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How to Pray Before the Work-Day

Matthew Henry gives some great suggestions for how to start off the day in prayer for your work and family. Quotes are taken from Daily Communion with God: How to Make the Most of Each Day.

1) Pray for your family:

We have families to look after, it may be, and to provide for, and are in care to do well for them; let us then every morning by prayer commit them to God, put them under the conduct and government of his grace, and then we effectually put them under the care and protection of his providence. Holy Job rose up early in the morning to offer burnt-offerings for his children, and we should do so to offer up prayers and supplications for them, according to the number of them all (Job 1:5) (Kindle Loc. 636).

2) Pray for your work

a) for wisdom, for success, for God’s blessing and presence:

We are going about the business of our callings perhaps, let us look up to God in the first place for wisdom and grace to manage them well, in the fear of God, and to abide with him in them; and then we may in faith beg of him to prosper and succeed us in them, to strengthen us for the services of them, to support us under the fatigues of them, to direct the designs of them, and to give us comfort in the gains of them. We have journeys to go, it may be, let us look up to God for his presence with us, and go no whither, where we cannot in faith beg of God to go with us (Loc. 640).

b) for skill and strength:

We have a prospect perhaps of opportunities of doing or getting good, let us look up to God for a heart to every price in our hands, for skill, and will, and courage to improve it, that it may not be a price in the hand of a fool (Loc. 645).

c) for deliverance from temptations particular to that day:

Every day has its temptations too, some perhaps we foresee, but there may be many more that we think not of, and are therefore concerned to be earnest with God, that we may not be led into any temptation, but guarded against every one; that whatever company we come into, we may have wisdom to do good, and no hurt to them; and to get good, and no hurt by them (Loc. 646).

d) for God’s general grace to carry us through the difficulties of the day:

We know not what a day may bring forth; little think in the morning what tidings we may hear, and what events may befall us before night, and should therefore beg of God, grace to carry us through the duties and difficulties which we do not foresee, as well as those which we do; that in order to our standing complete in all the will of God, as the day is, so the strength may be (Loc. 650).

Your Name at the Top of the Page

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a ‘killing.’ They are interested in being a writer, not in writing. They are interested in seeing their names at the top of something printed, it matters not what. And they seem to feel that this can be accomplished by learning certain things about working habits and about markets and about what subjects are currently acceptable.

-Flannery O’Connor, The Nature and Aim of Fiction, from Mystery and Manners, p.64

I found a lot of Ms. O’Connor’s points to be applicable to preaching and preachers as well. This is only the first example. Everybody wants a paycheck; not everybody wants to work. Everybody wants notoriety; not everybody wants to take notes. Everybody wants a gimmick. Everybody wants to figure out the market and opt for the easy thing that evokes some sort of reaction.

I’m reading nothing these days on the internet other than tirades – from both sides – about a trans on a magazine cover. That’s way too easy. Write something that will change people’s lives. Write something that will make people think. But, wait, that would actually take some hard work.

I say this as a note to self, really.

Lost In Your Profession

Martyn Lloyd-Jones was speaking to a group of medical doctors, but this thought applies equally well to a good number of professions and professionals, not just to doctors (and grocers):

Somewhere in Pembrokeshire a tombstone is said to bear the inscription ‘John Jones, born a man, died a grocer.’ There are many whom I have had the privilege of meeting, whose tombstone might well bear the grim epitaph: ‘…born a man, died a doctor’! The greatest danger which confronts the medical man is that he may become lost in his profession…

Quoted in Iain Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith, 1939-1981, p. 335

The Doctor wasn’t too lost in his profession to heed the call to gospel ministry. And he wasn’t too lost in the gospel ministry to heed the call to be a husband and a father. What you do does not define you. What you are defines you, and what you do should flow out of that. There is a great danger in taking your identity from what you do rather than what Christ has done for you, and thus what you are in him.

Recent Reading: Leaf by Niggle, by J.R.R. Tolkien

I give you my disclaimer up front – this is not even close to a review or analysis. It is purely devotional. If you can handle that, then, by all means, proceed.
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I read this story a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. I didn’t take the time to reflect on it at that point. Recently, my 7-year-old daughter has been boldly stating that she wants to be an artist, and so, I thought this might be a good story to read together. And so we did.

I understood after my first reading that this story was somewhat autobiographical. Tolkien admitted as much. In some sense it is a fictional, imaginative account of his own insecurities and hopes. But, as it happened, the very night I began reading the little book with my daughter, I listened to a talk given by Tim Keller at a recent Gospel Coalition event. The talk (HERE) is entitled Redefining Work.

During the talk, Keller uses Leaf by Niggle as an illustration of a point he is making about work. He essentially says (I’m paraphrasing), that Leaf by Niggle captures a very important principle that Christians need to understand about vocation and work: What are Christians working for? We are working for God’s glory, for the good of God’s creation, for human flourishing, and for distinct elements of existence that lead to those ends. And, here’s the kicker, we will not see any of those things fully realized in our lifetimes.

Christian lawyers work for justice, and the world remains unjust. Christian doctors, nurses, and pharmacists (and others of course) work for the health and well-being of people – all of whom eventually die. Christian business people work to provide products and services that will promote human flourishing, and ultimately those products and services become a byword along with the humans they serve. Ditch-diggers dig ditches that don’t last. Mail Carriers deliver letters that wind up in the trash. Supermarket cashiers serve in order allow hungry people to walk out of the store with food. But, nevertheless, the fact remains that said food will end up in the toilet.

