Monday, February 23, 2009
What To do With Tears?
Mark Daniels links to a Daily Bread devotional that would answer, "Take them to God in prayer!
The Christian life starts with confession - deep real, honest, heartfelt confession - acknowledgment of our pain and our inadequacies. But if it stops there we fail as miserably as if we never confessed at all.
We seem to want to make Christianity a one or the other thing? Either we are all "do" and no confession or we are all confession and we just sit there and wallow. The genuine Christian life synthesizes those experiences into a total remake of who we are.
God does not just heal us - He wishes to regenerate us. We do not confess to God so that He can make everything just like it used to be - safe, warm, happy and snug. NO, we confess to God so that He can make us into something unimaginably good. Hence the "unjust outbursts" of biblical prayers. God is dragging His prophets places they cannot see and are afraid to go - and He values their expression of those fears. But that said, we cannot let those fears prevent us from taking the trip. Yell at God, "I don't want to" all you want - BUT GO!
"But God, who has no reason to be threatened by us, invites a steady and honest flow of communication.Honesty with God matters deeply, but when I read things like this, I fear. I fear prayer becoming psychotherapy and I fear we as Christians wallowing in confessional prayer, as so many seem to do in an endless stream of counseling session - never getting better.I sometimes wonder why God places such a high value on honesty in our prayers, even to the extent of enduring unjust outbursts. I am startled to see how many biblical prayers seem ill-tempered. Jeremiah griped about unfairness (20:7-10); Habakkuk accused God of deafness (1:2); Job conceded, “What profit do we have if we pray to Him?” (21:15). The Bible teaches us to pray with blistering honesty.
God wants us to come to Him with our complaints. If we march through life pretending to smile while inside we bleed, we dishonor the relationship. — Philip Yancey
The Christian life starts with confession - deep real, honest, heartfelt confession - acknowledgment of our pain and our inadequacies. But if it stops there we fail as miserably as if we never confessed at all.
We seem to want to make Christianity a one or the other thing? Either we are all "do" and no confession or we are all confession and we just sit there and wallow. The genuine Christian life synthesizes those experiences into a total remake of who we are.
God does not just heal us - He wishes to regenerate us. We do not confess to God so that He can make everything just like it used to be - safe, warm, happy and snug. NO, we confess to God so that He can make us into something unimaginably good. Hence the "unjust outbursts" of biblical prayers. God is dragging His prophets places they cannot see and are afraid to go - and He values their expression of those fears. But that said, we cannot let those fears prevent us from taking the trip. Yell at God, "I don't want to" all you want - BUT GO!
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