Memorized any good prayers lately?

ROTE PRAYER roʊt pr(eɪ)ər noun. A prayer we’ve memorized.

How’d you learn your phone number?

Assuming you have; lots of us just trust our phones to remember ’em for us. When I first got my phone number, anytime someone asked for it, I had to look it up. Eventually I got what I thought was a good idea: Convert it to letters! If I couldn’t remember 268-3276, I could sure as heck remember ANT-FARM. (Which is not my actual number; I use it as an example.) Problem is, whenever you sign up for the Starbucks app and tell ’em your phone number is ANT-FARM, they object and demand digits, so now you gotta go through the mental process of “Okay, A is 1…” ’cause you forgot no phone numbers start with 1, ’cause in the early days of telephones they saved 1 for long distance numbers. But here I am digressing again.

A blessed few of us have really good memories, and don’t have to resort to silly mental tricks to get phone numbers in our brains. Most of us just go with blunt-force rote memorization: We recite the number over and over and over and OVER till it’s embedded in our memory like a shank in a prison snitch. (Awful simile, but you’ll remember it, won’tcha?)

Okay, so how’d you learn to pray?

Assuming you have; many don’t. As for those Christians who do, many of us resort to rote prayers. We learned ’em when we were kids, or we say them so often in church they just kinda stuck in our minds. We learned them by repeating them till they stuck. And when it comes time to pray, that’s what we pray. Like the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven…” and so forth. And it’s totally okay to pray such things, ’cause Jesus said so. “When you pray, say this.” Lk 11.2

Lots of us Christians do rote prayer… and lots of us Christians refuse to do rote prayer. ’Cause they got it into their heads rote prayer isn’t authentic prayer. “The only real prayer,” such people insist, “is extemporaneous prayer: Use your own words, speak from your heart, and say it to God. Don’t use somebody else’s words. Those aren’t your words. God wants to hear your words.”

Yes he does. But that’s not why we pray rote prayers.

It’s a submission thing. (Unless you’re not into that.)

The first time I heard somebody rant against rote prayer, she was basically mocking mainline churches. She grew up a mainliner, left ’em to become Fundamentalist, and had become one of those conspiracy-theory Fundies who think every church but hers is devilish. She didn’t wanna legitimize anything they did as worship. Rote prayer especially.

To her mind, the reason people pray rote prayers isn’t to learn from the prayers of Jesus or other Christians; isn’t to learn to pray, isn’t to conform our will to that of others. Rote prayers are entirely so you can pretend to pray. They’re not really prayer; they’re just some holy-sounding words you can recite but not truly mean. Just say your lines, feign prayer, and it’ll count as prayer, and you’ll be holy for going through the motions. It’s pure hypocrisy.

“That,” she’d explain, “is what mainliners do instead of worship.” It’s all dead religion. And it’s not just mainliners; Catholics and Orthodox and Episcopalians and most of the other churches do it too. They’re all hypocrites and going to hell.

Her teaching didn’t set right with me. ’Cause the Lord’s Prayer. It’s a rote prayer, y’know. One we were taught in Sunday school, ’cause Jesus taught it. One we were taught to recite. And taught, correctly, that it’s so we can learn to pray; and when we pray it we need to mean it. And once we apply that instruction to every rote prayer, we realize the whole point of rote prayer.

When we pray rote prayers properly, what we actually do is conform our will to those prayers. Yeah, they’re someone else’s words. But for it to be an authentic prayer, and not hypocrisy, we gotta mean their words. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we have to mean Jesus’s words. When we pray one of King David’s prayers out of Psalms, we have to mean his words. When we pray some other Christian’s prayers out of a hymnal or prayer book, we oughta mean their words. When we sing a hymn or worship song in church, we oughta mean those words. It’s all the same practice.

If we can’t say them and mean them, don’t say them! We should at the very least try to mean them; try to wrap our brains around ’em, understand what they mean, and believe what they say. (And ask the Holy Spirit for help when necessary.) Either way, strive for authenticity. Be real with God. Say it and mean it.

If you asked that anti-mainliner what she believed about the Lord’s Prayer, it’s entirely likely she’d say all the same things I just said. All the same things the Sunday school teachers taught. When you recite it, mean it. She wasn’t merely repeating it mindlessly, nor using it to pretend to pray. But good luck convincing her other churches pray it the same way she does. Some people simply can’t see beyond their prejudices.

The power of rote prayers.

When we recite a rote prayer, and mean it (’cause don’t bother to recite it otherwise), they’re extremely powerful.

When Jesus taught us to pray, “Hallowed be thy name” and so forth, Lk 11.2 KJV it’s because that’s his will. That’s God’s will. Jesus told us to pray God would honor his name, make his kingdom come, have his will done, and give us daily bread and forgiveness and grace from testing. And God wants to honor his name, make his kingdom come, have his will done, and give us stuff. We’re conforming and submitting to God’s will. We’re learning to think like God does.

Often we’ll get to the part of “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” Mt 6.12 and to be honest forgiveness is a tricky one. Some of us haven’t forgiven our debtors. We still have grudges. We’re still annoyed at fellow Christians. And neighbors, and especially enemies. We know we need to forgive; Jesus told us to; we just aren’t there yet. Some of us are trying to get there, and some aren’t. When we pray it and don’t mean it, we come under conviction: “Oh yeah; Jesus wants me to forgive.” Ideally it spurs us to work on this.

True, some Christians will just recite the words and work on nothing, ’cause to them the Lord’s Prayer is dead religion. The rest of us will submit to them, because to us the Lord’s Prayer is living religion.

Same with other rote prayers: We conform our own will to the words. It’s powerful stuff. When we’re just talking with God, casually or formally, it might never occur to us in mid-prayer, “I forgot this” or “I should do that” or “God wants me to pray for these things.” He might remind us to—if we’re listening to him, and sometimes we’re not. Just like sometimes we aren’t really listening to the rote prayers. But again: When we do, when we conform to what we’re praying, it’s powerful stuff.

It’s why the very last thing we wanna do is recite rote prayers mindlessly. That’s a mockery of faith. But the heartfelt, mindful, meant rote prayer is an act of surrendering our very thoughts and words—our all—to God.

Yeah, we can pray extemporaneously, for all the stuff we wanna talk to God about. Go ahead and do that too. But Jesus doesn’t want us to forget the stuff in his prayer. His prayer reflects God’s heart. Our off-the-cuff prayers reflect our hearts—which need work. If we pray nothing but the extemporaneous stuff, we shouldn’t expect to see a lot of heart-repair done too quickly. On the other hand if we do pray the Lord’s Prayer…

And same with other rote prayers. Most of the more popular prayers are a bunch of bible quotes. Some are wholly taken from the scriptures. So when we pray them, we’re likewise praying for stuff God already wants us to pray. Doesn’t it make sense to pray for things we already know God wants us to have and think?

“But they’re someone else’s words.” Relax; this isn’t plagiarism. God is fully aware we didn’t compose these prayers. But when they express how we feel, or says the very same things we wanna tell God, it’s totally fine with him if that’s what we pray. And totally fine with our fellow Christians: We have a long history of rote prayers. The Psalms are rote prayers, y’know.

Put a few of ’em into your brain and start praying them.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

Praying for stupid things.

I realize the title of this piece is gonna bug some people: “There’s no such thing as praying for stupid things! People can pray for anything and everything! People should pray for anything and everything! Stop discouraging Christians from prayer!” And so on.

I don’t wanna discourage Christians from prayer. We should all pray, and we should all pray more; most of us honestly don’t pray enough.

But yes there are stupid prayer requests. Come on.

No I don’t mean praying for ordinary stuff, like for the traffic light to change, or for the spaghetti to not overboil, or for your basketball team to do their best. God’s cool with such prayers. They may seem small and petty and irrelevant to pagans, but only because they don’t care about the little things in our daily lives. God does.

No; it’s more like when you’re praying for your basketball team, you happen to pray for the violent death of their rivals. Now we’re getting stupid.

Stupid is a synonym for foolish. When we’re being stupid, we’re clearly not thinking, not using our brains, not being wise, not even pursuing wisdom. We’re following our guts, or following the crowd, or following our flesh. If “Your will be done” is in any way part of this prayer (as it should be), it’ll immediately cancel out our stupid prayer request. ’Cause God’s obviously gonna tell us no.

But often we don’t know God well enough to realize this. So we’ll keep right on making these stupid prayer requests… and wonder why our prayers never seem to work. Well duh.

James 4.3 KWL

You ask, yet don’t receive because you ask for evil!—so you might spend it on your hedonism.

If we’re continually getting “No” answers from God, often this is exactly why. We’re asking for stuff that we think will satisfy us, or comfort us, or make us happy. They won’t. They might harm us or others. God knows this. So he’s kindly telling us no.

But like a child who can’t fathom why Mommy won’t allow her to eat her own bodyweight in cookies, we’re confused and frustrated: Didn’t Jesus promise us God would give us anything we want? So what’s the holdup?Gimme cookie!

The holdup is we’re still praying for stupid things. We need to grow up.

Obvious stupidity, and subtle stupidity.

