Tuesday, January 11

Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony…. I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears. My eyes grow weak with sorrow; they fail because of all my foes. Psalm 6:2, 6-7

My younger brother Joe was both fearless and extremely curious as a child – which, of course, is a dangerous combination! When he was about four years old (I was about six) we were playing on the old rusty swing set in our back yard when he became fascinated with the metal mechanism that allowed the see-saw to rock back and forth. He climbed up on the A-frame of the swing set and watched the mechanism intently – noticing that each time the see-saw swung a small round hole opened up momentarily in the mechanism before closing again. He also noticed that the hole looked just big enough for a finger to fit in. So, you guessed it, he timed up the mechanism’s movement and just as the opening appeared he stuck his finger right into it. The next sound I heard was the cry of pain because the mechanism ripped his fingernail right off and nearly cut the tip of his finger off.

We know that pain is part of the human experience. In the book of Job we read, “Man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward.” (Job 5:7) We also know that some of our pain is self-inflicted – like when a four-year old sticks his finger in a swing set mechanism – or when a full grown adult chooses to drive too fast, or drink too much or spend too much. But it is also true that some of our pain is undeserved and seems to come out of nowhere for no reason. I read in the newspaper the other day that over a million Haitians are still living in tent villages because of the earthquake that hit their small island over a year ago. They did nothing to deserve or cause that earthquake – yet they still suffer today.

Whether our pain is self inflicted or underserved – it still hurts. And the experience of pain can lead us to feel alone and to feel that God has abandoned us. In Psalm 22 David cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?” David knows, of course, that God has not gone anywhere – and the God has not somehow managed to forget his name – yet the pain he is experiencing creates a very real and deep sense of loneliness.

So what does he do? What does he pray? David is honest with God. He doesn’t pray a cute, churchy-sounding prayer. He doesn’t try to impress God with his theological understanding. He simply blurts out what he is feeling – he opens his heart and bleeds all over the page.

And this is prayer! Prayer is a relationship with God, and there is no real relationship without honesty. Of course, prayer is also worship and listening and intercession for others; prayer is obedience and discipline; prayer is, at its heart, and experience of God himself – but prayer begins with honesty.

Have you been honest with God today?

Brian Coffey

Monday, January 10

Psalm 22:1-5

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent.

Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the praise of Israel.

In you our fathers put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them.

They cried to you and were saved; in you they trusted and were not disappointed.

Have you ever stopped to think about how many different emotions you might feel in a given day? Love, joy, frustration, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, anxiety – can all be swirling in our hearts at any moment in time. I think I felt most of  those emotions just watching the Bears/Packers game last Sunday afternoon!

We are emotional creatures, the Bible says, created in the image of an emotional God. And at the intersection of human emotion and the experience of God is the great gift of prayer.

A couple of months ago we conducted an “FBCG prayer survey” and over 1200 people turned in responses to a number of questions about their personal experience and practice of prayer. We have begun to sift through the pile of data the survey produced and believe that there will definitely be some significant “take-aways” that result!

We have learned, for example, that just over 60% of women and just under 40% of men say that prayer is “very important” to them – which seems to indicate many of us (especially us guys!) can grow with regard to our understanding and experience of prayer. The survey results seem to show that prayer becomes both more important and more satisfying the older we get – which seems to make sense as we grow more mature in both life and faith. We have learned that while many of us express our emotions when we pray – that women and people in their 20’s are more expressive than the rest of us. And there seems to be a correlation between the expression of emotion in prayer with the experience of God in prayer.

Most of us recognize these words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as among the last things Jesus said as he was being crucified. But it’s important to see that Jesus was quoting from Psalm 22! Jesus was experiencing not only the brutal physical pain of the cross – but also the spiritual pain of taking on himself the sins of the world – and thus the rejection of his Father in heaven. Jesus, therefore, becomes a model for us not only in expressing painful emotion in prayer but also in using the Psalms as a model for our own prayers.

I have often encouraged those going through extremely difficult life situations to read through the Book of Psalms thoughtfully and prayerfully until they find a Psalm that expresses what they are feeling – then to dwell on that Psalm and make it their own expression of prayer to God. I can say that because the full range of human emotions can be found right there in the Book of Psalms – expressed with surprising and sometimes brutal honesty.

Did you know you can be honest with God?

Did you know he is not afraid of your emotions – even if they are negative?

Did you know that prayer can be sad, or angry, or joyful, or even full of doubt?

Psalm 22 introduces us to the intersection of pain and prayer. This expression of personal suffering and loneliness comes to us from the life of David; was used by Jesus himself in prayer; and can put words to the anguish of our own hearts as well. While I hope that you do not need to pray these words today – I also hope that when that time comes – you will know that God is always willing to hear your cry of pain.

