Prayer Is Knocking On the Door of the Sanctuary of the Heart

I took this photo of a woman praying
in the Church of the Nativity in Jerusalem

The human heart is like a home. The heart is a dwelling place.

When your heart was constructed, the architect and builder was God. You were, and are, made in the image of God. Your purpose in life is to host the presence of God in your heart-home.

If you place your trust in Him, this will happen. Jesus said, in John 14:23, “All who love me will do what I say. My Father will love them, and we will come and make our home with each of them." So, as a Jesus-truster, Christ the "hope of glory" has made His home in your heart. He lives within you, by His Spirit. Call this place the inner sanctuary. You, as a "temple" of the Holy Spirit, are a "portable sanctuary." 

There is a "door" into this inner place, and it is prayer. Prayer is the knock on the door of the heart-sanctuary God dwells. When we knock in prayer, God opens. Because real prayer is talking with God about what you and He are doing together, God will never not-respond to spending time with you in that way. 

These meetings with God are not mere business meetings. Imagine attending a corporate business meeting and the CEO interrupts, calls your name, and says "I love you." He cares for you. He heals your wounded heart. That's what doing business with God is like. I know this from experience.

In the history of Christian spirituality many have drawn on the John 14 imagery of the human heart as the place where God makes His home. One famous example is Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle. The heart, writes Teresa, is a castle containing many mansions. "The door of this castle is prayer." (K 353)

Enter in today.

Why So Many Zombies?

My son Josh took this photo in Detroit a week ago
as we were leaving a Tigers game.

"World War Z" ('Z' = "zombies") comes out this week. Zombies are, culturally, everywhere. Why? Why the proliferation of zombie movies and zombie TV shows and zombie video games and zombie apparel, and why do I even have a tin of zombie mints that I'm carrying with me these days?

Well, every effect has a cause. For the cause of zombie-pop see, e.g., University of Missouri sociologist Todd Platts's "Locating Zombies In the Sociology of Popular Culture." Platts writes:

• "Commonly understood as corpses raised from the dead and imbued with a ravenous instinct to devour the living, zombies address fears that are both inherent to the human condition and specific to the time of their resurrection. From an evolutionary perspective, zombies engender terror because of ingrained phobia of infectious contagion, loss of personal autonomy, and death."
• Zombie-pop represents "a monstrous tabula rasa whose construction registers extant social anxieties."  A tabula rasa, or "blank slate," is a term made famous by Descartes and recently debunked by Steven Pinker. Written upon the blank slate of zombieism is a statement about a mindless, decaying infrastructure and an anxious cry for help.
• "In their modern form, zombie narratives commonly present apocalyptic parables of societies in the state collapse (or have already collapsed) wherein a handful of survivors receive claustrophobic refuge from undead hordes. The survivors’ temporary rampart disintegrates not because of the zombies but because of the survivors’ inability to cooperate despite their differences."

The aftereffects of war, terrorism, and natural disasters closely resemble the scenarios of zombie cinema. 

Borrowing from the linguistic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, Platts writes:

"What nearly all understandings and depictions of popular culture zombies have in common is a flexible creature designed to evoke our macabre fascination and whose likeness adapts to contemporaneous tumult,  concerns about man-made and natural disasters, conflicts and wars, and crime and violence. This does not solve the problem of definition, but it is along this logic that the [Saussurean] diachronic and synchronic evocation of zombies should be comprehended."  

In other words, z-proliferation is a manifestation of cultural angst and anomie. Chaos rules, attacking family systems and communities, and there's nothing we can do to stop the advancing of this blind, brainless beast.  "Zombie studies scholars suggest the monster can be “read as tracking a wide range of cultural, political, and economic anxieties of American society”." (Platts)

1. The more zombies we see, the more anxious and uncertain Americans are.

2. We're seeing a lot of zombies.

3. Therefore... 

"Zombie" - all flesh, no spirit. (Thank you Peter G, for this!)

See also:

"The Zombie in Film"

"Zombies" 

"A History of Zombies in America" 

"The American Fascination with Zombies"

"Zombies Are Us"

And for something really different see the Center for Disease Control's  "Zombies - A Pop Culture Resource for Public Health Awareness." (!!!)

