Author: John Tillman

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Praise and Adoration from Great Britain :: Worldwide Prayer

Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 4.6-8
…in this matter no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister…For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God, the very God who gives you his Holy Spirit.

As this humble prayer lifts praise and adoration to God it recognizes that nationalism and faith in current governments, leaders, or other agencies of power is slavery. It is mercy and love for one another that we must fan into flame, not pride of nation or party. Pride’s only gift is in separating us from others, which is the opposite of our calling as ambassadors of the Gospel. — John

Reflection: Praise and Adoration from Great Britain :: Worldwide Prayer

Dear Father,

We praise you that we may draw near to you through the merits of Jesus, your Son, our Savior. We glorify you that your Holy Spirit continually moves in our world today. We bless you that your Spirit focuses faith on Jesus and draws us into fellowship with you and with one another.

Thank you Father for your transcendent love. Thank you that here and now we enter into fresh relationship with you through your mercy and grace. Free us from the shackles of nationality and insularity.

As we give you glory for all that you are doing through Christians around the world today, hear our prayers for one another and for those whom we represent. Fire us with your love.

Inspire our praise, our prayer, and our preaching with the gift of your Spirit and make us better ambassadors for Jesus.

We ask this in the Name of the Savior.

The Call to Prayer
Come, let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.  — Psalm 95:1

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
1 Kings 21 (Listen – 4:19)
1 Thessalonians 4 (Listen – 2:24)

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A Berean Take on Fake News

Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15
For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out.

Acts 17:11
Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

Reflection: A Berean Take on Fake News
by John Tillman

Bereans do not have a Pauline epistle in the canon of scripture and the Thessalonians have two. However, the Jews of Berea are described in Acts as being “more noble” than those in Thessalonica. This nobility is characterized by engaging Paul’s teaching with intellectual curiosity and scriptural research.

Paul’s opponents in Thessalonica used tactics that were anti-intellectual and anti-scriptural and we should recognize them from our own Facebook feeds—exaggeration and falsification. Then as now, people ate it up. After they succeeded in running Paul out of town, they followed him to Berea, doxing him as a heretic and a political agitator. Even amongst the “more noble” Bereans, they were still able to cause enough trouble to force Paul to move on.

If you think people today are more sophisticated, more cultured, or more intellectual than those of the ancient world, you have been paying attention neither to ancient history nor to Facebook.

In our day, both progressive-leaning and conservative-leaning publications profit by pot-stirring. While it would be easy to point the finger at the media, we are responsible to choose a “more noble” path as consumers of content. Our sinfulness is the reason that inspiring fervor is much more profitable than dispensing facts and sensationalism is more clickable than sensible reporting.

In our Internet-connected world, cries of “Fake News” reverberate in the insulated echo chambers that we stroll (or scroll) through. These echo chambers are built for us by algorithms whose intent is to keep us scrolling, viewing, and reading and whose strategy is explicitly to not offend us with contradictory data, stories, images, or opinions that we don’t “like.”

Christians shouldn’t rely on algorithms to tell us what is important in the world. That is why we have Scriptures, the Church, and the Holy Spirit. Christians have a responsibility to not get swept up in hysteria, to not spread rumor as fact, and to not react in denial or anger when the facts cast a bad light on us or those we support.

It is bad practice to only trust news from organizations we feel share our values. No news organization shares your values. They value your “shares.” As Ed Stetzer has said, “Facts are our friends.” We need to seek the facts in more places than those that pander to us.

Christians need to develop a more Berean attitude about not only the scripture we read, but the news we share. It’s hard to share the incredible news of the Gospel when the rest of what we share is in-credible

A Reading
…I in my turn, after carefully going over the whole story from the beginning, have decided to write an ordered account for you, Theophilus, so that your excellency may learn how well founded the teaching is that you have received. — Luke 1:3-4

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
1 Kings 19 (Listen – 3:53)
1 Thessalonians 2 (Listen – 2:53)

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A Prayer of Dependence on God From Ghana :: Worldwide Prayer

Scripture: Colossians 1:15-18
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

This beautiful prayer acknowledges the supremacy of Christ and our dependence solely upon him, not just for salvation but for every eventuality of our lives. May this prayer set us free from the idea of our own sufficiency and turn our hands and eyes Godward in search of his kingdom above all else. — John

A Prayer of Dependence on God From Ghana :: Worldwide Prayer

Our God,
God of all creation,
God of the fierce and stormy wind that plucks the green leaves from the trees,
That enables the dead wood hanging on trees to fall and find their resting place on the ground.
God who allows the poor to find that wood to make fire.

Our God,
God of all creation
You are the rain-giving God, rain that produces an abundance of food.

Our God,
God of all creation.
You who provides in abundance.
Strong warrior, what you have provided we collect with our right hand.

Our God,
God of all creation.
You are friend to the disabled, glorious king of lepers, servant of the crippled, guide to the blind.
Lord Jesus, your eyes mix with the rays of the sun to bring light everywhere.

