Secret prayer

For the last few months, I’ve been re-reading Charles Hambrick-Stowe’s History book on Puritan devotions, The Practice of Piety. I ran across this quote-ridden paragraph today:

Regular secret prayer was not only a means of grace but also the primary and most necessary means. New Englanders continually pointed to the dire consequences of the neglect of prayer, making much of the failure, suicide, or criminal conviction of those who “never used Secret Prayer” and “frequently omitted Family Prayer too.” Thomas Shepard said that the voice of the Lord “singles a man out” and is heard by a divine and newly created “internal spirit of prayer.” The other means of grace, both public and private, were preliminary to the awakening of this ability to pray in faith. “Is it not the end of Preaching, that you may learn to pray?” John Cotton demanded. True prayer required faith, so that “a man must not fetch his prayer from his parts, as will, memory, understanding, or ability, but from the Spirit, who is the prayer-maker.” In fact, the English Puritan John Preston defined prayer as “the voice of God’s own Spirit, that is, such as arise from the regenerate part which is within us, which is quickened and enlarged to pray from the immediate help of the Holy Ghost.”

Forgetting to Evangelize

I am beginning to think that the solution to this sort of problem is an increase in the general sort of piety that we are usually to cynical to stand. If the Gospel, particularly my own awareness of my own sin and my own need for a redeemer, happens to get mentioned in most every conversation, everything that follows in the way of evangelism is completely natural. CJ Mahaney, for instance, manages to lay the whole thing open simply by answering “Better than I deserve” whenever somebody asks how he’s doing.

Exhortation

This fallen world affects all creatures,
Saint and sinner, with the bread
Of hard affliction—mournful soul-ache,
Unjust judgment, creeping dread.

But the God of all creation
Has engineered a hidden path
Wherein the sweetest, purest pleasures
In affliction may be had.

The wise are found in those dark mine shafts
Sifting ore from worthless slag,
While the torrents of life’s hardships
Fall like oil upon their heads.

And the key into this pathway
Where God’s favorites know to hide
Is the simple abjuration
Of any form of human pride. Continue reading “Exhortation”

God’s Provision

As most of you know, I have been looking for full time employment since I graduated with my Masters in Public Health January of 2007. Since that time I have been a teacher, a CNA, an office assistant and most importantly a mom for my baby Bug. We have moved states twice searching for employment for both myself and for KB. We have prayed, discussed educational options, and continued seeking the Lord’s will for our lives.

Back in August, when we were moving to TN, I had put in an application for state employment as a child case manager. A couple of weeks later, the state’s application website was taken offline for upgrades and I was unable to apply for any other state jobs. Thinking that that door had been closed, I looked elsewhere for employment. About two weeks ago, I received a letter in the mail from the state requesting an interview for the case manager position. I interviewed and began a wait that would either end in a phone call offering the position or a letter declining my application. I was under the impression that if I was to be offered a position that I would receive a phone call within a week and the letter by Christmas. Needless to say, I was looking for the letter by this point, but God apparently had other plans.

I received the phone call this morning and accepted. My start date for orientation and the beginning of my training will be January 16th. I know that this will be a difficult job, but I’m really excited to be able to served the Lord and the families that I will be coming in contact with. Thank you all so much for your faithful prayers this whole time. We still have several decisions to make, especially in the realm of KB’s interest in going back to school for a Master’s in Accounting and childcare for D. We have some childcare options available, I just have to hash things out still.

May you all have a blessings filled Christmas and always remember that even though Christ came as a baby, he became a man to reconcile us to the Father. His gift of grace is always sufficient but he is also a God who loves to take care of His children’s needs and He is always faithful.

Thought to Ponder

From my reading this morning:

God’s people tend to suffer a lot of false guilt over sins they have already confessed and received forgiveness for. The big ones and the minor ones. Even attitudes. We long to live lives that are beyond reproach. We want to be perfect parents, perfect children, perfect friends, perfect Christians, perfect people. But we are not always empathetic and forgiving. We have trouble demonstrating unconditional love. We are not always kind. Sometimes we even have temper tantrums. And sometimes we are blanketed by depression.



Why do we have all the struggle? Why is it so difficult to see ourselves as God sees us — on the one hand, sinners who cannot be good enough to please him; on the other hand, his beloved children, forgiven and restored? Once reason, as we’ve discovered, is that we’re often preoccupied with the opinions of other people rather than with God’s. We’ve adopted this world’s standards. We judge ourselves and others by those standards, forgetting all that the Father has to say about us.


