Anything: The Prayer That Unlocked My God and My Soul

You have to thank God for the seemingly good and the seemingly bad because really, you don't know the difference [until we get to heaven].

From His eternal perspective, it's tolerable to allow our temporary dreams to fall apart.

I am a human, and we humans arrive with "screwed up" on our foreheads. We come that way, but somewhere between toddlerhood and being a grown-up we learn to wipe off our forehead signs. Sit up straight. To be good. But before God I am no different from these men. My forehead is clean my soul certainly is not. That day on an old, beat-up sofa with some old, beat up guys, I rethought the things of value to people and the types of people I've valued, and I realized that God shown more through those accused and hurting men then than in me.

Weight causes things on earth to fall--to remain grounded. What if the weight of sin holds the same purpose as physical weight? When I curl up on my sofa with God and his Word, that feeling that makes me want to bold should be the feeling that keeps me there with him. It's the weight of my sin pushing me down from the high and lofty places where my pride would rather keep me.

Every sin, at its root, is based in something we do not fully believe about God.

We love our earth. We love our people. We love our stuff. We love our schedules. We love our short lives here. And God is saying, Look up. This is going fast. Your life here is barely a breath. There is more, way more. Time is almost gone. Our lives are only spent well on him and whatever stories he has written for us. What are we really so afraid of losing? Heaven feels far away, and we forget. But it is real . . . and it is coming.

And when everything in life is working . . . plastic gods feel like enough.

Anyone can get to heaven—no matter how messy his or her life. And by the same token, anyone can be kept out—regardless of all his or her fancy goodness.

Unless there is some craving for God and some distaste for sin in us, we should question if we are believers.

Somehow I thought most of my life following God was not supposed to be too costly. Following God is flat costly.

Theologian Tim Keller says if you love anything more than God, even though you believe in God, if there is anything in your life that is more important to your own identity or significance than God, then that is a false god and it is a power in your life.5 And you can usually tell that something here has become an idol because you have an extreme reaction when it is threatened.

If we can taste heaven, we live differently.

The majority of us cannot hear anything but ourselves. And we cannot hear anything God says. But to be brought to the place where we can hear the call of God is to be profoundly changed.

Yet God clearly says first and foremost, “Have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3). Nothing here shall compare to me in your heart. Everything should so pale in comparison to me that it is as if you hated it. With our minutes and days and decades, we build houses and savings accounts and busy calendars full of activity. And in some deeper way, we build our reputations and friendships and invest in our kids and careers. We are looking for this life to matter. No, we are actually looking for ourselves to matter. So we keep so busy, so distracted, so in love with everything but our invisible, patient, jealous God. Christ said, “So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). This covers literally everything.

call. A call to fall on my face. It physically hurts to see our pride, to see our sin, to quit playing good, to feel broken and to need God. And it hurts even more to let others see it. So we run from falling; we choose large fig leaves to cover up with and not God. We run from that vulnerable feeling that we may not measure up, all while aching to measure up.

We have become such a pragmatic society with our pros and cons and schedules that when we get to matters of radical obedience, it’s easy for us to talk ourselves out of it. We rationalize that if the cost outweighs the benefit, then we shouldn’t do it. God’s Word in 1 Corinthians 1 says: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1:18, 20)

He began by listing all the ways we grow or know God: prayer, studying Scripture, church, worship, experiences, suffering, confession, community, and on and on. Then he said, “But obviously each of these is unpredictable . . . many people who study the Bible never find God. Many people who go to church never really know him. The only exercise that works 100 percent of the time to draw one close to the real God is risk.

God is most after his glory. Glory: it is a vague and mysterious word. John Piper defines God’s glory as “the holiness of God put on display.”1 It’s who God truly is, being made known so you can see and taste and feel him, and in turn fall flat on your face.

Plastic gods are safe. Plastic gods don’t mess with you.

ultimately faith in Christ is what will separate those who belong to God from those who do not.

We do not know God apart from Scripture, and every other experience must be held up to his Word, since it is the clearest revelation from him.

We need different eyes, a different mind. One that lifts us above the seen and our short time here, above the fears that invade our lives, above the snapshots in our scrapbooks.

we can believe in Christ and be free and still be stuck. God was my new master, but I didn’t know how to shake all the old ones. I knew a lot about God, but I still did not know him. I believed he was big enough to save me forever, but now I would have to grow to believe he was big enough to weave in and out of my every day, leading me, changing me. But now he was real, and I was his.

Christ never intended those who walked with him to feel comfortable and safe. This was meant to be a risk-it-all pursuit.

It is too easy in this country for blessings to become rights, for stuff and money to become what calls the shots in our lives. And before we know it, God’s gifts have replaced God himself.

Plastic gods are safe. Plastic gods don’t mess with you. Plastic gods don’t matter much; they fit in a small crevice of the life you want, the life you were planning to have. And when everything in life is working . . . plastic gods feel like enough.

Come back to me. You need me. He says, Go and sin no more (John 8:11),

Daily abandon would prove to be more costly than the reckless kinds of obedience.