Category: 843 Acres

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Bold Prayer :: Throwback Thursday

By Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892)
And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.  — Nehemiah 4.9
I would hold this prayer up as a pattern for our prayers in a like condition. It was a prayer that meant business. Sometimes, when we pray, I am afraid that we are not transacting business at the throne of grace; but Nehemiah was as practical in his prayer as he was in the setting of the watch.

Some brethren get up in our prayer-meetings, and say some very good things; but what they really ask for, I am sure I do not know. Oh, for more definiteness in prayer! I am afraid our prayers are often clouds, and we get mists for answers. Nehemiah’s prayers meant business. I wish we could always pray in this way.

Notice, next, that it was a prayer that came before anything else. It does not say that Nehemiah set a watch, and then prayed; but “nevertheless we made our prayer unto our God, and set a watch.” Prayer must always be the fore-horse of the team.

Do whatever else is wise, but not till you have prayed. Send for the physician if you are sick; but first pray. Take the medicine; but first pray. Go and talk with the man who has slandered you, if you think you ought to do so; but first pray. Do not begin it until you have prayed. Begin, continue, and end everything with prayer; but especially begin with prayer.

I gather from the words before me that it was a prayer saturated with faith. “We made our prayer unto—God”? No, “unto our God.” They had taken Jehovah to be their God, and they prayed to him as their God.

They had a full assurance that, though he was the God of the whole earth, yet he was specially their God; and so they made their prayer unto the God who had given himself to them, and to whom they belonged by covenant relationship.

The door of prayer seems to turn on those two golden hinges—“our God.” If you and I are to be delivered from the evil that is in the world, if we are to be kept building the church of God, we must have for our first guard, mighty, believing prayer, such as Nehemiah and his friends presented unto the Lord.

*Abridged and language updated from Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s sermon, The Two Guards, Praying And Watching, delivered July 24th, 1890.

Today’s Reading
Nehemiah 4 (Listen – 3:38)
Acts 14 (Listen – 3:54)

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Unassuming Greatness

‘After me one is coming, the sandals of whose feet I am not worthy to untie.’ — John the Baptist (Acts 13.25)

Zechariah and Elizabeth, John the Baptist’s parents, spent nearly their entire life without a child. The social scorn placed on families without children in the ancient Near East would have been felt more acutely by Elizabeth, but the nature of her husband’s vocation likely added to their pain.

As a priest, Zechariah would have surely cried out to God for a child. Each year a priest would be selected to enter the Holy of Holies—the place where God’s presence rested in Israel. Prior to the announcement of John’s birth, Zechariah had never been chosen. Unanswered prayers and a spiritual leader never invited into the holiest of places—on the outside it looked like Zechariah was the priest God didn’t listen to.

When it comes to prayer, “God will only give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knows,” says Timothy Keller. Zechariah’s prayers—which looked unanswered, or even ignored, for decades—were answered more fully than he knew to ask or imagine.

Their son, John the Baptist, would prepare the way for the long-expected Messiah. His prophecies, teachings, and baptisms called Israel to repentance, setting the stage for Christ. During his ministry John gathered and trained disciples of his own—a process that required years of dedicated service and sacrifice.

As Jesus’ ministry formed some of John’s disciples left him in order to follow the new Rabbi. Soon even the crowds that gathered around John began to follow Jesus instead. The prophet could have been jealous, or at least defeated, that those he had poured the most into were walking away. Instead he was honored and thankful.

You can contrast Zechariah and Elizabeth’s endurance, and John the Baptist’s faithfulness, with the arrogance and pride of the religious leaders in Acts 13. “But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began to contradict what was spoken by Paul, reviling him.”

Humility is stunning when you come in contact with it. We expect to see the covetousness and rage that came from the religious elite. Yet, a person whose life has come in contact with Christ has been overwhelmed by a grace that transcend circumstance. Like John, the glory of the Church is found when it follows Christ’s example of leading others to God through sacrifice.