Brian Coffey

Friday, January 7

Friday 

Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me, though they had seen what I did.  For forty years I was angry with that generation; I said,  “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways.”  So I declared on oath in my anger,  “They shall never enter my rest.”   - Psalm 95:6-11

We have been looking at the meaning of worship from the Psalms.  In particular, we have looked at Psalm 95 as an invitation to worship God with our whole lives.  The passage above includes the final verses of Psalm 95, and I have to admit that it is a little bit of a strange ending to a Psalm that is supposed to be teaching us to worship.  What is all this about God getting angry and declaring oaths against people?

It might sound like an odd ending, but there is a very important lesson for us here and it is actually not at all out of place in a Psalm about worship.  First, notice the critical phrase “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts”.  This is

God telling us what it is that what he wants in worship, what makes worship true worship - that today we would listen to his voice!  That is what he wants. He wants us to heed his voice not just gather together.  It is fine for people to come to a worship service, but it is of little real value if all we do is sit/stand and nod while our thoughts are drifting elsewhere. The central fact of worship is to listen to the word of God, to hear the voice of God.

The key to understanding this part of the Psalm is to know a little about that part of Israel’s history that this referred to here. It occurred shortly after the Israelites had come through the Red Sea and had journeyed only a week or two into the wilderness. They came to a place where there was no water, they had hardly had time to become very thirsty when the leaders of the people came to Moses and began to complain. "What are you doing? Leading us out into this wilderness to perish? Where is this God that is supposed to be taking care of us? Why hasn't he provided water for us?" They demanded that God prove himself again. This is the point God is making in Psalm 95. They put him to the test. They said, "Where is this God? If there really is a God who loves us and takes care of us, why doesn't he supply our need?"

Their hearts were set on the wrong things. Read the account and you can see what he meant. This was a generation that actually wanted to go back to Egypt (you know, Egypt, where they were slaves!). They wanted to return to Egypt and kept longing for the melons, the leeks, garlic, and onions of Egypt. Why would they want onions, leeks, and garlic?  I don't know!  The point is they thought only of their bellies, their appetites and desires, and God says therefore their hearts were wrong.

That is what it means to harden your heart. It indicates that you have not learned anything from God.  This is the problem God has with us. I think it must upset God that people can come week after week after week and hear stirring songs of praise, and messages from His word, and stories of what he is doing in many lives and see the evident change that has come to many and the release and freedom he is bringing about in so many hearts, and still, the minute anything goes wrong with them they are ready to fall apart and forget God.

One of the key aspects of worship is to learn how to rest in God.  Rest means to depend upon God's activity and not ours.  Hebrews defines it, "he that has entered into rest has ceased from his own works" (Hebrews 4:10).  That is what rest is.  It is really mental health, peace of heart, peace of mind, a sense of security in God.  That is what God wants for you and me.  He wants us to be secure, to be able to cope with whatever may come in our lives.  This kind of rest will only come to us as we hear His voice.  There is no other way. There is no alternative path.  There is no drug you can take that will give you rest.  There is no pursuit you can follow, no book you can read, no practice you can undertake, that will bring you true peace of heart and mind.  There is simply no alternative; you cannot come into His rest if you will not hearken to His word.

Father, help us to hear your voice as we worship.  Keep us from hardening our hearts against you.  Teach us by your Spirit to learn to rest in you – Amen.

Thursday, January 6

Thursday

Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.  Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song.  For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods.  In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him.  The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.  Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.     – Psalm 95:1-7

The heart of this Psalm is an invitation to worship.  The Psalmist makes several different appeals for God’s people to come and worship Him.  Each appeal (there are at least 3 that I see in this Psalm) is to a different aspect of the individual and taken all together, these three appeals tell us something very important about the nature of Christian worship.   

The first appeal is right there in the very first verse.  Notice the phrases; “sing for joy”, and “shout aloud”.  This is an emotional appeal.  The Psalmist is telling us to worship God through feeling and emotion.  Of course, we should feel something when we come to worship our God.  If you can sing of God’s incredible power, creativity love, grace, justice, mercy, compassion, righteousness, kindness and forgiveness without feeling any sense of joy or awe, then you might be able to carry a tune, but you are not worshiping!

The second appeal comes in the very next verse.  Notice how the Psalmist says, “For the LORD is…” and then goes on to list just who God is and what He has done.  This is a rational appeal, it is an appeal to our reason.  In effect, the Psalmist says, look around you, see what God has done, reflect on the beauty of creation and the wonder of life, think about these things, and see if you are not moved to worship the one who is responsible for it all.  This means that thinking, as well as feeling, are a part of what it means to worship.  You may go to a worship service and be deeply moved by the power of the music.  You can feel inspired and uplifted, but if your mind is not engaged and directed toward the Almighty God, then you are not really worshipping, you are just having an emotional experience.