If you’re just there to collect a paycheck, then who cares anyway? It doesn’t matter. ‘Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity,’ says the pundit.

Tolkien cared about his work. He had passion to run the race that was his life’s writing. But, before it was completed, he saw this: he spent most of his life writing a series of books that he wasn’t sure would ever be completed. He spent so much time working on the leaves, he feared he would never see the tree to maturity. Hence Leaf by Niggle. It is the story of an artist who never sees his great landscape to completion because of endless distractions and obsession over details.

And then, something happens, and in a new life, he finds his portrait to be a living reality. And he finds himself to be no longer a painter, but a gardener. Along with the aid of his gardening neighbor, whom he failed to appreciate in his first life, he sees his life work to completion, not on canvas, but in the real stuff of nature.

I am restating Keller here, but from all this we glean an insight into reality. You spend your life working on the painting, only to find it complete in the next. Yes, from this story we can glean the lesson that even small, seemingly insignificant contributions we make to this world can have a lasting impact. But Tolkien goes beyond this. Niggle’s tree is forgotten in the end. His tree is forgotten, but trees are not forgotten. His tree is forgotten, but his tree exists nonetheless.

Tolkien spent his life envisioning a world of beauty and magic. He imagined a world in which good prevailed despite great loss. All of those things will prove true in the end – in this world – because Christ is returning, and he is bringing heaven with him.

So, let’s say you are a lawyer and/or a judge. You spend your life working for justice while injustice remains all around you. The Scriptures declare to you that there will be justice in the end. Or you are a lover of mercy-ministry and you desire to see the end of world hunger. You spend your life feeding the underfed, knowing full well that hunger will continue. But food is coming, the true Bread, which comes down from heaven, who gives his flesh as food for the world, is coming – and he comes to feast us. Or, let’s say, you are a preacher, like me, and you desire with all your heart to see the earth covered with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters fill the sea. You desire to see every knee bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father. You desire to present every saint under your care to the Father in the full maturity of the image and likeness of Christ. It’s going to happen, despite your failures.

In the midst of the fight that we call work, it always appears to be a losing battle for those who seriously desire justice, mercy, peace, love, and human prosperity. Remember that in the end Jesus wins. And his victory is our victory. You are not fighting a losing battle. There are no lost causes, so long as the cause of Christ stands first and foremost.

Go paint your tree, even if you only finish a leaf. Fight the insecurity and cling to the hope.

 

The Doing of That in a Day, Which May Ordinarily Take a Thousand Years

I’m trying to compile some of my favorite George MacDonald quotes from C.S. Lewis’ anthology. That’s all I intended this to be, but then I began to think of quotes I read elsewhere that were related. Why not write them down in one place?

On Miracles:

Think of Jesus’ words, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise’ (John 5:19).

The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a loaf. No one creative fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before…There was in these miracles, I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us…Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once – immediately – than through the countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield (George MacDonald Anthology, pp. 12-13).

To this add C.S. Lewis’ thoughts, building off of MacDonald:

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn the water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see…But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.

He continues,

God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say… ‘It is the laws of Nature.’ The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder working is the feeding of the five thousand. Bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much bread. The Son will do what He sees the Father do…When He fed the thousands he multiplied the fish as well as the bread. Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming, pulsating fecundity shows He is still at work.

Finally, he applies this principle to the Virgin Birth:

This time He was creating not simply a man, but the man who was to be Himself: the only true man. The process which leads to the spermatozoon has carried down with it through the centuries much undesirable silt; the life which reaches us by that normal route is tainted. To avoid that taint, to give humanity a fresh start, He once short-circuited the process…For what He did once without a human father, He does always even when He uses a human father as His instrument. For the human father in ordinary generation is only a carrier, sometimes an unwilling carrier, always the last in a long line of carriers, of life that comes from the supreme life (Essay on Miracles, from God in the Dock).

So then, for Lewis and MacDonald, miracles are God speeding up, or (to use Lewis’ words) ‘short-circuiting’ the process. In Jesus’ miracles he was effectively hitting ‘fast forward.’ He was breaking the speed limit of the so-called ‘laws of nature.’

As to the purpose of such miracles, Lewis cites a quote by Athanasius from On the Incarnation:

Our Lord took a body like to ours and lived as a man in order that those who had refused to recognize Him in His superintendence and captaincy of the whole universe might come to recognize from the works He did here below in the body that what dwelled in this body was the Word of God.

Pure gold from MacDonald and Lewis.

But add to this Martin Luther’s take on Psalm 147:12-14 (which says):

  • Praise the LORD, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion! 13 For he strengthens the bars of your gates; he blesses your children within you. 14 He makes peace in your borders; he fills you with the finest of the wheat.

In his vocation man does works which effect the well-being of others; for so God has made all offices. Through this work in man’s offices, God’s creative work goes forward, and that creative work is love, a profusion of good gifts. With persons as his “hands” or “coworkers,” God gives his gifts through the earthly vocations, toward man’s life on earth (food through farmers, fishermen and hunters; external peace through princes, judges, and orderly powers; knowledge and education through teachers and parents, etc., etc.). Through the preacher’s vocation, God gives the forgiveness of sins. Thus love comes from God, flowing down to human beings on earth through all vocations, through both spiritual and earthly governments.

When we pray that God would give us our daily bread, he does so through the means of human agency, the same goes for many other areas. All of life is, therefore, a miracle in some sense. But the workings of natural and human agency are so common that God must short-circuit the process to shake us out of our unbelief and monotony – and this is what we deem as a true miracle.