Prayer and Being Examined by the Great Cardiologist (Prayer Summer)

Me in Little Italy, New York City

I have never forgotten how, over 30 years ago, I was sitting on a rusty tractor in a field in a forest preserve north of Lansing, Michigan. On that day I read - as if for the very first time - Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” I remember saying, "OK God. Do it. Examine me."

In my heart I meant these words. I wanted to be searched-out by God.

God told me "John, I would like to do this. You're going to need to learn heart-stillness."

This began a several-month period of being searched-out by God. I underwent a spiritual heart examination by the Great Cardiologist. It was hard, and it was good. It was never condemning. It was, at times, exhilarating. I was a person with a diseased heart who was being healed and given new life.

In prayer, in the God-relationship, we will be searched-out by God if we allow him access to our heart. Richard Foster writes: "Without apology and without defense we ask to see what is truly in us. It is for our own sake that we ask these things. It is for our good, for our healing, for our happiness." (Foster, Prayer - 10th Anniversary Edition: Finding the Heart's True Home, p. 29).

Needed: "Garden Time"

Playing in the Lake Michigan surf

Linda and I just returned from a wonderful week at our annual conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin. We appreciated connecting with Leif Hetland, Joe McIntyre, and Robby Dawkins. We got a lot of spiritual and intellectual input. Now, it's slow-down-and-reflect time.

We're at my brother Mike's (And Sue's) home tonight and tomorrow.  Then, we get to spend six days in "the garden." We'll be sitting the Lake Michigan beach for hours each day reading, thinking, watching, sleeping, swimming, pondering, contemplating, writing, note-taking, and etcing. And creating. Creativity springs from the garden, from getting away.

In 1984 I was writing my doctoral dissertation. I was bogged down in the massiveness of the thing, unable to see the forest for the footnotes. I was walking across Northwestern University's campus and ran into a professor friend of mine. He asked me how things were going. I said, "My writing is stuck." He said, "You need to get away from your writing for a few weeks." So I did. Two weeks away from the dissertation. Could I afford it, I wondered? The truth was I could not afford not to get away from the writing. In not-focusing on my research, ideas about the dissertation began to grow out of the hard soil of my stuckness.

Needed: slow down and engage in meditative thought. The slow-cooker (rather than the microwave) is where the creative juices flow.

Leo Marx contrasted between ""the machine and the garden" - the industrial ideal and the pastoral ideal" ( Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, Kindle, 2860-72).  "The industrial ideal of efficiency poses a mortal threat to the pastoral ideal of meditative thought" (Ib., 2873-84). Carr writes:

"The development of a well-rounded mind requires both an ability to find and quickly parse a wide range of information and a capacity for open-ended reflection. There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden. We need to work in Google's "world of numbers," but we also need to be able to retreat to [Hawthorne's] Sleepy Hollow. The problem today is that we're losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we're in perpetual locomotion." (Ib.)

Information overload is worse than ever. ""Today, more information is available to us than ever before, but there is less time to make use of it - and specifically to make use of it with any depth of reflection." Tomorrow, the situation will be worse still." (Ib., Carr quotes David Levy)

I see this battle - between tending the machine and contemplating in the garden - in the pastors and Christian leaders I teach. The need for deeper leaders is greater than ever before. Deeper leaders are refreshed leaders, with more needed energy and creativity for advancing God's Kingdom in our shallow world.

Everyone needs "garden time." I'm thankful Linda and are getting a lot of it this coming week.

Prayer and Discernment (Prayer Summer)

Prayer as Crying for the Inbreaking of the Kingdom

Linda's father Del, praying early in the morning in our kitchen.

Stanley Grenz, in his amazing, deep book Prayer: The Cry for the Kingdom, writes this on the Lord's Prayer:

"Seek above all the hallowing of the Father's name, and cry for the in-breaking of the kingdom into the brokenness of the present." As we pray this way, "the prayer of Jesus truly becomes [our] own."

True prayer is a kingdom-activity. Praying is conversing and conferencing under the realm, the domain, of the King.

When you pray today, pray this way: "Let your kingdom come, let your will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven."

