Paralyzed by prayer.

Try as you might you just can't break through.

Have you ever been paralyzed by prayer? 

I think this happens to more than a few believers, especially when they are facing big decisions.  With great earnestness we pray seeking God’s will and we wait for His leading.  Sometimes the Lord answers our prayers with great clarity and sometimes Heaven is silent.

Answer me honestly; have you ever wanted a burning bush experience?  We pray and we pray and we pray and we get no answer.  There is not willful sin in our lives but there is no leading, direction, or calling.  We can’t stay put and we won’t move without conviction of the Lord’s leading.  We throw out fleeces and with the greatest honesty that we as humans can muster; we look for God to act and still nothing.  Un- willing to “move ahead” of God we wait and hear nothing.  From somewhere deep in the heart of our conscience we begin to feel pressure.  We examine and then reexamine our motives to try to have them as pure as possible as we ask for God to reveal His will.  Still nothing.  With the growing silence there is a growing feeling of dread, we feel like something is wrong, and in this equation we know it is not God.  The longer and the harder we pray the deeper the silences of heaven.

I am well aware there are a multitude of reasons why prayers are not answered.  In my journal, I have about four and a half pages of lists and reasons for unanswered prayers.  I have explored the possibilities from one end to the other about Divine silence.  I still don’t have the answers to resolve the struggle.  I suppose if I did, then I suppose that God would be entirely too small.  The fact of the matter is that sometimes we don’t know.  And when we don’t know we can sometimes be paralyzed by prayer.  Not moving till prayers are answered and all the while being convicted that the status quo is not acceptable either. 

Perhaps I am the only one with this struggle.  If that is the case feel free to stop reading or if you want to send advice do so.  But if your answers are very simplistic or very long I may not read them.   Waiting for the break-through we return to the passages of scripture that give us hope.  We believe them and we trust the Author, but we are no closer to resolution.  We repeat the clichés to ourselves that we have shared with others and we realize that while true, they can have a hallow sound to them.  “When you can’t see God’s hand, trust His heart” is absolutely true, but it doesn’t solve anything. 

James 4:13-15 (NASB) Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.”  Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.  Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”

We often misapply this passage to say that we are to wait for the Lord to lead us in all our decisions.  That is not what James is saying.  This is not a call to be paralyzed by prayer or by waiting.  It is a call to hold our plans with an open hand.  It is not a demand that we have an angel descend on a stairway to Heaven and hand us a scroll with a life plan from God written on it.  It is a call to answer the heart beat that the Lord has put into our lives and to delight in the understanding that God may make minor adjustments, major corrections, or complete reversals.  It is not life to be paralyzed by prayer; it is the life we have empowered by prayer.

I know for most Christians this is simple stuff.  But when one approached learning God’s will with great earnestness it is easy to become a little tight.  Maybe I project onto God my concepts of climbing the ecclesiastical ladder.  Maybe I am expecting God to treat me like some Christians where my status, role and performance are apt to be judged by arbitrary standards.   Again the problem is not God it is my perception of God.

St Augustine once said, “Love, and do what you will.” (He is misquoted as saying “Love God and do what you will”.)  The point is that when we are motivated by love for God and our fellow man it is okay to act as we are convinced is best.  (Yes, we could offer a thousand disclaimers here).  The loving thing maybe the hardest thing, it maybe the most fun thing, it may seem irrational.  As long as Love for God and man His supreme creation is the motive we don’t have to worry about getting it perfect.  And that may be the hang up; we don’t want to move till we know the perfect will of God in a given moment.  If we got the perfect plan we would muff it up.  Better to have loving, self-giving imperfection than supplication-induced immobility.

This will have personal meaning for me, but most of all it takes the pressure off and allows me to enjoy being a child of God.  I will share this adventure in these pages, but if you hear I have gone off the deep end believe it.  I am hoping to go deeper and deeper into God’s love. 

