Gifts of Intercession

Of the sweetest gifts I’ve been given, knowing someone is praying for me, interceding for me, is among the very best.  I find that many conversations can take place, and I can inquire into the lives of others with genuine interest over many exchanges.  But rare is the time when someone asks, How are you?  How can I be praying for you?  Yet we are blessed with the opportunity, every day, to pray for those we love.  And to pray for those we struggle to love.

Bonhoeffer again has wise words for us:   “Intercession is a gift of God’s grace for every Christian…Because intercession is such an incalculably great gift of God, we should accept it joyfully.  The very time we give to intercession will turn out to be a daily source of new joy in God and in the Christian community…

“Intercession is a daily service we owe to God and our brother [sister].  He who denies his neighbor the service of praying for him denies him the service of a Christian.  It is clear, furthermore, that intercession is not general and vague but very concrete: a matter of definite persons and definite difficulties and therefore of definite petitions.  The more definite my intercession becomes, the more promising it is…

“I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me.  His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner.  This is a happy discovery for the Christian who begins to pray for others.  There is no dislike, no personal tension, no estrangement that cannot be overcome by intercession as far as our side of it is concerned…

“To make intercession means to grant our brother the same right we have received, namely, to stand before Christ and share His mercy…..”  --from Life Together

Intercession is something Christ consistently does for us.  Do we allow this to encourage us?  It ought to make us sing inside.  Intercession is a way we can become more like Him. 

So, pray for those you love today.  Pray for those with whom you struggle to love, today.  Let people know you are praying for them; some of the darkest days I have known, were those in which I wondered if anyone prayed for me.  Pray using Scripture, the power of God’s words and promises back to Him.  Be assured that many of you reading this, I pray for often.  (Even, on occasion, my unknown friend in Russia? -whom I will one day meet.)

When the Surreal is Real

I woke in the middle of the night Friday, thinking, “She’s in China.  This is the most bizarre thing.  She’s not just down the hall, like she’s always been.  She’s across the world right now.”  It was surreal.  I couldn’t even imagine it.  I tried to imagine what she was seeing, waiting in the Shanghai airport, attempting  to sleep through the layover.

It reminded me of how surreal seems our heavenly home.  My growing up years blur together now into a fairly meaningless small patch of history.  What will our time here on earth seem, when we are dazzled by His Home?  Our Home?  Do we get this?  “In my Father’s house are many mansions.  If it were not so, I would have told you.  I go to prepare a place for you…”  We navigate so many joys and sorrows here, as if it were the time of importance.  And it is, insofar as we are sowing and harvesting according to our calling.  But it isn’t insofar as what we work toward is There, not here;  a place, a time, we cannot begin to fathom.

We also can note the context.  Jesus had been having a most disturbing conversation with His disciples.  RC Sproul points out, “The words fell like a thunderbolt on the ears of those assembled in the upper room.  In short order, they had been told that Judas was going to betray Jesus, that Jesus was about to leave them,  and that Peter was going to deny Him.  Can you imagine how these men felt upon hearing this series of dire announcements?  Their hearts were troubled beyond description, and it was in that context that Jesus said to them, “Let not your heart be troubled.” (Commentary on John 14)

Let not your heart be troubled...

And then He tells them to believe in Him.  Believe in His character, which does not change.  Believe in His promises, which are always what He says.  Believe in His love for His people, which we cannot begin to fully grasp.

And then, then…He tells them He has prepared mansion rooms for them… in a different world, a world beyond their imagination, but nonetheless exceptionally real.  Real for them.   And real for us.

Photos courtesy of Capturing Barefoot Photography

Taken in Cambodia, March, 2013

The Daily Unexpected

Each new day brings the unexpected.  We can’t write our days and how they will go any more than the ant can do something so simple as write a grocery list.  We’ve been reveling in small signs of spring—a froth of crocuses, birdsong, and the best, the frog choruses starting again.  Then, this morning, we woke unexpectedly to a couple inches of snow to welcome spring.  Our younger daughter went out on the deck and started throwing snowballs in her brother’s open window, up a story, to wake him up.  He wasn’t pleased.  It’s quite beautiful, but it certainly wasn’t what we expected.  And we just heard that one of the travelers to Cambodia, leaving today, discovered his passport was three days expired.   