O God,
You are always there, and we listen to good news from you.
You are king of teachers who always imparts knowledge to your children.
Jesus, your beauty is like the moon rising from the sea.

O God,
Our king, when we come near you, it is as if we come to sleep in a room covered in gold.

We worship you in the name of Jesus.

*Prayer from Hallowed be Your Name: A collection of prayers from around the world, Dr. Tony Cupit, Editor.

The Call to Prayer
I will call upon God and the Lord will deliver me.
In the evening, in the morning, and at the noonday, I will complain and lament, and he will hear my voice.
He will bring me back…God, who is enthroned of old, will hear me.

— Psalm 55:17

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
1 Kings 14 (Listen – 5:22)
Colossians 1 (Listen – 4:18)

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The Idol of Immorality, Impurity, and Greed

Scripture: Ephesians 5:3, 5
But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed…For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

Reflection: The Idol of Immorality, Impurity, and Greed
By John Tillman

Paul, in Ephesians 5:3-6, describes three qualities that the church must not allow a “hint” of—immorality, impurity, and greed. (We have a tendency to ignore that greed is in there…)

Why is it, according to Paul, that no immoral, impure, or greedy person will inherit the kingdom? “Such a person is an idolater,” Paul says. Modern sophisticates that we are, we have trouble admitting to idolatry. We think of idolaters as foolish primitives staring into the light of a sacrificial fire, not children of the technological age staring into the lights of our devices.

We are correct when we assess idolatry’s primitive nature. Where we are wrong is in thinking that our modernity exempts us from its allure.

This past week many articles were written about the death of Hugh Hefner. There is much for our culture to idolize about him. His story of rising from impoverished roots to become the multi-millionaire-magnate of a publishing empire would be irresistible in our culture even without the added sex appeal.

Hefner was the high-priest of a uniquely American religion of erotica, venerating sex as the chief marker of identity, as the chief goal of individual self expression, and as the ultimate pathway to self-actualization and self-worth. There is nothing holier (worth protecting) in secular culture than sexuality and sexual expression. When it comes to sex, we have all become Cameron Frye.

“She will have given him, what he has built up in his mind as the end-all-be-all of existence.” — Ferris Bueller.

But Paul reveals to us that what is truly at the root of sexual immorality, is exactly the same thing that is at the root of greed—selfishness.

We worship this idol, by making an altar of our own bodies and sacrificing the bodies of others upon it. Yet just as with every other form of idolatry, the benefits we seek at the feet of an idol can only be found in the true God. Carved stone rain gods can’t bring rain, and our photoshopped gods of sexual expression leave us just as dry—alone in a loveless drought.

In the end we must recognize that the reason Paul connected sexual immorality and greed is that the two forms of idolatry are identical. They each are concerned with “getting mine” without regard to what the costs are to other humans.

Reclaiming sexuality as an honoring celebration of God’s image in our physical bodies and as a unique emotional and spiritual union for couples is a difficult, and narrow path. When we walk this path we will be marked as strangers and aliens in a foreign land.

A Reading
…not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven; but he beat his breast and said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” This man, I tell you went home again justified… — Luke 18:13-14

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
1 Kings 8 (Listen – 10:23)
Ephesians 5 (Listen – 3:42)

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Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer From Argentina :: Worldwide Prayer

Scripture: Ephesians 3:14-17
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

This re-imagining and expansion of the Lord’s Prayer as a step-by-step confession of our weakness is a model for us to follow as we pray, not just the Lord’s Prayer, but the Psalms, Christ’s other prayers in Scripture, or prayers that we read from believers throughout history. May our insufficiencies always bring us to the feet of the sufficient Savior and may our hearts continue to be shaped by the indwelling and empowering Holy Spirit. — John

Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer From Argentina :: Worldwide Prayer

Our Father in heaven

We want to pray, “Hallowed be your name.”
For we acknowledge your holiness.

We want to pray, “Your Kingdom come:
But we behave as if this was our kingdom!

We want to pray, “Your will be done”
But we so easily put our will before yours!

We want to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”
But we desire the bread for tomorrow as well!

We want to pray “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”
But we do not even forgive unintentional debts!

Lord, have mercy on us.
Help us to follow your example of forgiveness.

And because “Yours is the Kingdom”
Give us concern for all human beings…

Because “Yours is the power”
Help us to proclaim your Word with power.

Because “Yours is the glory”
May our lives reflect that divine glory

In the name of Jesus, name above all names, we pray.

Amen.

*Prayer from Hallowed be Your Name: A collection of prayers from around the world, Dr. Tony Cupit, Editor.

The Request for Presence
Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you; let these who love your salvation say forever, “Great is the Lord!” — Psalm 70:4

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
1 Kings 6 (Listen – 5:10)
Ephesians 3 (Listen – 2:41)