Prayer Request.  Tonight is my Author Release event for my new book.  I have put a lot of chips on the table with this book and (forgiving the gambling metaphor) would be most thankful if you would ask God to bless this book both as it touches lives and in sales.

www.JuneBugJohnson.com

Texas Shooting

My original blog for the week is going to be postponed because of the shooting in Texas at First Baptist Church.  Again the pain caused by a mass shooting has our nation in the grip of pain.  The pastor lost his 14-year-old daughter, as a pastor with daughters I cannot begin to imagine his pain.  The horrors of this atrocity remind us of the evil that is at work in our world.

What is the church to do?  How do we respond to the horrors of this another expression of evil?  At first, I thought about a list of useful and not so useful reactions to this moment, but I will leave that to smarter people than me.

As I heard and read about what happed the words of Jesus came to mind. 

“The thief comes only to kill, steal and destroy;

I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.”

The enemy and his underlings have not changed their motives or their tactics since the Garden.  Unable to assault The Almighty directly they would bring sorrow to God’s heart by hurting those He loves so passionately.   The enemy does this with all his deceits and tricks.  Be it a murder, an affair, an addiction, a perversion; name the sin and vice, the goal is always the same.  An attack on the Father’s heart by assaulting the ones He loves. 

So what can we do?  We can do what Jesus did.  Give our lives away so that people can know the grace of God and His gift of eternal life.  We will need to figure this out in our own lives and hearts, but our best response is to be faithful disciples of Jesus.  Love as Jesus loved, share as He shared, speak as He spoke, and proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God.  Let’s renew our commitment to that Kingdom.

This morning in worship I was moved to tears as I again considered the Father giving His Son for me.  I am moved again as I think of a pastor losing his daughter.  My emotions are raw and apt to become dark.  I am sad, I am angry, I am sick of it all.  But I have this hope.  Jesus will come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead.  Paul tells us that part of the judgments at the end of time will be when the saints judge the angels (fallen).  And in that day we will see the vengeful wrath of God poured out against the Accuser and we will say, “AMEN”!  For the evil that he prompted today there will be Hell to pay (literally) and the enemy will, before he is forever damned, bow before the glorified Christ and will confess that He is Lord, the glory of the Father. 

Come Lord Jesus, Amen

O land of rest, for thee I sigh!
When will the moment come
When I shall lay my armor by
And dwell in peace at home?

We’ll work till Jesus comes,
We’ll work till Jesus comes,
We’ll work till Jesus comes,
And we’ll be gathered home.

No tranquil joys on earth I know,
No peaceful, shelt’ring dome;
This world’s a wilderness of woe,
This world is not my home.

We’ll work till Jesus comes,
We’ll work till Jesus comes,
We’ll work till Jesus comes,
And we’ll be gathered home. 

Revelation in morning prayers

This morning I had a revelation during my morning prayers.  I have a prayer list of about 28 people or ministries I pray for each morning.  As I was praying for these men, women and ministries I had an insight that hit like a brick on the forehead.  This is not a revelation of new truth but rather an insight that was there all along and I just understood it in a new way.

As I prayed for a friend who is a minister.  I prayed about the church he serves, a church that is having a Truck or Treat Event this evening.  This preacher is a good man who loves the Lord and His church, and is doing the best he can.  I was asking for non-believers to come to the church's Halloween party and in some way connect with the church so that maybe they would come back for a service and perhaps hear the gospel in such a way that they might be willing to consider the claims of Christ.

I also prayer for a minister who serves in the 10 40 window.  He goes out an evangelizes among Muslim and Hindu people.  He trains other ministers to evangelize and to train other evangelist.  My prayer for him and his team was that they would be protected in their travels and teaching, that the lost would come to faith, and that when, not if, they are persecuted they will be kept strong and be a great witness.

The juxtaposition of those prayers told me so much about the church in America.  My own poor ministry and why the church is growing other places but not here.

God have mercy on us.

Who picks you up when you are down?