The third appeal is found in the final sentence of this passage. The Psalmist calls us to come and bow down, to kneel before God.  Kneeling and bowing the head were signs of humility and reverence.  It requires an intentional decision to kneel, you must choose to bow before God.  The appeal here is not just to feel and think, but to do something in response.  This is an appeal to our will.  True worship must impact more that our heads and our hearts, it must change our lives – it must impact the way that we live.  You can have an emotional experience, you can even think heavenly thoughts, but if your life is not impacted at all by what you think or feel, then you are not worshipping God!

Do you see how all-encompassing worship is for the Christian?  God wants all of us; heart, head and body.  This is a challenging call!  Many churches and individuals overemphasize one aspect of worship to exclusion of the others.  There are some that are all feeling and emotion when it comes to worship, but they are not grounded in the truth and there is no engagement of the mind for God.  There are others who have relegated worship to merely good theology or sound doctrine, but it is devoid of life and the Spirit.  There are even those who think the only way to truly worship God is to be an activist, to get out and do something for Him.  But too often these activists lose sight of why they are doing what they are doing and who they are doing it for.

I think we all have a kind of natural worship temperament.  We kind of have a natural bent toward one of these three appeals.  This is a good thing, I believe it is even a God-given thing.  My natural bent is the rational approach.  I love to read and study and think about God.  However, this does not mean that I get a pass on the other aspects of who I am.  My worship is incomplete and unhealthy, and displeasing to God if I never engage my heart and if it does not translate into my everyday life. 

What about you?  What is your worship temperament?  Are you more of a thinker, feeler, or doer when it comes to worshiping God?  Which of the three appeals is most difficult for you?  In which area do you struggle to engage with God?  Take a few moments to thank God for the temperament He has given you and ask Him to help you learn to worship you with all of who you are.

Wednesday, January 5

Wednesday

Praise the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens.  Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness.  Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with tambourine and dancing, praise him with the strings and flute, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals.  Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD.  – Psalm 150

This is the last of the Psalms.  Notice how many times you see the word “praise” in this Psalm, 13 times in 6 verses.  In fact, this word is used over 200 times in the book of Psalms.  It is no accident that the final phrase of the final Psalm is “Praise the LORD.”  Praise is the fundamental purpose for why the Psalms were written.  Halal is a primary Hebrew root word for praise. Our word "hallelujah" comes from this base word. It means "to be clear, to shine, to boast of, to rave about, celebrate, to be clamorously foolish."  Praise is at the heart of the Christian life; it is what we were made to do, and what we will do for all eternity!  Praise can be distinguished from worship in that worship is something that encompasses all of our life and our total being, while praise is a specific act we engage in.

C.S. Lewis once commented that when he first began to believe in God, he used to struggle with the idea of a God who is always telling his people to praise him and demanding praise from his creation.  Lewis said he felt that if God was really so great, then He wouldn’t need to be praised.  After all, nobody likes to be around a person who continually needs to be praised.  Lewis even remarked that he couldn’t stomach the idea of a God who seemed to be saying, “what I want most is to be told how great and wonderful I am.”  But Lewis admits that he missed something critical about the nature of what it means to praise.  The following excerpt from his book Reflections on the Psalms has been a great help to me; take a few moments to read it carefully.

But the most obvious fact about praise-whether of God or any thing-strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise-lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game-praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least…I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: "Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?" The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. (C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, pp. 93-95)

The basic idea is that God tells us to praise Him more for our sake than for His!  In commanding us to praise and glorify Him, God is actually inviting us to enjoy Him!  We delight to praise what we enjoy – Do you enjoy God?  Do you want to?

Then praise Him!

Tuesday, January 4

Tuesday

All of the Psalms are designed to teach us to do one thing - to worship. The Psalms reflect every human emotion, but they do so in a distinct and important way: they are emotions seen in relationship to God. Every Psalm is written in the presence of God. This book, therefore, teaches us how to be honest before God.

If you have a problem, tell God about it. Don't hide it. Don't cover it up.  Don’t pretend that it (whatever it is) isn’t bothering you. Especially, don't get pious and sanctimonious and try to smooth it over with religious speech.  When you stop and think about it, it is really ridiculous for us to think that we can hide our true feelings from God.  Who do we think we are fooling?  Do we really think that God would rather have us put on a good religious face and pretend to be happy and joyful in His presence when we are really feeling discouraged or fearful?  If you are angry with God, say so. If you are upset about something he has done, tell him so. If you are resentful, bring it out. If you are happy and glad, express that too. That is what worship is – an honest heart.  In fact, you can actually worship God better shaking your fist at Him than by offering a bunch of religious speech that you do not really mean.  As Jesus said to the woman at the well in Samaria, "The true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth." (John 4:23)

God is looking for that kind of worshiper. And as you learn to worship in Spirit and truth, you will discover a new source of strength. If you can be honest before God, even about those troublesome problems and even in the midst of bad moods and attitudes, you will gradually find His grace answering your questions and meeting your needs.  As we said earlier, all Psalms are designed to teach us to worship.  But there were a few Psalms that were at the very center of the corporate worship of God’s people in the Old Testament. 