A Critical Spirit Cannot Enter Into Fellowship with God

Oswald Chambers has written:

"It is impossible to enter into fellowship with God when you are in a critical mood. Criticism serves to make you harsh, vindictive, and cruel, and leaves you with the soothing and flattering idea that you are somehow superior to others. Jesus says that as His disciple you should cultivate a temperament that is never critical. This will not happen quickly but must be developed over a span of time. You must constantly beware of anything that causes you to think of yourself as a superior person."     

(Thanks J.H. for this.)

Prayer Comes Before To-doing (Prayer Summer)

Without Prayer All Ministry Loses Its Meaning (Prayer Summer)

At Graham and Hillary's wedding (Linda's nephew)

To pray is to be in relationship with God. This is because prayer is communication with God. How weird to claim:

1. I love God and am in relationship with God.
2. I don't have time to pray.

Henri Nouwen writes that prayer is foundational, therefore essential, to mall authentic leadership. Nouwen states:

"Prayer is not merely a condition for compassionate leadership: it is its essence. As long as we keep speaking about prayer as a way to restore ourselves from spiritual fatigue, or worse, to recharge our batteries, we have reduced prayer to a method and compassion to a commodity. Reminding ourselves that we should not forget to pray in our busy lives is like reminding each other to keep breathing! Prayer is the essence of the spiritual life without which all ministry loses its meaning. It is the fulfillment of the great commandment to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind." (Nouwen, The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life, 79)

God wants our love, without any reservations.

I thank God for many of you who today will be setting aside 30-60 minutes to connect with God in prayer.

The Parable of the Father's Outrageous Love

With Joe LaRoy in Bangkok

Most are familiar with Luke 15's "parable of the prodigal son." This famous and beautiful story  would be better called “the parable of the father’s outrageous love,” because the central character is the dad, not the younger son or the older son.

About the Younger Son

He asks his father for his inheritance. This would have been a scandalous thing to do, since a son only received his inheritance after his father was dead. To ask for it while his father was alive was as good as saying to him, “Father, I view you as dead.” 

What the son got was probably mostly land, not cash. He cashed in the land and spent it all in a foreign country on sex and who-knows-what-else. 

It would, at that time, have been a son’s responsibility to care for his father in his old age. But now that he’d sold his father’s land it was like saying “Not only do I consider you dead, don’t plan on me taking care of you when you get too old to care for yourself.”

Finally, he comes to senses. He’s lost all his money, he’s an alien in a foreign nation who works feeding pigs, even eating the pigs’ food. He is at the bottom of the social hierarchy, an “expendable” person even below “unclean” people. No one is there to care for him. He thinks of his father’s love and rises up to go home.

About the Older Son

The older son, in the parable, represents the Jewish religious Pharisees. They are mentioned in Like 15:1-2 as being disgusted that “sinners and tax collectors” are welcomed by Jesus. 

Jesus hangs with the lowly and poor and hungry and marginalized and weak and sick and blind and filthy and the prostitutes. The Pharisees can’t believe this! The older brother can’t believe it when his father runs to embrace and kiss his screwed-up younger son. He is shocked that the father throws a huge party for the kid. 

The older son obeyed all the rules and stayed at home – so why doesn’t he get the party?

The older brother is scary-moralistic and self-righteous. His younger brother doesn’t deserve a celebration. If his father should kiss anyone it should be him. 

In this the older brother is both right and wrong. He’s right that the younger brother doesn’t deserve his father’s love; he’s wrong in thinking he deserves it. The older son is an alien in his own father’s home, who does not understand how his father loves.

About the Father

In the parable the father loves both sons. He loves them with an unconditional love. 

A conditional love says “I love you IF… you perform/look nice/keep all the rules.” But the love of this father, and by analogy the love of God, loves with no conditions or strings attached. God longs for both his sons to come back to him. He longs to celebrate the return of his children. And he welcomes them with loving, enveloping arms.

This is how God loves you. Unconditonally. No strings attached.

This is the love of the Father. For you and me.

Prayer & the Nature of God (Prayer Summer)

Baby Hummingbirds!