We all pray for stupid things from time to time. Yep, I do it too. It’s because I too am not using my head; I’m irritated, so I’m rattling off some angry prayer and probably saying a few things I shouldn’t. For those things, God is rightly, wisely denying my requests. And rebuking me a little.

Luke 9.54-55 KWL

54 Seeing this, the students James and John said, “Master, with your permission,

can we call fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”

55 Jesus turned round to rebuke them.

’Cause sometimes I’m no wiser than his immature students in the gospels.

But I do know better than to expect God to smite my enemies like James and John wanted. He wants to save my enemies; he wants me to love my enemies; I know all this stuff already, and need to snap out of it and be like Jesus. We all have low points where we know better, and need to adjust our attitudes or change our behavior. That’s what I mean by obvious stupidity: We know we’re not being wise, and not praying right. Let’s do better.

The subtle stuff is when we think we are doing better… but if we stopped a second to think things through, we’d realize no we’re not.

Most imprecatory prayers are wholly inappropriate: We need to pray for evil to stop, but we mistakenly attack individuals. Most prayers for wealth and prosperity are because deep down we trust riches to be our safety net, not so much God. Often we need to pray for causes instead of effects: Yeah, we want God’s blessings on ourselves and our land, but how we arrive at those blessings needs to come through moral, ethical means; not by cutting government programs for the needy, raising taxes, raiding companies, nor exploiting workers.

Most prayers for our life and circumstances to change might be valid requests, but there’s an awful lot we can do to change these things, and if we used commonsense instead of trying to wish things into being, we’d actually get somewhere. No, I’m not saying “God helps those who help themselves”: God helps those who follow him, and any activity on our part needs to submit to his will. But often God’s “no” is really “I’m not gonna do that, you are.” Followed by our usual Moses-style or Gideon-style whining that we can’t… but yeah, we totally can. Especially when God’s empowering us.

Too often, prayers are emotional experiences instead of thoughtful experiences. We’re meant to love God with all our minds as well, so let’s stop slobbering all over God and deal with him as the rational, thinking being he is. Get serious about those prayer requests. Ask wisely.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

When two or three gather in Jesus’s name.

Matthew 18.20.

Matthew 18.20 KJV

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

We Christians quote this verse for all sorts of reasons.

• To point out the importance of group prayer: When two or three of us pray together, Jesus is there, so he must therefore hear our prayers. (Though getting him to answer “Yes” is another thing.)
• To point out the importance of small groups. Same reason: Two or three of us are together, so Jesus is there, and supposedly his presence blesses our meeting.
• To avoid church. “You don’t have to go to Sunday morning worship; you just have to gather with two or three fellow Christians and talk Jesus for a few minutes. That counts.” It doesn’t, but I’ll get to that.

But in context it refers to church discipline.

Matthew 18.15-20 KWL

15 “When your fellow Christian sins against you,

take them aside and reprove them—just you and them alone.

When they hear you, you’ve helped your fellow Christian.

16 When they don’t hear you: Take one or two others with you.

Thus ‘by the mouth of two witnesses or three, every word can stand.’ Dt 19.15

17 When they refuse to hear you, tell the church.

When they also refuse to hear the church: To you, they’re like a pagan and taxman.

18 Amen, I promise you whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven.

Whatever you loose on earth is loosed in heaven.

19 Amen again, I tell you when two of you agree amongst yourselves on earth about any activity,

when you ask your heavenly Father about it, it’ll happen to it.

20 For I’m there in the middle of it wherever two or three come together in my name.”

It’s not about when we come together for any old reason, like prayer or worship. It’s when we’re trying to deal with a serious matter, where relationships may have to be suspended or end. It’s about the direction of the church; not about whether our little prayer breakfasts counts the same as Sunday morning worship.

There aren’t separate “earthly” and “heavenly” areas in God’s kingdom.

Whenever Jesus began a teaching with “Amen” (KJV “verily”), he did so ’cause he was teaching something important. Stuff his students had better remember, ’cause it reflected God’s kingdom way better than their popular culture. Stuff they’d initially be inclined not to believe, ’cause Jesus was stretching them. Heck, these amen statements still stretch us.

“Amen” is an oath. In saying it, Jesus promised these things are true. Not ’cause he wasn’t truthful the rest of the time; he doesn’t do degrees of truthfulness. He wanted us to believe him, not take him for granted. Or take him out of context.

Here, Jesus instructed us how to deal with fellow Christians (Greek ἀδελφός/adelfós “sibling,” which in context meant a fellow believer) when they sin. Εἰς σὲ/Eis se, “against you,” is a textual variant, found in copies of Matthew after the fourth century, so Jesus means any sin: If your fellow Christian robs banks, but not your bank, you aren’t off the hook. First deal with them privately; Mt 18.15 next bring one or two witnesses; Mt 18.16 then stage your intervention. Mt 18.17 As you know, your average American lacks the patience to follow any of these steps, and leaps straight to the intervention. Or petitions. Or public shaming. Or whatever the fastest method of resolution will be.

But whatever the church decides, Jesus promises he’ll back us up. Whatever binding agreements we make Mt 18.18 aren’t just a local, earthly, temporal thing—but no longer counts after the defendant dies, or once the Son of Man returns. They count. If you sin, won’t repent, and the church says you’re out, you’re out.

It might only feel binding when they’re the only Christian community in town. (As still is the case when the churches in town talk to one another, like we’re supposed to.) But most of the time you can do as many a kicked-out sinner has: You can go find another church which knows nothing about your sins. Hide ’em from this new church even better than you did from the old one. Stay there the next 40 years with them none the wiser. But that original decree of you’re out? Stands till you repent.

Yeah, the idea God backs up our decrees is an awesome thing.

Yeah, it also means it’s an ability heavily abused. Many a cult has made plenary declarations over Christians, pagans, the nation, their enemies, anyone and everyone. All because they figure God empowered ’em to do it. But they do it for all sorts of ungodly reasons.

So does God consider those churches’ decrees valid? Nah.

’Cause these churches are in the wrong. Remember, decrees are only valid when they’re done in Jesus’s name. Mt 18.20 But we can’t invoke his name when we don’t legitimately know him, and we can’t get anything done in his name if we ask for all the wrong reasons. Jm 4.3 When churches go wrong it’s obviously because they don’t know Jesus. He doesn’t know them either. So their “binding” and “loosing” never counts. Don’t worry about them. (Seriously, don’t. They can’t curse you.)

But if a church does legitimately know God, and if you are legitimately sinning—against God, against your neighbors, against them, against anyone—when they make any formal declaration over you, no matter how formal or informal it sounds, it’s binding. ’Cause Jesus said it is.

If you wanna imagine it only applies within that church, and only that church, you probably haven’t realized every single church, no matter the denomination, belongs to Jesus. Totally applies. So if you leave and go hide in a new church, they belong to Jesus too, and if they’re listening to the Holy Spirit, it’s only a matter of time before he outs you.

Yeah, your best hiding place is a church which doesn’t listen to the Spirit. Conveniently for you (but sadly for them) there are lots of those. But when you one day stand before Jesus, you still gotta answer for what your original church has against you.

Yeah, you’re gonna need better proof texts.

If the reason you’re misquoting Matthew 18.20 is because you’re hoping to make the case we Christians need to pray together, sorry: It’s not your best proof text. Prayer groups can be good things, but God never made group prayer mandatory, and actually doesn’t care whether we hold prayer groups or pray en masse. It’s nice when an entire nation of believers agree in prayer, but really God prefers we as individuals pray—and mean it, instead of hypocritically pretending there’s consensus.

Neither does God promise group prayer is more effective than solitary prayer. ’Cause it’s actually not. You wanna be heard? You pray righteously. Jm 5.16 He’s not more apt to hear us when we’re in bunches; he’s more apt to hear us when we strive for a proper understanding and relationship with him. When we take him for granted—especially when we assume we’ll be heard because of our greater numbers, as if God can be swayed by mobs—he’s far more likely to not be there, and have nothing to do with our sinful, self-serving prayer groups.

No I’m not knocking prayer groups. They’re great at teaching us to pray better, pray in public better, confirm the Holy Spirit is answering us, or confirm we’re on the right track. Go join one. But don’t assume just because two or three are gathered in Jesus’s name for prayer, you’re gonna get what you pray for because Jesus is listening. God’s always listening. Now give him something worth listening to.

Likewise with those Christians who think their kaffeeklatsch counts as church because Jesus is in their midst. He isn’t necessarily, ’cause it doesn’t necessarily.

It’s not a valid church if you can’t worship freely. If the coffeeshop manager has to tell you to stop singing ’cause it’s bothering the other customers; if you can’t do sacraments like, say, hold a baptism; if you simply don’t have the room to bring in new people; if you don’t meet regularly and frequently: You’re not a church. Now yeah, if you do practice these things in your small groups, fine, you’re a church. But most small groups never get that organized, and the justification, “I don’t need church; I got my group” is usually a rubbish attempt to avoid accountability.

Just go to church, wouldya? Jesus doesn’t wanna hang with rebels and phonies.

Anyway, you can see how our ideas of God go askew when we take this verse out of context. So let’s not.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

When God tells us no.

