Life + Faith

Tag: Discipleship

  • Weaknesses in Our Praying (Part 2)

    Weaknesses in Our Praying (Part 2)

    Part of our Christian culture has absorbed an idea from the nineteenth century Romantic movement, that only spontaneous prayer is authentic prayer. Only the unscripted, in the moment work of the Spirit counts as real, while anything prepared or written is somehow second best. I want to push back on that, and on a few other habits we’ve fallen into along the way.

    Prepared Prayers Aren’t Cheating

    One of the best habits I’ve built into my own rhythm is praying prayers that others have written. They give me words I wouldn’t naturally reach for myself. In one particularly difficult season, it was often just a Psalm or two that got me through, prayers already written for exactly that kind of day or week or month. Prayers composed by Christians from earlier centuries can do the same, putting good theology and honest feeling into words when I can’t find my own.

    It’s a little amusing, really. Peter Adam makes the point that we’re perfectly happy singing prepared songs when we praise God together, yet we can treat a written prayer as somehow less spiritual than praying off the cuff. 

    I’m fairly sure nobody wants to hear me sing off the cuff!

    Colossians 3:16 reminds us that the message of Christ is to dwell in us richly. As he does the overflow of our hearts will come out in prayer and praise to God, and it doesn’t matter if it’s resonating with a written prayer or one that is extemporaneous. 

    Pray the Bible Back to God

    It was a long way into my Christian life before anyone taught me that praying the Bible was even an option. By that I mean taking the actual words of scripture, a Psalm, a passage Paul wrote, a prayer of Hannah, Mary or Zechariah, and praying them back to God as our own. Who would have thought that praying the Bible is simply returning to God the very words he has revealed to us in his Word?

    When we do this, our prayer life is shaped and enriched by scripture at the same time. We recover the old habit of turning our Bible reading straight into prayer, letting its phrases become our own.

    This might be something you’ve never thought of too. It’s worth having a go. I’d encourage trying a Psalm first, since they were written to be prayed as much as read, and see how you find it. As we train ourselves in this our prayers become soaked in scripture and are helpful not only in our prayers but our knowledge and experience of God. 

    Don’t Get Tunnel Vision

    Detectives can fall into what’s called tunnel vision, narrowing in on one suspect so tightly they stop considering other evidence or other people altogether. It’s something good investigators are trained to guard against.

    Our prayer life can suffer the same problem. In time our prayers can shrink down to a narrow band of familiar concerns, and lose the imagination and breadth the Bible calls us to. Many of us rarely pray for rulers, politicians, and nations, especially those we don’t relate to. Other countries and peoples can go entirely missing from our prayers too, along with thanksgiving for what God is doing in places we’ll never see or influence. We need prayers that reach further than our own circle. We need prayer that asks the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest field (Matthew 9:38).

    We’ve Stopped Praying Together

    Public and private prayer are both a weakness in our contemporary church culture. There was a time when Christians expected each other to turn up to the regular prayer meeting. That’s largely gone from Western church life now. I once heard of an African pastor visiting a church in the UK whose first question was where the prayer meeting was, and how many people came. If someone asked us the same thing, what would we say?

    Praying together as a church matters. It’s one of the clearest ways we express our shared life with God as we walk this journey with others. But the gap isn’t only in the prayer meeting. Some churches have dropped pastoral prayer from their Sunday gathering, couples stop praying together, parents stop praying with their children, and close Christian friendships can drift along without much prayer at all.

    It’s a stark contrast to our forebears, and something worth considering in our own practice of prayer today.

  • Weaknesses in Our Praying (Part 1)

    Weaknesses in Our Praying (Part 1)

    Most of us know we should pray more than we do, and most of us have never really stopped to ask why we don’t.

    A few years ago I signed up for prayer training, six sessions with an experienced pastor and mentor who led a group of us through the breadth of praying available to us in scripture, then walked with us as we prayed together and grew in it. It was as much experience as it was knowledge. Like most things in the Christian life, it turns out we need someone to teach us how to do this well. Jesus himself taught his disciples to pray through the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13. Evidently being trained in prayer is something we need as his followers. 

    In his recent book, Prayerfulness, Peter Adam outlines weaknesses that can creep into our praying or view of prayer. Using these weaknesses as a basis for this post and the next, I think it is a helpful corrective and challenge to us. 