I recently had to make a change in my weekly routine.  I had set up a Google alert to bring me news of specific church events that popped up on the World Wide Web.  One of the alerts I set up was the word, “pastor”.  Anytime the word pastor would appear in the news Google would send me a link for the news report.

I had to delete that alert because it was so disheartening.  Everyday I would get alerts where pastors would appear in the news and it was almost always bad news.  The number of alerts varied from as few as a half dozen to some days twenty or more.  The stories ranged from the goofy, such as the pastor who delivered the sermon dressed as the Easter Bunny, to the all too frequent reports of criminal/sexual misconduct.  It was a daily heartbreak that saddened me to the core of my being.  It also angered me; so much I wanted to take some of these pastors on a “Millstone Swimming Trip”.  But the most pronounced effect was that it discouraged me.  It was not unlike the painful betrayals I have experienced in local church ministry.  The discouragement of these daily briefings of ministerial failure wounded my heart and twisted my soul. Getting down into the slough of despair can and will happen to any of us.  But once there what do we do?  I have taken three steps to help readjust my attitude.

First, I have to take responsibility for my negative attitude and for changing it.  That begins with limiting the negative input in my life.  While I work with pastors and do need to stay current on the negative issues related to ministry, I have to make sure that the volume, both in bulk and in decibels, is limited.  Paul gives a great list of things to think about in Phil. 4:8.  Awareness of evil is wise, but meditation needs to remain focused on attributes Paul mentioned.  I need better boundaries.

Second, I must remember that it is not about me.  Luis Palau once said, “We have everything we need when we have Jesus Christ living in us.  It is his power that controls our dispositions, enables us to serve, and corrects and directs us.”  By both personality and training I am a fixer.  I enjoy fixing.  Both the process and the result are very satisfying to me.  The desk I am using as I write is in the process of being restored.  I would love to get a “basket-case bike” and put it on the road.  My dream house is a fixer upper.  I like to fix things.  The problem is that I want to fix stuff that is not mine to fix: the church, pastors and situations from the Google alerts.  I need better boundaries; I also need to remember who is Lord on all sides of all boundaries.    

Third, I need to encourage in order to be encouraged.  It is a spiritual principle that never fails that what you sow you reap.  In the act of loving someone you discover that you are loved.  In the blessing of an enemy you find that you are blessed.  It is true of encouragement as well.  When you encourage someone it comes back to you and you are encouraged.  When I am pulling someone from the slough of despair it helps pull me from that same bog.  We all need to be encouraged, but we forget that a good place to start is by encouraging someone else.  We shouldn’t go on an encouragement fishing expedition, but encourage another and trust that in giving we will receive.  You never know the impact of our encouragement on another person.

I will conclude with an excerpt from my up coming book, The Adventures of June Bug Johnson.  The story is true, but embellished, and the names and characters are fictionalized to protect identity.  The chapter is called “Cussing in Church” and tells about a word of encouragement that rescued a young pastor’s ministry. 

At this point, Randy realized what he had done.  He had slipped back into his old Marine words.  He stopped mid-sentence and looked over the congregation.  They sat there eyes wide and mouths hanging open, it didn’t seem like there was even one of them breathing.  Grandpa Lymon and June Bug sat on the second pew.  Grandpa Lymon had his brow so knitted together it looked like a once-plowed field.  June Bug looked afraid-really frightened-as if he expected the roof to be split open by fire from on high at any moment.    There is never a silence like the silence in a church after someone slips up and cusses and Randy did a dandy job of cussing. 

Randy almost broke down in tears.  He was so ashamed that he couldn’t even word an apology.  He saw the shock on the faces of the little congregation and simply stepped out of the pulpit and went and sat down on the front bench.  He didn’t look like a proud Marine or even a young preacher.  He looked like a dog that had been beat all its life.  He looked like he might just curl up on the front pew and cover his face with a hymnbook.   He just slouched there hoping everyone would just leave without him having to talk to anyone.  In that moment, he decided he would go back to school, drop out of college, and go back into the service.

