Lent Meditations
Prayer: Thomas a Kempis
Friday, March 12th, 2010 | Lent Meditations, Spiritual Disciplines | No Comments
Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471) was a writer and monk who penned a famous book on Christian discipleship entitled The Imitation of Christ. The prayer of surrender below is from that book.
Lord, You know what is best; let this be done or that be done as You please. Give what You will, as much as You will, when You will. Do with me as You know best, as will most please You, and will be for Your greater honor. Place me where You will and deal with me freely in all things. I am in Your hand; turn me about whichever way You will. Behold, I am Your servant, ready to obey in all things. Not for myself do I desire to live, but for You – would that I could do this worthily and perfectly!
Give us, O Lord, steadfast hearts that cannot be dragged down by false loves; give us courageous hearts that cannot be worn down by trouble; give us righteous hearts that cannot be sidetracked by unholy or unworthy goals. Give to us also, our Lord and God, understanding to know you, diligence to look for you, wisdom to recognize you, and a faithfulness that will bring us to see you face to face.
Amen.
Prayer: The Disciples’ Prayer
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 | Lent Meditations, Spiritual Disciplines | No Comments
This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’ -Matthew 6:9-13
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, He wasn’t just giving them the words of a specific prayer, He was teaching them a pattern for prayer. His pattern includes praise to God, praying for the world to be set right and God’s Kingdom to be advanced, prayer that our daily needs would be met, confession and forgiveness, requests for guidance and protection, and closing praise to God. The closing praise is also acknowledgement of, and submission to, God’s unique authority and power.
Including all of these elements in our prayers helps us to pray beyond ourselves and align our heart with God’s desires. The following is a paraphrase of the prayer Jesus taught. Would you pray it to God, pausing for a moment at the end of each line to consider what you have prayed?
Our Father, above us and all around us,
May your unspeakable Name be revered.
Here to earth, may your kingdom come.
Here on earth, may your will be done as it is in heaven.
Give us today our bread for today.
And forgive us our wrongs as we forgive those who wrong us.
Lead us away from the time of trial.
But liberate us from the evil.
For the kingdom is yours and yours alone,
And the power is yours and yours alone,
And the glory is yours and yours alone.
Amen.
Prayer: Anselm of Canterbury
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 | Lent Meditations, Spiritual Disciplines | No Comments
Over the next few days, we’ll be concentrating on prayer. Freely expressing our heart to God in our own words is so important, but sometimes it can be very helpful to pray using the words of Scripture or of other Christians who have gone before us. In conjunction with praying in our own words, using written prayers can help us pray in ways we have not prayed before.
Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) was a Benedictine monk who wrote some beautiful and challenging prayers. Would you take a moment to pray the following prayers to God? You can use written prayers on their own, as they are written, or you can pray a sentence or two, pray more in your own words, and then continue. Remember that there are no “rules”; this is an open conversation with your Father.
I acknowledge, Lord, and I give thanks that you have created your image in me, so that I may remember you, think of you, love you. But this image is so obliterated and worn away by wickedness, it is so obscured by the smoke of sins, that it cannot do what it was created to do, unless you renew and reform it. I am not attempting, O Lord, to penetrate your loftiness, for I cannot begin to match my understanding with it, but I desire in some measure to understand your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this too I believe, that “unless I believe, I shall not understand.” (Isaiah 7:9)
O God, let me know you and love you so that I may find joy in you; and if I cannot do so fully in this life, let me at least make some progress every day, until at last that knowledge, love and joy come to me in all their plenitude. While I am here on earth let me know you fully; let my love for you grow deeper here, so that there I may love you fully. On earth then I shall have great joy in hope, and in heaven complete joy in the fulfillment of my hope.
Take Up Your Cross?
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
Then Jesus began to tell them that the Son of Man must suffer many terrible things and be rejected by the elders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He would be killed, but three days later he would rise from the dead. As he talked about this openly with his disciples, Peter took him aside and began to reprimand him for saying such things.