    We Don’t Trust God Enough

    One of the deepest weaknesses for many of us is that we lack real trust in God. In practice, many of us are practical deists. We believe in God, but we don’t quite trust his constant, sustaining rule over the universe. We assume he isn’t especially active in the world, or that even if we pray, he might not act. Without meaning to, we undermine his sovereign involvement in what happens around us, and end up trusting ourselves instead, as though everything depends on us.

    How often do we go about our day without prayer, not even considering that it might change something? Anything!? We end up working for God rather than with his grace, praying to him out of duty rather than with his enabling. We forget that nothing happens apart from him. It’s a good reminder that when we pray we trust, and when we trust we pray. It’s like the man who comes to Jesus in Mark 9:24, we believe, but we need help to overcome our unbelief! 

    We Don’t Think It’s Productive

    We swim in cultural waters that prize making the most of every minute. The technology we use trains us to move faster, work more efficiently, and produce more, whether that’s quicker meals, a fuller inbox cleared, or another project ticked off the list. Prayer runs against all of this.

    It asks for intentional time away from what the world calls a good use of time. In fact, it flips our usual measure of time on its head. Prayer requires us to stop, to be attentive, and to take up a posture of worship before God rather than productivity. We might not see an immediate benefit in the hour after we’ve prayed, but that is never the point. The point is the relationship we have with our Heavenly Father, and there’s no more productive use of time than that.

    Martin Luther once quipped that he had so much to do in a day that he needed to pray for three hours first just to get through it. I wonder if we’ve ever thought of praying with that attitude in mind? 

    We Make It Too Narrow

    How often do we pray for the things going on in our own life, and neglect prayer for God, for the world, and for the many other ingredients prayer can hold? A good meal usually needs a variety of ingredients working together, and the same is true of a rich prayer life.

    One of our weaknesses is how much weight we give to intercession alone, praying on behalf of others and ourselves. That matters, of course, but on its own it can become transactional, a running list of requests rather than a relationship. What about the other ingredients of prayer: praise, thanks, worship, confession, lament, trust and love? When our prayers stay narrow and close to home, so does our emotional engagement with God. Paul writes to Timothy at one point reminding him to bring petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving for all people to God (1 Timothy 2:1). Paul clearly has more than just intercession in mind here. 

    I know I’m certainly prone to this. Missing in my prayers is often adoration, praise for God and his character, and certainly lament and confession are harder to find as well. 

    This is a great reminder to widen the range of our prayers and see how God might work.

  • From Milk to Meat

    From Milk to Meat

    Growth in faith is a slow and patient work that is more than likely seen in the rearview mirror. 

    As parents the growth of children into bigger children is also a slow, patient process that requires resources we didn’t realise we had before they arrived. And it’s obvious to anyone who has had a newborn that feeding them is one of the priority tasks of parents. Feeding babies their milk is a multiple times per day event that often becomes an all in effort for the child to settle, be filled, and sleep in due course. At every feed there is very little evidence of immediate growth. It’s happening before our eyes but it’s not like the child suddenly grows centimetres after each feed. It’s a slow and patient process. 

    This is the case with our walk with Jesus. 

    What we need when we start out in faith is consistent milk that we can suckle down to help us grow. Day to day it might look like not much is changing. Week to week it might look like not much is progressing. Soon enough, however, the consistent bottle of God’s Word and prayer gives growth and thickness to our walk with Jesus. 

    Milk for Beginners

    When Paul was writing to the church in Corinth he expressed how he’d been committed to feeding them appropriately. This of course is not physical food but the food and sustenance of the gospel and the scriptures. He writes in 1 Corinthians 3:2, 

    “I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready.”

    Paul recognised that the maturity of a believer comes in time, through appropriate teaching and experience. 

    Feeding a child can be all sorts of fun. Depending on our mood and the temperament of a child it can be a whole lot of pain too. The time of moving from milk to solids is among battles of teething, and the ability to chew and swallow solid food needs to be tested with puree or mashed foods. If it is taken then we know we’re on the way to solid food. If it isn’t, then it’s still time for milk before trying again. 

    Reading Maturity in Others

    This is what it’s like for us, and those around us in our churches. The state of maturity can be observed, although it is more of an art than a tick-the-box process. It involves having trusted people around us, those ahead of us in the faith, asking good questions, and an openness and vulnerability to the patient challenge of Christian maturity. 

