Prayer for Busy People :: A Lenten Reflection

How can you spot the difference between a thriving prayer life and a moralistic or legalistic prayer life? Timothy Keller contrasts these two views, for which he uses the shorthand gospel vs. religion, by observing:

Religion: My prayer life consists largely of petition, and it only heats up when I am in a time of need. My main purpose in prayer is control of the environment.

Gospel: My prayer life consists of generous stretches of praise and adoration. My main purpose is fellowship with God.

Central to the practice of healthy, gospel-centered prayer is the awareness of God’s presence in and around our lives. However, the busier our lives become the more difficult identifying God’s presence can be.

This is not a new problem, when Saint Ignatius of Loyola developed a work called The Spiritual Exercises in 1522-1524 C.E. One of the enduring prayers from this work, the Prayer of Examen, was designed to be prayed even when the necessities of life made other forms of prayer impossible.

Today we give you an adapted version of the prayer. For a fuller explanation of the prayer download Prayer of Examen (PDF).

1. Recall You Are In The Presence Of God

As you sit in silence, renew your awareness of God’s love for you as your one true and perfect Father.

2. Review Your Day With Gratitude

Review your day (or the previous day) from beginning to end. Identify and give thanksgiving for God’s presence throughout.

Process your day’s high and low points. Search for encounters and experiences where you showed grace and your heart was at peace, and those where you did not. Is there anything God is asking me to (1) start doing, (2) stop doing, (3) start believing or thinking, (4) stop believing or thinking, (5) to commit to, (6) or to stop committing to?

3. Renew The Gospel In Your Heart And Life

As you recall actions you’ll find yourself naturally thankful where you have lived a holy life and naturally convicted where you have not. The good news (gospel) is that, although you are guilty and unworthy, through Christ you are fully accepted and loved.

4. Look Forward With The Lord’s Prayer

Our Father in heaven, holy is your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.


Today’s Reading
Job 37 (Listen – 2:27)
2 Corinthians 7 (Listen – 2:58)

 

Rats in the Cellar :: A Lenten Reflection

By C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are. This may sound rather difficult, so I will try to make it clear from my own case.

When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed.

And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated.

On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is. Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth. If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. Apparently the rats of resentment and vindictiveness are always there in the cellar of my soul.

Now that cellar is out of reach of my conscious will. I can to some extent control my acts: I have no direct control over my temperament. And if what we are matters even more than what we do—if, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are—then it follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about.

And this applies to my good actions too. How many of them were done for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion, or a desire to show off? How many from a sort of obstinacy or sense of superiority which, in different circumstances, might equally have led to some very bad act?

But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realize that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God.

*Abridged from C.S. Lewis’, Mere Christianity.


Today’s Reading
Job 34  (Listen – 3:26)
2 Corinthians 4 (Listen – 3:02)

Christ’s Passion :: A Lenten Reflection

The depth of Christ’s humiliation is astonishing. His life was marked by radical marginalization and poverty; he was born a political refugee, grew up a subsistence-level worker, and died homeless and possessionless.

If we believe Christ suffered because he wants us to emulate his example, our lives will be known for their striving and either frustration (for failing) or pride (for succeeding on our own power). Fortunately the New Testament paints a different picture.

Viktor Frankl observed, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.” No stranger to suffering, Dr. Frankl was a psychotherapist who willingly stayed in Austria and endured the holocaust. Of his time in the concentration camp, he wrote, “There was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”

This way of understanding suffering demonstrates why Christians have, for centuries, referred to Christ’s suffering as his passion. In modern culture passion is defined as powerful feelings or interest. The historic word comes from the Latin, pati: to suffer.

Following a true passion is a journey of suffering defined not by the intensity of positive emotion, but the willingness to endure for a greater reality. Most people do not miss out on their passions because they have been held back from expressing emotion or desire, but because they were unwilling to courageously place their faith outside of themselves.

