prayer

Chaplain Daily Touchpoint #314: The Good Portion

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Intro: The works wheel. That’s what I call it. It’s the tendency that many folks have to think that they can work their way into God’s favor via their own labor and/or merits. But what the Lord desires is obedience to His revealed will.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, let us admit that. I cannot speak for others, but I was raised to work hard. As a boy, I was taught discipline and the value of labor. It started off with simple tasks appropriate to my age, and now that I’m much older, those lessons have followed me. I have a deep distaste for laziness. Biblically, we were designed to labor, not to coast. So, it is easy for me to get on the works wheel and think that I’m somehow pleasing God. It can be a sneaky spiritual virtue signal, if you will, where one points to himself/herself and says, “See what all I’ve done, Lord? See all my efforts?”

There is a short episode in Luke 10 of Martha and Mary that demonstrates what I’m exploring. Here’s the text:

38 Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. 39 And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. 40 But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” 41 But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, 42 but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.” (Lk 10:38-42, ESV)

Teaching: Did you catch Jesus’ rebuke? Wasn’t it unexpected? Martha was busy, busy, busy. Martha was a worker. She was getting after it. You’d think she’d be the one commended by the Lord Jesus, right? But the Lord rebuked Martha because she was “anxious and troubled about many things.” Martha’s sister, Mary, was the one to receive the commendation. Why? She was seated at the feet of the Lord Jesus. She was looking to Christ; Martha, on the other hand, had been looking at Martha, and at her own works.

Have you ever worked yourself to a frazzle for folks who didn’t appreciate it? Have you ever labored for what seemed like ungrateful people? Have you ever been a Martha, and the Lord had to teach you to trust Him rather than your own works? I cannot speak for others, but I certainly have that tendency. And it’s painful to learn (and re-learn) that we cannot make others see; we cannot make others care; we cannot work ourselves or anyone else into a state of grace. We are simply recipients of grace that comes from the hand of Christ. Mary sat at the feet of God, and she was commended. Martha was working herself into a state of anxiety and was rebuked. May God be pleased to rebuke us to alert us to the truth that He’s the source of any Godly change, not anything that we do or manufacture.

Wisdom Through the Crucible of Suffering

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Text: “But to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the LORD had closed her womb” (1 Samuel 1:5, ESV).

Bottom line up front: Very often the Lord uses most significantly those whom He first places in the crucible of suffering.

Historical context: 1500s B.C. The Lord was about to bring about the last of the Old Testament judges, Samuel. But before Samuel’s birth, we get the massively important story of his mother, Hannah. Hannah was loved by her husband, Elkanah. Scripture attests that Elkanah had two wives, but he especially loved Hannah, so much in fact that “he gave her a double portion” of the sacrifices (1 Samuel 1:5).

Hannah’s barrenness: But despite Elkanah’s love for Hannah, the Lord closed Hannah’s womb for a season. She could not bear a child. Peninnah, the other wife, was able to conceive and bear children. But Hannah? No. Why? The Lord had closed her womb (1 Samuel 1:5, 6). It seems safe to say that the Lord was using Hannah’s present circumstances of suffering to bring about providential blessing.

Hannah’s response: She wept; she fasted (1 Samuel 1:7-8). She pleaded with the Lord (1 Samuel 1:11). She implored God for a son and the Lord answered. Verses 19-20 of chapter are so tender: “They rose early in the morning and worshiped before the LORD; then they went back to their house at Ramah. And Elkanah knew Hannah his wife, and the LORD remembered her. And in due time Hannah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Samuel, for she said, “I have asked for him from the LORD” (1 Samuel 1:19-20, ESV).

Encouragement/takeaway: Very often the Lord uses most significantly those whom He first places in the crucible of suffering. I don’t think that Hannah fully understood her circumstances of barrenness, at least not initially. Scripture is clear that she wept bitterly, that she fasted, that she appeared nearly out of her mind with grief. But she trusted the Lord. She petitioned the Lord. She persevered. She endured in the faith. And yet, for a season, the crucible of suffering remained for her. But the Lord was not wasting her suffering. He was using it to bring about the birth of one who would be used even mightier still for the Lord. God’s ordaining of suffering for His people, though we might not fully grasp it at the time, is not random; it is ordained by the Hands of the Lord, who knows our beginning and our end.

Do We Underestimate the Power of Prayer?

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There is an Austrailian historian and thinker from whom I continue to learn a great deal. His name is John Anderson. In the following video (less than 3 minutes long) he discusses how many Brits gathered for prayer during the WWII Battle of Dunkirk from late May to early June of 1940, and of how Christians assembled to pray for their troops amidst Germany’s seemingly formidable forces.

Questions:

How is this relevant for us? Well, it is so easy and tempting to give in to despair, if you have a certain theology. If you’re convinced that things are only going to get worse, your prayer life will evaporate. Why? Well, because you’ve convinced yourself that it’s all downhill, so why bother.

But is that view biblical?

Per Scripture, we are to pray because of who God is.

We tend to underestimate God and likewise underestimate the power of prayer. I have certainly been guilty of that.

