Discipline in Prayer

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Pastor Foley

The following is a written preview of our new Q&A style podcast where Pastor Foley takes questions related to the Whole Life Offering discipleship training model. Subscribe now!

Q: So we’re going to work on our prayer life as being a key part of Healing and Comforting as well as the other Works of Mercy; this fits heavily into the Works of Piety, doesn’t it?

A: Yes. Every month there’s a prayer focus to what we do. In Healing and Comforting, it is really key because we know the association between prayer and healing and, as we’ve talked about, we know the connection between confession and healing.

Confession is a form of prayer that God gives us as a means of grace that allows us to experience healing, whether or not we’re ever healed physically. We have some real opportunity to practice our prayer this month. We need to do that by doing things like praying the hours – whether it’s every hour or three times a day or whatever. We don’t do it because we want to fall into legalism. That’s always what Christians worry about: “I don’t want to do anything that looks like discipline because I might fall into legalism.” My response is, “You don’t have to worry about it.”

If people exercised the way they practiced spiritual disciplines they would never lose weight; they would never become healthy. We eat at certain times during the day, but we don’t fall into legalism. Amazingly, we still enjoy the food. So we can distinguish between legalistic aspects of prayer and being disciplined to say, “I’m going to pray at these certain times because it is going to force me to turn my attention to God and outside of my own navel-gazing.” That’s going to be very helpful to be able grow us to fullness in Christ.

Q: You’ve blogged a lot about James 5:13-18 during this series. But I wanted to share verses 19 and 20 because that seems like a piece that brings a lot of this together. It says, “My brothers if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”

So it seems like the things we talked about in terms of prayer and confession are all ways that we would help people keep from wandering from the truth and keep from wandering ourselves. Is that true?

A: This is such a key point. It’s considered accepted  behavior today that people can wander away from God and say, “I did it because he wasn’t there when ______,” as if God has to come and say to us, “I am so sorry.” That posture is so radically unbiblical because it portrays a God who doesn’t care unless we bring something to his attention and really put a lot of effort into getting him involved. You do not see that when you hear Jesus talking about his father. What you hear when Jesus talks about his father, and even when Paul talks about the Lord, is “Look, in the past God overlooked that time of ignorance. But he has appointed a man to judge.”

We don’t shake our fist at God about not being there when __________.

We have to say, “I have wandered away from a good God who created me and had good intentions and purpose for my life and has always supplied for me. I have wantonly disregarded that provision.” Tools like confession are really important because they remind us that God doesn’t come to us and apologize for neglecting us as if he were an erring father. We come to God and we confess our sin and say, “You are a good father. You provided for me. I was the one who disregarded that. I only worshipped you when I got what I wanted and, yet, when I got what I wanted, it didn’t turn out to be what I needed anyway. I’m turning my life over to you.”

That’s what confession, Healing and Comforting, that’s even what illness can do. God uses all of those things as a way of reminding us not that he is around the corner if we need him, but that he is always present and it is us who fail to see his presence and draw upon his provision even in times of illness.

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How to Pray Better

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Pastor Foley

The following is a written preview of our new Q&A style podcast where Pastor Foley takes questions related to the Whole Life Offering discipleship training model. Subscribe now!

Q: One of the key things we learn about in Healing and Comforting is the danger of self-centered prayers. The message we portray when we pray this way is that we believe in a being who, if we’re good enough, is going to grant our wishes. What are the things that we should be praying for and how we can go about learning to pray better (i.e. more Biblical)?

A: We have a tendency when we get sick to become very focused on ourselves. So what does the church across Christian history do to be able to deal with this? It reminds us that no matter what our physical situation is, we can pray for other people and be a meaningful part of the kingdom of God working on Earth. That’s pretty exciting! There’s already a shift there from saying, “My nose feels kind of stuffy today” to saying, “Even though my nose feels stuffy today, I can still impact the work of God.”

Prayer is our permission. We invite and invoke the presence of God to be active in those specific areas of our lives and the lives of other people. Healing prayer, unfortunately, tends to be synonymous with very self-centered prayer: “Lord, I am really sick; therefore, heal me.” Is there anything wrong with that? No. Is it sufficient as a prayer life? No. The more you get sucked into that kind of prayer, the more efficacy is lost. That kind of prayer says that in order to be an effective Christian, I have to be healthy, I can’t be in debt, etc. Wow! That’s symptomatic of the way the church thinks today.