Today’s Reading
Nehemiah 3 (Listen – 5:43)
Acts 13 (Listen – 7:36)

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Prayer and Hope in Suffering

 

And when he had seized him, he put him in prison, delivering him over to four squads of soldiers to guard him, intending after the Passover to bring him out to the people. — Acts 12.4
“I believe that God both can and will bring good out of evil,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi prison in 1943. It was in the first months of his incarceration, and he believed he would be free by Christmas that year.

Adjusting to life in his cell, which offered little natural light, was extraordinarily difficult. Bonhoeffer, like the disciples in Acts, drew deeply from his faith:
I believe God will give us all the power we need to resist in all time of distress. But he never gives it in advance, lest we should rely upon ourselves and not on him alone. A faith as strong as this should allay all our fears for the future.
Though Bonhoeffer would not taste freedom in this world again (he would later be transferred to a concentration camp and hanged), his words of lament, faith, and hope stretch through all his correspondence. Never more-so than his prayer from Christmas, 1943:
O God, early in the morning do I cry unto you. Help me to pray, and to think only of you.

In me there is darkness, but there is light in you. I am lonely, but you do not leave me. I am feeble in heart, but you do not leave me. I am restless, but there is peace with you. In me there is bitterness, but there is patience with you; your ways are beyond understanding, you know the way for me.

O Holy Spirit, grant me the faith that will protect me from despair: deliver me from the lusts of the flesh. Pour into my heart such love for thee and for men, that all hatred and bitterness may be blotted out. Grant me the hope that will deliver me from fear and timidity.

Chiefly do I remember all my loved ones, my fellow-prisoners, and all who in this house perform their hard service.

Lord have mercy. Restore me to liberty and enable me so to live now, that I may answer before you and before the world. Lord, whatever this day may bring, your Name be praised. Amen.
The accounts of those who suffered before us can foster resilience in our suffering today. May our prayers be enlivened by the glory of God. May our Spirits rest in the peace of Christ. May our suffering never eclipse our view of the glory and sufficiency of God.

Today’s Reading
Nehemiah 2 (Listen – 3:42)
Acts 12 (Listen – 3:49)

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Courage to Suffer

 

“As soon as I heard these words I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven.” — Nehemiah (1.4)
We are too often left to suffer alone. Our culture is immensely individualistic and communal mourning stopped shortly after the first immigrants arrived in the new land. Our pride further complicates things—suffering is, by nature, inglorious—sharing our pain risks loss of relationship, status, or worse.

Suffering alone deepens isolation. We become disconnected from our community and distanced in our relationship with God—we struggle to feel the love of others, even if we have an intellectual grasp of its presence. In her TED Talk on vulnerability researcher Brene Brown says this:
There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they’re worthy of love and belonging. That’s it. They believe they’re worthy.
Before you dismiss it as self-help tripe, the reason Brown discovered this was true has a deep meaning for people of faith. In looking at those who had a strong sense of love and belonging, Brown says:
What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language—it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning “heart”—and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.

These folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can’t practice compassion with other people if we can’t treat ourselves kindly.
Nehemiah weeping is reminiscent of David’s Psalms of Lament—there was a courage to confront the veracity of the pain. More than that, as we see in the Psalms, there was a progression: a cry out to God, followed by a request for his intervention, then a praise for his love.

We cannot forget that when Jesus was confronted with the pain of this world he wept. God incarnate, weeping at loss. When we hurt, God weeps with us. But he does not stop there. For it is only through his power we, like Lazarus, can be called out of the depths of our pain.

Today’s Reading
Nehemiah 1 (Listen – 2:06)
Acts 11 (Listen – 3:52)

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Ancient Jewish Insight on Gun Control :: The Weekend Reading List

Our teachings tell us that preserving human life is the greatest human calling, and murder the most depraved attack on man and G‑d there can be. — Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe

The scriptures have a profound way of speaking into modern life. The privilege of a spiritual kingdom, which stretches through time and culture, is that our understanding of how God’s word articulates today can be inspired by the faithful who walked in faith before us.