If you ever browse books on prayer, you’ll notice most of them are about being successful at prayer: Prayers that work. Prayers that get heard. Prayers which’ll definitely reach God’s ears. How to be persistent at it, and thereby get what we want. How to have the proper prayer attitude, so God’ll be pleased with us and give us what I want. How to pray as God would want, and therefore get us what we ask for. Yada yada yada.

What makes prayer “successful”? Clearly, getting all our wishes granted.

Of course we won’t always admit this. We’ll try to make our answers sound less greedy, more spiritual, less self-centered. “Um… A successful prayer gets us closer to God.” Yeah, nice try Bubba. Closer to God for why? So now that he knows us, he’ll grant all our wishes.

Look, I already pointed out it’s okay to ask God for anything. The Lord’s Prayer entirely consists of prayer requests, and Jesus tells us to pray like that, so clearly God’s not gonna be offended when we tell him we want stuff from him.

But let’s be honest for once: As far as every Christian is concerned, successful prayer gets results. We ask God for miracles, money, quick fixes to big problems, autonomous fruit of the Spirit, power and influence, and maybe daily bread. God grants all our requests, we get what we want, we give him all the credit (’cause apparently that’s all the payback God needs, and thus we restore our karmic balance), and that’s how prayer works.

Thus we have Christians who arrogantly expect everything we pray for, to just happen. We named it; we claimed it; God’s gotta cough it up, because he promised he’d give us whatever we ask for in Jesus’s name. And he wants us to live successful, prosperous, territory-expanding lives. And he gave us his power to call forth the things that are not, as though they were. Ro 4.17

Now lemme be blunt: God is not your genie.

Nearly all the name-it-claim-it Christians do not have the ultimate goal of growing faith and glorifying God. Their goal is to enrich themselves, and justify their comforts on the grounds God wants us to be comfortable. Their relationship with God is distorted into a senile grandpa who wants to spoil the kids, or a Santa Claus who’ll give us everything on our Christmas lists. It’s entirely based on how God benefits me, ’cause I am the center of this universe.

So those people who are wealthy and comfortable and problem-free, figure God’s happy with them and they needn’t apply any more effort to their relationship. They’ll gleefully call him a mighty God. The rest of us, who still have struggles and suffering… wonder what’s wrong with this system. And one of four things follow:

1. We figure we’re the problem. We prayed wrong. Or we sin too much, or haven’t confessed everything, and thus alienated God. Or we don’t have enough faith; let’s believe even harder! Or we’re short on good karma; let’s do a bunch of good works and get back in God’s favor. Or maybe we’re not even saved; maybe God isn’t gonna save us.
2. We figure God turned off the miracles. He doesn’t answer prayer anymore. He left. All he left behind is the bible; read that and be ye warmed and filled. Jm 2.16 KJV
3. We figure God’s the problem. And if God won’t come through for us, f--- him; we quit. (Happens more often than you’d think.)
4. We still don’t get it… but we don’t really care enough to investigate, and like the trappings of Christianity too much to just quit. So we go through the motions, claim we believe but really don’t, put our faith in other things, and go Christianist.

All these wrong ideas are based on the assumption that too many Christians don’t honestly consider: God can, and does, tell people no. He’s not ignoring us; he’s not denying us; he’s not punishing us; he’s simply saying, “You don’t know what you’re asking” Mk 10.38 —same as Jesus told two of his students when he told them no.

Yep. God’s not a mathematical formula that, once you figure him out, you can get the answers you like. Our relationship isn’t a contractual quid pro quo, where we do for him, and he’s therefore gotta do for us. He’s a sentient being with free will, and as the wisest being, he knows best. He says “no” for good reason. If we can’t accept that, we’re presuming we’re the wisest person in our relationship… and that’d be stupid.

Learn to trust his no.

It’s actually not true that most of God’s prayer answers are “no.” We humans just tend to focus so much on the “no” answers, we forget how frequently God tells us yes. Imagine a child whose parents took her to the Disney store and bought her every princess tchotchke imaginable… yet because they won’t let her stay up past her bedtime to play with them, her day’s just ruined. That’d be us. We get so fixated on the “no” answers, it colors the way we look at God’s infinite generosity.

Simple fix to the problem: Start keeping track of your prayer requests. Mark down God’s answers. Notice how few “no” answers God actually gives you.

And notice how often these “no” answers are actually “not yet.” I get a lot of those. I get ’em every time I pray for Jesus to return. I know it’ll become yes eventually; it’s inevitable. But God’s response is “Not now,” and I want it to be now. You know, like the kid with the princess toys.

So why not now? Well, God doesn’t have to tell us. Sometimes he will; sometimes he won’t. If the answer will do us any good, he’ll tell; if it doesn’t, he won’t. You might notice, in Job, how we know the entire backstory: The devil dared the LORD to let it smite Job, and the LORD said okay… and poor Job didn’t know what hit him, nor why. Come to think of it, Job would’ve been pissed had God explained it: “Well y’see, Job, the devil and I had this bet…” I sure wouldn’t have appreciated it—even though God has every right to take back my property, my family, my health, and my life, if he so chooses. And Job needed a reminder of that fact, which is why God answered, “Can you do what I can?”—and this truth shut Job up.

When we’re miserable, no answer God gives us is really gonna comfort us. That’s why sometimes God won’t bother with answers. They don’t help. We just need comfort. And faith. We need to remember God knows best.

He doesn’t tell us no because he wants to frustrate his kids, and deprive us. Just the opposite. Mt 7.9-11 He has far better in mind for us—but we don’t see it right now. We can’t see how the consequences of our smallest actions might affect or influence people for billions of years, from this age to the next. We may not even care about such things; we think of ’em as hypothetical realities, and we’re only looking at what’s right here and right now. But to God, these “hypothetical realities” are realities, ’cause he’s infinite and is already there. In order to bring us from here to there, he’s gotta bring out the best in both us and everyone else. If we can’t fathom this, there’s really no point in God giving us any answer: We’ll just flail about in confusion and anger, nitpick his decision (kinda like we already do), and wallow in self-pity.

Look, I don’t like God’s “no” answers any more than you. Deep down I probably still foolishly think I know better. God’s “no” is a reminder I don’t. He does. There are infinitely good reasons why I follow him, and not vice-versa. And if I’m gonna follow him, I need to accept a “no” from time to time and be okay with it. So I try. So should we all.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

The bargain with God.

Probably the most common form of prayer is the bargain with God. It takes the form of, “God, if you do this for me, I’ll [something I may do; no guarantees though].”

We fill in the blank with all sorts of things. We promise we’ll reform our behavior: We’ll stop sinning, start some religious practice—or do one of ’em more regularly, be more charitable, perform some act of penance, or pathetically that we’ll even believe in God. ’Cause we don’t really, and this bargain with God is, to completely confound metaphors, our Hail Mary pass.

I’ve heard a lot of Christians dismiss, mock, or discourage the bargain with God. They believe it encourages the wrong attitude about prayer: Prayer’s about putting God’s will before ours. Not about working out an exchange of goods and services.

True. But the whole putting-God’s-will-first idea? That’s something devout believers know and practice. The bargain-with-God idea? We find it more among pagans, unbelievers, not-yet-believers, and newbies. (And the desperate, who revert back to this old behavior whenever doubt overwhelms ’em.) When we’re talking mature Christians, of course I’m gonna discourage them from trying to cut deals with the Almighty, ’cause we’re supposed to be tighter with him than that.

But when we’re talking newbies, I don’t mind when they bargain with God. And y’know, God doesn’t mind if they bargain with him either. Sometimes he actually accepts their deals.

No, really. It’s in the bible.

Genesis 28.20-22 KWL

20 Jacob vowed a vow, saying, “God, if you’re with me on the way I’m going,

you’ll give me bread to eat and clothes to wear, 21 and I’ll return in peace to my father’s house.

LORD, be God to me.

22 This stone, which I set up as a marker, is God’s house.

Everything you give me, I tithe you a tenth of it.”

God actually went along with that one. He watched over Jacob, despite the trickery of his uncle/father-in-law Laban, and despite some of Jacob’s own trickery. Jacob did eventually return to Canaan in peace.

1 Samuel 1.11 KWL

Hanna vowed a vow, saying, “LORD of War, if you see me,

see your maidservant’s affliction. Remember me. Don’t forget your maidservant.

Give your maidservant offspring, a man,

and I give him to the LORD all the days of his life.

A razor will never go upon his head.”

God went along with that one too. Hanna’s offspring was the prophet Samuel, and his mother dedicated him to God. Hence the whole no-razor thing; those under a Nazirite vow of holiness never cut their hair. Nu 6.5 Samuel was even sent to live at tabernacle, where he first heard God’s voice.

Judges 11.30-31 KWL

30 Jefta vowed a vow to the LORD. He said, “If you give answers to prayer,

give the sons of Ammon into my hand.

31 My offering will be whatever goes out the door of my house to meet me on my return,

in peace after battling the sons of Ammon.

It’s for the LORD; it goes up in the fire.”

And God did indeed help Jefta defeat the Ammonites. Unfortunately Jefta’s story has a nasty ending. See, the first thing out of Jefta’s house—the thing which Jefta promised to go up in the fire—was his only daughter. Jg 11.34

Yeah, are we sure this was part of the bargain?

