One of my favorite spiritual writers is A.W. Tozer. He begins his master work The Knowledge of the Holy with a chapter entitled “Why We Must Think Rightly About God.” I used the following quote in a Bible study on biblical eldership this weekend to emphasize the importance of sound theology, and thought I’d post it here for the benefit of other readers as well.
(If you’ve never read The Knowledge of the Holy, consider this your invitation to pick up a copy. It’s well worth your time and effort.)
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.
For this reason the gravest question before the church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the church… Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on his character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is – in itself a monstrous sin – and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness…
Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and that civilized peoples are therefore free from it. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place… Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.
Before the Christian church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, “What is God like?” and goes on from there… The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.
Several weeks ago I was in a bookstore, where I noticed a boy of 10 or 12 thumbing through the most recent Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. His mother stood nearby, her boy and his newfound reading material in full sight. She seemed not to care. It’s a sign of something—decayed community bonds, perhaps, or moral cowardice—that the thought of speaking to her about this made me cringe. Then the boy put down the magazine, and they wandered to another part of the bookstore, and that was that.
Of course that wasn’t really that, because the entire purpose of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and indeed of most pornography choking the stream of popular culture—be it sexual or violent—is to cast images that are unforgettable. Whether it’s a woman arching luridly, or a film villain carving up his screaming victims, their creators and especially their profit-seeking marketers want you to remember what you’ve witnessed.
And boys do remember. I remember discovering my stepfather’s stash of pornography as a child, and the heart-thumping realization that here was something secret and forbidden. There’s no regaining your innocence once you’ve looked upon obscenity. That’s one reason for obscenity laws, not so much that we might transform the onanist or pornographer, but because once a child sees the vulgar T-shirt or cast-aside magazine, he is forever changed.
The sophisticated will snicker. What’s wrong with a boy looking at women in bathing suits, after all? It’s hardly hardcore pornography, after all. And besides, boys will be boys.
Boys will indeed be boys, but there are a great many varieties of boys, and of men. The person who pretends that seeing women as items of sexual consumption doesn’t shape a man’s behavior is, in fact, the one who is being simple-minded, for all his feigned urbanity.
But we don’t want to talk that way, because it smacks of puritanism, and besides, these lovely women are just proud of their bodies, as are their families. This year’s SI cover girl, semi-topless Brooklyn Decker, reports that her mother cried when she made the cover. Out of pride. Her husband, tennis player Andy Roddick, tweeted his pride as well.
I once saw a talk show on which a porn actress insisted that she wasn’t cheating on her husband because the sex she performed for paychecks was “different.” This personalized truth is inevitable in a world more inclined to follow Pilate (“What is truth?”) than Christ (“Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice”).
It’s distortion that’s essential to the self-esteem of people inclined toward pornography but not yet liberated enough to call it such. Thus are the nearly naked women in Sports Illustrated, or the college girls who pose in Playboy’s periodic college campus issues, simply proud of their bodies. How dare anyone deprive these women of their self-esteem by telling them that, in blunt terms, they’re simply taking off their clothes for money and applause?
One might be tempted to think the damage is limited to the girl who exposes herself for cash, the boy learning to look at women the way a butcher eyes a cut of meat. But the damage is never limited. The compromised woman has taught countless girls that this is how to gain the admiration of men. The boy, meanwhile, has been weakened, and the seeds of a hunger have been sown, and he has started down a path toward the perversion of a man’s natural desire for women.
The libertine scoffs, but I know too many men for whom this is true. I am one of those men. Images are etched into my mind, and they spark a perpetual struggle. Many of my sins, especially those against my wife, are rooted in those illicit hours learning to see women as playthings.
The eyes and ears of children must be guarded—this is common wisdom garnered over centuries and across civilizations. Only recently has it been cast aside. “Guard your son” is what I should have told the mother in the bookstore. “It doesn’t end with this,” I should have said. God help me, I know.
The point of the Redemption Stories video series is to narrate how the gospel is changing the lives of actual people within the Coram Deo Church Community. Randi’s is one of my favorite stories yet: a great tale of God’s providence with an interesting back-story involving a sermon I preached in the Douglas County Jail. (To one of the most intimidating audiences I’ve ever faced… and they were all women).
Thanks, Randi, for sharing your story on video. And thank you Jesus for your amazing grace that transforms felons into followers and friends.
The goal of the ‘Redemption Stories’ video series is to show how the gospel is at work in the lives of actual people so that we can celebrate together, church-wide, the ways God is moving around us.
In this video, Micah talks about his slide into depression and how the gospel, spoken and lived out by a community of friends, was essential in pulling him out.