Here are just some of the obvious reminders from Scripture about our duty to pray:

  • “pray without ceasing,” (1 Thess. 5:17, ESV)
  • And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts,as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. (Mt 6:5-13, ESV)
  • “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working” (Jas. 5:16b, ESV).
  • “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith” (Mt 21:22, ESV)

Encouragement: Again, it’s just a 2.5 minute video, but it touches on how soldiers and civilians, believers from a across a land, gathered and prayed, and of what happened. Real history, real prayers, and the real God.

A Paean for CJ

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FullSizeRenderIt was when I pulled out of the driveway that I knew. I knew I had to write it. Let me explain. She was sitting there with the dogs, watching me pull away to drive south again to Fort Benning for surgery this Thursday. I knew I had to write it. I can get it across on the page, things I don’t say as often or as well as I should—namely, that I am grateful for her, for her steadfastness, for her loyalty, for her feistiness, for her prayer life, for her deftness at organizing our lives, and on and on. I had to write it. To write what exactly? A paean to my wife who makes me better than I would otherwise be.

I learned an awful lot during my seminary years. And one of those lessons came by way of my favorite seminary professor. He was teaching us seminarians about personal discipleship. He was stressing that we could learn lots of theological precepts and still lose our marriages. Then he made this profound remark: “Don’t wait till Mother’s Day to realize if you have a Proverbs 31 wife.” Dr. Cutrer, my professor, could have ended class that moment. He was that gifted in teaching via example.

Proverbs 31:10-31 is perhaps the most obvious set of verses in Scripture where a godly wife is praised. King Lemuel uses synonymous parallelism in Hebrew poetry to make the point of how valuable a godly wife is. Here is just one example from verse 10: “An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels” (Proverbs 31:10, ESV). Pretty straightforward, right? An excellent wife, according to Scripture, is worth more than fine jewels, and this was written circa 1,000 B.C. in an ancient Near East context, so precious jewels perhaps sparkled more in people’s thinking than they might today.

But what made Dr. Cutrer’s lesson for us more poignant was that Jane, his precious wife, was in class with him. She was at his side, serving alongside him to show us seminarians what an enduring commitment looked like. In short, the precept was theological (that God created, ordained, and loves biblical marriage) but also fleshed out in real lives. Theology was not just to be cerebral but incarnational. And that is why I had to write today—not primarily about theology but about my wife. Following are three examples of why I felt compelled to share.

 Example one: I love to work outside in the yard. Where I’m from, folks call it “piddlin’.” It is a catchall phrase. In my case, it usually involves doing something in the soil. From my mom and my maternal grandfather, I inherited a love for the earth—the smell of soil, a love of colors in nature, of flora, of things growing, etc. Some guys like to peruse sports cars; I like to walk through the garden section at Lowe’s, if that gives you an idea.

When I was outside piddlin’, my wife, CJ, pressure-washed both of the decks on the back of our house. We live in the woods, and so spiders and carpenter bees and all sorts of other creatures like to try and stake a claim on the decks of the house. So while I was out in the yard, my wife had gone down to the basement, hauled up a pressure washer, and sprayed off two decks. I don’t know of many husbands who would have complained. This one didn’t. Score one for the Proverbs 31 wife.

Example two: I have a surgery this week at Fort Benning to reconstruct my right shoulder. I’ll be operated on here, and then return to my barracks room to rest and recuperate, and hopefully, return home for a few days of convalescence. No big deal, right? No need for my wife to drive three hours south. Yet when I told her that I was good, that I had a buddy down here who had promised to look after me if anything goes wrong, she got … well, feisty. “Are you kidding me?” she asked, not really wanting any reply I might have offered. “I’ll be there. You’re having major surgery. Do you really think I’m staying home? Good grief, Pirtle.” Yep, not the brightest husband moment. Score another one for the Proverbs 31 wife.

Example three: I was in a church recently where a teacher was teaching on a couple of verses from one of the New Testament epistles. As part of his lesson, he cross-referenced a passage from another letter but when he cross-referenced the second passage, he did not explain the context of the passage at all. The passage was about dietary laws, not about what he was trying to emphasize. And I was troubled because context is crucial. A fundamental rule of correct interpretation is to know, understand, and teach the correct context. Put bluntly, we are never to rip verses out of context. Anyway, I was troubled but I did not say anything until my wife and I were talking after lunch. I told her what had transpired and she asked me this: “Will you just commit to pray about it (talking to the teacher) this week?” She knows I don’t like conflict, but she was right. Not only should I have gone to the teacher, but I should also have been praying and prayerful as I did it. But I had not. My wife was right on both counts and I was wrong. Score another one for the Proverbs 31 wife.

When I pulled away today to drive back down, she was on the driveway with the dogs. She would undoubtedly go in when I pulled away, make sure the kids were okay, straighten something in the house, perhaps read the book she’s working on currently, prep for the coming week, and wait for me to call and tell her I had made it to Benning again.

I have made it here now and reflected some on how much better I am because of her, on how far I still have to go, on how humbling it is to be chastened and loved by one who loves and remains alongside me despite knowing my many weaknesses.

Her parents (my in-laws) I have grown to love and respect more with each passing year, and two of the greatest blessings they gave this world were daughters, both of whom love the Lord. They (my in-laws, sister-in-law, and wife) know, too, that Proverbs 31 is not just for Mother’s Day homilies. It’s for us stubborn, sinful husbands who don’t tell you enough that you are more precious than jewels.