Jefta’s first, understandable response was to freak out. Jg 11.35 Because while he knew he couldn’t break his vows to God, Nu 30.2 he didn’t know God well enough to know human sacrifice opened up a huge exception to his promise: God forbade that! Dt 18.10 But all the pagan gods permitted human sacrifice, so Jefta assumed why wouldn’t the real God?

So he gave his daughter two months to mourn, then “did to her as he vowed.” Jg 11.34-39 Which lots of Christians much prefer to imagine was send her to live as some kind of pre-Christianity nun, but they had no such things back then. So… eww. Just eww.

Because of the horrible outcome of the Jefta story, there are plenty of Christians who insist there’s no such thing as a bargain with God. Jefta thought God gave him victory because of his vow, but this is a case of the post hoc ergo propter hoc error: Just because one event follows another, it doesn’t mean one’s a cause and the other’s an effect. God was gonna let Jefta defeat the Ammonites anyway. He didn’t have to vow to burn the first thing out of his door. Arguably he might’ve just been showing off, just to demonstrate how devout he was.

Anyway, these Christians get downright deterministic: The Almighty’s gonna do what the Almighty’s gonna do. Making promises isn’t gonna sway him one way or the other, once his mind’s made up. So if our promises are irrelevant, they’re therefore invalid. So what if I promised God I’d go to church if he’d heal my kid? He was gonna heal my kid either way. To hell with church.

Sounds all reasonable and logical… till we get to the rotten fruit.

Look, obviously God has his own ideas and plans in a lot of situations. Sometimes, especially when we’re following Jesus, we’re gonna want the same things he does, and pray for the same outcomes he wants. Even when we’re not following Jesus, sometimes we’re gonna coincidentally want the same things: Pagans don’t want their neighbors to throw noisy orgies every weekend, any more than God does, though for different reasons. Sometimes the bargain with God isn’t necessary, ’cause we’re on the very same page: He wants what we want.

But the main reason people decide, after the fact, that the bargain with God is invalid: They wanna weasel out of the bargain. At that point, they’re perfectly happy when some know-it-all Christian proclaims, “God doesn’t make such deals.” He doesn’t? Great!—it lets ’em off the hook. They don’t have to follow through with their end of the bargain. Heck, some of ’em will quickly jump from “God doesn’t make such deals” to “There’s no God out there to make such deals with.”

The fact is, if God appears to come through in any bargain, we’re on the hook for it. ’Cause we promised God, “If you… then I’ll,” and it doesn’t matter whether he did it specifically for us or not: We promised we would. God holds us to our promises. Don’t make ’em if you won’t follow through with them.

If you don’t really believe there’s a God out there to make such promises to, that’s a whole separate issue. The whole no-atheists-in-foxholes, “If you’re there, God, get me out of this!” situation is a pretty common move of desperation. But be honest with yourself: Did God legitimately come through for you? Did you actually get what you prayed for? You did? Then do a little more investigating. You’ve got some evidence for a real God; it makes sense to find out more. Denial might be convenient, but it’s stupid.

God’s motive: Faith.

The bargain with God isn’t an invalid form of prayer. Immature? Sure. But sometimes we’re immature. And God is willing to meet us where we are.

That’s the point. That’s why God sometimes takes us up on these deals: We don’t know him. We don’t know any better. We doubt he’s there. We don’t know the difference between God’s love and reciprocity: We think we gotta pay him back; that if he does us a favor, we owe him one. And when we do know better, but we’re desperate, we wonder whether offering God something, anything, might just tip the scales in our favor.

The bargain with God means he’s dealing with a person who lacks knowledge and faith. He interacts with these people anyway because he wants to grow their knowledge and faith. He knows answering their prayers will get them to take him seriously, even follow him. In the long run it’ll have a positive outcome. And he’s not gonna be so hung up on “what’s proper” to deny such people. (Besides, who gets to decide what’s proper anyway?)

Hence when we bargain with God, we need to be sincere in what we offer. Too often people tell God, “If you… then I’ll,” but have no follow-through. They might totally mean it in the moment, but they’re flaky. And God knows whether we’re the type of people who will, no matter how ridiculous it might look, how humiliated we might feel, do as we promised. If our promise is likely to bring us into a relationship with him, of course he’ll take us up on those deals. God’s no fool. He knows a good deal when he sees it.

In some cases, we’re not sincere but God still takes us up on our bargains. And then—because we’re not allowed to break our oaths to God Nu 30.2 —lets us suffer the consequences of oath-breaking. Not because God wants us to suffer, but to make us realize a promise is a serious thing. For those people who have a superficial relationship with God, this wakes ’em up: God isn’t to be trifled with.

Maturity: When God stops making deals.

Keep following God, and you’ll invariably find we reach a point where we can’t bargain with him anymore.

About 15 years ago I was really in a bind. I asked God’s help out of it, and in good ol’ desperation I found myself trying to bargain with him a little. “If you do this for me,” I told him, trying to think of anything to bargain with, “then I’ll….”

“You’ll do it anyway,” said the Holy Spirit.

I stopped. Went through a mental inventory, which took a while: Everything I could think of to offer, was stuff I ought to do regardless.

• Give something up? I should give it up regardless.
• Pray more? I should pray more regardless.
• Praise more? Ditto.
• Give more charity? Also ditto.

Went through everything I could think of, and gradually realized I was screwed. I got nothing.

And as any mature Christian could tell you: Well duh. We’re supposed to surrender everything to God when we first became Christians. We don’t have anything left to bargain with: It’s all surrendered! If we have any bargaining chip, it means we’re inappropriately clinging to something we have no business saving. Gotta give it up too.

When we look back upon our old bargains with God, we’ll often laugh about how immature these bargains were: The stuff we offered him, already belonged to him! Everything was a gift from God; anything that wasn’t, needed to go. And in the End, everything goes into the fire. 1Co 3.10-15 What’s from God, survives. What’s not… well, if we’re still clinging to it, I suppose we’ll stay in the fire with it.

So after a certain point of Christian maturity, the bargain with God can’t work. We’re beyond that. Which is just as well.

By this point, we oughta have way more faith in God to answer prayer. We oughta be way better at hearing him. We shouldn’t have to resort to desperate behavior so often. Okay, sometimes there will be slip-ups, like mine. But we can easily slip right back into place once God snaps us out of our panic. No bargaining necessary.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

People who love angry prayer.

Θυμοί/thymí, “anger,” is a work of the flesh. Ga 5.19 Period.

I know: For a lot of Christians there is no such period; anger is okay in various circumstances. ’Cause the LORD gets angry, Dt 4.21, 1Ki 11.9, 2Ch 25.15, Ps 60,1, Jr 10.10 and Jesus got angry that one time, Mk 3.5 and if God can get angry, we presume we can indulge our anger.

Forgetting, of course, God is absolutely in control of his emotions. Whereas we suck at it. We get angry, then forget all about loving people, take our revenge, get our satisfaction. We get murdery.

There are a lot of angry people in the world, and as a result there are a lot of angry Christians. And rather than get hold of their anger, fight it, and eliminate it by the time the sun goes down, Ep 4.26 angry Christians wanna embrace that anger, make it part of their character and lifestyle, and justify it as “righteous anger.” Even though there’s nothing at all righteous about how they wanna express their anger. They’re not seeking anyone’s good, nor God’s glory. They just want death and destruction.

So of course they wanna pray angry prayers. Again, they justify it by pointing out angry prayers are in the bible—and they’re right. The imprecatory psalms are a bunch of angry songs and prayers about God smiting David and Israel’s enemies. A lot of prophets prayed some really violent things about their neighbors. So, these angry Christians argue, we oughta be able to do likewise. These angry petitioners wrote Spirit-inspired bible, after all. While angry.

As I said in the angry prayers article, the reason the imprecatory psalms are in the bible is because God wants us to be honest with him. When we’re angry, he wants us to feel entirely free to tell him so, to tell him exactly what we’re feeling, and to hold nothing back. To do otherwise is hypocrisy, and he hates that. The last thing we should get is the idea there are off-topic subjects for God; that he’s too holy to discuss our issues, hangups, sins, problems, anything. So when our family and neighbors, even friends, certainly opponents and rivals, piss us off: Tell God so.

But of course angry Christians don’t really care about sharing themselves with God. Their angry prayers are about indulging the flesh: They wanna rage out, and now they can do it and call it good religion. It’s carnal, it’s harmful… and it’s popular.

Excuses, excuses.

I came across an article by one angry Christian who gave a big ol’ list of all the reasons we should pray imprecatory things against our enemies. Which he made a big point of insisting are God’s enemies, y’know; there’s Satan and its imps, there are antichrists and heretics and liberals, and he wants God to strike ’em all down. By jingo you’d better pray angry things:

• Christians pray the psalms all the time, and how dare we skip the imprecatory psalms? What, are you nullifying scripture or something?
• It’s not just an Old Testament thing either, ’cause Paul cursed people, 1Co 16.22, Ga 1.9 and the saints in Revelation called out for vengeance. Rv 6.10 So if you lean dispensationalist, it should make no difference.
• God is just, and he’s gonna stamp out evil, as the bible says on multiple occasions. So let’s get on board with the bible, and encourage God to stamp ’em out right away!
• In praying for the weak and needy, part of what makes ’em not weak and needy anymore is their oppressors get what’s coming to them. [Not flip ’em, like Jesus did with Paul; not forgive ’em, like he does with us.] So we kinda have to pray for God’s wrath upon those oppressors.
• It’s not really vengefulness, ’cause we’re praying for God to take revenge on our behalf. So that makes everything all good.
• It is being honest about how we feel, after all.