(Prayer Summer friends - Linda and I are at our annual summer conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin this week. I have had the time and space to spend a lot of time praying. The amount of rich content and experience we are all receiving is now fuel for the fire of prayer in my heart.)

Prayer & the Kingdom (Prayer Summer)

Prayer and Revival (Prayer Summer)

Prayer Summer - Why We're Doing This

For those doing Prayer Summer with me:

It's Saturday morning and Linda and I are in Illinois at her sister's house. We had a delightful day yesterday with Lora and her husband Grady. We began by going to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and spent an hour and a half on a boat before the storms rolled in. Then we had an excellent lunch together.

No one else is awake yet so I'm sending this off and going apart to meet with God. To pray is to meet with the Maker of heaven and earth, about what He and I are doing together. This is a today-thing. God is doing stuff this day, and I get to be part of it.

I'm so thankful you are doing PS with me. My heart is to encourage and challenge Jesus-followers like you to have a life of prayer, which means: to be actually praying.

Why pray? Well, all the Old Testament God-leaders prayed. The early church gathered and prayed. Paul had a deep, constant prayer life. But even more important than this: Jesus prayed. Often. Who, then, am I to say I don't have time to pray?

When we see praying as foundational to our relationship with God and abiding in Christ, we will understand how important it is. A prayerless church will be an out-of-touch-with-God church. Prayerlessness renders the people of God irrelevant, impotent, and inauthentic.

I want to be part of reconnecting people to God, via praying. Or, to strengthen an already-existing prayefulness, since we all have room to grow.

Three weeks of PS have passed. How are you doing? Remember this is not to be some "striving" or "trying harder" thing. The reason it doesn't have to be like that is because this is about a relationship. If I have to strive to take time communicating with Linda, then my marriage is in trouble. Real relationships don't need to be pressured or guilt-manipulated.

God doesn't love us less if we don't pray or love us more if we do. But it is in prayer that we especially hear God expressing his love for us, and we respond by telling God "I love you, too." Prayer is communicating with God.

God has called his people to pray. That's what we're doing, together. The 30-60 minutes a day, 5 days a week idea is one I believe God gave me. I pass this on to you. My prayer is that this will ignite your conferencing with your Lord.

I bless you now with a deep, abiding prayer-relationship with the One who knows and calls you by name.

Prayer and the Unbalanced Life (Prayer Summer)

Needed in Preaching: Fewer "Spellbinders" and More Spiritual Power

Green Lake Conference Center, Wisconsin

I'm reading the autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Chapter 3 is called "Crozier Seminary." King inserts  something he wrote n preaching, while at Crozier.

"We have too many minsters in the pulpit who are great spellbinders and too few who possess spiritual power. It is my profound conviction that I, as an aspirant for the ministry, should possess these powers."

- The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.,  (p. 18)

I agree. The apostle Paul was definitely not a "spellbinder" as  preacher. But he did have access to spiritual power. Which is way better, correct? I'll take power over drama any day.

The Brain Is Not the Mind

David Brooks has a nice piece in the nytimes - "Beyond the Brain."

While neuroscientific reearch and discovery is immensely valuable, there's a "zeal without knowledge" neuromania happening, where the uncritical belief The brain explains everything is being sung in worship.

Brooks's essay is readable, and points us in a good direction.

Prayer As a Total Way of Life

Lewis Baldwin's book on the prayer life of Martin Luther King, Jr., is so good, so helpful in putting King's life and accomplishments in perspective. King the Christian theist believed God responded to our prayers, and that to be a praying person was essential if anything godly was to happen in our struggling and systemically evil world.

Baldwin writes: "As far as King was concerned, he was involved in essentially a "spiritual movement" and not simply a struggle for equal rights, social justice, and peace; this invariably meant prayer and praying, much like the spiritual discipline of nonviolence, had to be for him a daily activity and a total way of life. Otherwise, the quest to redeem and transform the moral and political spirit of the nation and of humanity as a whole would ultimately prove futile and perhaps even counterproductive." (Baldwin, 68)

So:

• the peace and justice movement championed by Jesus and His followers is essentially spiritual, not secular.
• praying must be a daily activity
• praying must be a total way of life (cmp. Dallas Willard's idea that "prayer" is talking with God about what He and I are doing together)
• without the ongoing, empowering conversational prayer-relationship with God all that we do is futile
• indeed, without the daily, vital prayer-relationship with God our merely human, prayerless (hence godless) efforts will even work against the plans and purposes of God 

The Humanities are Needed for Knowledge and Meaning

Is science the only discipline that gives us knowledge? Of course not. For knowledge, the humanities are needed. In fact, without the humanities there is no knowledge.

