Good News Sense

“If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

To be honest, when I pray, I tend to think in terms of faith like a mustard seed.  That verse is a great promise for when our faith is small and tentative.  However, Jesus also made this promise.  Together they offer an amazing opportunity to seek what we need from God, not as a “fairy godmother” or a genie in a bottle, fulfilling our every passing desire, but rather as a loving father hearing the needs of his children.

I have been praying for a school for immigrants because I tutor refugees who need more than most of the schools are willing or able to provide them.  I have been tutoring kids who’ve come to this country without any family, with their parents often dead or missing.  They’re placed in foster homes, and many of the foster parents are kind, loving people.  Otherwise, they have no one, although some have me.  When I started doing this, I was hooked; perhaps better to say, God put a burden on my heart for these kids, a very literal burden.

Besides my individual work, I have been helping foreign students at New Covenant Christian School, and slowly the number of my foreign students has been increasing.  Until this year, that is!  I learned a week or two ago that we’d have 7, and Saturday I got a phone call telling me we might have 6-8 more!  Suddenly, my one-on-one tutoring has grown into a program, one step away from a full-fledged school (within a school).

I’ve no doubt God has been working.  New Covenant has a heart for foreign students, too.  The senior pastor’s wife, herself a teacher, shares my desire for a school for these students, and she has been encouragin me since I first mentioned it.

For the last day, however, I have been pondering the matter of prayer.  I asked for this, but did I expect it?  Was I praying with faith, or was I merely throwing my words at God?  I’ve never doubted that He gave me this desire, this mission, and I’ve even remarked that I’m rather passed the age of new visions…or so I thought!  I can feel a little of Moses’ questioning: “Who am I to take this on?”  I don’t speak a single foreign language.  My degree are in physics and pastoral ministry.  I taught myself English as a Second Language.

Yet, I did ask.  I may have been a little cautious, but I asked.  I considered the impossibility, but I know God loves to do what appears impossible or what indeed is impossible for us mere mortals.  I was aware of how little preparation I have for this, but I asked anyway, because it’s a task that needs doing.  Huge numbers of people from many countries have come and are coming.  We can assimilate them, teach them English, show them our American heritage, and model our faith; or we can allow them to become a new lower class, doomed to do the dirty jobs “real Americans” won’t do.

So, I’m ready to pray and believe.  How much to do miss because we don’t pray in faith?  Are we so faithless that we can’t even pray with a mustard seed sized faith?  How much to we lack because we don’t pray at all?

One of my favorite passages is Ephesians 4, especially the first 16 verses. In it, Paul seems to encapsulate the mission of the Church and of Christians as a community of believers. He acknowledges the variety of individual believers and yet strongly encourages us to unity, “in the bond of peace.” Long before the word diversity became a cultural watchword, the Lord was charging Christians to work toward a “one out of many” kind of community. “E pluribus unum” urges something similar upon the citizens of the United States—one country from many states, one people from many backgrounds. Yet, only in Christ can we experience the ultimate kind of unity that reaches into the depths of who each of us is.

What is the opposite? Strangely, two extremes represent contrary positions. One is division, in which we are Balkanized into factions fighting each other, finally ending in a kind of solitary individualism where no one trusts or works well with anyone (Sound familiar?). The other is uniformity, where we are forced to conform to whomever has the power to demand agreement. We see it looming in the world today with governments seeking to control more and more of people’s lives, but we also see in a similar pressure to conform in churches who confuse conformity with holiness. How sad it is that nonbelievers can make fun of some church folk because of how they dress or speak. Christians are to be Christlike, but I doubt that has much to do with a prescribed style of clothing

Into the tension between these two extremes, the gospel of Jesus Christ should be a refreshing burst of hope and opportunity, and it will be if we properly express it. What is the good new? Of course, it is a message of forgiveness from sin based on the blood of Jesus Christ, but sometimes our definitions and explanations of sin themselves “miss the mark.” Prior to my favorite passage in Ephesians, Paul says, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

Why are we here? What is the purpose of our lives, of any particular life? It is to do the good works Paul writes about. Are such works merely charitable acts? I don’t think so. The Bible says we are diversely gifted, and each should use his gifts appropriately. The point is that God saves us for a purposefully meaningful life in which each of us exercises his or her own gifts creatively. When we deal with the many kinds of doubters, skeptics, and opponents of the gospel, this is the message we should be sharing.

How do we do it?  Many seemed frightened at the thought of sharing their faith in a culture that seems to be increasingly unfriendly to Christians.  Matt Raley addresses this in his book, The Diversity Culture.  On the one side are all the diversely indifferent and hostile unbelievers, products of our postmodernist educational system, yet people searching for something perhaps unaware even that they’re missing anything.  On the other side are two groups of Christians, a smaller segment of aggressive, yet often ineffective evangelists, and the larger who feel helpless to engage.  People who know Jesus and love their neighbors have no need to be in either group.  Check out Raley’s book to gain insight into how to speak effectively to whomever you meet.