The ancient world was deeply marked by hostility and violence. The Hebrew Bible and rabbinic commentaries written during this time explored the profoundly spiritual implications of using weapons against others, protecting the innocent, and maintaining civility.

“The rabbis could never have fathomed the destructive nature of modern guns,” says Marc Katz in his exploration of the Jewish view on weapons.
To understand what our sages would have thought about our modern problems of unlimited ammunition and semiautomatic weapons, we have to examine their perspective on the dangers of their time… Their wisdom remains eerily relevant. — Marc Katz
Regulations for The Creation and Sale of Weapons

Weapon creation and sale was permitted in ancient Jewish culture, but multiple rabbinic writings prohibited the sale of a weapon to a suspected criminal or member of a country who served other gods (assuming they would be an enemy of the state).

To better understand how the rabbis applied their understanding of the scriptures to weapons, we can look at a more common instrument of self-defense: animals. Dogs used as a means of protecting life and property had to remain chained at all times. (If the owner lived in a rural area the dog could be loosed after dark.)

Dogs are not the most efficient or violent animals when it comes to taking a life, but other animals like wolves, lions, bears, leopards, panthers, and serpents, were entirely forbidden as means of protection. The rabbis believed that using these animals, due to their extreme unpredictability—and the damage they were capable of producing—was unfit for people of faith.

Permission to Use Weapons for Self-Defense

The image of blood is a central theme in scripture, often highlighting cases of either injustice or redemption. Tellingly, it is the image invoked when scripture speaks to the issue of home invasions.

If someone breaks in to another person’s home—in the dark—the writers of the Law permitted the victim to respond as if the criminal “had no blood,” thus prioritizing the lives of innocents. The ancient commentator Rashi says the thief is to be considered as dead “from the beginning.”

All other invasions and confrontations were excluded from this understanding. In general we see those furthest from protection—living in rural settings, under the veil of darkness—were given margin to be aggressive. Everyone else was called to restrain their reactions in order to protect the lives of themselves and those around them.

Blood of Innocents

The overwhelming majority of what the rabbis wrote about about regulating weapons of defense prioritizes the conservation of life, not the protection of property. In Leviticus, God commands, “You shall not stand by [the shedding of] your fellow’s blood. I am the Lord.” More than a simple call to arms, it is a call to action to protect those God has placed around us through diligence and restraint as much as threat.

This calling, to protect the innocent, is where the rabbis of the past would have the most to say in today’s world. Nicholas Kristof reframes the statistics; “Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than died in all U.S. wars going back to the American Revolution.” More sobering, “In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013), according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI.”
[The sages call] weapons a “disgrace” and point to the most famous prophetic text from the book of Isaiah to show that humanity’s goal is to someday make these weapons disappear: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” — Marc Katz

Christ didn’t disarm Peter, but he did rebuke the disciple’s naiveté for believing that the answer to violence from weapons was more weapons—those who believe that, Jesus said, were as foolish as they were likely to die by the mechanism of their own violence.

Until the time when all humanity is fully disarmed by the peace of Christ, we tolerate weapons as necessary—though they are also byproduct and perpetuator of the brokenness and evil of our world. Legislations will come and go, political parties will change their positions, and evil will not be restrained by the power of man. Our ultimate hope rests in Christ. His return will bring the deeper repentance and restoration needed for peace on this earth.

Today’s Reading
Ezra 8 (Listen – 5:40)
Acts 8 (Listen – 5:10)

This Weekend’s Readings
Ezra 9 (Listen – 3:19) Acts 9 (Listen – 6:05)
Ezra 10 (Listen – 6:19) Acts 10 (Listen – 5:49)
The Weekend Reading List