Prayer is good for us

I think as much as prayer is part of God’s intention for fulfilling His own plans through our requests (mind-blowing in itself!), it is also for our own good.  Philip Yancey, in his book Prayer, points out that prayer for him has become more than a shopping list of requests to present to God; it has become a re-alignment of everything.  It restores the truth of the universe, to gain a glimpse of the world, of him, through the eyes of God.  Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view (p. 21).  I think I’ve been slowly understanding that in my own prayer life.

I remember praying before every study session during my HSC.  I always prayed, ‘God, please help me to focus and use this time you’ve given me productively.  May this please you to answer.’  Though it felt selfish to pray this at the time, God did answer my prayer, but I think He was also helping me to depend on Him for everything, which is part of His purpose for prayer.  It’s to help me see that He is the one in control and I can trust Him.  It’s to help me re-align my desires with His own, to see them from His perspective, to submit them to His will.

And sometimes, He answers ‘yes’ to show us not only that He answers prayer, but that He really does hear us and that He is sovereign over all things.  It’s been rainy weather for the past week.  Last Saturday, MiCF (Macquarie international Christian Fellowship) had organised an Amazing Race around the city, but unfortunately it was postponed to yesterday because of the weather.  We prayed that God would indeed make it a sunny day.  And He did.  As I was thanking God for the weather yesterday morning, I realised that God answered ‘yes’ to ‘sunny’ not just to answer that prayer.  He did it so we would see that He does hear us and that He is indeed in control over the weather.  He truly uses everything to bring glory to Himself.  When you have such beautiful weather (as it was yesterday) contrasted between the gloominess of the day previous and the day after (today it looks pretty gloomy), there really isn’t anything to say except to say it was the Lord indeed!  And He uses us to proclaim this with others.  I can’t count the many times that the international students brought up the weather yesterday and the many moments that He gave us to attribute it to His hearing and answering of our prayers.

I’m still learning what praying achieves, but I know that I can only do that if I continue to pray more and more, submitting everything to Him, which I still don’t.  So I pray for you and for me, that God would help us to keep persevering in prayer and give this ‘unseen’ act priority in our lives, because He uses it for His glory and for our good.  And that should be good enough reason for us to keep at it.

Jesus died and suffered…so that Jesus could achieve His own resurrection from the dead.

Last Thursday, I did a study on the resurrection of Jesus with my international students small group.  This morning, I read the 4th reason for why Jesus had to die, and I regret not printing it out for my group last Thursday!  Piper’s explanation is so clear, and it reminded me of how proud I am of Jesus’ resurrection!  How much we, as Christians, can boast in it!

Piper points out that the resurrection isn’t merely something that happened after Jesus’ death.  For the death of Jesus was meant to be the blood of the covenant (Matthew 26:28).  This means that the Promised Messiah’s shedding of blood (which represents death) and subsequently what Jesus said about His own death are meant to pay for sin and satisfy the holy curse for sin, which symbolises the new covenant of God.  And how can we know that Jesus’ death indeed did that and wasn’t in vain?  It is only by God somehow giving public declaration of His endorsement of what Jesus did on the cross as indeed paying for sin and satisfying the curse for sin, that we would know that Jesus’ death indeed was the blood of the new eternal covenant.  (I apologise for al the ‘indeed’s!)

This public declaration of God’s is the resurrection.  It was also a reward and vindication of Christ’s achievement in death.  God raises Jesus from the death to say ‘Yes, this man is the Christ, the Messiah, and His death did achieve what He said it would achieve.’  As it says in 1 Corinthians 15:17, ‘If Christ had not been raised, your faith is futile ad you are still in your sins.’  The point is not that the resurrection is the price paid for our sins.  The point is that the resurrection proves that the death of Jesus is an all-sufficient price!  What a humdinger!