Consider the statement: Only the sciences give us knowledge. This statement is not something science can conclude. It is a philosophical statement, something like a worldview claim. With statements like this we enter the realm of the humanities.Science provides the "how"; the humanities provide the "why."

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has just published a 61-page report entitled "The Heart of the Matter." Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke University and a co-chairman of the commission that produced the report, states: People talk about the humanities and social sciences “as if they are a waste of time. But this facile negativism forgets that many of the country’s most successful and creative people had exactly this kind of education.”  ("Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm," nytimes.com, 6/18/13)

Here's a video by the AAAS. 

We're a Tuition-Free Ministry School - How to Apply

Redeemer Ministry School is tuition-free in 2013-2014.

Students will be responsible to purchase their texts.

Students from outside of the Monroe area will need to secure their own housing. We can help you make contacts.

Classes begin Sept. 10.

Intimacy & Identity in Worship

True worship and adoration comes from intimacy with God.  It is founded on the understanding of God's great love for you. Intimacy & Identity in Worship will focus on building and furthering that love relationship with Him while defining what a lifestyle of worship looks like.  This class will include an in-depth look at Song of Solomon and Old & New Testament character studies.

Time: Fridays, 9:30am – 1:00pm

Instructor: Holly Benner

Spiritual Formation

In order to be used by God as an agent of renewal and transformation one must themselves be in a continual place of personal renewal and transformation. This course will combine times of personal prayer, spiritual journaling, and teaching from biblical and historical resources on what it means to dwell in the presence of God and be renewed and transformed.

Time: Tuesdays, 9:30am – 1:00pm

Instructor: Dr. John Piippo

Kingdom of God I

The main teaching of Jesus was about the “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven.” This course will present the major interpretations of the meaning of the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. Students will learn to understand the real Jesus from the perspective of God’s kingdom message.

Time: Thursdays, 5pm - 8pm

Instructor: Jim Collins

Bible Study Methods I

This course will provide students with systematic methods of studying scripture.  Through those methods students will also learn how to practically apply their understanding as they study different books of the Bible. 

Time: Wednesdays, 9:30am - 1:00pm

Instructor: TBA

Want to study with us in the fall? 

Let me know - johnpiippo@msn.com.

To check out the classes, 

and the application process, 

go here.

Prayer as Being with God (Prayer Summer)

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." (!!!)

Prayer Comes Before To-doing (Prayer Summer)

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)

Heroin Addiction in Southeast Michigan

Damselfly

I know someone who died of a heroin overdose this spring. I know many people who have been or are addicted to vicodin and oxycontin. I am aware that there are doctors who hand out these drugs like the jar of mints on their secretary's desk.

The progression to heroin is often: 1) vicodin and oxycontin; 2) heroin.

See today's Detroit Free Press - "New, troubling heroin addiction trend grips southeast Michigan." From this article:

• At the 99-bed St. John Providence Brighton Center for Recovery, more clients are coming in these days addicted to opiates, including heroin.
• “Our 18- to 25-year population has exploded” in recent years, said outreach and referral specialist Scott Masi, 48. “The prescription medication problem is pushing this heroin problem. Anybody who tells you anything different doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I could poll every kid who comes in our clinic, and it’s a broken record. It’s the Vicodin and Oxycontin, and then it goes to the heroin.”
• Authorities say a particularly toxic heroin mix known by some on the street as “black shadow” appears to be circulating in southeast Michigan communities, causing a rise in overdoses and at least one death this month.
• During a two-day period last week, eight people overdosed in Washtenaw County alone, including one person who died. Officials there are trying to determine whether the incidents are related.
• “You used to have one every other day or so, but now two or three a day either dying or coming in — and that’s just our hospital,” [Dr. Thomas] McKeown said. (Henry Ford Hospital)
• The fatal overdoes in recent years often involve young men and women — some just teenagers — who are working and going to school “and who get caught up in it. You see heroin use in a population that most people don’t think of as users,” [Macomb County Medical Examiner Daniel ]Spitz said. Masi said they include addicts from successful and intact families. Athletes. Top students in school, he said.

