Speaking and Teaching at Linden Avenue Baptist Church in Dayton Today

Today I'll be speaking and teaching in Dayton on Prayer, Spiritual Transformation, and Living the Presence-Driven Life.

Where: Linden Avenue Baptist Church (Pastor Pam Wantz)
101 Linden Avenue
Dayton
937-254-1724

When: 1 PM - 6 PM

Cost: Free

Anyone is invited to come.

Pray for Humility (PrayerLife)

Playing chess with Katie and Oliver Scoles

On New Year's Eve 2013 (like this New Year's eve) I challenged people in our church family to a game of chess. Katie and Oliver Scoles accepted the challenge. I thought I was doing well when suddenly, out of nowhere it seemed, one of them spotted my king, trapped in the corner of the board with no place to move. They advanced their queen from d1 to d8 and... yikes!... I was checkmated! 

That was a brilliant move. And yet another humbling experience. I must accept it and move on in life.

I was humbled. Everyone gets humbled, multiple times in life. But being humbled is not the same thing as being humble. Everyone gets humbled; not everyone acquires humility as a heart-condition. 

This is so important that James 4:6 tells us that God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble. This is a foundational attitude in the spiritual life, without which progress in holiness will not happen. God has struggled mightily with me about this over the years.

Pray for God to remove pride.

Pray for a humble heart.


***

 Here are some things I have written out of the struggle. 

"Humility" Defined

Humility, Charity, Patience, and Chastity

Prayer and Humility (Prayer Summer) 

Self-Exaltation is Bad; Humility is Good

Thomas Merton on Pride

St. John of the Cross on Humility and Pride

Ernie Harwell & the Power of Humility

C.S. Lewis on Pride
 
Humility (Jack Deere on...)

Realize Your Own Faults

(More On) True Greatness
 
Reputation Increases; Ability Decreases
 
God Morphs Us From Pride to Humility

Prayer and Humility

Self-Control & Freedom

RMS prayer circle

The fruit of the Spirit is... self-control...
- Galatians 5:22-23

While working out on the elliptical machine yesterday I listened to the Philosophy Bites interview with neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland on self-control. 

Churchland says that a good working definition of "self-control" has four things in mind:

1. 1.       Ability to defer self-gratification. That is, deferring a smaller value now for something greater later.
2. 2.       Ability to maintain a goal despite distraction.
3. 3.       Ability to suppress impulses that are inappropriate.
4. 4.       Ability to cancel an action once started when you see that following through with an action would be a disaster.

The opposite of self-control would be things like impulsivity or addiction. The impulsive person and the addict are, in their impulsivity and addiction, neurally enslaved.

“Addiction is where there are structural changes to the reinforcement learning system which actually change the behavior with respect to the drug in question.” But notice that even drug addicts can be careful and organized when it comes to exercising self-control that is needed to obtain more drugs. 

If we can’t control ourselves, if we lack the four abilities given above, then in what sense are we free?

The answer to gaining self-control is this:

• As I connect, like a branch connects to the tree, I receive the resources of the tree. They get into me.
• My life will then "bear much fruit" (Jesus, in John 15:5, 8).
• The fruit of the Spirit-abiding life includes self-control.

(Note: Churchland is an eliminative materialist, which I am not. "Eliminative materialism" is the idea that all mental states are states of the physical brain.)

Discernment Increases as Intimacy Increases (PrayerLife)

University of Michigan

Prayer is, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, a "conversation with God." A conversation involves speaking and listening. As we listen for the voice of God how can we discern whether what we hear is from God or not? (On this see Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God) 

The answer to this is: as intimacy with God increases, discernment increases. 

This principle applies to many things. For example, a few weeks ago Linda and I saw the movie "Saving Mr. Banks." There was a point in the movie where a few tears were coming from her eyes. Because we've been married 40+ years I had an idea where those tears were coming from. I'm not always right about this kind of thing. But because of our long-term relational intimacy rooted in much time spent in conversation, my ability to discern Linda's heart is far greater than it was when I first met her.

The more you practice and perform the more you can discern what to do on the guitar. The more you teach the more you can discern what's really going on in the classroom. And so on. 

Conversely, when intimacy is low discernment is low. 

The growing ability to discern what God is saying in the prayer relationship comes from much conversational time with God. As Henri Nouwen writes: "Once we have committed ourselves to spending time in solitude, we develop an attentiveness to God's voice in us." (From Making All Things New, cited in Nouwen, Seeds of Hope, 64)

Converse with God today.