He had way more bullet points than I do, ’cause he got mighty redundant. I like to condense things, so I did. So he had excuse after excuse for why he should be able to pray angry prayers, and why any Christian should be able to pray angry prayers.

And lemme remind you: I don’t have an issue with praying angry prayers. We can pray such prayers. Often we should pray such prayers—’cause we’re angry, and we need God’s help with that!

Likewise we should pray against evil. God’s gonna vanquish evil, and we should totally be in favor of him doing that. The sooner the better.

But ultimately it doesn’t matter how valid the bullet points are, how true the excuses might be. The underlying issue is the motives of an angry Christian. Does he wanna pray an angry prayer to support Jesus and his kingdom, and glorify what God’s doing and going to do? Or does he just wanna rage against his frustrations, and feel self-righteous and justified for doing so?

Does he want to live a carnal lifestyle, and claim it’s really devout Christianity, full of prayer, conforming to God’s will? Does he even believe it’s not really Christianism, wherein he stays the same angry, bitter person he’s always been, but with a veneer of Christian jargon making it seem like something’s changed about him? Where he doesn’t love and forgive his enemies like Jesus taught; he figures his “tough love” is a valid substitute?

It always comes down to motives. What’s inside him? What’s inside us? A person motivated to follow the Holy Spirit wherever he might lead? Or someone who’s still as self-focused and self-pleasing as ever?

Let’s not fool ourselves. We’re certainly not fooling God.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

Angry prayers.

IMPRECATE 'ɪm.prə.keɪt verb. Call down evil upon.

[Imprecation ɪm.prə'keɪ.ʃən noun, imprecatory ɪm'prək.ə.tɔ.ri adjective]

Yep, there’s a whole category of prayer which is all about people letting loose their rage as they pray. Not because they’re angry with God—although sometimes they might be! But commonly they’re furious at other people, at human behavior, or at Satan itself. So they call down God’s wrath, or put curses on people and things, or otherwise condemn ’em.

I started with a definition of the old-timey word Christians use to describe such things: Imprecatory prayer. (Not everyone knows how to pronounce it properly.) It’s a nicer way of saying “angry prayer.”

And lest you think God doesn’t allow, or listen to, angry prayer: Nope, he permits it. Angry prayers are in the bible. There’s a bunch of ’em in Psalms. ’Cause sometimes King David’s enemies would piss him off, so he’d declare God was gonna do all sorts of savage things to ’em. God didn’t necessarily, because God’s under no obligation to answer our prayers like a leprechaun grants wishes; he can easily tell us no, and often will. So any Christian who panics, “Don’t declare such things into the universe!—it might come to pass!” clearly hasn’t read their scriptures.

But yeah, angry prayers are in the bible. Including the New Testament, lest you get the idea it’s solely an Old Testament thing. Paul damned anyone who preaches another gospel than his, Ge 1.8-9 and damned anyone who didn’t love the Lord. 1Co 16.22 Jesus himself damned a fig tree, Mt 21.19 and warned several cities at the rate they were going, they were on the road to hell. Lk 10.13-15

Among those who have read their scriptures, one favorite imprecatory prayer is good ol’ Psalm 109. Many a partisan has joked about how it’s their favorite prayer for certain politicians. “Oh, I pray for the president every day; I pray directly from the scriptures—”

Psalm 109.6-13 KWL

6 Place a wicked person over him, with Satan standing at his right.

7 May those judging him return an evil verdict, and his prayers be offensive.

8 May his days be few, and another ruler supervise him.

9 May his children become fatherless, and his woman a widow.

10 May his children wander, wander, begging, digging through people’s trash.

11 May debt seize everything he owns, and strangers steal his labor.

12 May he never find love; his fatherless children never be given grace.

13 May his generation be the last one, and his family name be wiped out.

And so on. You get the idea. David wrote this because he wanted this guy thoroughly crapped upon, because this enemy and his friends had done likewise to David. David wanted karmic justice—for the evildoer to get what David felt was coming to him.

Now as I said, there are certain Christians who think imprecatory prayers are awful and wrong; that because anger is a work of the flesh, we ought never pray angry. And obviously there are Christians who think otherwise. Generally we’re of three minds:

• All for it. Evildoers need and deserve our condemnation.
• Wholly inappropriate for Christians: We’re ordered to forgive. Mk 11.25 Forgive friends, forgive enemies, forgive everyone, or God won’t bother to forgive our own sins. Mk 11.26 What’re we, of all people, doing calling down curses upon others?
• Only appropriate towards the devil and devilish things, bad behaviors, evil ideas, false thinking, corrupt institutions. We draw the line at fellow human beings. Never ask God to destroy women and men, no matter how bad they get. ’Cause God made them in his image, Jm 3.9 and wants to save everyone, 2Pe 3.9 not destroy ’em. Everybody’s redeemable.

Me, I lean towards the third category. And a fourth: If we’re angry, and we need to calm down and get ahold of ourselves, go ahead and pray while angry—and ask God to help you regain control; to help “gentle” you, as a horse-trainer might say. We need a healthy outlet for anger, and sometimes that outlet is to tell God you’re pissed off. Tell God what you’d really like him to do to all those people who’re frustrating you—and let him take that rage away.

Dark Christians, angry prayers.

In my experience the crowd who’s fondest of imprecatory prayer consists of dark Christians. Of course.

In life, humans get angry. Christians get angry. Yes, even Jesus got angry, Mk 3.5 and no doubt still gets that way. Anger’s a natural emotional reaction when we wanna see things happen a certain way and they don’t. It’s even appropriate when injustice takes place. In itself, anger isn’t necessarily evil. But we certainly use it as an excuse for every kind of evil. And a lifestyle of anger means we’re not following the Holy Spirit, who gives us peace. Angry Christians are fruitless Christians.

Their justification is the prophets prayed such prayers. And the apostles got a little outraged from time to time too. Even Jesus had his “woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” bits in the gospels. Mt 23.13-29 (They don’t realize “woe unto you” means “how sad for you,” not “damnation upon you.” They don’t really care either.) They figure they have a valid precedent for praying likewise.

But here’s the thing: When Jesus condemned cities, he didn’t do it maliciously. He doesn’t wanna destroy anyone! God wants everyone to be saved. 1Ti 2.3-4 Jesus is loving, patient, and kind, and that’s the attitude we have to read into everything he does. Even when he condemns.

We aren’t so loving, patient, and kind. We’re angry, spiteful, and cruel. We bring those attitudes into our prayers, and they’re the wrong ones. God doesn’t care to answer fruitless prayers. If our imprecatory prayers are borne out of anything but the Spirit’s fruit, we really have no business praying them.

Wait, so how do we kindly curse anything?

Really easy: When a loved one is sick, we have all kinds of compassion for the person, right? But none for the ailment. None for the virus. None for the bacteria making ’em puke. We want it out of them and gone. So we can easily condemn the illness: “I rebuke this illness, and demand it come out of you in Jesus’s name.” We never have to lose our heads in doing so.

Now if we can’t do that—if we always lose control of our emotions when we rebuke evil—we’d better hold off on the angry prayers. Maybe for a long time. Ask the Spirit for the self-control we’re clearly missing.

Dark Christians neither understand this, nor care. Like a gun nut who also has no self-control, they just keep indiscriminately firing away—unaware God swapped their ammo for blanks long ago, because he can’t trust them to pray right.

God doesn’t have to agree, y’know.

Now yeah, there’s the crowd who ban angry prayers of all sorts. Not just because Christians should forgive instead of cursing. Ro 12.14 A number of Christians are convinced curses stick; that when we call down evil, we actually have the power to make evil materialize out of thin air. Supposedly one of the ways God made us in his image, was to make us able to create ex nihilo/“out of nothing” like him.

No; God did no such thing. Everything we humans create is made of pre-existing material. Not even our ideas are created from nothing: Most are obviously based on something, and if its influence isn’t obvious to you, it is to the person who last had that idea. We can’t create anything out of thin air, much less evil. Humans need power to fuel our curses, and unless you’re colluding with devils, the power has to come from the Holy Spirit. But if the Spirit has no intention of empowering our angry demands (and he usually doesn’t), nothing’s gonna come of them. We have him under no obligation whatsoever.

Remember Saul of Tarsus? Violent persecutor, enemy of Christ? Ac 8.3, 9.1 Betcha plenty of Christians, at the time, damned Paul to the stinkiest parts of hell for what he was doing to Jesus’s church. Did God agree with any of these vengeful prayers? Absolutely not. Rather than destroy Saul, he flipped him. Jesus appeared to him, commissioned him as his apostle to the gentiles, and made him spend the rest of his life willingly undoing all the evil he originally. Ac 26.14-18 God knows better, and his plans are infinitely better than our curses.