    Before passing comment on where others are at we ought to examine ourselves and assess whether we are able to digest the solid food first. Often, Christian maturity can be disguised in all sorts of religiosity that might need to be peeled back like the layers of an onion before it’s seen. Sure, some things can seem obvious to those of us who have been walking with Jesus for a while, but in others it is more subtle. 

    To add to the difficulty of helping people mature in the faith is that adult new believers can expect themselves to be more mature than their junior counterparts. This might cause tension within this person, or in those who are discipling this new believer.

    Stuck on Milk

    The writer to the Hebrews uses this milk metaphor when writing his sermon as well. This time it’s focussed on those who have been walking in faith for some time but are stuck in immaturity. Hebrews 5:12 reads, 

    “In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!”

    Those who have been walking with Jesus for some time should be more mature in faith than they actually are. The writer says some of these folk should be teachers but they need the foundational truths explained to them all over again. They have regressed to milk after tasting the solid food of the Word of God and gospel. 

    It’s a funny thought, isn’t it? To think about our own eating and going back to milk and mashed pumpkin having been able to chew through steak and boiled vegetables. Ironically, in today’s world, many make the choice to have the protein shake and avoid having the slow but nutritious solid food. 

    Is that the story we find ourselves in too? 

    Instead of eating the solid food provided for us in the scriptures we are trying to drink a quick protein shake of the Word to get us through to the next meal? 

    It’s an appropriate picture of what we do in our own walk with God. 

    Instead of being patient with the slow and digestive work of the Word and prayer we want the quick devotional and prayer that will take all of seven minutes. It might be suitable for a season, but it could be that we’re neglecting where we should be. We might actually need to go back to the gospel and hear the message of Christ. To be refreshed in the elementary truths again so we can keep growing our maturity and communion with God.

    As you think about the developmental milestones of your faith, where would you place yourself? Is it worth asking a trusted friend about what they see? 

    The point is not to be discouraging at how we may have stalled in our growth in God, but it’s an encouragement to draw us back to the meat that holds our faith and walk with Jesus together.

  • The Joys and Challenges of Sending

    The Joys and Challenges of Sending

    When I think of partnership, my mind always drifts towards Paul’s words in Philippians 1:3-5, 

    “I thank my God every time I remember you… because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.”

    It’s a great line, isn’t it? It’s more than a thank you, it’s a picture of what it looks like when a local church embraces its role in God’s mission. It’s not just cheering others on from the sidelines, but it’s partnering meaningfully with those called to take the good news of Jesus across cultures and borders. 

    At our church here in Mooroolbark, we’ve had the privilege of sending people we know and love to serve cross-culturally. It’s not a long list, and we’re not a big church. Not that size is the measure anyway. But what’s mattered most is the posture we’ve taken. A posture of sending, of being open to God’s leading and being partners in the gospel together. 

    The Joys

    Watching someone within the life of the church respond to God’s call into mission is a beautiful thing. To see them grow in faith, serve in ministry, walk with others, and begin to sense God’s leading somewhere new is exciting. It’s exciting for them, and it’s exciting for the church. It doesn’t happen quickly–in fact, it can be awfully slow. But when that conviction settles and through discernment it is affirmed there is a great sense of God at work. You end up realising that this is why the Church exists.  

    We’ve had the joy of commissioning services, which are rich in meaning and prayer. The laying on of hands, the setting apart, and the committing those called to the Lord. These are services that energise the church as people rally around them, offering financial support, practical help, consistent prayer, and just good encouragement. 

    It’s also encouraging to see the impact that mission updates have on others. Whether it’s stories of discipleship, translation, medical work, or leadership development, it all reminds us that we’re part of something bigger. It lifts our eyes beyond the immediate and makes our hearts swell. 

    Then, perhaps not thought of as often as we should, is the encouragement of seeing the growth in those we send. There’s a deepening of faith, a maturing of character, and a greater sense of hope in God. The way God shapes those on the field is a sight to see. They don’t just go to give and serve, but they go and are formed, too. And this is a blessing for all involved. 

    The Challenges

    Of course, sending is not without its challenges. The hardest part is often saying goodbye. Those sent are usually not just any member of the church, they’re often those who are deeply involved in the life of the community. This is certainly true in my experience. They lead small groups, mentor others, serve in different capacities, and then suddenly there’s a gap. The church can’t help but feel it. 

