Better at Private Prayer
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. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Matthew 6:6-7 (NIV)
Prayer is not only understood as asking, but in ancient Greek, it is also understood to be like pleading or beseeching God. What does it mean to beseech? It’s like asking, but with a lot more emotion, as a passionate appeal. You’re not tossing prayers around in hopes of a response. No, you are praying toward God as a way of approaching or seeking Him. This isn’t like gambling, hoping things go your way. Your ask is urgent; your need to communicate with God ought to make you turn your face toward your Heavenly Father with fervency.
Prayer was also understood as a wish to speak your desire, almost like a vow. It’s that shaping of prayer that you would offer most when you have a deep wish or need. Prayer was also understood to be an expression to God in response to an emergency that had taken place in life. Many people today are trying to come up with such different forms of spiritual disciplines as if to create different and better methods of prayer. But we don’t need to attempt to create different prayers shaped on performance and language, public display, spiritual depth, or maturity.
Notice in the text, Jesus is not speaking in parables, trying to create interpretive bridges by painting images or telling stories that make it easier to understand and softer for absorption. In this text, He is straight to the point. Why? Because He wants you to have a strong private prayer life. He doesn’t want you to pray like pagans, who pray mindless, senseless, long, empty prayers for public performance. He helps His disciples so that they can get prayer right.
We could all do better at developing greater discipline around our private prayer lives. You can offer better prayers first by simply honoring the discipline.
God attaches the promise of a reward to our disciplining our lives to pray. He rewards your commitment to bring your urgencies to Him. He makes us increasingly aware of His abiding presence. He is extending Himself and letting you have the ability to make your request known, to express what you think He is worth to you, and what value you think the Lord has in your life.
Better at Dealing with Hurt
Soon afterward, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him. As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out—the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the town was with her. When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, “Don’t cry.”
Then he went up and touched the bier they were carrying him on, and the bearers stood still. He said, “Young man, I say to you, get up!” The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.
They were all filled with awe and praised God. “A great prophet has appeared among us,” they said. “God has come to help his people.” This news about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country.
Luke 7:11-17 (NIV)
Your hurts don’t have to be introduced every time you walk in a room. Your reactions to people don’t have to always be fueled by your hurts, past or present. You don’t have to keep making progress with hurt being the obvious crutch that defines your resistance and explains your defenses.
We have to believe that life in Christ helps us to live better than our hurts. It starts when we let Jesus stop us from the pace our hurts have set and the direction our hurts have determined.
Luke is trying to encourage you in this text to stop heading in the direction your hurts are leading you in, and to stop walking at the interrupted pace your hurts have set for you.
If Jesus has the capacity to stop death when the procession is headed to the cemetery, then why didn’t He just go into the ministry of standing in front of cemeteries? Every time a coffin was coming through, He could just turn it around. Here’s the answer: because death is a part of life. Jesus wasn’t touching that coffin because He was just trying to demonstrate His power and sovereignty over death, but because He wanted everybody to know that when you are hurting, He has the capacity to pull out His compassion and turn your hurt around.
This is why verse 14 says Jesus saw her; her pain was apparently so deep, so telling, so painful that His heart was touched by it. He wants to affect how she processes her devastation and bless her so that she doesn’t have to live the rest of her life led by hurt.
Let’s not ignore our hurt. Let’s not let hurt linger either. We can do better by letting the Lord stop us from being guided by our pain and our hurt.
Better at Nurturing Joy
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds.
James 1:2 (NIV)
What is joy? In the context of this text, it is a deep and abiding sense of contentment or satisfaction, even in the midst of difficult circumstances. This means it’s not joy as a reflection. It’s joy as a reflex response.
Every one of us could do a whole lot better at considering the joy of it all:
- To live better at choosing joy as a lens by which we will interpret the unfolding movements and gradations and experiences that make up our lives.
- To consider joy before we consider hurt or rage or regret.
- To consider joy before we choose mourning or hate or retaliation.
- To consider joy before we decide to completely shut down emotionally.
- To consider joy before we choose doubt and cynicism and detachment and negativity.