We can curse a person up, down, and sideways, and add “In the name of Christ Jesus” as much as we wish. But if Jesus doesn’t approve, nothing’s gonna happen. Our imprecatory prayers come to nothing… for they don’t actually conform to God’s will. His will be done, remember? Lk 11.2

For there’s no fruit of the Spirit in angry prayer. There’s no love nor compassion; no kindness, forgiveness, grace, nor mercy. Take another look at Psalm 109: Regardless of the horrible things David’s enemy might’ve done to him, what business did David have in wishing horrible things upon his enemy’s children? What kind of twisted prayer demands that God make the innocent suffer? Obviously David’s prayer doesn’t reflect God’s mind at all.

Okay, so what’s it even doing in the bible? Well, it’s not to teach us it’s okay to wish evil upon the innocent. It’s to teach us it’s okay to vent to God. It’s okay to tell God how we honestly feel: We feel like being harsh, unforgiving, unyielding, loveless, and savage. None of this comes as any surprise to God, of course. He knows our hearts. (He’s heard way worse.) And it’s far better we express these sentiments to God, than ever act on them.

Learn from the angry psalms.

Seriously, some of the angry psalms are messed up. Some poet actually sat down, wrote these lines, set it to music, and for the past 25 centuries Christians and Jews have recited and sang these prayers. Sometimes several times a year.

Yes sang. Scottish Presbyterians, because they originally wouldn’t sing anything that didn’t come directly from the bible, translated the psalms and set ’em to music. And sometimes they’d sing this.

Psalm 137.7-9, Scottish metrical psalms

7 Remember Edom’s children, LORD, who in Jerus’lem’s day,

“E’en unto its foundation raze, raze it quite,” did say.

8 Oh daughter thou of Babylon, near to destructión:

Blessed shall be he that thee rewards, as thou to us hast done.

9 Yea, happy surely shall he be thy tender little ones,

Who shall lay hold upon, and them shall dash against the stones.

Pretty sick.

When we’re not frighteningly taking these passages out of context, Christians tend to treat ’em like we’d treat an embarrassing racist grandmother: We pretend she didn’t just say horribly offensive things. We blame it on her being old, out of touch, out of date. We don’t stand up to her. Not even sure we should, ’cause aren’t we supposed to respect our elders?

Same deal with the imprecatory psalms. We tend to skip ’em and pretend they’re not there. Or we admit they’re there… but just in this one case, we’re gonna borrow the Dispensationalist idea which figures they don’t count anymore: They’re from a past era, but God works all different nowadays. Even though we should know better than to nullify parts of the bible, solely because they make us uncomfortable.

Instead we need to take serious looks at these prayers. Understand where the author was coming from: Her homeland was just conquered by a horde of filthy, violent pagans. Her homeland was burnt to the ground. Possibly her kids and husband killed in front of her; possibly she was raped; now she was getting dragged to Babylon to become a slave. And the Edomites, their cousins who were supposed to be allies, supposed to be fellow worshipers of the LORD God: They rejoiced at Jerusalem’s destruction.

Along the way her captors, for sport, ordered her to sing a few Jerusalem worship songs for their entertainment. Ps 137.3 So how would you feel? More than likely, you’d want to compose a really sarcastic song in response—take advantage of their unfamiliarity with Hebrew—just to get back at them a little.

Well, here’s that song. “God, do vile things to the Edomites. Do nauseating things to the Babylonians.” The smashing-kids-on-rocks bit? Betcha the Babylonians had done it to her. And she wanted life for life, Dt 19.21 which seemed only fair.

Should she have forgiven the Babylonians? Well duh; of course she should have. The rage would eat her up inside if she didn’t. But here, we get to see how she, and the other survivors of Jerusalem, really felt. These were the emotions boiling in her, which she didn’t bother to hide from God. It’d be stupid to try.

That’s the point of these psalms. Total honesty with God. He wants this kind of integrity from us: What’s in our minds, oughta be in our prayers. He knows us inside and out, whether we admit this stuff or not. But if we can’t be honest with God, of all people, our relationship with him is simply gonna suck.

If we’re this kind of angry—if we want our enemies to burn in hell forever and ever—let’s just be honest and say so. Let God minister to our anger. Let him help us get beyond it.

Anger vented.

One thing you’re gonna notice in most of the angry psalms: By the end of it, the psalmist finishes by praising God. The anger’s gone. It was dealt with, and done with.

True of us too. Once we confess our anger to God, and put it in his hands, he tends to dissolve it. We give this emotion to God, and he casts it away. We vent, and he purges us.

But if we don’t do this—if we stamp our rage down, and pray only holy-sounding things which don’t truly reflect our state of mind—it damages us in two different ways. I already mentioned how our relationship with God’s gonna suck, ’cause we’re embracing hypocrisy instead of authenticity. But there’s also the fact that when we hold onto our anger it grows, and corrodes us. Turns into other evil things, like revenge, bitterness, joylessness, hatred, prejudice, argumentativeness, and violence.

We’ve all encountered angry Christians. They’re awful, aren’t they? They do such damage to everyone around them, and drive people away from Jesus. Let’s never unthinkingly become one ourselves. Give these emotions to God, and tell him, “God, I’m furious; help me.” Trust him with it. He can take it, and will. Submit to him, and let him free you.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

How often ought we pray?

Ask any Christian, and we’ll likely admit we don’t pray as often as we ought.

Well, nuns, monks, and the people who staff prayer rooms, might be exceptions. Yet even some of them will admit they oughta pray more. Why is this? Well, some of it is because it’s true: We could pray more than we do.

For a lot of folks, other than saying grace, they don’t pray daily. Or they pray maybe two or three minutes a day… then beat themselves up for not praying 10 minutes a day. Or 30. Or an hour. Or even longer.

Okay. For a moment, let’s stop doing that and seriously think: How long does God reasonably expect us to talk with him?

Why should every Christian prayer become as long as the longest phone conversations you could possibly have with your friends? (And considering how much of these conversations consist of really dumb, frivolous, irrelevant stuff, should our prayers ever become that dumb?)

Much of the reason a lot of Christians have this idea of prayer as a marathon race, comes from this simple little two-word verse—

1 Thessalonians 5.17 THGNT

ἀδιαλείπτως προσεύχεσθε·

—and if you don’t know ancient Greek, that’s adialeíptos proséfhesthe, “unstoppingly pray.” Or as the KJV puts it, “Pray without ceasing.” Or the NLT, “Never stop praying.”

Never stop? Never ever stop? Is that even possible?

How do we physically do that? Don’t we need to take the odd break for, say, sleep? Should we band together in some prayer organization, like a “prayer watch” or monastery, which makes certain every day, 24 hours a day, someone is talking with God?

See, this is the traditional way “pray without ceasing” has been interpreted: Constant, unrelenting, unending prayer. We got the idea no matter how much we do pray, God isn’t satisfied. He’s like a helicopter mom who won’t be satisfied till we get a phone surgically implanted in our head so she can talk at us 24/7. Because God loves us so much, he wants us to talk to him all day long. Hence all the prayer centers and monasteries.

Is this what God meant by “Pray without ceasing”? Of course not.

You might recall the Genesis story of Eden, where the LORD used to personally hang out with the first humans. Was he with them all day long? Clearly not, ’cause the humans apparently had enough free time to go talk to serpents, and get talked into sinning. If chatting with us all day long was God’s original plan for humanity, we should see some of that in the Eden story, wouldn’t you think? Same as when Jesus more fully explained God to his students: Did he instruct them to have nonstop prayer gatherings?

Certainly there are times for nonstop prayer meetings. Like when the first Christians met to pray for the Holy Spirit to come to them. Ac 1.13-14 Sometimes we expect the Spirit to do something big, so we pray for that. The rest of the time, we pray as usual. And that’s what the apostles were instructing the Thessalonians to do in 1 Thessalonians: Pray as usual. And don’t quit praying as usual.

Dialíptos means “[one who] falls down, takes a break, drops the ball, skips, slacks.” It doesn’t mean “[one who] stops.” It’s an instruction to keep up our prayer life. Don’t take a break from it. Don’t skip it. Don’t slack on it. Don’t quit your regular practice. Keep it up.

When the apostles wrote to Thessaloniki, their readers were Christians who were overly concerned about the End Times. (Sound like anyone you know?) The Thessalonians were so fixated on End Times paranoia, they dropped the ball on various things we Christians oughta do. Like care for the needy. Like obey God’s commands. ’Cause why follow commands when the End is near? Start digging out that End Times bunker!

Likewise they slacked on their prayers. And that’s never gonna help. If you don’t stay in regular contact with God, you’re gonna go heretic on him.

So no, it doesn’t mean to constantly, never-endingly pray. Talk to God as long as you talk to God. If you need to speak with him more, do. If you don’t… well, pray the Lord’s Prayer at least. Check in with him. Keep an ear open in case God has anything to tell you. You’re not the only one who talks during prayer, y’know.

Don’t feel so guilty about not praying as much as other Christians. Honestly, you’re probably praying more. No, I’m not kidding. A lot of the people who talk a lot about their strong, devout prayer lives are giant hypocrites. And a lot aren’t—but it’s not your duty to play “Spot the Hypocrtite.” Just concentrate on yourself, and pray without slacking.

