Month: July 2020

How Not To Pray

What are some things to avoid in prayer? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Sometimes, I hate public prayer at a church service. I say this as someone who has to do it as well. You never really feel genuine doing it. You know people are watching you to see what you have to say. It’s awkard.

Then there are the people who do these public prayers and they go on and on and on. You can say they’re real men of Jesus, but most of us just find them annoying. I find it interesting that the Lord’s prayer can really be said in under a minute. When the closing prayer starts to go longer than the sermon itself, we have a problem.

Jesus had a few statements about things like this. He never said to not pray in public as He sometimes did this as well, but He did say to watch your motives again. Some people do make a show of public prayers. They pray showing off their eloquence and their devotion to God, which if that is what you’re doing, we can call your devotion into question. Let’s look at verses 5-8 of Matthew 6.

5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

One of the rules for giving a sermon is to KISS. It has two meanings. “Keep it simple, stupid” and “Keep it short, stupid.” Prayer is done to talk to God. It’s not done to show others how awesome you are.

This is why also your devotion is not meant to be measured necessarily by how long you pray. I know some people who are true prayer warriors and they can pray for a long time. I’m not one of them. I know I need to work on that. Those like me need to start simple as well. Don’t say you’re going to build up prayer and then say you’re going to start with an hour a day. You’ll burn out and give up. If anything, start small. Maybe 3-5 minutes even.

Jesus also tells us our Father knows what we need before we ask. If so, why do we ask? We ask not to make something known, but to show that we are realizing our trust and dependence.

One of the problems I have with many prayer studies is they treat prayer as if the only goal is to get something. It also treats God as if He is obligated to answer a prayer. Many of us were devoutly praying for the healing of Nabeel Qureshi. It never came. Does that prove God doesn’t exist or that God doesn’t or didn’t love Nabeel? Not at all. It just shows for whatever reason we don’t understand, God chose not to heal.

It’s also too easy for prayer to become just a wish list. There’s not enough time spent in thanksgiving and adoration. I remember J.P. Moreland once saying he thinks in a worship service, the music should come after the sermon. Why? Because then we have heard the Scripture and the good news and we are giving thanks and celebrating about what we have heard.

Yet keep in mind, Jesus still points us to the reward. Our true reward is from our Father in heaven. It’s not in the praise and adoration of men. It’s in the approval of our Father. That is the praise we are to have.

Prayer is something important and we need to work on it, but one of the first things to do is to learn what not to do.

Let’s try to get it right.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Give In Secret

How should we give? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In Jesus’s day, people wanted to get honor. To some extent, we all want this today, but honor is not the driving force that it used to be. In some ways, I think it is, but we don’t recognize it. If you’re on social media, you want your posts to have likes and shares. You want to have followers on Twitter. You want subscribers and views on YouTube. High school can often just be a big popularity contest and truly, high school never ends.

Jesus talks about the proper method of giving though.

2 “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Something that can irk me is when a company makes an advertisement and in the advertisement, they talk about how much they are giving to help something, which has been something common during this pandemic. Even more bothersome to me is when the giving is used to encourage people to get the product. “If you give to us, we will donate so much to charity.”

It’s worth pointing out though that Jesus doesn’t condemn giving for the sake of honor. However, He points us to the true honor. It is the honor of the Father that we are seeking. God sees what we do in secret and He will reward us for what we do. We often think that seeking something for yourself is bad. It’s not. It’s how and why. Jesus tells us to seek the honor that comes from God.

This isn’t to say that your giving can never be shown publicly. It can be. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. However, the goal of our giving should not be so people will just think how awesome we are. It should be for the kingdom of God and the good of the other person.

In Jesus’s day, the Pharisees would publicly proclaim when they were given. They did get their reward in full right there. They got the praise of people around them. Jesus wants us to seek the higher praise. This is the praise of God. The praise of people is temporary and will fade. The praise of God lasts forever.

And really, that’s something we need to keep in mind. We focus so much on temporary things and lose sight of eternal things. We will be around God forever and forever experience how we dealt with Him. If we lived our lives in love of Him, we will live our eternity that way. If we lived lives of hating Him, we will live forever that way too. Each of us is building an eternal dwelling in some sense and when we get to eternity, we will have the dwelling we built.

Build well.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Are God’s Methods Limited?

Do we have a problem often with seeing how God works? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I play Question of the Day everyday on my Tap. Today, there was a question about Hippocrates. After the question, there’s a brief discussion giving the player more information about the question.

One thing said was that Hippocrates tried to look for natural causes of disease and natural treatments. Those were usually attributed to the divine and the work of the gods. Hippocrates was a dissenter in this and became the father of medicine.

Whether that is true or not, I cannot say, but it occurred to me that too often we have an idea on how God works and think that if God works, He must work in such and such a way. It is either God does a direct miracle or God has no involvement at all. Thus, if someone gets sick, if we find a “natural” explanation, then God wasn’t involved.

Dan Barker told a story of driving with someone once, I think a brother, who was trying to convince him of God’s existence and he pointed to the mountains and the wonder of the mountains and said, “Doesn’t that show you the wonder of God?” This is a very valid argument. I suspect many people are skeptical of atheistic theories because of the beauty and grandeur of the universe.

Barker goes on to talk some about plate tectonics and how that produces mountains. His brother just gives an angry response. The problem was that Barker still did not really refute his brother. His brother was thinking it had to be a pure fiat creation. Barker was saying “If I find a natural explanation, then that proves God isn’t needed.” Both are wrong.

To be sure, this doesn’t mean that God exists and it doesn’t mean that He doesn’t. It means this is a poor argument. If God is real, why does He have to work through a means of fiat creation? Could God not work through a natural process and use that to create mountains?

This happens often in debates about creation and evolution. Many Christians think if God created everything, He had to do it through a fiat process. Many atheists meanwhile think that if a naturalistic process can be found for bringing about living organisms, then God is out of a job. Both of them are doing God of the gaps thinking. It could be God exists and created fiat. It could be God does not exist and evolution brought living organisms about. It could be that God exists and created through evolution.

Another example is something like the parting of the Red Sea. Now some miracles are most certainly done fiat, but let’s consider this one in Exodus. For argument’s sake, we’ll take the event as historical. It could be that the parting of the seas is a natural event in that that happens when a really strong wind comes through. What would be the miracle here? It would be the miracle that it happened when it happened.

This can apply in other areas too. I remember when Michael Jackson died, there was a story going around about his ghost being at the Neverland Ranch based on a shadow seen moving across the wall. There was a news story done that showed a natural explanation for it and then said, “Therefore, we have shown there was no ghost.”

Do I think there was a ghost? No. Does that mean that the news story is right though? Not at all. It could be their explanation works and that the ghost of Michael Jackson is still at Neverland Ranch. It could even be their story is true and there is still such a ghost. Again, I remain highly skeptical, but showing one explanation does not prove another is automatically false.

So when it comes to medicine, God could use a sickness of some kind as a punishment. It could just be the way the universe works at times. We don’t know. Any sickness can be a good chance for self-exploration and seeing how we are living, but it doesn’t necessitate that we are being judged. I think it’s quite dangerous for Christians to speak for God when it comes to sickness and natural disasters as if they’re a prophet. We had one such prophet (And more than a prophet) in Luke 13 and I don’t think we’re going to top Him.

Theists and atheists too often are talking past each other because both have an idea that if God exists, He must work in such and such a way. Odds are God works in ways that we do not fathom. Limit how He works and both are prone to missing how He is working.

In Christ,
Nick Peters