- To consider joy when interpreting persecution.
Have you considered that God is dispensing grace to your life because He wants to use you to prove to others that no matter how severe the persecution, Jesus can keep you seated and clothed and in your right mind?
James is saying to us: I don’t want your joy to always be a reflection. I want your joy to be a reflex response, which means in the middle of your persecution, in the middle of your trouble, I want you right in the midst of the torrential downpour to say, I don’t know how this is going to work out, but I know God’s got some grace in here somewhere, and instead of giving into anger, instead I’m going to wait on the Lord and be of good courage and know that He will strengthen my heart.
Joy is a choice. It is choosing to be happy because your contentment is not based on your circumstances, but it is based on what you know about the sovereignty of God.
This text is teaching us that we can live better at considering joy when we keep space open in our suffering for grace.
Better at Responding to Purpose
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Matthew 9:9-13 (NIV)
What is your purpose in life as designed and imagined by God?
One of the biggest liberations in life is to be fueled by a clear discernment about God’s intended purpose for your life. When you’re clear about your purpose, you stand behind many yeses because you know they are directly in line with the purposes of God in your life.
So, how do we better steward our lives for purpose?
This text suggests that being a better steward comes through better interpreting our “rest stops.” Not rest as in a chill place between point A and point B, but rest as in an intended interlude between where you are moving from and where you are headed to.
Perhaps one of the reasons it was easy for Matthew to walk away from his tax collecting arrangement is because he was clear that it was never a permanent station and only a rest stop.
There are some clues in the Scriptures that Matthew was in a rest stop as a tax collector. For example, being a tax collector assured that you were fluent in Aramaic and in Greek, and accurate in data collection. The qualifications make you the perfect candidate for writing a gospel. Everything Matthew experienced prior to meeting Jesus would be needed so he could have impact for the continual spread of the gospel.
The lesson is to stop regretting your rest stops. These rest stops, these pass-throughs, these certain seasons, these shifting spaces: they birth or confirm vision. They create heightened awareness. They mature spiritual gifts. They confirm callings, talents, and abilities. They contribute to or challenge emotionality.
The ability to interpret when God is moving and what God is saying is critical to becoming better at marrying our lives to His purpose for us.
Better at Fighting My Flesh
Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.
Romans 13:14 (NIV)
Our thoughts, our actions, our emotions, our drives, our passions, our pursuits—they are all subject to the desires of our flesh. Our flesh, our human nature, is that part of us that lives apart from the influence of Christ. Paul says you can live better than your flesh. Every one of us can live better than our base nature.
While you are maturing in Christ throughout your life, you will have to ask God to help you live as you should, and you will live your entire life fighting the pull of your nature to do the opposite.
How do we fight these habits? How do we live better at fighting what tries to influence us outside of the influence of the Holy Spirit? Paul says: Here’s how you live better fighting your flesh: Stop making provisions for your base nature.
In the original Greek, this means stop processing the pull of your flesh. You can’t do anything about its invasion, but you do have a choice about how you process it. Paul says to stop giving your flesh a contribution in the consideration of your life’s plans. Be quick to dismiss the flesh.
You can’t stop a thought from circling around your processing center, but you don’t have to give an audience when selfish people start making suggestions to you. You can choose to feed your spiritual discernment and to seek wisdom from the Word of God, watching how Christ has exemplified this Himself.
Scripture doesn’t say “negotiate.”
Scripture doesn’t say “bargain.”
Scripture doesn’t say “compromise.”
Scripture says, resist the devil and he will flee.
This is all Paul is suggesting. If you know your flesh is going to take you in a direction that’s not under the influence of the Spirit, make no provision for the flesh. Cut its access. And its access is your attention, your time, your affection, your responses.
Make no provision for the flesh. Here’s how: clothe yourself in the Lord Jesus Christ.
That means making the choice to start the day intentionally aligning our thoughts with Christ, doing a head and heart check through the revelation His Word gives to us, submitting our entire day to Him in prayer, letting the Lord exercise dominion over the subtle ways our flesh is begging for responses from us. This is what Scripture means when it says to submit your ways unto Him.