That is when, Grandpa Lymon stood up and took just three steps to stand next to Randy and turned to face the congregation.  He put one hand on Randy’s shoulder and extended the other to the congregation, hand up as if asking for a coin.  After a moment that seemed like a year to Randy, Grandpa Lymon spoke.

“I don’t care much for the way he said it, but I sure am glad to know which side he is on.  I think this church ought to hire this young man.  I think he could do with a bit more training, but you got to admire how he feels about the enemy.”

www.JuneBugJohnson.com

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Churches Praying for Vegas a good thing or is it a symptom of something un-healthy?

Personal note: This was the blog I did not want to write.  I put it off and tried to avoid it.  The truth is I had to come to some very uncomfortable realizations about the church I love.  

On October 1, a man deeply committed to evil launched the bloodiest shooter attack in U.S. history on a concert on the Las Vegas strip.  It created immediate media frenzy.  The concertgoers and by-standers began posting videos, photographs and commentary almost before the shooter took his own life.  In the media storm everyone wanted his or her voice to be heard and to be portrayed as compassionate and caring.  Churches across the nation had special prayer services, watches, masses and candlelight vigils providing a note of spirituality to this dramatically horrible event.  The phrase “Praying for Vegas” graced almost every outlet of social media. 

While prayer is the appropriate response to any tragedy we should have been praying for a long time.  There are heroic, great Christians with a strong Christian witness serving in Vegas and their work is not in vain.  Any perceived negativity is not meant for those who have become missionaries to what might be called “America’s Corinth”.

However, the “Pray for Vegas” flourish may reflect a problem in the American church’s culture.  Before I make a specific assertion, let’s note several observations.

Consider this:

• ·      In September of this year 58 people were killed and over 200 wounded, not in Vegas, but in Chicago.[1]
• ·      According to Yelp there are almost 100 strip clubs in Vegas.  It has been called the Strip Club Capital of the World.[2]
• ·      According to one website that studies and reports on black market economies, there are 30,000 prostitutes in Vegas.[3]  In one police raid girls as young as 13 years old[4] were found working in the Vegas sex industry. 
• ·      Vegas’ city fathers (and mothers for that matter) have intentionally marketed Vegas with a marketing campaign, “What happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” that is a blatant appeal to the most base nature of fallen humanity.
• ·      In the last 30 days (as of this writing) there were 126 Islamic attacks in 26 countries, in which 1,102 people were killed and 1,116 injured.[5]
• ·      In the US there are an estimated 3,000 abortions a day.[6]  That is roughly the same as a Vegas shooting every 25 minutes, around the clock.

We are very selective in our moral outrage!  Why?

As we consider these great tragedies, many of which are in terms of sheer numbers and much worse than the Vegas shootings, one has to ask, “Why is there so little moral outrage on the part of the church?” Is there a reason that the passions and energies of the church can be so excited by one thing and not another?  Why was there no outcry to “pray for Vegas” as she marketed herself as a vacation spot for vice? Why is the church both locally and nationally so selective in taking the moral high ground?

Throughout its history the church has had a tendency to take the shape of the predominate culture.  Today our culture is media dominated and I believe that in many cases the Christian’s spirituality is media driven.  What ever is trending is what gets our attention.

Often the pattern is something like this:

1.    We see the tragedy as presented by the medias in our lives.

2.    We are caught up in the emotion associated with the tragedy and have a strong emotional reaction to that tragedy.

3.    We express our emotions, often mimicking the emotional reactions we see in the media.

4.    We often feel that our participation in this flood of emotion will in some way make a positive difference.

5.    Having had our cathartic experience (posting a video, lighting a candle, or liking a post of a video of someone lighting a candle) we go on unchanged in an unchanged world. 

If you ask me if I am just being cynical, I would ask you, “Are you still praying for Vegas?  Are you praying for the children in human trafficking in Vegas and other U.S. cities?”