Those who do pray without ceasing.

However, some Christians are called to pray a ton. No, not everybody. Ignore those folks who insist it’s everybody.

Certain women and men dedicate their lives to prayer and good deeds, and function as professional prayer teams. In older churches they’re called monastics, or individually, nuns and monks. And prayer is their job. Yeah, they do other things, but those other things are side duties: Prayer is their job. Several times a day (and once in the middle of the night, ’cause they believe prayer is more important than sleep) they drop what they’re currently doing, and go pray together. They frequently live together in a prayer community, called an abbey, cloister, convent, friary, nunnery, priory, or monastery. But that’s not all of them; many groups live in their own homes, and only get together for prayer.

No, these monastics aren’t just not found in older, liturgical churches. Newer charismatic churches have rediscovered the idea, but don’t call themselves monastics, and put their own spin on what their prayer teams look like. Many of them have day jobs. Their prayer sites are either at churches, or special prayer centers, houses, rooms, or towers. They pray the very same things monastics do, but in a more contemporary style. More recent worship music, fr’instance.

All these groups pray several times, even 24 hours, a day. They pray formal prayers or off the top of their head; they pray the psalms and other scriptures; they pray for all the requests they have, or the requests others make of them. Anything and everything.

It’s a lot of prayer. And that’s not counting all the other prayer functions we Christians get involved in: Prayer-based small groups, the church’s prayer teams and prayer chains, vigils, and watches. Sometimes five times a day, sometimes more. Some of us Christians pray a lot.

And God might want you to pray just as often, and devote your life to prayer. That’s fine. But it’s not a ministry for everyone. Like I said, ignore those folks who insist everybody must pray that often. Pray as you can, when you can.

If you don’t pray five times a day, relax. God doesn’t require you to. It’s a nice habit to aim for, but first we need to start by praying once a day. Don’t run marathons when you’re winded after jogging round the block once. Start with once a day. Don’t push yourself beyond that till you feel ready.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

God doesn’t owe us anything for fasting.

I’ve pointed out fasting is a great way to focus our attention on God so we can pray better, hear him better, and develop our self-control.

But no, I don’t guarantee you’ll grow in all these ways when you fast.

All things being equal, you probably will. But as you know, there are lots of ways people can bollix our own growth. If we’re fasting, yet the rest of our lives are just as sinful as ever, why should we expect anything to change whatsoever? And yet Christians do: “I’m fasting! That should count for something.”

The Hebrews did it too, y’know. They’d fast, then make prayer requests ’cause they believed fasting would show the LORD they were serious, and it’d move him a little faster. It’s why Jehoshaphat told Jerusalem to fast so God might rescue them from invaders, 2Ch 20.3 and why Esther asked the Persian Jews to fast before she petitioned the king. Es 4.16 Since God apparently acted on the petitioners’ behalf in these stories, Christians get the idea fasting makes God move. They’ll claim this is “the biblical principle of fasting”: If you fast, God’ll answer prayer, and give you revelations.

But no it’s not a “biblical principle.” The idea’s based on works righteousness, the idea God we can earn God’s favor through good deeds and acts of devotion. So if we’re good, God supposedly owes us one; if we’re super good God owes us a lot. And supposedly religious acts and rituals can cancel out any evil deeds: If I’m stealing from my workplace’s cash drawer, saying a few hundred Hail Marys will work it off. What’s the going exchange rate, a buck per hail?

There is no biblical principle of fasting. Because in the bible, the LORD never commanded anyone to fast. Ever. The bible contains no teachings about what fasting does, why it’s important, and how often we oughta do it. The one teaching it does have on fasting is when Jesus tells us to not be hypocrites about it, and do it privately instead of publicly. Mt 6.16-18 The rest of Christianity’s teachings on fasting come from tradition: From fellow Christians’ experiences with fasting, and how it benefited them; and how it personally benefited us when we tried it.

But anyone who claims fasting unlocks God’s promises, and now he owes us stuff: They didn’t get that from bible. They got it from a corrupt Christian tradition, if anything. It’s not so. God owes us nothing. His kingdom runs on grace, not quid pro quo. He grants us grace and prayer requests and revelations because he loves us, not because we racked up enough heavenly frequent flyer miles to get a trip to Belize.

He tends to grant these things to active followers, not because we’re actively following, but because what good would they be in the hands of people who aren’t actively following? Such people will just squander his gifts, and be of little to no help to his kingdom. It’s not merit; it’s pragmatism.

So when we fast, is God obligated to do more for us than usual? Not at all. He tends to, but that’s only because Christians who fast, tend to love Jesus and follow him otherwise.

Fasting while you’re sinning.

Lots of Christians fast, but not really because they’re seeking God and his kingdom. They’re seeking wealth. They were told if they want a prosperous new year, start the year by fasting! If they want visions for a prosperous new year, deny themselves for a week or so; do a Daniel fast. (Supposedly it’ll also clean out your liver and kidneys. Based on what evidence, I dunno. I doubt any researchers are doing clinical studies on Daniel fasts.)

Likewise around Lent you get a lot of Christians who give up something till Easter. But they’re not always doing it for Jesus. They’re doing it because everybody else in their church is fasting, or because Mom is on their case about how they oughta give up something this year… so it’s peer pressure and legalism, and not so much love of God. Or they’ll give up a vice they oughta give up anyway: “This year I’m giving up hard liquor for Lent!” (Which is why they suddenly start buying so many four-liter jugs of wine: Seems they don’t realize chronic drunkenness is the real problem.)

In any event, fasting for ulterior motives means we’re gonna do it wrong. We’re gonna think of fasting as if it’s a heavenly punchcard, where you fast enough days and you earn a free sin. Instead of redirecting our focus towards heavenly things, fasting simply becomes a little personal devotion we’re doing on the side, and we never ever notice all the violations of God’s commands and love which we commit every day. And even when we do: Hey, we’re fasting! Shouldn’t that cancel some of the badness out?—just a little?

For too many Christians, fasting clearly doesn’t make us any holier. We don’t grow any different from the rest of the world; we look exactly like them, only hungrier. As demonstrated in Isaiah, when the LORD himself told Isaiah to rebuke the Israelis for fasting without transforming.

Isaiah 58.1-4 KWL

1 “Shout really loud. Don’t hold back. Your voice should be loud as a shofar.

Tell my rebellious people about the sins of Jacob’s house.

2 Day after day they seek me, ‘delighted’ to know my way—

as if they’re a righteous nation, who judges rightly and hasn’t abandoned their God,

asking me for righteous judgment, ‘delighting’ in God’s closeness.

3 But they ask, ‘Why do we fast and you don’t see us? Why do we oppress our souls and you don’t seem to know it?’

Look, on your fast day you seek pleasure. You oppress your employees.

4 Look, you argue and fight as you fast, punching with a wicked fist.

Don’t fast like you do today, and expect your voice to be heard on high!”

Same as Isaiah’s day, we have Christians who make a big deal of fasting on a regular basis, yet they think giving their employees Sundays off makes up for not paying them any more than they legally have to. Who will still pick fights on the internet. Who will still lie and break promises and cheat as usual… but think they’re doing pretty good ’cause they fast. Hey, look at all the Christians who don’t fast: They’re doing better than them, right?

And like the Israelis, sometimes they wanna know why God isn’t paying out. Well, the response the LORD gave through Isaiah, applies to us too. If we’re not really following God any, throwing a fast on top of our irreligion isn’t gonna get us anywhere. It’s just more hypocrisy.

Fasting doesn’t make up for anything. Jesus makes up for everything. 1Jn 2.2 Our good deeds, fasting included, don’t atone for jack squat. God doesn’t work on karma. So if we presume, “I’m fasting; that should count for something,” no it doesn’t. God is no more obligated.

But when we’re making a true effort, and fasting is part of that effort, God recognizes us as true followers. We’re something he can work with. Strive to be that.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

Why do Christians fast?

Y’know, if fasting weren’t in the bible, we’d have invented it as yet another health fad. Like juice cleanses, or probiotic foods, or making sure everything is gluten-free. (Although it’s ridiculous to see so many product labels now say “gluten-free” on them. Dude, we already know beef jerky is gluten-free… or do we? Have you been secretly adding wheat this whole time?) Anyway you know some lifestyle guru would make a YouTube video, “The food-free diet,” and there ya go. Surprised it hasn’t happened yet.

Of course it is in the bible… which puts it at risk of becoming the opposite problem, where people straight-up refuse to fast because it’s “an Old Testament thing.” Because it’s part of God’s old covenant with the Hebrews which Jesus supposedly voided. Because Jesus even appears to have dismissed fasting as irrelevant:

Mark 2.19-20 KWL

19 Jesus told them, “Is the wedding party able to fast when the groom’s with them?

So long that they have the groom with them, they’re not able to fast.

20 The day will come when the groom’s taken away from them.

Then they’ll fast on that day.”

’Cause you know there are Christians who insist Jesus is always with us; he even said so. Mt 28.20 So they’d interpret “they’ll fast on that day” as only referring to the three days Jesus was dead—and now that he’s alive again, we need never fast again. In fact I’ve heard Christians claim this is the very reason they don’t fast: Why? Christ is risen!