Leading Church is Different (The Presence-Driven Church)

Monroe County, MI

Ruth Haley Barton writes that some pastors have the "vague sense that our approach to decision making should be different from secular models—particularly when we are leading a church or an organization with a spiritual purpose. The problem is that we’re not quite sure what that difference is. In the absence of a clear consensus, that difference often gets reduced to an obligatory devotional (often viewed as irrelevant to the business portion of the meeting) or the perfunctory prayers that bookend the meeting. Sometimes even these well-meaning attempts at a spiritual focus get lost in the shuffle!" (Barton, Pursuing God's Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups, Kindle Locations 180-185)

This difference is: God. God's presence. God, doing the leading. God, doing the building. Because unless God builds the house, we are laboring in vain.

What's needed is: discernment. 

"Discernment," writes Barton, "in a most general sense, is the capacity to recognize and respond to the presence and the activity of God—both in the ordinary moments and in the larger decisions of our lives. The apostle Paul says that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we can discern what the will of God is, that which is good, acceptable and perfect (Rom 12:2). This includes not only the mind of each individual but also the corporate mind." (Ib., Kindle Locations 186-189)

What's fundamentally needed is mind-renewing transformation. Pastors and church leaders must therefore themselves be living in the rivers of constant spiritual formation and transformation, in order to discern what the will of God is. This is what the whole "church" thing is about. Barton writes:

"It is hard to imagine that spiritual leadership could be about anything but seeking to know and do the will of God, and yet many leadership groups do not have this as their clear mandate and reason for existence. This raises a serious question: If we are not pursuing the will of God together in fairly intentional ways, what are we doing? Our own will? What seems best according to our own thinking and planning? That which is merely strategic or expedient or good for the ego?" (Ib., Kindle Locations 201-205)

Our Productivity Does Not Define Us

9-1-1 Memorial, New York City

Yesterday in my Spiritual Formation class at Payne Seminary I told my students that a main emphasis in my church is on helping my people understand their identity in Christ. The Pauline idea of "in Christ" is used, with variations, 180 times in his letters. One could argue that Paul's central idea is what it means to have Christ the hope of glory in you.

God spoke to one of my students yesterday about reclaiming their true identity, and to not allow this world's values to define them. This is so important since the core question of the spiritual life is "Who do I belong to?" Whose am I?

One of the false ways we are tempted to measure our identities by is our productivity. Henri Nouwen, in Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit, writes: 

"A life without a quiet center easily becomes delusional. When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identification, we become possessive, defensive, and dependent on false identities. In the solitude of prayer we slowly unmask the illusion of our dependencies and possessiveness, and discover in the center of our own self that we are not what we can control or conquer but what is given to us from above to channel to others. In solitary prayer we become aware that our identity does not depend on what we have accomplished or possess, that our productivity does not define us, and that our worth is not the same as our usefulness." (P. 19)

I am in Christ. I am his "beloved" and he is mine. My worth is not the same as my usefulness, since I am God's child. My productivity, or lack thereof, does not define me. I am set free from the punishing, hierarchical honor-shame systems of my surrounding culture.

The Purpose of Prayer Is to Know God (PrayerLife)

The River Raisin in Monroe

When I instruct seminary students or pastors to pray 60 minutes a day I advise them not to do church work or sermon preparation during that time. I say: "You are going to pray because you need God. Anything less than this and "prayer" is really about you instead of God."

Philip Yancey writes: "The main purpose of prayer is not to make life easier, nor to gain magical powers, but to know God. I need God more than anything I might get from God." (Yancey, Prayer, Kindle Locations 1039-1040)

This makes sense when we understand real prayer as a give-and-take relationship with God. God will give of himself to you in the prayer relationship, but he will not be used.

In a life of praying knowledge is a two-way street. I grow in personal knowledge of God, and I am searched out and known by God.

Robot Creates a "Hand-written" Torah

© Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Yves Sucksdorff
A new robot has been programmed to mimic a human hand.

See "The Robo-Scribe."

Learning the Secret of My Own Nothingness

Yellow Springs, Ohio

When I sent the 22 Payne Theological Seminary students out to pray for an hour this afternoon I asked them to leave their cell phones behind. Because one of the things God wants to do is free us from the illusion of our indispensability. I am not needed as much as I might like to think I am.

Yes, God loves me. No, God does not need me. I need God, and God wants to use me in his kingdom activity. But God does not need me to get the job done. It is a very good thing, spiritually, to know this.

Thomas Merton writes:

"We must long to learn the secret of our own nothingness (not God's secret first of all, but our own secret). But God alone can show us our own secret. Once we see it, we can seek to receive His love into our hearts, and we can desire to become like Him. Indeed, by His love we can begin to become like ourselves - that is, we can find our true selves, for we are made in His image and likeness." (Merton, quoted in Henri Nouwen, Encounters with Merton, 36)

I am important to God. I can be used by God as my self diminishes and God's being fills me and moves me. This is important because what people need is not me, but God. God is the Indispensable One, not I. People need the Lord, not moi. God is life's raison d'etre. One result of realizing this is that I become free of striving to make some name for myself or to establish myself as some fleeting object of admiration.