Is the Media driven culture hijacking Christian spirituality?

Could it be that as Christians we have mistaken emotion for spirituality and that our spirituality is media driven? Our emotions are drawn to those events that garner media attention and we respond accordingly.  With the rise of visual media we are tempted to think with our eyes.  As Francis Shaffer said, “He (the viewer) knows, because his own eyes have seen.  He has the impression of greater objective knowledge than ever before.  For many, what they see on television becomes more true than what they see with their eyes in the external world.”[7]

The great problem with a media driven spirituality is that it easily becomes a media manipulated spiritualty.  There need not be a grand conspiracy.  If the dominant cultural and media establishments share a common worldview they need not conspire to exert the pressure in the same direction on Christian sensitivities.   

For example, we might find a circumstance in which a church that held a traditional view on a subject would be labeled negatively and congregations that held a more progressive view would be presented in a more positive light.  Christians with a media driven spirituality could be swept away with the accompanying emotions.

While it would be wrong to suggest Christians should not be engaged in the media available to us, we must be careful to think prudently.  Here are three suggestions that might help prevent Christians from being manipulated by the media and led astray.

Re-evaluate our involvement with all media outlets.

As we approach any media outlet, be that mainstream, talk radio, entertainment or social media we need to make sure we know why we are engaging and what we want to accomplish. We need to have a plan for our participation with the media.  We can do this by asking some simple questions:

How is this related to God’s will and calling for my life?

Why am I choosing this medium to do this? 

How am I going to use this media to advance God’s calling on my life?

When will I know that I am reaching my desired objective?

Once that objective is reached how do I need to re-evaluate my involvement with the media?

We can go to the media to be informed, entertained, conduct business, or just to keep up with friends, but we better not go there without an intentional approach in mind.

Prioritize the study of Scripture

If the foundational beginning of our spirituality and consciousness is anything other than scripture we cannot help but end up in the wrong place.   In the early church it was scripture that shaped the spirituality of Christians.  There can be no doubt that the church needs to be aware of its cultural context.  However, we have, in my opinion, over-emphasized cultural sensitivity to the detriment of our commitment to scripture.  The seeker sensitive and seeker driven approach to the life of the church might have brought us to a seeker driven spirituality, which results in a faith that is pushed by the currents of culture.  In our context, the currents of culture are the media.  Biblically trained Christians are not apt to be manipulated about moral high ground.

Think critically

Many committed Christians engage with the media without serious reflection.  While they are deeply committed to Christ they tend to not think critically. To often the media has become the background noise of our lives.   We often approach media without the realization that there is an agenda behind what we see and hear.   From Michael Savage to NPR to Oprah Winfrey to Justin Bieber to this writer, everyone has a reason to be, a message and agenda.  We must learn to measure what we see and hear against God’s word; in so doing, we learn to think critically. By laying the ideals we encounter in the media with the statements of Scripture we can discern truth from falsehood. 

A fun exercise to learn to do this with is by measuring church music against scripture.  This is a great way to see that both traditional and contemporary worship songs have examples of Biblical and un-Biblical messaging.  By training ourselves to think critically about ourselves we can then move on to news, entertainment and culture.

We do not need less prayer.

When we face the next tragic moment that will surely flood the media we do not need less prayer.  We need less sentimentality disguised as a spiritual moment the only purpose of which is to make us feel better, but makes no difference at all. 

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[1] https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/2017-chicago-murders/timeline?mon=9

[2] https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Nude+Strip+Clubs&find_loc=Las+Vegas,+NV&start=90

[3] http://www.havocscope.com/number-of-prostitutes-in-las-vegas/

[4] https://www.thedailybeast.com/shooting-on-the-strip-las-vegass-prostitution-secret

[5] https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/attacks.aspx?Yr=Last30

[6] http://www.worldometers.info/abortions/

[7] Frances Schaffer, How Should We Then Live. 1976 Crossway Books page 240