Thanks again to Coram Deo’s own Jon Kayser for his incredible camera and production work that makes these videos possible.
This is the third installment in the Redemption Stories video series. The goal of these videos is to tell stories of how the gospel is at work in the lives of actual people so that we can celebrate together, church-wide, the ways God is moving around us.
Kelli tells the story of how brokenness in her family led her to search in vain for acceptance through beauty and achievement – and how she ultimately found what she was looking for in Jesus.
To spur us toward deeper persistence in prayer, consider the following insights on cynicism from Paul Miller’s book A Praying Life. Of course my ulterior motive is to get you to buy the book and read it.
The opposite of a childlike spirit is a cynical spirit. Cynicism is, increasingly, the dominant spirit of our age. Personally, it is my greatest struggle in prayer. If I get an answer to prayer, sometimes I’ll think, ‘It would have happened anyway.’ Other times I’ll try to pray but wonder if it makes any difference.
Many Christians stand at the edge of cynicism, struggling with a defeated weariness. Their spirits have begun to deaden, but unlike the cynic, they’ve not lost hope…
When I say that cynicism is the spirit of the age, I mean it is an influence, a tone that permeates our culture, one of the master temptations of our age. By reflecting on cynicism and defeated weariness, we are meditating on the last petition of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one’ (Matthew 6:13, NIV).
…Satan’s first recorded words are cynical. He tells Adam and Eve, ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God’ (Genesis 3:5). Satan is suggesting that God’s motives are cynical. In essence, he tells them, ‘God has not been honest about the tree in the middle of the garden. The command not to eat from the tree isn’t for your protection; God wants to protect himself from rivals. He’s jealous. He’s projecting an image of caring for you, but he really has an agenda to protect himself. God has two faces.’ Satan seductively gives Adam and Eve the inside track – here is what is really going on behind closed doors. Such is the deadly intimacy that gossip offers.
Satan sees evil everywhere, even in God himself. Ironically, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since the Fall, evil feels omnipresent, making cynicism an easy sell. Because cynicism sees what is ‘really going on,’ it feels real, authentic. That gives cynicism an elite status since authenticity is one of the last remaining public virtues in our culture.
…Cynicism begins with the wry assurance that everyone has an angle. Behind every silver lining is a cloud. The cynic is always observing, critiquing, but never engaged, loving, and hoping… To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being ‘in the know,’ cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to a creeping bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit…
A praying life is just the opposite. It engages evil. It doesn’t take no for an answer. The psalmist was in God’s face, hoping, dreaming, asking. Prayer is feisty. Cynicism, on the other hand, merely critiques. It is passive, cocooning itself from the passions of the great cosmic battle we are engaged in. It is without hope.
- from Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2009), 77-79.
I originally wrote this post in October of 2009. Since we are talking about prayer this week in our journey through Colossians, I thought it appropriate to re-post it, in the hopes that it will help you “devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful” (Col. 4:2).
Since the launch of Coram Deo, we’ve gathered every Wednesday night for an hour of communal prayer. And when I say “we,” I mean a dozen or two faithful people. The faces change from time to time, but rarely are there more than 15 people in the room.
This causes me great angst as a pastor. I want to see more people show up to pray. At the same time, I despise legalism. I refuse to bind people’s consciences. Showing up at Wednesday night prayer doesn’t merit God’s favor, nor does it necessarily indicate a healthy prayer life. People may come because they’re motivated by guilt or they want to look good to others. People may stay home and yet be deep and vibrant in prayer.
In calling people to corporate prayer, I have erred on both sides. I have given off shades of performance: “If you really love Jesus, you’ll come to prayer.” I have been apathetic and passive: “The Lord will bring whomever he wants.” Even now, I confess that I am mystified about the proper biblical approach to this subject. The parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8) and the radical promises of Jesus (John 15:7, 16) convince me that prayer matters more than we think it does. On the other hand, “performance praying” is a classic mark of a Pharisee (Matthew 6:5).
So here I am, gingerly stepping out in a blog post to address the matter. I will begin by airing some of my frustrations. I will end with personal narrative, explaining why corporate prayer is good for my soul. I’ll leave it to the Holy Spirit to do what he needs to do in your heart.
FRUSTRATIONS; OR, STUFF THAT NEEDS TO BE SAID
It is not legalism to call people to spiritual disciplines. Many Christians have a nervous twitch toward anything that smacks of fundamentalist rigor. Anytime someone uses the word “should” (as in “you should gather with other Christians to pray”), we accuse them of legalism. But this is foolish and misguided. The New Testament is full of imperatives. Telling, urging, commanding someone to do something is NOT legalism. Legalism is what happens when we forget the proper motivation (gospel grace) or when we measure God’s acceptance of us by our good performance.