Again, if you would like to read John Piper’s Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came To Die, you can download it for free from Piper’s website: http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/OnlineBooks/ByTitle/2289_Fifty_Reasons_Why_Jesus_Came_to_Die/

Were the Gospels telling ‘the truth’ about Jesus?

I had an interesting conversation with my mum today.  She’s a headstrong atheist, and she has been reading a book called ‘The Case For Christ’, which I gave her a while ago.  (I do recommend!  If you’d like a read, don’t hesitate to ask me…I will definitely have  a copy for you.)  Anyway, when I asked her how she’s going with it, she said that they’re just interviews with so-called ‘experts’ on certain issues concerning the historical Jesus.  ‘We can’t just trust what “the experts” say’, she said.  For her, a virgin birth is simply out-of-the-question ridiculous.  It’s all an elaborate story.  Well, we (kind of unfortunately) headed in the direction of miracles with the conversation, and I tried to point out that a virgin birth is indeed impossible unless there exists a force outside of natural science.  And this prophesised virgin birth as that being of the Son of God certainly posits that assumption.

But it got me thinking.  My mum was right about the experts thing.  We can’t just take expert accounts for granted.  Just because they have a ‘Dr.’ before their name, doesn’t mean that everything they say is ‘the truth’, as my mum said.    How do the Gospels themselves match up to this scrutiny?  You could potentially call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John ‘experts’, since they saw, touched, heard, walked with, talked to Jesus himself in the flesh (1 John 1:1)!  (Haha, I guess that answers that question!)  But not taking that as an assumption, could you show that the Gospels were telling ‘the truth’?  That is, are they consistent, or rather, are extra-biblical sources consistent with the Gospels?  My answer is a resounding ‘yes’ and hopefully over the next few weeks I can look at some of the many, many extra-biblical sources that confirm the accuracy of the accounts given by the Gospels in a bit more detail.  (And hopefully and prayerfully share some with my mum!)

50 Reasons Why Jesus Came To Die

I just started reading this great book (as titled) by John Piper.  It’s free to download (as well as many of his other books!!) from http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/OnlineBooks/ByTitle/.  Do check it out because he’s a great writer, and I thank God for that 🙂

I’m up to Reason #3 (Christ suffered and died to learn obedience and to be perfected), which is one that I’ve only really heard and thought about more recently.  At first it seems a strange thing to say about what Jesus’ death accomplished, but Scripture says it!

Piper points to two verse from the book of Hebrews:

‘Although he was a son he learned obedience through what he suffered.’ – 5:8

‘For it was fitting that he [the Father], for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation [Jesus] perfect through suffering.’ – 2:10

How could this be when Jesus was and is sinless?  Piper says that Jesus learning obedience through suffering doesn’t mean that he learned to stop disobeying, but it actually means that Jesus had to learn in practice as a human being (that is, in pain) what it means to obey.  And being made perfect through suffering doesn’t mean that God the Father was refining Him the way He does to us through suffering; it means that he was gradually fulfilling the perfect righteousness that He had to have in order to save us (‘For it was fitting…’ – Hebrews 2:10).

And this bit really blew my small brain away: Jesus’ suffering didn’t only absorb God’s wrath but it also fulfilled His true humanity and made Him able to call us brothers and sisters (Hebrews 2:17).

I thought to myself, ‘who would be crazy enough to do that?!…who would want to give their son over willingly to suffer for another, and not just any ‘another’, but people who hated you for demanding their loyalty and submission, and ultimately wanted nothing to do with you?  what would he have to gain by this?’

Well, obviously God is crazy enough to do this.  He poured his anger out on his own son, the one whose perfect submission to him made him infinitely unworthy to receive this anger.  It would be an understatement to say that God was unfair to His own son.  It is a terrible yet wonderful picture of God’s justice (in demanding punishment for rejecting Him as God) being met by God’s love (His willingness to sacrifice even His son to meet the demands of this punishment).

And for what?  So that Jesus could make himself nothing, being found in appearance as a man (the perfect man) and call us brothers and sisters.

Crazy.