"I call these drugs 'the beast," said the young addict who came to check out our church.

Another young man came to the altar for prayer, shaking and in the midst of heroin withdrawal.

If you are an addict and want to get on the road to freedom come to Redeemer this Sunday, introduce yourself to me (a former drug user myself from 43 years ago), and I would love to help you.

4 Books on Prayer and Praying I Am Now Reading and Re-reading

Climbing the large dune at Warren Dunes State Park

Here's a few books on prayer and praying I am now reading and re-reading. 

Henri Nouwen, The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life (beautiful, deep, meditative)

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (deep, meditative thoughts on the purging quality of solitary praying)

Stanley Grenz, Prayer: The Cry for the Kingdom (I'm currently reading this excellent little book very slowly - how Grenz connects praying with the kingdom of God is very good)

Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home (emphasizes prayer as relationship with God)

I'm re-reading the Merton and Foster texts, and reading the Nouwen and Grenz books for the first time. 

Remember there is no greater learning to be had than by actually praying. You will learn more by engaging in real prayer than could be gotten from any book. Here's the order of learning:

1. Have an ongoing prayer life.

2. Read what some others say about this. 

It's more effective to do it in that order.

Always sacrifice 2 for the sake of 1.

Learn to Pray by Praying (Prayer Summer)

Ramifications of Divorce; Hope for Struggling Marriages

Linda, in the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island

Here are some posts I've made on the matter of divorce. 

Divorce - The Kids Will NOT Be OK

For Children, There's No Such Thing as a "Good Divorce"

Overcoming the Regret of Divorce

Divorce Has Ruinous Consequences That Remarriage Cannot Heal

America's Divorce Culture

Does God Hate Me If I Am Divorced?

Do you want to save your struggling marriage? Here are some of my ideas on this.

How to Save Your Failing Marriage

Your Marriage Can Be Saved (Especially for Husbands)

Finally, are you a pastor who counsels struggling marriages? Linda and I are reading this excellent book to strengthen our own abilities to help marital couples: 

Hope-Focused Marriage Counseling: A Guide to Brief Therapy, by Everett Worthington.

Prayer as Accepting God's Invitation to the Big Dance (Prayer Summer)

The Wailing (Western) Wall, in Jerusalem

For the past 32 years Tuesday has been my extended prayer day. This afternoon I get to go to a quiet place, apart from distractions, and converse and confer with God, 1-on-1, for several hours.                                                                          

As I meet with God here are some things about prayer that are important to me.

