[muse]

No words.  Just…wow.  From Guitar Hero II, it’s: Dueling Banjos…

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wfdgY5ZYDk

Someone help, I can’t figure out how to embed youtube movies into my wordpress!

Now, in my last blog, I talked about the power of contemplative prayer and how it was the key to the concept of “prayer without ceasing.”  If you’ll remember, I tossed out a challenge and am still waiting on some people to take me up on it and tell me what it was like.  Now, in this blog, I want to dive deeper into actually how perpetual prayer changes things, specifically us.

Recently, I’ve been stuck in the first chapter of Hebrews.  I can’t get past it.  I keep re-reading it and re-reading it because I keep getting stuff out of it.  I’ll break down what I’ve got right now:

 1God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways,

 2in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world.

 3And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

-Hebrews 1:1-3 (NASB)

The reality is that in days gone by, God chose to reveal himself through prophets, a prophet being one man whom God chose to speak to, and then commanded to take the spoken message to a specific people group.  Now, that might seem like an inefficient method of communication, and it depended a lot on the particular man’s obedience to God, but think about it this way: could people in the Old Testament time period have handled the idea that God was a god of love and that he wanted, not to burden them with a rigid set of rules, but with a a relationship, a partnership of love between creator and creation?  I don’t think that they could have.  In an era where it was a daily struggle just to live and where men were more comfortable killing each other than talking out their problems, who in their right mind would have served such a God?  It would have been seen as “weak.”

No, God revealed himself to the patriarchs and to the people of Israel in a way that could pierce the hardness of their hearts.  He spoke to them through prophets, the few men and women who actually could handle the idea of a God who was divinely interested in the welfare of his people.  I find many times that some people (albiet unconciouslly many times) think of the Old Testament God as different from the New Testament God.  I’m not convinced that this is the truth.  It’s not so much that God was different as the people were different.  This idea brings peace to my constant question: “Why wait so long for Jesus and the plan of salvation?”  The answer that I discern is: “Because there was more to Jesus than just being Messiah.  Jesus came to bring a message that people that came before his time could not receive.  They were no less worthy of salvation (heck, nobody was worth of salvation!), but God did not reveal his Son until his Son could be received.  His timing, after all, is perfect.

Now, when God had revealed his son, he had no more need to speak soley through the prophets, he had revealed himself through his son.  Look at the first part of verse three in particular:

And He (Jesus) is the radiance of His (God the Father’s) glory and the exact representation of His nature…

-Hebrews 1:3a

Think of God as the sun.  The sun is huge!  You could fit 1,300,000 Earths inside the sun’s volume.  It would take almost 12,000 earths to cover the surface of the sun alone.  It’s hard to imagine how huge that is considering how small we are!  The sun, to humans, is a vast object that influences most every single aspect of our day to day life, and yet, we don’t actually ever see it.  Granted, you could look at the sun for about 90 seconds before it would start to burn your retinas, but I wouldn’t reccomend it.  What we see are the rays of the sun, or rather, the sun’s radiance.

Jesus is like that to God.  Jesus is the radiance of the Father.  He’s the fullness of God in doses that we can handle.  Think of it also like this:  If God were a foreign language, then Jesus is the Rosetta Stone.  For those of you not familiar with the Rosetta stone, it was discovered in Egypt in the late 18th century during Napoleon’s conquests there.  The cool thing about the Rosetta Stone was that it featured a royal decree in three different languages: demotic (a more modern form of the written egyptian language), advanced heiroglyphics, and ancient greek.  This was such a ground-breaking discovery, because previouslly, heiroglyphics were nigh-impossible to translate even with the use of demotic writings, which were ambiguous at best anyway.  The Rosetta stone gave scholars the ability to study both demotic and heiroglyphics next to Greek, which they understood.

The beauty of the Rosetta stone is that each section said the same thing, it just said it in a different language.  God operates on a plane that we can’t possibly understand.  We don’t know his language.  Jesus acted as a Rosetta Stone by becoming a man.  He, the perfect representation of the character and nature of God, spoke both the divine language and the language of man.  Who better to be our teacher?  Who better to be the greatest Rabbi of all time?

 All of that to say this:  If Jesus is the translation of who God is, the exact representation of his nature, then does it not make sense that the closer we get to being like Jesus, then the more like God, and thus, more pleasing to Him, we will become?  How do we become more like Jesus?  Well, first we cannot be ignorant of him.  We must read the Word to know what he was like and what he said.  Secondly, we cannot ignore the Helper that he sent us. 