Karl Barth, the great theologian of the last century, said we have a human inclination to constantly look inside ourselves and say, “There’s nothing good in there.” God says, “Yes. Obviously. I know. So stop doing it.” Our focus, instead of looking inside and seeing that there’s nothing good in there, is to do what Jesus did. He said, “I only ever do what I see my father doing.” We should do what he calls Peter to do when summoned to walk across the water: we have an unerring focus on Jesus. If we find ourselves focused on anything else, we return our focus to him. And we need not fear that because we’re focused on Jesus that he won’t notice that we’re sick. Trust me, he’ll notice because he is a good father. If we’re not feeling well, the father knows it. So we say, “Lord, I’m turning myself over to you today, but I’m not going to allow my illness to stand in the way of carrying out my responsibility as a minister of the Gospel. I’ll pray for my own needs, but it will always be part of interceding for the needs of others.”

Q: This is an area that I think a lot of Christians struggle with. If you were to put on a seminar titled, “How to Pray Better” you would sell out! Christians go to church, they pray these self-centered prayers, and they have this feeling or knowledge that they’re not adequate or sufficient. But they don’t know what to do because that’s all they see modeled in the churches they’re in. Previously, you blogged about praying through the hours and praying the Psalms; can you go through that and any other ideas that will help train us to pray better?

A: Your distinction is a good one. We’re not talking about praying “better” as if by praying more eloquently, God hears you more. What we’re saying is that prayer is an integral component to the way that God grows us to fullness in Christ. As a result, we can’t pray to our lowest common denominator which is to be self-focused: only whenever we feel like it, at the times that we don’t have anything better to do, etc. We’re not going to grow that way. So the church has instituted various disciplines like praying through the hours, like prayers we memorize. People say, “Well, if I memorize it, then it’s not authentic,” but that’s absolutely not true. If that were true, we shouldn’t be singing any of the hymns or worship songs in church, we shouldn’t be reciting wedding vows, and we shouldn’t say the pledge of allegiance.

We have a tradition as human beings of knowing that if something is written down you have to make sure you’re not just going through the motions of rote memorization and speaking while your brain goes somewhere else. But the reason why we pray the prayers that the church has entrusted to us over these two thousand years, including the one that Jesus himself entrusted to us, is because we grow  into those prayers. They reshape what we think about when we pray and how we pray.

Submit your questions to Pastor Foley by posting a comment or emailing us at [email protected].

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Do We Need to Be Healed of Our Low Self-Esteem?

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Pastor Foley

The following is a written preview of our new Q&A style podcast where Pastor Foley takes questions related to the Whole Life Offering discipleship training model. Subscribe now!

Q: I have to talk to you about the songs again. There’s a big push now towards healing people’s self-esteem.  How would something like “I lay my sins on Jesus. He bears them and frees me” fit into the general approach of that kind of message?

A: Here’s the problem. Look at every single instance of where Jesus encounters a sinner in the Bible; there’s not one where he diagnoses their problem as a lack of self-esteem. He is always straightforward about the person’s sin. But…what causes them to want to be around him is that, even though he’s straightforward about their sin, he knows something that is bigger than their sin that causes them to have absolute confidence that they can be set free.

When we are in the presence of God we can bring our sin to God and know that it doesn’t define our relationship with him. There’s a way he can help us, not only to be forgiven for it, but to be empowered to live in a way that allows us to rise above it. That’s the kind of God in whose presence we want to be.

That’s what the song really celebrates. I lay my sins on Jesus because our sins don’t just evaporate, right? It’s not that God is in the form of Christ, on the cross, saying, “Hey, I’m taking the punishment here because I love you. You guys are great!” Your sins have to go somewhere. Someone has to pay the price for those. That links you and Him together forever. He becomes your life, your only hope, your only way of not only being able to receive forgiveness for your sin, but to be set free for a new way of living that matches what it is that God designed you for in the first place.

Q: Very few churches, I think, are singing hymns anymore. I don’t know that they have praise band arrangements for these songs. 

A: The reason why we do music in the church isn’t primarily for emotional expression. It’s because it’s how we come to know the truths of God in both sides of our brain and in the fullness of our being. They teach us theology. The problem is, we have such a warped notion of theology, we think of it as just head knowledge, but it’s not. Theology is the hearing and the doing of the Word and you’ve got to have music in your head. That needs a soundtrack.

There are going to be times when that hymn gives you the guidance of what to do or what to say.

Submit your questions to Pastor Foley by posting a comment or emailing us at [email protected].

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