their forty-year wilderness journey. Quoting Psalm 95, it says: 

So, as the Holy Spirit says:
Today, if you hear [God’s] voice,
    do not harden your hearts
    as you did in the rebellion,
    during the time of testing in the wilderness,
    where your ancestors tested and tried me,
    though for forty years they saw what I did.
That is why I was angry with that generation;
    I said, “Their hearts are always going astray,
    and they have not known my ways.”’ (Heb 3:7-11).

The writer warns, “Do not harden your hearts”. Why? Because a hard heart is an impediment to faith.

The first Bible character to be diagnosed with a hard heart was Pharaoh. When Moses advocated  for the Hebrew slaves and God sent plagues on Egypt, Pharaoh refused to understand this new reality that was invading his kingdom. He wanted to keep living in his old reality, where he was the only king and no one questioned him.

When the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, they wanted to go back to Egypt. Their hearts weren’t big enough to take in the new reality that God might look after them in the desert. 

Just like Pharaoh and the Israelites. people still cling to the past. The “Make America Great Again” movement looks back to a great past, instead of facing current realities. Climate deniers resist evidence that the world is changing around us. Many evangelicals feel the way forward is to return to an older culture and a simpler faith. 

When Carl F. H. Henry was editor of Christianity Today, theologian Karl Barth once asked him, “Is the name of your magazine Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday?” Each generation struggles to live Christianity today. If we imitate Pharaoh, we focus on the good old days and harden our hearts to today. If we imitate Israel, we want to return to the past instead of learning the difficult lessons God is teaching us today.  

Here’s another example of a hard heart. I once talked to a man who said, “God doesn’t exist. A loving God would end poverty and violence and injustice. Unchecked evil proves there is no God of love.” I replied, “If you were God, you would fix all the evil. But suppose God has a different program than yours? Why don’t you check the Bible to see what God’s program is?” The man had a soft heart toward the suffering world, but was unable to soften his heart enough to ask if God had a different program.

Prayer can also lead to a soft heart or a hard heart. God promises to do whatever we ask, but he doesn’t fix our lives and the world. It is tempting to abandon prayer with the thought, “God must not care about these problems” or “I guess I’m not the sort of person he listens to.” A wiser perspective, that comes from a soft heart, says, “There’s something here I don’t understand. I wonder, what is God saying to me?” 

Let’s pray. 

O Jesus, like Pharaoh and the Israelites, we find change difficult. We are stuck in our old ways of thinking. With the author of Hebrews we pray,
  Today when we hear your voice,
      help us not to harden our hearts (Heb 3:15).

Help us to believe you are active in our world today–in the pandemic, in the  weather, in our wilderness journeys, in the church. Make us willing to hear your voice. Soften our hard hearts until we see your presence and hear your word in the reality we live today.

Amen. 

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

Ep.205: Psalm 93: Unchanging God, Immovable Earth.

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

Psalm 93, which we look at today, highlights three immovable foundations of the poet’s faith: God on his throne is eternal, the earth is immovably fixed in place, and God’s law is unchangeable. 

For us moderns, these fixed foundations raise questions. The poet imagined a stationary earth, with sun and moon and stars circling around it. Our modern imagination pictures a moving earth circling the sun, part of a solar system moving through space, belonging to one galaxy among millions traversing the universe. The earth is far more moveable than the poet imagined. 

The poet also cites God’s law as immutable. To him, God’s law was the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. These books regulated ancient Israel’s diet, clothes, sacrifices, worship, and morality. Our modern understanding of the Old Testament law divides it into obsolete bits we’ve discarded (like animal sacrifices and unclean foods), flexible bits we tweak (like choosing Sunday instead of Saturday for our sabbath), and inflexible bits which we see as mandatory (like most of the Ten Commandments). When we take the Bible literally, we don’t mean we do everything it says. We mean we subscribe to a system of interpretation that carefully selects the bits that apply to us. God’s law in the Bible is not immutable for us in the same way it was for the poet; because we discard bits we think are culturally conditioned and emphasize bits we think are unchanging moral laws. And argue endlessly about how to tell the difference.. 

The poet’s third immovable foundation is God’s eternal throne. Here we are on firmer ground, because like the poet, we believe God is eternal, that he created heaven and earth, and that he rules them a hidden providence. We have moved beyond the poet’s understanding to a faith in Christ who will one day bring the world under his direct and visible government.

Let’s pray. 

Our father, even though our cosmology and our relationship to the Old Testament law differ from the poet’s, we share his articles of faith. 

With him we say,
  You reign Lord,
        you are robed in majesty and armed with strength.
  Your throne was established long ago,
        you are from all eternity (vv. 1-2). 
   The seas have lifted up their voice,
        the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.
  Mightier than the thunder of great waters,
        mightier than the breakers of the sea–
        the Lord on high is mighty (vv. 3-4). 