The good news is that the Bible shows us the way.  Jesus is an excellent model.  Raley uses Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman as his model, but there are others.  If we pay attention to godly instruction, we will also find direction–love your enemy, do not judge, be patient, be prepared.  Just remember, the Church of Jesus Christ is not monochrome; it wasn’t even birthed in Western culture.  Opposition has been the norm through history, and persecution something Jesus expected.  None of this should hinder us from working to bring together all the sheep into a single flock under our one great shepherd of the sheep, to fulfill his purpose, his prayer:

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Last time, I mentioned Stuart Robinson’s Mosques and Miracles: Revealing Islam and God’s Grace and how long I had been reading it because of the challenges described in most of the book. Well, I finally finished it, and the final quarter of the book was worth plodding through the rest. I found it hopeful and encouraging, particularly in reaffirming the importance of prayer. We face serious threats here and abroad. The world may be a very different place for future generations unless we believers face the challenge. I favor doing all we can politically, and I hope we do not surrender in the war on terror. Yet, we dare not ignore the spiritual dimension of both domestic concerns and foreign threats.

For a long time, I have thought that too much prayer is mundane—help the sick, find a job, deal with this or that problem. I wonder how many actually believe that God will hear them. I am sure God wants us to seek his help when we need it, but our privilege in prayer is so much greater. As important, I suspect some engage in spiritual practices seeking only to experience the supernatural; here again, I fear people seek something more for themselves than accepting the greater opportunity that prayer offers.

I wonder how much American Christians actually believe in prayer. Robinson tells amazing stories of Muslims coming to Christ. Sometimes, they have dreams or visions, just like in the Bible, things I’ve also heard missionaries tell. Our good life here easily robs us of a sense of the supernatural, of our own dependence on God, and of the vitality of prayer. We have our blessed lives, bank accounts, and retirement, though we’re seeing how easily our own government may take them from us. Robinson suggests, however, that miracles are happening in places where Christian missionaries may not go, and he credits God through the prayers of committed Christians seeking that very thing.

I had a student who amazed me with his simple, direct faith. He was an Afghani Muslim who had come to Christ in Russia. His Muslim father had told him, early in his life, that if he ever needed help to “pray to Jesus.” That was a remarkable thing for a Muslim father to tell his son, despite the fact that the Koran speaks favorable of “Isa” (as a prophet). My student took his father’s advice, but that was only the first of many “prayers to Isa.” He told me so many stories of dealing with life and its problems where he simply prayed to Jesus. I was to teach him English, but I gained so much more from him.

We Americans enjoy the privilege of freedom and democratic government, and I believe deeply in both. I believe more in God’s power, power we access through prayer. Political activism may turn things around in Washington, and our military may defeat the radical terrorists who cry “Death to America!” Yet God desires more from us than pleas to preserve our way of life in this world. Jesus said, “Make disciples of all nations,” including the many where Islam dominates. In Ephesians, Paul writes, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms… And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.” Such prayer is more than an opportunity; it is a divine obligation.

I have always had a cautious view of spiritual warfare, as some refer to it. In one sense, everything in a Christian’s life is a battle with the enemy; in another sense, it can be a way of avoiding the personal responsibilities that God has given us. To put it another way, “The devil made me do it” is an easy justification for sin; for many sinners, the devil has no need to trouble them, as they already are doing his work. Besides, the devil is not God; he is not all-knowing, all-powerful, or everywhere present. I wonder if evil spiritual influences are not more like the KGB, the former Soviet Union’s spy agency, working cleverly behind the scenes, especially in those areas more critical to the overall war.

Islam represents such an area. If you’re not familiar with this religion, I encourage you get Mosques and Miracles or Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs by Ergun and Emir Caner. As the world’s newest and fastest growing major religion, it has shown itself to be both powerful and enduring, even to inciting militant aggression and terrorism through suicidal attacks. Many Muslims hate both Jews and Christians, partly from misunderstandings and partly from mistakes made by Christians. As a result, many countries prohibit missionaries and treat Christians as second class citizens, sometimes even physically harming them.

Yet prayer knows no boundaries, cannot be stopped by human borders, and will not be limited even by the devil’s power. Only our failure to use it restricts the possibilities. Robinson believes prayer is already making a huge difference, but I don’t believe the Church of Jesus Christ has yet to tap the depths of the enormous power available through prayer. I’m ashamed to admit my own failings in this area, but I urge you to make this area of prayer a priority. Pray for God’s hand to work in the big concerns in our world and in our nation. Look beyond your own comfort and future or even that of your children. Be the voice of God to change the world, to defeat the enemies of God and his people, and to win the world to His Son, our Savior Jesus Christ.

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Now, I’ve started reading The Diversity Culture: Creating Conversations of Faith with Buddhist Baristas, Agnostic Students, Aging Hipsters, Political Activists & Everyone in Between, by Matthew Raley. I was so impressed with what I read about the book that I wrote the author. Now, at a little over half-way, I see that his ideas mesh well with Robinson’s.  We must pray for the lost, and then we really need to make a thoughtful effort to reach them.  More later…