1. God exists. God is real. There is a God. I believe in God. Without this, of course, prayer is an illusion. With this, I view myself, in the act of praying, as keeping company with the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, necessarily existent (everlasting; without beginning or end), personal agent who created and sustains all things. This is no small appointment I have today!
2. God is a personal being. God desires relationship. The Christian idea of God as a Trinity makes sense of God as essentially relational. God, in His being, is 3-Relating-Persons-in-One. (I confess that I do, very much, like The Shack on Trinitarian theism.) God as a 3-Personed Being makes conceptual sense of the idea that God is love. Everlastingly the Father has been loving the Son, the son the Spirit, the Spirit the Father, and round and round in the Big Dance (perichoresis). To pray is to accept God's invitation to the Big Dance.
3. God made me. For what? For relationship with Him. God, who is a relational being in essence, desires relationship. He made me for such a thing as this. When I pray I am living in the heart of God's desire for me.
4. God knows me.
5. God loves me.
6. Put 4 and 5 together and you'll begin singing "Amazing Grace" accompanied by tears of gratitude and joy.
7. God desires me to love and know Him in return.
8. This is where prayer comes in. Prayer is talking with God about what God and I are doing together. To pray is to enter into a loving-knowing relationship with God.
9. When I talk with God in prayer I often begin by asking God a question – “God, is everything all right between You and me?” This is the "Search me, O God" moment. Then I listen. If God shows me something that’s breaking relationship with Him, I will confess this to Him. It then becomes God’s delight to forgive me. God loves doing this because God is love, and God desires to heal anything that breaks relationship. (Note: God’s grace is amazing but it’s not cheap. It will cost me something to be in relationship with God. This should not surprise me, since it will cost me something to be in real relationship with anyone. Love is sacrifice. There are no exceptions to this.)
10. In prayer I talk and listen to God. Talk – I express my love to God, and my concerns. I don’t hesitate to ask for my own self if my request is kingdom-advancing. This is called petitionary prayer. I meet some people who feel odd about asking for their own self. That feeling is not a feeling from God. I also pray for others. This is called intercessory prayer. 
11. Listen – when God speaks to me, I write it down. I keep a spiritual journal, which is a record of the voice and activity of God to me. I will remember the things God speaks to me. God's history with me is more precious than things and accomplishments.
12. I have found that God has much to say to me – today. I take "This is the day the Lord has made" seriously. Today is the day of breakthrough for me. 
13. God has plans and purposes for me, which have to do with His Kingdom and His righteousness. I will, now, seek these two things in the first place. Then God will add all good things unto me. (“Good” = the kind of things God values, things like love and honor and reconciliation and joy and peace and compassion and real, authentic relationship.

There's no formula for this because prayer is relationship with God. And there's way more to prayer-as-relationship than these things.

Yet there are essentials that apply to all strong relationships, such as listening and understanding, and of course love.

I will pray, with these kind of things in mind, today.

The Decline of the American Entertainment Church

The River Raisin

Recently X told me his family left one of our local churches and is now going to a church because his kids are more "entertained" there.

I wanted to say, but didn't: "You are kidding, right?"

X would not like our church, since I am 0% concerned with entertaining anybody. But we are (like some of our local churches) 100% concerned with abiding in Christ and worshiping the one true God. Imagine the first church in the book of Acts meeting in that room worrying about how to keep the new Jesus-followers happy and entertained! When the people left those meetings they were talking about God and Jesus, not evaluating the "service." God, when actually encountered, is not "entertaining." That, precisely, is not the word to describe him.

Roger Olson, in Against Calvinism, agrees with the new Calvinists when he writes:

"The new Calvinists are reacting to what they regard as a general decline of theology and especially emphasis on God’s glory in contemporary American church life. His subjects, he says, are reacting against the “feel good theology” of many contemporary evangelical churches....

Far too many Christian youth grow up with almost no biblical or theological knowledge, thinking that God exists for their comfort and success in life even if he lays down a law nobody can really live up to. Like a kindly grandfather who dotes on his preteen progeny while decrying their bad grades, God may be disappointed in us but his whole goal is to make us fulfilled anyway." (Roger Olson, Against Calvinism: Rescuing God's Reputation from Radical Reformed Theology, p. 17)

I agree, as does Olson, with the new Calvinists. The Entertainment Church is brainwashed by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Want to Discuss Calvinism With Me This Wednesday?

J.B. and I will be discussing Calvinism this Wed., June 12, 11:30 AM, at Panera Bread in Monroe.

Anyone interested is invited to join us.

We will be especially referring to William Lane Craig''s online article "5 Objections to Calvinism."

They are:

1. Universal, divine, causal determinism cannot offer a coherent interpretation of Scripture.
2. Universal causal determinism cannot be rationally affirmed.
3. Universal, divine, determinism makes God the author of sin and precludes human responsibility.
4. Universal, divine, determinism nullifies human agency.
5. Universal, divine determinism makes reality into a farce.

I have never been a Calvinist. Perhaps that's because, on becoming a Jesus-follower in 1970 at Northern Illinois University, one of my campus ministry leaders was Bill Craig. Bill, though almost as young as I was at the time, was already a brilliant philosophical thinker. I was a philosophy major. Bill was my initial mentor in theistic philosophy.