You, God, are mighty: greater than Carribean hurricanes and cyclones in southeast Asia and tsunamis in the Pacific. In the short history of mankind as we know it, the earth has provided a predictable home for us. The waters of the ocean are held back by land, the rain and sun nurture crops, the climate has been stable. But now, as the globe warms, perhaps due to natural cycles or to human activity, we see the stability of the earth changing. Lands once fruitful are becoming deserts, coastlands flood as oceans rise, weather events are more destructive. 

O Lord, are these changes your judgement for our greedy stewardship of the earth? Or in the cycles of nature that you supervise, is it time for the earth to change, causing the death and dislocation of billions as we seek liveable climate and politics and security? 

Your statutes, O Lord, stand firm. May our lives be defined by your laws, whatever happens in our government and weather. Help us to welcome strangers instead of building walls and buying guns. Help us preserve life instead of destroying it. Help us build community instead of escaping off the grid. As others turn to lies and selfishness, help us hold fast to the truth.  

You are mighty Lord, mightier than floods and winds and changes of time. In our short, uncertain lives, may we be good stewards of everything you have given us. Hold us in your eternal hand, bring us at last to your eternal home. 

Amen.

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

Ep.204: God, the Family Man.

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

Hebrews 2 presents God as a family man, stating,
  In bringing many sons and daughters to glory,
      it was fitting that God . . .
      should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering.
  Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy
      are of the same family.
  So Jesus is not ashamed to call them
      brothers and sisters (Heb. 2:10-12). 

To evangelical ears, the term “Father God” sounds normal, but saying “Brother Jesus” sounds a bit weird. And churches where they call each other “Brother Bill” and “Sister Sarah” strike us as a bit affected. If I called my siblings “Brother Steve” and “Sister Ruth”, I think they’d refer me to a psychiatrist. 

While it is true that people at church are my siblings (because God is our father and Jesus calls us brothers and sisters) I still don’t invite them all to my house Christmas morning, and I do encourage them to cook their own turkey at home. I have separate compartments in life for my birth family and my church family. At the door between those two families, I have a surveillance camera and an armed guard. 

Yet, there is crossover between the two. Because the word “family” explains something important about my relationship to God, Jesus, and fellow Christians. God wants me to connect with them and show some responsibility and love. God wants me to share life with his people instead of self-isolating in front of the computer. 

Hebrews describes Jesus’ relationship with his brothers and sisters this way:
  Since [God’s] children have flesh and blood,
      Jesus too shared in their humanity
      so that by death he might break the power. . .of death. . .           
            and free those who all their lives were slaves
            to the fear of death (Heb 2:14-15). 

Jesus was born into the human family, taking on flesh and blood and human culture. He experienced death to free his family from the fear of death. 

On a personal level, Jesus wants me, as his brother, to be free from the fear of death. My first fears are the little deaths that threaten me daily–a lack of status and respect that makes me feel inferior, a mediocre spiritual life that doesn’t visibly demonstrate my identity as God’s son and Jesus’ brother, a disappointing church life that is often more duty than family, more obligation than participation. Sludge and drudge instead of ladders and open windows.

Perhaps when Jesus invites me to carry my cross, it looks like this: to die to the narrow view I have constructed of a successful Christian life, to perform small acts of kindness in Jesus’ name, to live graciously in the community of my brothers and sisters, and eventually, like Jesus, to die unknown and uncelebrated.

After all, belonging to God’s family means I follow Jesus in life and in death.

Let’s pray. 

Father, our view of family is that if we are children of the king and siblings of your son, we are princes and princesses. Surely you want your royal family to be wealthy and happy, to live with style and status. Don’t you? 

Or did you send Jesus to die, and did he invite us to carry a cross? Did he associate with an unsavory crowd of common people, and love them with his life? Help us then to follow in his footsteps. 

Amen. 

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

Ep.203: Psalm 92: A Fruitful Old Age.

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

Psalm 92 is constructed like a Big Mac. The bun on the outside and in the middle is praise to God. The top and bottom halves are identical twins: each contains a meaty offering of the poet’s experience of God’s faithfulness, garnished with an assortment of predictions about the overthrow of God’s enemies. 

Or, to describe it more technically, the first half of Psalm 92 begins with praise to God,then  predicts the downfall of his enemies, and climaxes by stating the central theme, “You, Lord, are forever exalted” (v. 8). The second half of the psalm repeats these themes in reverse order, predicting the destruction of God’s enemies and concluding with a confident statement that yes, the righteous will flourish and praise God. 

Let’s pray some phrases from the psalm. 

   It is good to praise you, Lord,
    and make music to your name,
  proclaiming your love in the morning
      and your faithfulness at night (vv. 1-2).