    There is the challenge of distance too. Supporting people well from the other side of the world isn’t exactly a straightforward task. There’s the practical reality that we can’t always help in hands-on ways. We must be intentional to keep connection, to communicate regularly, and stay informed and prayerful as the needs arise. As the saying goes, “out of sight, out of mind”, can be true in our churches as well as our personal lives. Wrestling with those questions of how partnership works, between the church, the missionaries, and the mission agencies, is key. How do we stay involved without overstepping? Who takes the lead in care, and in what ways? All these tensions are good and right, but tensions all the same. 

    And like many churches, we rely on a volunteer team to keep our missionary support active and present. They pray faithfully, with love and care, but as the needs of missionaries become more complex (especially around member care and logistics), there can be a stretch. There’s more to support than a few emails, an occasional gift, and financial contributions, but how do we do it well? It isn’t always obvious. 

    The Posture of Sending

    Through these things, the practicalities and the questions, we’re learning what it means to have a sending posture. This isn’t about an occasional project, it’s a long-term commitment that is shaped by the Great Commission, those words of Jesus himself in Matthew 28:19-20:

    “Go and make disciples of all nations… and surely I am with you always.”

    We want to respond to this call as a church, not only by going but by sending. We go into our neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces, sporting clubs, and families but we also go into the wider world. And we do so trusting that the Lord of the harvest is still calling, still sending, and still doing more than we could ask or imagine. 

    Sending missionaries isn’t easy. But it’s worth it. It reminds us that the gospel is good news for all people, everywhere. 

    And we get to be part of it.

  • Do You Do A Mid-Year Reflection? 

    Do You Do A Mid-Year Reflection? 

    It’s that time here in Melbourne where the days are cold and fresh and we come to the halfway mark of the year. 

    I’m not sure about you but I long to be somewhere warm about now. The kids have just gone on school holidays, there will be more family time and unstructured time in the home. Friends have disappeared up north to get a dose of sun for the week, and most of the regular life programming has taken a pause. It is usually the case that after our summer break we walk back into life with a pep in our step but we are far removed from January energy. As we mark the midpoint of the year that pep might have gone by the wayside and we are simply trying to put one foot in front of the other. 

    In recent years, with all this in mind, I’ve taken time to intentionally reflect on the first half of the year. I love the book of Proverbs, and don’t dip into it nearly enough, but it has a couple of gems for us in terms of being reflective people. In Proverbs 4:26 we read, 

    “Carefully consider the path for your feet, and all your ways will be established.” 

    And then in Proverbs 14:8 is says, 

    “The sensible person’s wisdom is to consider his way, but the stupidity of fools deceives them.”

    Both these proverbs encourage us to be self-aware and reflective people, teaching us that it is discerning and wise to do so. 

    Becoming this kind of person doesn’t happen naturally either. It is not really in our nature to stop, think, be intentional, and reflective of our lives. More often than not we bumble along trying to keep up with whatever responsibilities we have before us, some simply day by day. And so being intentional in this way is a form of discipline. We discipline ourselves to stop, to think, to be reflective as to what is going on inside and around us. We do so in order to observe what God has been doing in our lives and where he might be leading us. 

    In seeking to do this in my life I work through 10 short questions, giving dot point answers to each of them, as an exercise in reflection. I’ve only just done it again for this year, and have found it really helpful. I share the questions below and pray they will be useful to you as well. 

    All the best, and my prayers are with you, as you consider the path of your feet and the way you have walked this year. May it be an encouragement to you. 

    Mid-Year Reflection Questions:

    1. What are the most important events that have happened to me, or in me, this past 6 months?
    2. What are the greatest breakthroughs in any category of my life this past 6 months (physically, emotionally, relationally, vocationally, spiritually, with other people, etc.)?
    3. What has been the greatest struggle in my life this past 6 months?
    4. What has been the greatest, and deepest, loss this past 6 months?
    5. What was the area that has consumed my thinking, attention, and focus this past 6 months (health, relationship, future, etc.)? 
    6. Where have I felt most vulnerable in my life?
    7. Where have I most experienced the presence of God this past 6 months and why?
    8. In the past six months, where have I experienced the greatest sense of consolation (peace, contentment, shalom, beauty, etc.)?
    9. In the past six months, what area of my life has given me the most desolation (pre-occupation, depression, anxiety, etc.)?             
    10. What is ONE word that would begin to sum up this past 6 months?