Cultivating the Life of Prayer, Part 1

If a friend came to you with a pressing need, would you be secure that your prayer life could make a difference for them?  There are two things to consider here:

• Your willingness to step forward in prayer for them.
• Your ability to connect their need to Jesus in prayer, not just to your heartfelt sympathy.

On a recent Sunday morning, I asked the people of Celebration-Harderwyk how it is that we learn to cultivate a prayer life that can connect the needs of our friends and family with the situation-changing grace of the Heavenly Father.

One resource that has been helpful for cultivating my own prayer life in this way is the book Praying for Prodigals by James Bank.  He writes:

Mark and Luke tell a striking story of Jesus “catching people in the act” of faith.  Four men brought a friend who was paralyzed to Jesus for healing.  When they couldn’t find a way through the crowd, they climbed up on the roof of the home where Jesus was teaching, removed some tiles, and lowered the man “right in front of Jesus” (Luke 5:19).  Mark and Luke both write that “when Jesus saw their faith,” he healed their friend (Mark 2:5, Luke 5:20).

Notice that both Mark and Luke mention more than just the faith of the man who was healed.  Jesus saw “their faith,” indicating the faith of his friends.  When the man was paralyzed and could do little for himself, the active faith of those around him made all the difference.

When we pray for our prodigal kids, we carry them on stretchers of faith to Jesus.  We do the heavy lifting, but they receive the benefit.  They may be entirely passive or even actively resisting us, but Jesus sees our faith as we bring them to Him.

Jim Cymbala writes of his daughter Chrissy’s return after a long prodigal season.  One Tuesday evening, God moved the church he serves (The Brooklyn Tabernacle) to intercede passionately for his daughter.  He came home that evening and told his wife, “It’s over with Chrissy.  You would have had to be in the prayer meeting tonight.  I tell you, if there is a God in heaven, this whole nightmare is finally over.”

Two days later, his daughter came home to her family and back to God.  She asked one question over and over: “Daddy .  .  .  who was praying for me?  Who was praying for me?” pp.83-84

Remember that resources like this one are most helpful when they serve as a bridge and not as an end in themselves.  It is Jesus who teaches His people to pray.  We join him “who lives to make intercession” for His people (Hebrews 7:25) and learn from Him. There is no magic in praying the words of a book like this or being moved by the inspiration they bring.  As a bridge to our Faithful Intercessor, we join Him in the work that He is about.

CLICK HERE for the Amazon link to this book and CLICK HERE for a 90-second YouTube introduction by the author.

Thomas Jefferson Was A Calvinist?!?

I am not saying that Thomas Jefferson was a Presbyterian minister in disguise.  Nothing of the sort.  And I will leave to others - specifically to God Himself - to determine the state of Jefferson's experience of grace and confession of faith.  But I do think that the world of Jefferson's thought, and the thought of those around him in those colonial times, was deeply formed by the ideas of John Calvin.

Deeply formed in much the same way that as an American in the 21st century my view of the world and the shared conversation regarding values, people and politics is deeply formed by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein.  Even though I have significant disagreements with two of those thinkers, their impact on my world is such that I am effected.  Like the water that a fish lives in, their thoughts have effected the pond in which we all swim, breathe and live so to speak.  

It was that same way with John Calvin for Thomas Jefferson.  I am not thinking about his own convictions, but the cultural atmosphere in which he lived.

I became aware of this connection by doing three things that I suggest for you.

• First, read the Declaration of Independence - Click here to do that.
• Then, read the last chapter of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion entitled "Of Civil Government" - Click here to do that.
• Finally, read the Declaration of Independence again.

A note to the reader: Expect this to take about 45 minutes - with reading the Declaration twice taking only ten of those!  Understand that Calvin wrote in the mid-sixteenth century in Latin.  We live in a day of sound-bite videos from Sesame Street to Stephen Colbert, so we are unaccustomed to writing that follows a long and careful argument.  This exercise was worth the effort for me, and I would recommend it to you.

Read these two pieces and see if you don't find the same connection that I do.  Jefferson was no theology professor, but the ideas that he wrote from, and the ideas of the people he wrote for and to were deeply informed by the view of reality and thoughts presented by Calvin in his chapter on Civil Governemnt.

It's another study to document further evidence of the impact of Calvinist thought on the forming of the United States.  In this post, I simply want to make the connection and ask a question: If Calvinist thought was the intellectual culture that gave birth to our Declaration of Independence, what are the implications for our liberty and politics when that intellectual culture has changed - which it certainly has?

By the way, at no extra charge, here is a link to a great - and brief - post entitled "The Presbyterian Rebellion."  King George of England connected the rebellion of his colonies with Calvin as well!  CLICK HERE for an artical from the Journal of the American Revolution with an abundance of original source references.