But as we begin to recognize and accept our standing in God’s value system, we can be free from the struggle for self esteem, the maneuvers to bolster our egos, the fight for our place in the pecking order. Freedom will come when our views of ourselves don’t depend on the looks, physique, or intelligence we inherited, the family we were born into, the size of our bank account, or even how others treat us. A general principle is: When you feel comfortable about yourself, about who you are and what you have, you can direct your focus away from yourself and toward others.


Norma Kvindlog and Ester Lindgren Anderson (From Beyond Me)

Emasculate the course

Andrei Toom:

To survive against competition every university and every college has to pretend that it gives something modern, advanced and immediately marketable. But is it possible to give advanced courses to students who are ignorant in elementary mathematics? Of course not. What to do? Very simple! Emasculate the course by excluding everything non-trivial, reduce the students’ task to applying ready-made recipes without understanding—and you will survive and succeed. Your pretensions that you teach something advanced will allow the students to pretend that they are educated, and this will allow the firms and departments that hire them to pretend that they hire educated people. But at some point this chain of pretensions will have to break.

Toom is talking here about his frustrations in teaching “Business Calculus” to college students, but the curious thing is that his remarks could just as easily be said about teaching grammar to middle school students.

Other articles by Andrei Toom can be found here.

Assurance

John H at Confessing Evangelical gives us more proof that the Pope is a closet evangelical. Or perhaps, not so closet.

At the same time, I’m starting to have afterthoughts about my agreement with John on the Lutheran understanding of assurance. The Lutheran emphasis has always been on the word preached with authority. The gospel has it’s effect as it is preached, and the Christian can have confidence in his salvation because it has been proclaimed to him personally by Jesus Christ, via the preacher. In the standard Lutheran liturgy, there is a time for public confession of sin, after which the minister proclaims, “your sins are forgiven.” And they are, because Jesus Christ has said so. In the same way, doubts about true conversion can be allayed with “But I’m baptized!” or even, “I am baptized! So there!”

And there’s an element of truth to it – particularly when compared to a Catholic understanding that says, “unless you see me putting my own effort into it as well, it didn’t take.” In other words, the Catholic understanding is typically that sanctification is an intrinsic part of justification, to the point that assurance is withheld against the collateral of the ongoing fruit of a Christ-like life. The Lutheran balks and says no, the word of God preached is always effective. The preacher says I have been buried in Christ and raised with him, and so I have been. The word of God does not fail. I am a Christian.

But I’m starting to veer toward a more Calvinistic perspective, which is more biblical, I think. Continue reading “Assurance”

The Title Says it All

So my dad was offered several free magazine subscriptions that he had basically already paid for so he decided to get some random titles that looked like they might be interesting. One of the magazines he is having sent to the house is called Working Mother.

Sounds interesting right? Well, when the first one arrived I flipped through it and found it to be both intriguing and appalling at the same time. This second issue is no different.

On the cover there is a perfectly coiffed platinum blonde mother and her two platinum blond children. One boy and one girl of course and they look to be about 7 and 10. Oh, and by the way, the Papa is missing in the photo because this is about the working mother.

In the past year or so, I have come to the conclusion that you cannot be a mom and a career woman and be satisfied with your life in both arenas. You can either be the best mom or be the best at your career. It takes more than 40 hours a week to do either them exceptionally and there aren’t enough hours in the week (unless you intend not to sleep and no one can go full throttle on no sleep for long).

Now I’m not saying that a mom can’t work. In fact, there are a lot of women who enjoy their jobs and being a mom. And there are lots of women who have jobs they might not like so much but have them because of financial constraints on the family. What I am saying is that the focus and time allotment to really succeed cannot be divided between two objectives: motherhood and careerhood.

The table of contents of Working Mother really hits this dilemma on the head, or should I say the order in which articles are clumped exemplify the point. First up are the articles focused on You, then Work, and finally Family.

The main problem is found in the first focus: you. When we focus on ourselves everything else does come secondarily and even tertiarily. But I believe that our positions in which we serve others (family and church) suffer the most. Even careers don’ suffer as much because ultimately a career is also self-focused and about how I can get ahead, make more money, attain esteem, etc.