Lord, in the evening I  see a full moon over a glittering field of snow. In the morning I see sunlight sparkling in the winter white. You paint a beautiful world, Lord, with palettes for each season. In our dark northern winter, we sing your love and faithfulness in morning sun and evening moonlight,

    You make me glad by your deeds, Lord,
        I sing for joy at what your hands have done.
    How great are your works, Lord,
        How profound your thoughts (vv. 4-5). 

We praise you for your works: creating and sustaining the universe, giving your son to save us. We thank you for healing our minds from fear and superstition and ignorance, for freeing out hearts from narrowness and isolation, for caring for our bodies with medicine and exercise and food, for our souls with salvation and communion. 

How great are your works, Lord, how profound your thoughts. Johannes Kepler, an early pioneer of the hypothesis that the earth circles the sun, said his research was “Thinking God’s thoughts after him.” In the 15th century, he studied the motions of the planets and cast horoscopes for his classmates and tried to explain scriptures where the sun was circling the earth. Lord, take our modern minds with their modern superstitions and assumptions, and change them until we think your thoughts after you. Give us the mind of Christ.

As the psalm says,
      Senseless people do not know,
          fools do not understand,
      that though the wicked spring up like grass
          and evildoers flourish,
          they will be destroyed forever.
      But you, Lord, are exalted forever (vv. 6-8). 

Yes, Lord, your presence and your thoughts are light to our darkness, overshadowing senseless and foolish worldviews. With the poet, we believe that those who reject the light of your truth and reality and morality will be consigned by their choices to darkness. But you, Lord, will reign forever in light, you are forever praised. 

   Your enemies, Lord, will be scattered,
      but the righteous will flourish like a palm tree.
    They will still bear fruit in old age,
      proclaiming, “The Lord is upright” (vv. 9c, 12a, 14a, 15a).

Yes, Lord, you alone are upright, you alone are our rock in the shifting sands of modernity, you alone are our compass in a morally bankrupt society, you alone our health in a diseased and decaying world. Care for us, that we may flourish like trees, bearing fruit even in our old age. 

Amen.

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

Ep.202: Images of God.

Ep.202: Hebrews 2: But We See Jesus

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

To explain where humans fit into God’s creation, the author of Hebrews quotes Psalm 8. He writes:
    What is humankind that you are mindful of them,
        their children, that you care for them?
    You made them a little lower than the angels,
      you crowned them with glory and honor
      and put everything under their feet (Heb. 2:6-8).

God made humans the rulers of the world, a job designed to bring us glory and honor. This is what it means to be made in the image of God: we represent his great universal kingship by ruling our bit of creation, the world he made for us. 

The second of the Ten Commandments says, “Do not make any graven images”, that is, don’t make sculptures of God from wood or stone. We don’t need sculptures because we already have lots of images of God. Seven billion of them. All living and breathing, people made in God’s image. 

If you need a sculpture of God, an idol to put in your holy place, God says, “Don’t do it. Your neighbors are my image. Go show them some love.” That’s how to honor an image of God.

The author of Hebrews is emphatic about the wide-ranging authority God gave us, his representatives on earth. He says:
  In putting everything under them,
      God left nothing that is not subject to them.
  Yet at present we do not see them ruling over everything (Heb. 2:8).

So what’s the problem with these rulers of earth? Why haven’t we imitated God’s example by implementing a just, orderly, and thoughtful regime? Why do we perpetrate wars and pollution and oppression and destruction? Why do we fight each other, clawing our way to be king of the castle, overthrowing God’s rule on earth, establishing our own religions and kingship? 

When God looked at the mess his images made, he launched a rescue operation. The Book of Hebrews says: 
   At present, we do not see everything subject to humans (Heb 2:8). 
   But we see Jesus
      who was made for a little while lower than the angels,
      now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death,
      so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone (Heb 2:9).

The big problem was death. We, who are supposed to be living images of God, instead pursued activities that promoted sin and death. We are no better than dead sculptures of God made of wood or stone. 

God’s rescue plan meant sending a new image of himself to earth: Jesus, made in a true human mold, a little lower than the angels, attired with the glory and honor God intended for humans. Jesus’ solution to a messed up humanity and our corrupt rule of the earth was to participate fully in a human life and a human death, so we could share a new life with God.  

Let’s pray.

Our father, with the author of Hebrews, we look away from the mess we have made of your world and from the deadness we have imposed on your image. We look upward and say, “But we see Jesus.” He is the recovery project manager for our failed project of ruling creation. He implemented a new way of ruling. He shares his life with us, and teaches us to be your living image on earth.

Help us to be his loyal subjects, for you have put everything under his feet. We wait for the day when Jesus will fully renew us in your image, and fit us for our vocation. 

Amen. 

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