9 However, as it is written:
   ”No eye has seen,
      no ear has heard,
   no mind has conceived
   what God has prepared for those who love him”

 10 but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.
      The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.

11For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God

-1 Corinthians 2:9-11

The Spirit of God inside of us (in conjunction with scripture) is the best way of learning how to become conformed to the image of Christ, and thus to the nature of God.

This, guys and girls, is the true power of prayer: the power of consolidation.  I am, like you, a compartmentalized creature.  There is a part of me that is totally sold out to the idea of knowing God more, but there is also a part of me that is resistant.  The process  of prayer consolidates all of my compartments, compacting them all into the image, the nature, the character of Jesus.

In prayer, I lose my pretentious arrogance.  In prayer, I lose my crippling insecurities.  In prayer, I trade my regrets for the revelation that I am loved and that I am accepted.  In prayer, I’m forced face-to-face with the realization that there is absolutely nothing that I can do to be any better than I am and forced to have faith that God will shape me into what he desires to be.

That is the power of prayer.  That is why it is so important to be perpetually in prayer, for the consolidation of self to the image of Christ.

-fin

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  It’s been a while since I last blogged, so sue me.

 Since my last couple of blogs haven’t been that spiritually motivated, I figured I’d share something with you from my own personal devotion time over the last couple of weeks.

 Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of “the classics” (ala Brother Lawrence, Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Madame Guyon, ect) and have been really amazed by the spiritual depth of the things that these great fathers and mothers of modern faith had to say. 

I’ve recently been in a discussion on one particular work in particular, and that is Madame Guyon’s A Short and Easy Method of Prayer.  Madame Guyon (whom you can read all about here) was imprisoned for the ”revolutionary” ideas set forth in this book.  Idea, incidentally, which we hold biblically sound.  This begs the question for me, as a guy who would sincerely like to impact the world for Jesus: what ideas do I have that are so revolutionary enough as to tick people off about me?

I’m not saying that we should pursue division by any means, but people like Madame Guyon spent YEARS in prison, and some of them even gave their very lives to nurture the ideas that we take for granted as the basics of Christianity.  What great revelation does God give to us in our time alone with him that could potentially shake up the whole of Christianity, maybe even make us into pariahs?  Lest I continue with my rant, I’d like to dive right in to what’s been on my mind.

Madame Guyon once said: “Prayer is the key of perfection and of sovereign happiness; it is the efficacious means of getting rid of all vices and of acquiring all virtues; for the way to become perfect is to live in the presence of God. He tells us this Himself: “walk before me, and be thou perfect”  Prayer alone can bring you into His presence, and keep you there continually.”

Although, I think she and I might disagree on exactly what the definition of perfection is in this passage and whether it is possible for a man to live perfect on Earth (apart from Jesus, that is), she hits on something that has always been a fascination of mine, and that is the idea of perpetual prayer.  I’m not talking about walking around all day and babbling like a moron, I’m talking about really being in an attitude of prayer.

***CRAZY CHARISMATIC ALERT!!!  ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT SPEAKING IN TONGUES!!!***

I think she’s talking about praying in the spirit, and I’m not necessarilly talking about “praying in tongues” like we talk about in charismatic circles, because I believe that you can pray in tongues without praying in the spirit and pray in the spirit without praying in tongues.  What I’m talking about isn’t an outward expression so much as an inward condition.  I’m talking about walking around, being totally cognizant about going through your everyday life, but all the while your spirit is in communion with the Holy Spirit.  It’s easy enough to talk about, sure, but hard to actually live there.

I believe the key to this kind of prayer is being in the presence of God.  Now, we’ve all expereinced times in our lives where we KNOW that we were in the presence of God, and hopefully they weren’t all during corporate worship.  Hopefully, some of those times have been by ourselves in what the old-timers called “the prayer closet.”  Here’s a challenge to all of you, including myself:

El Ben’s Incessant Prayer Challenge:  One morning this week, take the time to start your day getting into the presence of God (however best you do that) until you are absolutely aware that God is with, inside, and all around you, and attempt to maintain that awareness throughout the day.  Every time you think about God, take a moment to just recognize that he is there with you.  You don’t actually have to say anything, just maintain your awareness of God.  It might be work, but I’m willing to be you’ll be surprised at the results.  People might look at you funny as you take time to close your eyes in the line at Burger King to re-focus your awareness, but you’ll be fine.

So, what do you think?  Can you take the challenge?