Two weeks ago I found a hummingbird nest on our property. Today my friend Dave N took this photo of the two baby hummingbirds in it.

A hummingbird's nest is very small.

Add Scripture Meditation to Praying (Prayer Summer)

Purity

"How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing (and perhaps, like you, I have met it only once) it is irresistible." 
- C.S. Lewis, in Letters to an American Lady

A few years ago I did premarital counseling with an engaged couple. I use the FOCCUS premarital inventory. It's so well-put-together, and gives me an MRI of the relationship. It asks all the questions I want to get into. Most couples enjoy taking this survey, and end up talking about a number of important things they have not yet thought of.

This couple - call them Jason and Andrea (not their real names, and I've altered their story slightly) - scored pretty high on the FOCCUS. I had a good feeling after my first meeting with them. Especially because of their stance toward pre-marital sex.

Jason and Andrea had known each other for many years. They dated for several years. She was working on a graduate degree, and he managed a business. The FOCCUS survey led us to talk about sex.

"Have you had sex together?" I asked them.

"Neither of us have ever had sexual intercourse or come close to it," they responded in unison. Andrea said, "When Jason told me he loved me and was interested in pursuing marriage I immediately told him, 'There's no way I'm having sex before I get married.'"

"How did Jason respond to this?"

"He respected me for it," said Andrea, "and never has pressed himself on me."

Jason added, "It's not always been easy, because I love Andrea and look forward to sex in marriage. But I agree with her. God wants us to wait, and we are waiting."

I stopped.

I was stunned.

This was, for me, a holy moment.

Jason and Andrea are two attractive, intelligent, and successful people with great futures. Yes, they are Jesus-followers, but most of the Jesus-followers who get married have premarital sex because "they can't wait." (A lot of the "True Love Waits" teens failed to wait.)

I don't wish to judge them for that. Yet, I want to bow down before Jason and Andrea and do a little worship! Who are these rare, unusual people who take the road less traveled and delay gratification? Especially in our sex-addicted culture where we are now even subjected to commercials advertising the enlargement of...  you know what, right?

From my pastoral POV I see lots of sex addiction. Sometimes I wonder, falsely I am certain, "Who is not a sex addict today?" Have you ever seen or counseled one? Addiction is a monster. The French word for addict, as Gerald May has told us, is attache. Attachment. Claw-like attache. Being married or shacking up (I'm not talking about the book The Shack) cannot cure this. Our culture of sexual freedom has, ironically, imprisoned many. A sex addict outside of marriage will be a sex addict within marriage (unless The Transformation happens, to be accomplished only by grace).

Somehow, Jason and Andrea escaped from the prison house of "sexual freedom."

I told them I was proud of them. Delayed sexual gratification displays self-control and breeds trust.

Linda and I abstained. In my abstinence I was not being some kind of religious legalist. I was so screwed up sexually that I just wanted God to heal the garbage of my heart so that, should I marry, I would not infect my life partner and children. When I told Linda I would not be asking her to have sex with me, I asked her how this made her feel. She said, "Safe." I didn't love her only for her physical beauty. I wanted her heart. The two are different.

While dating I waited several months before I kissed her. I will never forget that kiss! We were walking in a park, and it began to lightly rain. A little voice told me, "It is time!" I asked for her permission. She said yes. That kiss lasted only one second, but mega-volts of lightning came through her lips! From then until we got married we kissed only occasionally, and then only for a second or two. Our love and trust and respect only grew. This was wild and unbelievable to me, a former drug-alcohol-fraternity-sex-womanizer. A foundation of faithfulness was being laid from which we have never diverted (for 40 years).

I don't see that often. So when I sat in my office with Jason and Andrea I got those feelings that have to do with my understanding of real, deep, growing Jesus-love that lasts a lifetime. Because Jason and Andrea have no history of sexual partners and have not sex-partnered with each other I predict they will stay faithful to one another. They are disease-free, physically and spiritually. In this they are...  pure.

The odds are greatly in their favor. Their children will be blessed. They will pass marital fidelity to their kids. And maybe a couple of children whose parents are named Jason and Andrea will lead the counter-revolution to purity?