Jesus turned around and looked at his disciples, then reprimanded Peter. “Get away from me, Satan!” he said. “You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God’s.”
Then, calling the crowd to join his disciples, he said, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? -Mark 8:31-36
If you want to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood. -Daniel Berrigan
Today, when someone talks about “the cross”, the first associations that enter our mind are Jesus and Christianity. When people hear the phrase, “take up your cross”, they often think about being called to bear something or do something difficult for Jesus. But to the people Jesus was addressing, his words would have meant something entirely different.
We don’t have the slightest idea how shocking, disturbing, and even dangerous these words were when Jesus uttered them. To the people of His time, the cross was a horrifying instrument of public execution. It was a constant reminder of Roman tyranny, and it was one of the most agonizing and shameful ways to die. Common criminals, thieves, and rebels against the Roman empire were killed by crucifixion. Before they were crucified, they were beaten and forced to carry their cross, their own instrument of execution, through the streets as a form of public humiliation.
Those are the things people would have thought when Jesus told them they would have to take up their cross daily if they wanted to follow Him. His words were a radical call to a different—and dangerous—way of life centered not on self, but on the Good News that Jesus is King.
Denying Myself, I Gain Everything
Monday, March 8th, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? -Luke 9:23-25
God’s Kingdom, as described by Jesus, seems completely upside-down. Jesus says that the first will be last and the last first, whoever wants to be greatest must be a servant, and, in the passage above, whoever loses his life will save it. All of these are inversions of our world’s way of doing things. Yet the more I see them worked out in the lives of people around me in our church and our community, the more I believe that these inversions are not upside-down, but rather rightside-up… and it is the world that has things backward.
It is a completely different way of thinking and living. Rather than pursuing my happiness first (and ultimately failing), I pursue what God wants, and somehow, He fills me to overflowing with everything I need, and I end up deeply happy. Consider what Jesus says in Matthew 6:31-33:
So then, don’t worry saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For the unconverted pursue these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But above all pursue his kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
This is the paradoxical beauty of the Kingdom. We finally find our true selves, our true happiness, and our true meaning… but never while we are looking for them. Only while we are looking for Him.
A Revolution of Generosity
Sunday, March 7th, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
Today at Christ Community the message will be from Matthew 20:1-16. During His last week, Jesus spent one day teaching and telling a number of parable stories to His followers. This passage is one of the parables he told. Would you meditate on this passage of scripture? Ask God to open your eyes and heart as you do.
1″For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. 2He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.
3″About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. 4He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ 5So they went.
“He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. 6About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’
7″ ‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.
“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’
8″When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’
9″The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. 10So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. 12′These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’
13″But he answered one of them, ‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? 14Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
16″So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
The Gift vs. The Giver
Saturday, March 6th, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
More than any other discipline, fasting reveals the things that control us. -Richard Foster
They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. -Romans 1:25
Yesterday we talked about experiencing fasting as “hunger for God” in which we discover that God alone is enough for us. Yet another way fasting helps us grow closer to God is by showing us what things rule us. Often we are so used to the various influences in our lives that we don’t even notice what controls us.
In A Hunger For God, John Piper writes:
What are we slaves to? What are we most hungry for—food or God? Fasting is God’s testing ground—and healing ground. Will we murmur as the Israelites murmured in the absence of bread? For Jesus the question was: Would he leave the path of sacrificial obedience and turn stones into bread? Or would he “live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God”? Fasting is a way of revealing to ourselves and confessing to our God what is in our hearts. Where do we find our deepest satisfaction—in God or in his gifts?
God is the Creator of all things, the great Giver who provides us with everything we need. James 1:17 says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” Yet when we fast, the way we react to the raw hunger we experience often reveals to us that we are more interested in the gift than the Giver—God doesn’t “change like shifiting shadows,” but we certainly do!
Fasting reveals and concentrates our desires. It shows what is under the surface, displaying to us who we really are. It’s like the hot water poured on a tea bag. If you want to know if the tea is good or not, smelling the bag is not enough. You have to pour on the water and wait. Once we know, we can seek meaningful change.
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