You cannot have a healthy prayer life without corporate prayer. Some people assert that they pray in private instead of gathering with others to pray. I question whether these people are very mature in their practice of prayer. Corporate prayer shapes you in a number of ways that private prayer cannot. It makes you humble yourself and engage with the prayers of others. It forces you to quiet your straying mind. It forces you to confront your judgmental attitudes toward that guy across the room who prays too long or that person who just asked for something completely selfish. Corporate prayer is an essential component of spiritual formation.
Yes, prayer meetings are often lame and feel like “a waste of time.” I’m happy if we experience a unique sense of the Spirit’s presence one out of every four Wednesdays. Sometimes prayer is lame. That’s OK. It’s still shaping. And isn’t the nature of relationship about “wasting time?” We live in a very production-oriented society, where everything is measured by efficiency and productivity. Except friendship. When you are with friends, you expect to “waste time” together. To those who are “too busy” to commit an hour of the week to corporate prayer, I would simply ask: what other time-wasters do you commit an hour to? Facebook? Revising your fantasy football roster? Watching television? Talking on the phone? Arguing with friends about really life-altering issues like who should have won American Idol or which Avett Brothers album is the best?
SELF-DISCLOSURE; OR, WHY I MAKE IT A WEEKLY DISCIPLINE TO GATHER WITH OTHERS FOR CORPORATE PRAYER
My soul needs it. By Wednesday nights I am often beat down, dejected, and spiritually tired from pastoring and teaching and discipling and counseling and rebuking and problem-solving. An hour of praying with others recharges my heart, refreshes my vision, and renews me in the promises of the gospel.
It’s too easy for me not to pray. I need a regular weekly rhythm to keep me disciplined. Otherwise I could easily go months without really devoting myself to prayer, keeping alert in it (Col 4:2).
I meet with God. Regularly I experience a deep sense of God’s presence while praying corporately with others. I feel a greater sense of burden and urgency than I do praying alone.
It’s a rebellion against my flesh and my culture. We live in an entertainment-saturated, convenience-driven culture that idolizes work and busyness. Setting aside one hour of my week for corporate prayer is one way for me to live counter-culturally. It’s rest. It’s reflection. It’s dependence. It’s admitting my need. It’s worship.
It humbles me. I’d far too easily drift into thinking that Coram Deo is successful because of something I’m doing. Prayer reminds me that I can do nothing apart from him.
It shapes me. When I pray with others I have to learn to listen, not speak; to trust, not doubt; to believe the best, not assume the worst. Over the past decade God has graciously made me slower to speak and quicker to listen. Much of that spiritual formation has come through corporate prayer.
It’s the most important part of our mission. We are out to see people repent of sin and trust in Jesus. And yet that’s not something we can make anyone do. If we’re going to succeed, we’re going to succeed on our knees. Because unless God works, our work is useless.
I’m trying to set an example. Too many Christians think that spiritual leadership is about doing something to lead others. But spiritual leadership is primarily about being a certain kind of person. A worshipful, prayerful person. I’m doing my best to become that kind of leader, so that those who follow me will become those kind of people.
I like it. For all the reasons above and many more, I look forward to Wednesday evenings from 8 to 9 PM. It’s one of the highlights of my week. Even when it’s lame and awkward and laborious… I like prayer.
I’m praying that this post might spur more of you to join us on Wednesday nights. We meet at Evan’s house, near 97th and Maple. Ask around in your MC, or call the CD offices for specific directions.
This is the second installment in the Redemption Stories video series. The goal is of these videos is to tell stories of how the gospel is at work in the lives of actual people so that we can celebrate together, church-wide, the ways God is moving around us.
Nathan tells the story of how he fell into a pattern of compulsive gambling – and how the message of the gospel (and a community centered on the gospel) were crucial in getting him out.
This is the first in a new series of videos called Redemption Stories that we’ll be showing at Coram Deo’s Sunday gathering. The goal is to tell stories of how the gospel is at work in the lives of actual people. God’s grace is transforming people throughout our church, but too often the stories of what He’s doing only get told within missional communities or smaller sub-sets of our church family. These videos exist to help us celebrate together, church-wide, the ways God is moving around us.
Special thanks to Jon Kayser, who is serving the mission of God by lending his considerable production skills to this project. (Also to Ben Lueders, who is the official “key grip” of the Redemption Stories video team.) And most of all, to Barb and the others who will follow: thanks for being willing to share your story on camera.
