On Dimes, Twenty Dollar Bills, and Spiritual Discipline
I was at one of our house churches the other day talking to an eleven year old who asked some great questions. We were talking about the places in Scripture where Jesus tells us to “go and buy gold refined by fire,” and his story where he tells us to “go and buy oil.” All of these are places that tell us go and develop a close relationship with Christ.
He was having a hard time understanding those concepts, so I told him this story:
“Imagine that your dad made you a deal. Every time you brought your dad a dime, your dad responded by giving you $20.00. Would you take your dad up on that deal?”
He shook his head yes.
“I bet you’d do it a lot, wouldn’t you?
He shook his head again.
“I bet you would. You’d do it until you became rich. Well that’s what its like with Jesus. We go and bring our small hearts to Jesus and ask him to reveal himself to us. We call this prayer. He responds by showing up and showing himself to us in ways that grow our hearts and make us wealthy in God, because that is real wealth — knowing God.”
Dallas Willard famously said, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.” We have to make the effort to show up and pray. We have to show up to encounter him. We bring our dime. When we do, God takes our ten cent prayers and brings $20 encounters and $20 answers to the things we ask for. This is grace.
This morning I was thinking of the conversation again. I realized that I hadn’t told my young friend the whole story. See, I had told the story to him as if the first dime he brings to his dad is his. The reality is one we forget often — the first dime he gave his dad is a dime his dad gave him first. We are able to bring our hearts in prayer to meet with God because he gave us the initial desire to do so. It was him, putting in us a desire to be close to him to begin with, that allows us to begin to want to pray. You may even be feeling the tug right now to spend time with Jesus. This is also grace.
So let’s bring our dimes and trade them in. The little we bring will be transformed into so much more. Let’s also not forget who gave us the dime in the first place.
Photo Credit: Drop It On A Dime by Voldy Morton
Encountering Jesus, Organic Church, and Corporate Prayer
At the heart of Christianity is a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. This doesn’t mean that everyone who becomes a Christian has to have an experience like Paul did on the road to Damascus, but it means that everyone who is truly born again will encounter Jesus by His Spirit. Often that begins by faith, accepting the truth of the Gospel and the work of Jesus on the cross and then as we grow in faith we learn to interact with Jesus as a living being as we grow up in Him. But make no mistake, every believer (whether they feel it or not) encounters Jesus.
When I first became part of the organic church movement, there was a lot of talk about encountering Jesus. Many of those I learned from had taught us how to encounter Jesus by waiting on the Lord in silence and prayer. As I’ve been exposed to more and more parts of the house church movement, however, I’ve noticed varying degrees of emphasis on encountering Jesus in prayer, usually less. To some degree I’m sure this has to do with some who have tried to call the church away from religious prayer routines.
While I applaud leaving behind dead religious traditions, I’m often saddened by the hardness towards people who try to encounter Jesus within the organic church/house church movement. Our lives were never designed to be lived outside of a regular encounter with Jesus, so while we need to leave behind the trappings of religion that really were more like hiding than meeting Jesus, we also must position our hearts to regularly encounter Christ. Jesus tells us to do this individually in secret prayer routines where we meet the Father (see Mathew 6:5-6).
The life of the body, however, is not just the coming together of the individual lives of the believers that make it up. Christians have always believed that because of the blood of Christ they have had direct access to God themselves, personally (Hebrews 4:15-16), but they’ve also always believed that something different happens when believers come together and pray. Jesus said that He would show up in a different, more significant way when two or three believers gather together and pray. Part of the promise of Him showing up when those two or three gathering and agreeing in prayer is that He will answer their request (Matthew 18:19-20).
So this encountering of Jesus through prayer, this agreeing together, this listening and obeying Christ, must be done both individually and corporately. If we try and obey the commands of Jesus without it, we will find ourselves continually wearied and unequipped both individually and corporately, because we were never designed to live the life of Christ outside of being fueled by encounter with Him. While this must happen individually, it must certainly happen corporately. If we don’t teach our churches how to pray, we stop successive generations of disciples from learning how to pray together (we don’t pass it on) and we lose the promise Jesus gives us when we agree together on anything.
Friends, our brothers and sisters from the house church planting movements around the world almost unanimously agree that movements do not start without a groundswell of prayer. This may begin with one person, but it culminates with many, many people praying for God’s Kingdom to come to their neighborhood, city, and region. When they gather and pray in a significant way, God answers. These are the people that have put their dependency on God answering their prayers and because of that they see people healed, raised from the dead, and most importantly lives transformed by the Gospel. I believe we have much to learn from these brothers and sisters, not the least of which is their dependence on God answering their prayers.
Friends, we serve a God who desires to encounter us. He will do this both individually and corporately, but He will encounter us differently with a group than He does when we are all alone. So let’s not stop gathering together with other brothers and sisters to pray, as some are in the habit of doing, but let’s begin to gather to ask Jesus for the harvest that He desires to bring in.
He will respond.
Photo Credit: Small Group Prayer by Portland Seminary H
Inspiration Avenue 2017 06 11
Welcome to Inspiration Avenue!
My conviction is that our generation is over-taught and under-inspired, so every week I cultivate some of the most inspiring content I can find on the internet and bring it to you. I hope you are inspired to live fully submitted to Christ and pursuing everything He purchased for you on the Cross.
Maybe this goes without saying, but I don’t expect you to agree with me about everything I post here. In fact, I expect some of the things I post will rattle your theological cages. My suggestion? Be inspired by people who aren’t perfect. Realize you won’t agree with everything I share here. Eat the chicken, spit out the bones.
So, without further ado, here are three sources of inspiration for the week:
Methods and Tools vs. Prayer and Obedience: Roger Thorman writes about his journey into simple, organic house churches on his blog, SimpleChurchJournal. This post hammers at the thought that all of our disciple making methods and strategies are useless outside of a close walk with the Lord. This is so crucial, because often we get so caught up in the methods that a relationship with Christ can get left behind.
The Phenomenonal Growth of the Salvation Army: Lex Loizides is a church historian of the revivalist variety. He spends his time at his blog Church History Review telling the stories of revivals of the past. Currently Lex is telling the story of the Salvation Army. While the whole story is powerful, I was particularly touched by the picture here of William Booth as an old man, completely eclipsed by the men and women he had raised up into ministry from the ranks of the poor and disenfranchised. May God help us all to raise up disciples that touch the nations of the Earth like He did with William and Catherine Booth.
David Ravenhill: David Ravenhill is the son of famed preacher and revivalist Leonard Ravenhill. Leonard Ravenhill was known throughout the 70’s and 80’s for calling the church away from being like the world. I recently came across a quote of David, echoing his father in many ways: “this tidal wave of deception [. . .] seeks to make self the ultimate object of our worship while reducing God to being our ultimate personal trainer. In recent years, the words “your destiny” have been preached, prophesied, and promoted throughout the Body of Christ, to the point where self has become the center and focal point of life rather than Christ and His Kingdom.” Let’s all purpose to serve Jesus and not continue to ask Jesus to serve us.
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 