Here is a quote from Calvin's famous Institutes of the Christian Religion:

"In conformity, therefore, to the clear doctrine of the Scripture, we assert, that by an eternal and immutable counsel, God has once for all determined, both whom he would admit to salvation, and whom he would condemn to destruction. We affirm that this counsel, as far as concerns the elect, is founded on his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of human merit; but that to those whom he devotes to condemnation, the gate of life is closed by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible, judgment. In the elect, we consider calling as an evidence of election, and justification as another token of its manifestation, till they arrive in glory, which constitutes its completion. As God seals his elect by vocation and justification, so by excluding the reprobate from the knowledge of his name and the sanctification of his Spirit, he affords an indication of the judgement that awaits them."

Calvinism is again making headlines. See, e.g.,:

"How Calvinism Is Dividing The Southern Baptist Convention," June 6, 2013, The Huffington Post

"Growing popularity of Calvinism invites discussion about predestination, gender roles," June 7, 2013, Kansas City Star

"500 years later, theological debate over Calvinism still simmers among Southern Baptists," June 7, 2013, The Washington Post

Prayer Summer An Analogy from Marriage

Tonight - A Challenge and Call to Prayer

Tonight (June 9) I will be giving A Challenge and Call to Prayer at Toledo Vineyard Church. 

Thanks so much Pastors Bill and Barb Herzog and your people for your great support in joining and helping with this!








We'll begin at 6 PM, led into God's presence by the Vineyard Worship Team.

Then, the challenge and the call.



Toledo Vineyard Church

210 E South Boundary Perrysburg OH 43551

419.874.4808

MAP

How Mercy Looks from Here

I just gave Amy Grant's new cd a listen - "How Mercy Looks from Here" - and it is beautiful.

It's so good to hear her voice. Amy was an important piece in my faith in the 70s and 80s. She became a "crossover" artist with her album "Unguarded" and got persecuted by Christians for it. How ignorant, since Jesus was a crossover artist too. Christ crossed over from heaven to earth. He came to us, rather than waiting for us to come to him.

I'm listening to one song over and over - "Deep As It Is Wide" - with Cheryl Crow and Eric Pasley. This song brings tears of joy to my eyes. Here are the lyrics.

There's a place at the edge of the sky
Where there's a love deep as it is wide
The weak are strong, the hungry are all fed
And there's a breeze from the angels flying overhead
Oh yeah

And there's a path, a glorious light
That guides you up the mountainside
And at the top, if you could you'd cry
Cause you see pure love for the very first time

Deep as it is wide

Every breath taking me closer
Every step leading to paradise
They say the faithful get to go there
I believe there's a love
Deep as it is wide

And I hear, when you get to the river
You look back for the very last time
And when you cross, you get washed off forever
Hurry up boy, eternity's on the other side

Deep as it is wide

Every breath taking me closer
Every step leading to paradise
They say the faithful get to go there
I believe there's a love
Deep as it is wide
I believe there's a love

Every nation covered [?]
Like grace pouring out, far as the eye can see
Singing praises up to a King
Cause He died, for a crown
Deep as it is wide

Every breath taking me closer
Every step leading to paradise
They say the faithful get to go there
I believe there's a love
I believe
I believe there's a love
I believe there's a love
Deep as it is wide
Deep as it is wide
Deep as it is wide

There's a place at the edge of the sky
Where there's a love deep as it is wide

Frog Weddings and Sex Slaves

Annie D. posted this on Facebook:

"Weddings for frogs and shrimp while Thailand's daughters are sold in prostitution? Speechless."

See "Mass wedding for frogs, bullfrogs in Thailand's Northeast." 
Meanwhile, here in the American world of irrationality, Ariel Castro may be prosecuted on multiple counts, including aggravated murder for purposely beating one of his women hostages who was pregnant with his child, causing her to miscarry. But in America abortion is legal. You will not be able to logically wrap your mind around this.

Prayer Summer - Finding a Lonely Place to Pray

Prayer and Stillness as the Gateway to the Source of Life (Prayer Summer)

Green Lake Conference Center, Wisconsin

Howard Thurman writes: "There is no argument needed for the necessity of taking time out for being alone, for withdrawal, for being quiet without and still within. The sheer physical necessity is urgent because the body and the entire nervous system cry out for the healing waters of silence. One could not begin the cultivation of the prayer life at a more practical point than deliberately to seek each day, and several times a day, a lull in the rhythm of daily doing, a period when nothing happens that demands active participation...