So why do any Christians fast? Well duh, ’cause Jesus did.

Luke 4.1-2 KWL

1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan,

and in the Spirit, was led into the wilderness 2 40 days, getting tested by the devil.

Jesus ate nothing in those days, and was hungry at its end.

 

Matthew 4.2 KWL

After fasting 40 days and nights, Jesus was hungry.

And Jesus fasted hardcore: He ate nothing. Wasn’t a Daniel fast. And you know some Christians would totally claim Jesus’s fast was really some form of diet; that he only gave up meat, or bread, or somehow subsisted on a diet of juniper berries and tea. But nope, Jesus ate οὐδὲν/udén, nothing. He obviously drank water, ’cause you’d die otherwise. But no food.

Since Jesus fasted, Christians fast. No, we won’t always go without food. Nor will we go without it for nearly a month and a half; most of us won’t push ourselves beyond a week. In the United States, the popular option is to forego a meal. Nope, not even a full day: One meal. Nope, not even our last meal of the day; we skip lunch, knowing we can make up for it that evening. That’s just how little self-control we have. But the reason we bother to give up something pathetic, then hypocritically act like it was a vast sacrifice, is because we know we should fast… because Jesus fasted.

And because Jesus taught us how to fast:

Luke 6.16-18 KWL

16 “When you fast, don’t be like the sad-looking hypocrites

who conceal their faces so they look to people like they’re fasting.

Amen! I promise you all: They got their credit.

17 You who fast: Fix your hair and wash your face 18 so you don’t look to people like you’re fasting,

except to your Father in private—and your Father, who sees what’s private, will repay you.”

Because fasting’s a prayer practice—it’s about using self-denial so we can focus more intently on God—we’re not doing it to show off, same as prayer. It’s between him and us, and no one else. So we fast privately. Not secretly; it’s okay to admit you’re fasting, and reschedule your business or social occasions till you’re not: Sitting there drinking water, whether you mean to do it or not, is totally showing off.

(Worse: Going to a restaurant, ordering nothing, having your server fetch you glass after glass of water, then not tipping on the grounds you ordered nothing? Not okay. If anything you should tip ’em 30 percent of what you would have spent on a meal. Oh, and do so privately—the other stingy people at your table will use your generosity as an excuse to undertip.)

Jesus taught about fasting because he totally expects us to fast. Really fast. Bad enough that people of his day would dress down and try to look all miserable when they’re going without food; now imagine how ridiculous it’d be if they behaved that way because they were only skipping lunch for a week. Nope; devout Pharisees in Jesus’s day would go wholly without food twice a week. (Devout Christians in the first century did it too.)

Because nothing declares to God, ourselves, and every spiritual force set against us, “God is more important than life itself” like fasting.

Read the whole thing! ➡️

Amen!

AMEN ɑ.mɛn, eɪ.mɛn exclamation. Utterance of support or agreement.

Amen probably comes from the Hebrew verb אָמַן/amán, “to support, assure, trust.” Sorta the Hebrews’ way of replying, “True.” For the most part, we Christians use amen as a way to end our prayers. Like when you say “goodbye” on a phone conversation, or “over and out” on a radio conversation. My childhood Sunday school teachers even described it as “hanging up.”

Custom is, we gotta finish our prayers with amen. Or the popular incantation “In Jesus Name amen.” Or, if you want everyone else in the room to say amen along with you: “And all God’s people said…” (or “the church said,” or “we all said”) at which everyone was conditioned to reply, “Amen.” Sometimes the three-syllable “A-a-men.”

As you know, some Christian customs are more than just traditions: We gotta do them. They’re virtually commands. If you don’t end a prayer with amen, it confuses people. Wanna really throw off your prayer group? Next time you lead prayer, don’t bother to “hang up.” Just start speaking to them as you ordinarily would, and watch ’em get all agitated: “You didn’t say amen. You gotta say amen.” As if God ever gets confused. As if he thinks we’re still speaking to him unless we “get off the phone,” so to speak.

No, we don’t need to end prayers with amen. You realize even the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t end with amen? Lk 11.2-4 Yet Christians will still go bonkers if we skip amen. It’s become an obsessive-compulsive thing with them; it’s like someone who simply can’t knock an odd number of times, and has to knock twice or four times or six times, but never thrice. And you just knocked thrice. Some of ’em will even say an annoyed amen for you.

But this insistence on capping our prayers with amen, misses the entire point of the word. What’s amen mean again? True. Why would you say “True” at the end of a prayer? Because the rest of us are listening to it, and agree with its content: “What you said is true. What you requested is good. So be it. Amen.”

This being the case, having “all God’s people say amen” at the end of a prayer is appropriate. It’s not just the prayer leader trying to get recognition: It’s consensus. Do you agree with what was just prayed? I’d hope so. (That is, I’d hope the prayer leader didn’t pray anything inappropriate. It’d suck not being legitimately able to mean amen when we say it.)

This also being the case, do we need to cap our own prayers with amen? Seems a little redundant to agree with ourselves. Yet we do it anyway… ’cause it’s unthinking, brainless custom. You know, dead religion.

When did Jesus say amen?

Jesus says amen in the gospels all the time. And you probably never noticed it, ’cause bibles don’t translate it “amen.” They use other words.

KJV. “Verily.”

ESV, NIV, NRSV. “Truly.”

GNB, NJB, NLT. “Truth.”

NKJV. “Assuredly.”

Because Jesus uses amen to declare what he’s about to say is absolutely valid, as good as a promise. Not end his prayers. Here’s five instances from his Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 5.18 KWL

“Amen! I promise you all: As long as the heavens and earth exist,

not one yodh nor one penstroke will ever be taken out of the Law till it’s achieved.”

 

Matthew 5.25-26 KWL

25 “Be quick to cooperate with your opponent—whoever you get in the way of—

lest your opponent turn you in to the judge, the judge to the bailiff, and you’re thrown into prison.

26 Amen! I promise you: You’ll never come out of there

till you work off your last quarter.”

 

Matthew 6.2 KWL

“So whenever you do charity, don’t toot your own horn,

like hypocrites do in synagogue and on the street, so they can be praised by people.

Amen! I promise you: They got their wages.”

 

Matthew 6.5 KWL

“When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who really like standing in synagogues

and the corners of the main streets, praying so they might be seen by the people.

Amen! I promise you all: They got their credit.”

 

Matthew 6.16 KWL

“When you fast, don’t be like the sad-looking hypocrites

who conceal their faces so they look to people like they’re fasting.

Amen! I promise you all: They got their credit.”

Jesus prefaces his statements with amen (or “amen amen,” two of ’em, in John) because he wants it clear he’s making a statement we can utterly depend on. It’s why I translate these statements, “Amen, I promise you.”

Hence we should get the idea amen isn’t a word to be thrown around lightly. As so many hypocrites do.

Inappropriate amens.

See, amen means we agree. In responsive churches, like my Pentecostal church, whenever the pastor says something people agree with, you’ll hear people in the congregation say (or shout) “Amen!”

In fact there are certain Christians whom you can count on to say amen to pretty much everything their pastor says. Whether he makes any sense or not; whether she’s quoting bible in context or not. Popular culture tends to call these folks “the amen corner”—they’re the ones who can be counted on to go along with any harebrained thing you say or do. Like political devotees.

From what we’ve seen of the amen corner’s unkind, out-of-control lives, we know they’re not actually following Jesus. That’s why they’re so quick with the amens. That’s why they sit within earshot of the podium; if the sermon’s getting recorded, they’ll be heard on the audio. They’re sucking up because they’re trying to hide their sins. It’s more hypocrisy.

The rest of the church says amen when we actually agree. But not always. Too often we’re hypocrites too: We say amen when we oughta agree, but deep down we don’t necessarily.

Or we wanna look like we were paying attention. We say amen to some long-ass prayer we weren’t really listening to; meanwhile our minds were wandering, and we spent the last 15 minutes debating with ourselves whether to have Mexican or Chinese for lunch. ’Cause we like Chinese, and it’s less expensive; but the kids always want Mexican; but the kids have no taste, and all they ever order is quesadillas anyway, and that’s just cheese and tortillas and barely counts as Mexican food; and I’m the adult here dangit… oh wait, did they just say “In Jesus Name all God’s people said”? Gotta say amen now!

Not only should we never say amen to any prayer we don’t agree with: Sometimes we need to speak up. Sometimes the prayer leader needs correcting. Hopefully that’s very rare. But it can happen, and when it does, us saying amen to it means we’ve vocally agreed to a rotten prayer. Bad example for fellow Christians, and doesn’t honor God any.

I know; people don’t wanna make trouble. Which says all sorts of things about their lack of courage, or their church’s dysfunction. Either way, grow a spine. I’m not saying you have to stand up and proclaim anathema (the opposite of amen, which literally means “accursed”) upon such prayers. Just don’t blindly, or falsely, say amen. If you don’t mean it, don’t say it. Let your yes be yes, your no be no, Mt 5.37, Jm 5.12 and your amen be amen.

And privately get this stuff sorted out. Have an honest relationship with one another.

Read the whole thing! ➡️