Oh, we don't
mean to. We think we are firing powerful weapons of war, kicking ass and taking
names.
But
sometimes, sometimes we're actually firing blanks.
Jesus
modeled for us a way to pray that was more about telling the situation how it
needs to be, rather than about us whining at God to pleeeeease make it be that
way. We are learning to command, to declare, rather than to ask politely. Or
impolitely.
That much is
good.
The problem
is, so often we just fire blanks.
We read the
Gospels oh, and we observe how Jesus did it. He said, Lazarus come forth! And
Lazarus came forth. He said, I am willing, be cleansed. And the leper was
instantly healed.
We look at
the model of Jesus, and we make it our model. But we are only looking at part
of the model that Jesus gave us. We're looking at his Harvest, not his labor.
I am a
member of a few prayer groups. I am embarrassed to tell you how many times, in
response to a really dire need, somebody pipes up, blithely commanding all
demons to go to hell, smugly decreeing bones and skin and organs to line up,
happily commanding this and that, and wrapping it all up with a grin of
self-congratulation.
And of
course very little actually changes. Nobody really expected it would. I think
even that the enthusiastic intercessor himself didn't expect it. And why would
he? We get so that we’re commanding everything nowadays, and nobody points out
that it's not really changing much of anything. The emperor has no clothes on,
but everyone is afraid to mention it.
Yeah, I
know. I’ve overstated it in order to make a point. You know this goes on, at
least some of the time.
I have been
reflecting on how much of Jesus’ life is hidden from the casual reader of his
biographies in the Gospels. I suspect that this is on purpose. If we really
want to know the secrets, he wants to go find them for ourselves, to do the
work of learning, to make the knowledge our own.
The gospels
are quick to tell his hero testimonies, how he healed this person, raised that
guy from the dead, all before lunch, and without raising a sweat.
That's the
part that big, flashy, and easily captures our attention. But it's only the end
of the story. We miss the beginning and the middle. And I think that if we
don't follow all of Jesus’ example, the beginning, the middle, and the end, we
will probably not have the results that Jesus had.
I have been
involved in a lot of spiritual war. I have friends who have been in so much
more than I have. Some of it has been successful; some has been less
successful. Ultimately, I think that Winston Churchill may have had it right.
War involves blood, sweat, toil, tears. And healing the sick, raising the dead,
these are acts of War. It’s not a quick declaration of victory and move on.
I've been
thinking about the topic of rest recently. God is constantly inviting his
people to a place of rest. Not a place of doing nothing, a place of doing much,
but doing it from the place of resting in him. Kind of a foreign concept to
most of us, I think. But it wasn't foreign to Jesus. Jesus seemed pretty big on
working from a place of rest. I’m beginning to learn the value of this.
And Jesus
was always getting away with Father. Sure, we have our “quiet times,” and
that’s a great starting point, but it seemed that Jesus spent all night in
prayer sometimes. All night, getting to know what Father was doing and
thinking.
In fact,
there was one time he spent much of the night in prayer, and it was hard work.
He sweat blood. We talk about that in the context of the Easter story, but as
he said, “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.”
Paul kept up the theme. “These things happened to them as examples and were
written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come.”
I’m not
saying that blood is the signifier of a solid prayer life. I’m saying there’s
work involved, hard work, if we’re aspiring to declare with the kind of power
that Jesus’ declarations had.
There is one
more secret, I think, that we need to lay hold of. In John 5, Jesus revealed
this secret: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can
do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son
also does.”
The last
secret (for this moment) of Jesus’ amazing record was that he was only doing
what he saw Father doing.
A whole lot
of our failing comes from our making our declarations about things that are in
our heart and mind that are not actually things that Father is doing. They may
be things that we wish he was doing, things that we think he might want to do,
or things that we ourselves want, and we’re maybe just putting God’s name on
them.
That’s a
whole lot different than seeing what God is doing, or seeing the situation -
really seeing it! - in its completed state, and then telling reality to line up
with that vision.
This is a
hard one to ‘fess up to. But we kind of have to separate our desires from his,
separate soul from spirit, as it were, in order to walk how Jesus walked.
I’m so
thankful that we’re growing up into Him. We’re going to change the world. In
him.