...At first the quiet times might be quite barren or a retreat from exhaustion. One has to get used to the stillness even after it has been achieved. The time may be used for taking stock, for examining one's life direction, one's plans, one's relations, and the like. This in itself is most profitable. It is like cleaning out the closets, or the desk drawers, and getting things in order.

The time may be used for focusing or re-focusing one's purposes in the light of what at first may be only one's idea of the best and the highest. Then quiet changes begin to take place. Somewhere along the way, one's idea of the best and the highest takes on a transcendent character and one begins to commune, to communicate with one's idea of the best and the highest - only a man does not talk to, or with, an idea. When the awareness of God comes in - how He entered, one does not know - one is certain that he has been there all the time. This assurance is categorical and becomes the very core of one's faith; indeed, it becomes more and more one's faith." (Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, 27-28)

I love how Thurman puts the idea of getting still in the presence of God.

• Withdraw daily from the rat-race of life
• Get still in your heart
• Your physical body cries out for such heart-and-space stillness
• Take time to "do nothing" but be with God
• If you're new at this, tiredness and exhaustion will take over, and the God-times may seem barren and dry
• Our world does not train us for this kind of stillness, so it takes getting used-to
• Once achieved as a lifestyle it becomes the gateway to the Source of Life
• In the stillness be examined by God, as you engage in listening prayer
• In the stillness "spring cleaning" happens every day (there's a lot of useless garbage in the human heart, which accrues in inverse proportion to the amount of "still time" with God)
• Then... God breaks in, creativity happens, life results, energy gets retored, purpose gets defined, direction is given, transcendence takes over, and one communes (dwells/abides) with God

Where Was God When the Tornado Came?

Storm forming over our house

I'll be teaching two sessions of a workshop at our coming conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin, that I'm calling "Where Was God when the Tornado Came?" Here's the description:

WHERE WAS GOD WHEN THE TORNADO CAME? How do we respond when someone asks us a question like this?  In this workshop we will see how the reality of God as all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing is compatible with the existence of moral and natural evil, and why belief in such a God makes the best worldview-sense of moral and natural evil. Led by John Piippo.

I'll be bringing in materials from my "problem of evil" sections in my MCCC philosophy of religion classes. I've been studying this issue for decades, and am now putting it together in an hour and a half package.

I'm reading two new (to me) texts that are excellent:

- Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, by Michael J. Murray. Murray's book is on the problem of animal suffering, and brings in the issue of natural evil. (Note: Greg Boyd's warfare worldview denies the distinction between moral evil and natural evil, arguing that all evil is due to the free choices of created agents.)

- The Problem of Evil, by University of Notre Dame philosopher Peter Inwagen. Inwagen is brilliant and his writing is challenging.

I looking forward to presenting this.

When Your Mind Wanders During Prayer (Prayer Summer)

The Focus of Prayer Is Not Prayer

Monroe sunset

The focus of prayer is not prayer itself, but God himself.

James Houston says that "this is absolutely basic to prayer, but it is easy to forget in today's world." (Houston, The Transforming Power of Prayer: Deepening Your Friendship with God, 34) 

In this way prayer is like a sign. A sign is, ultimately, not about itself, but about something else; viz., that to which it points to.

Or, prayer is like a tool. Tools have specific purposes beyond themselves. This is important to know, especially for me since I inherited many of my father's tools but have no idea of what many of them are for. I've got a lot of tools sitting around, on display. This might look impressive, but tools are not meant to just be looked at. Like, "Look at all these tools lying here in my garage. Aren't they cool?"

We are not to pray simply because we can, or because it's the religious thing to do. Houston writes: "Prayer is our response to God's interest in us and his love for us. To pray is to become aware that God's Spirit lives within us. Through prayer, we explore a deeper and more intimate relationship with God." (Ib.)

Jeremiah 29:13 says, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." In true prayer we find God. That is the point of the whole thing. It's the point of our life.