It is only through dying to ourselves and placing our passion in Christ that we truly live. It is Christ’s love born in us that gives us hope and a future—never more than in suffering. “Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire,” reflected Dr. Frankl. Reflecting on his time in the concentration camp, he concludes:

The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’


Today’s Reading
Job 33 (Listen – 3:00)
2 Corinthians 3 (Listen – 2:25)

Christ’s Humiliation :: A Lenten Reflection

“Christ was subject to great humiliation in his private life at Nazareth,” writes Jonathan Edwards. While many of us can appreciate a great high priest who can “sympathize with our weaknesses,” the grittiness of this reality can escape us.

Edwards, the great theologian, writes of the daily toil of Christ’s vocation in Nazareth:

He there led a servile, obscure life, in a mean, laborious occupation; for he is called not only the carpenter’s son, but the carpenter. By hard labor he earned his bread before he ate it, and so suffered that curse which God pronounced on Adam; “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.”

Let us consider how great a degree of humiliation the glorious Son of God, the Creator of heaven and earth, was subject to in this—that for about thirty years he should live a private obscure life among laboring men, and all this while be overlooked, not taken notice of in the world, more than other common laborers.

Christ’s humiliation in some respects was greater in private life than in the time of his public ministry. The first thirty years of his life he spent among ordinary men, as it were in silence. There was not any thing to make him to be taken notice of more than any ordinary mechanic.

In fasting we forego a luxury in order to better understand our desires and better experience the only one who can truly satisfy. The sacrifice of fasting is our way of entering into the footsteps of Christ who, “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor.” Edwards reflects on the fulfillment of Christ’s love, even as he was subjected to the pangs of earthly brokenness:

He suffered great poverty, so that he had no where to lay his head. So that what was spoken of Christ, “My head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night,” was literally fulfilled. And through his poverty he was doubtless when tried with hunger, thirst, and cold.

Christ had no land of his own, though he was possessor of heaven and earth; and therefore was buried by Joseph of Arimathea’s charity, and in his tomb, which Joseph had prepared for himself.

Christ being thus brought under the power of death, continued under it till the morning of next day but one. Then was finished that great work, the purchase of our redemption, for which such great preparation had been made from the beginning of the world.

 

Today's Reading
Job 32 (Listen – 2:12)  
2 Corinthians 2 (Listen – 2:13)

Shattering Selfishness :: A Lenten Reflection

At some point we become seduced into believing our life, dreams, and work are the most significant and complex things going in the world. Though we would never admit such things, it’s only a matter of time before this belief yields a near-overwhelming concern that God cannot handle things so complicated without our guidance.

Soon our prayers are dominated by a grasping for control and longing for success. With each circumstance beyond our control we resolve ourselves to refocus—not realizing this only deepens our commitment to ourselves. Kierkegaard warns:
It is the Spirit who gives life. The life-giving Spirit is not a direct heightening of our natural powers—what blas­phemy! How horrible to understand the Spirit in this way!

Christianity teaches that you must die. Your power must be dismantled. The life-giving Spirit—that is the invitation. Who would not willingly take hold of it? But die first—there’s the rub!
Each of us can go along, dedicating our lives to pursuing our dreams or fleeing our failures—both will catch up and crush us. The invitation of Christ is to abandon ourselves—to dispense with our successes and aspirations as well as our failures and shortcomings—for the transcendent love and grace of God. Kierkegaard concludes:
You must first die to every earthly hope, to every merely hu­man confidence. You must die to your selfishness, and to the world, because it is only through your selfishness that the world has power over you.

What, exactly, does it mean to die to yourself? It is more than not seeing your wish fulfilled or to be deprived of the one that is dearest to you. True, this is painful enough, and selfishness is wounded. But it does not follow that you are dying. No, but personally to shatter your own fulfilled desire, personally to de­prive yourself of the dearly desired one who is now your own: this is what it means to wound selfishness at the root.

Christianity is not what we are all too eager to make it. Christianity waits before it applies its remedy. This is Christianity’s severity. It demands a great sacrifice, one which we often despair of making and can only later see why it was necessary to hold out and wait.

Today’s Reading
Job 31 (Listen – 4:16)
2 Corinthians 1 (Listen – 3:52)