The 95^th Psalm is one of a series of psalms which the Israelites sang together as they went up to the temple in Jerusalem to worship (these Psalms are often referred to as the “Psalms of Ascent”).  This series begins with the 93^rd and concludes with the 100^th Psalm. Each of these is a demonstration and exhortation on how to worship. They are not only magnificent poetry but they are also instructions on what worship is and how it is to be done.

Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.  Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song.  For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods.  In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him.  The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.  Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.     – Psalm 95:1-7

Do you see what the Psalmist is doing?  He is giving the basic reasons why everyone should worship God.  They apply not only to those of us who are believers but to all men, whether they acknowledge it or not.  Each man has a responsibility to praise God, for all are creatures of his hands.  Have you ever considered that worship is a debt that you owe to God?  In the first chapter of Romans the Apostle Paul points out that one of the charges God brings against men is that  “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (Romans 1:21)  They did not care to recognize their relationship to him. 

The truth is that sometimes I just don’t feel like worshipping God.  I can be self-absorbed and prideful to the point that I actually think my life is all about me.  I am too easily distracted and too often forgetful of God.  The Psalmist calls us away from focusing on ourselves, and calls us to consider who God is, what He has done, and who we are in relationship to Him.  This is the foundation of our worship – not our needs or our desires, but the character and nature of our God!

You cannot focus your mind & heart on Him while you are consumed with yourself.  What are you worried about?  What are you stressed about?  What are you angry about?  What are you afraid of?  What do you obsess over?  What are you confused about?  What are you trying in vain to control?  Whatever it is, tell God about it (hint – He already knows), then as you begin to worship, let Him shift the focus of your heart from you to Him!

Monday, January 3

Monday

Psalm 6:9 - The LORD has heard my cry for mercy; the LORD accepts my prayer. 

Psalm 17:6 - I call on you, O God, for you will answer me; give ear to me and hear my prayer.

Psalm 54:2 - Hear my prayer, O God; listen to the words of my mouth.

Psalm 65:2 - O you who hear prayer, to you all men will come.

Psalm 66:19-20 - but God has surely listened and heard my voice in prayer.

Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!

Psalm 88:13 - But I cry to you for help, O LORD; in the morning my prayer comes before you.

Psalm 141:2 - May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice.

This week we began a new sermon series called “Honest to God; the language of prayer”.  We also begin a new series of “10 Minutes with God” devotions that will be centered on prayer in the Psalms.  This series is focused on growing in our practice and experience of prayer through a study of some of the key Psalms in the Bible.  The Psalms have historically been the place God’s people have gone to learn how to pray.  They are in fact the prayerbook of the Bible in that they contain a record of the prayers and praises of God’s people. 

One of my favorite little books on the Psalms was written by the German theologian and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called Prayerbook of the Bible; An Introduction to the Psalms.  In this book, Bonhoeffer calls the Psalms “the great school of prayer”, and he asserts that we humans don’t really know how to pray. When left to our own devices we can’t find the words of true prayer. We must join the disciples in asking Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray!” (Luke11:1).  Sin has permeated our whole being, even to the point of affecting our ability to discern what we really need. Bonhoeffer writes, “It is not just that for which we ourselves want to pray that is important, but that for which God wants us to pray. Not the poverty of our heart, but the richness of God’s word, ought to determine our prayer” (p.157).

We are not the best judges of what we need to pray for. God tells us what we need and tells us how to begin to align our prayers with what God wants us to need. This is why Bonhoeffer turns us to the Psalms. In the Psalms we learn the language of prayer. There is a discipline to the practice of prayer. It does not come easy. Why would we expect learning to talk with God would be easier than learning to drive. Learning to drive took me days of sitting at the wheel with my dad sitting by my side graciously showing how not to stall every time I let out the clutch (remember manual transmissions?).  I stalled all the time at first, but slowly I started getting the hang of it. This is what Bonhoeffer means when he talks about the Psalms as “the school of prayer.”

His analogy is better than mine:

The child learns to speak because the parent speaks to the child. The child learns the language of the parent. So we learn to speak to God because God has spoken and speaks to us. In the language of the Father in heaven God’s children learn to speak with God. Repeating God’s own words, we begin to pray to God. We ought to speak to God, and God wishes to hear us, not in the false and confused language of our heart but in the clear and pure language that God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ.

We learn to speak by repeating God’s words to us and for us. The Psalms are God’s gracious gift to us. Through their words we learn how to speak the language of God back to God. We submit our self-centeredness to God and allow him to shape our desires. 

May we all learn how to better speak and listen to our Father in this new year! 

Jeff Frazier