Recently I read a small post on how young mothers lack the time to be in the Word, to have devotions.  Yes, I remember the exhaustion and the demands;  I regret thinking I did not have the time every morning to lay the dailyness of my way before the Lord.  Did I actually think I would be equipped for the day, for whatever it did bring, without first having even a few moments with Him who ordained each hour?  We take our daily food for granted; we often think we can go without our daily sustaining power.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer has a good word on this.  He talks in Life Together about the importance of hard work in a day, following the time of coming before the Lord, and the words of Paul to pray without ceasing as a unity of our particular work with the presence of God:  

Thus the prayer of the Christian reaches beyond its set time and extends into the heart of his work.  It includes the whole day, and in doing so, it does not hinder the work; it promotes it, affirms it, and lends it meaning and joy,  Thus every word, every work, every labor of the Christian becomes a prayer; not in an unreal sense of a constant turning away from the task that must be done, but in a real breaking through the hard “it” to the gracious Thou.  Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Col 3:17).  Then from the achieved unity of the day the whole day acquires an order and a discipline.  These must be sought and found in the morning  prayer and in work they will be maintained.  The prayer of the morning will determine the day.  Wasted time, which we are ashamed of, temptations that beset us, weakness and listlessness in our work, disorder and indiscipline in our thinking and our relations with other people very frequently have their cause in the neglect of morning  prayer.  The organization and distribution of our time will be better for having been rooted in prayer.  The temptations which the working day brings with it will be overcome by this breakthrough to God.  Decisions which our work demands will be simpler and easier when they are made, not in the fear of men, but solely in the presence of God.  “Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as unto the Lord, and not unto men” (Col 3:23).  Even routine mechanical work will be performed more patiently when it is done with the knowledge of God and his command.  Our strength and energy for work increase when we have prayed to God to give us the strength we need for our daily work.

The Deepest, Sweetest Water

Psalm 84 has always held a place of joy and comfort for my heart.  I opened to it for this morning’s Psalms reading, and it once again felt the touch of an old friend.  I wrote some verses from it into a card for our eldest daughter, who leaves today for some time in Cambodia.    I didn’t realize until I sat down to write this, that this Psalm had become meaningful to me when I was exactly the age she is now, finishing up her senior year of high school.  Our assignment, 30 years ago, was to study a Psalm through commentaries and write a paper for our senior thesis.  Everyone groaned and leaped to the shortest, easiest, most familiar Psalms.  Late, I chose recklessly and randomly a more obscure Psalm.  Late, and home sick from school, with the paper due all too soon, I cracked open the commentaries I’d amassed, and set to work.

This assignment became the most meaningful, enjoyable several-dozen hours I spent in my entire school career. 

Understanding the obscure imagery, reading what people like Matthew Henry and others said to make the verses come alive, realizing the depth of meaning in the verses, it was like going snorkeling in tropical waters for the very first time – a whole new world come alive.  How often are we skimming above the waters thinking we “see”, and missing the colorful world underneath the surface?

Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, whose heart is set on pilgrimage.

From Abraham to Frodo, since Adam and Eve were sent from the garden we all have been captivated somewhere in our hearts by the longing of pilgrimages – the longing to arrive at a place we dimly know is the ultimate of our desires.  “Pilgrimage always orients the believer toward an anticipated goal…a life of traveling for an eventual place of rest…one senses it also encompasses broader implications for the pilgrimage of faith and trust that characterizes God’s people at all times…they are people of the way, journeying rather than settled…”

As they pass through the Valley of Baca they make it a spring; the rain also covers it with pools.  They go from strength to strength; each one appears before God in Zion.”  (KJV)

“Passing through the valley of Weeping (Baca)they make it a place of springs; the early rain also fills [the pools] with blessing.  They go from strength to strength [increasing in victorious power].  (The Amplified Bible)

Valleys can reference hard times.  I’ve passed through some of the dark wilds in those valleys, where the sun went early behind the hills.  Valleys are places where battles are often fought, for the topography is “right”.  The arrows above and stones underfoot can stumble us wearily.  But valleys are places where rivers are found, where things can grow verdant.  The valley in Psalm 84 is the Valley of Weeping.  The Psalmist tells us it can be made a place of oasis for others weary along the way.

And the promise of those who do?  Increasing in victorious power.

Our girl will, no doubt, be blessed far more by those in poverty, in dry and weary places, whose faces shine with their new-found life and hope in Christ, than she brings to them from her western comfort.  She knows she goes to walk among brothers and sisters in Christ who will be rewarded in their heavenly home.  We pray she, wearing the clothing of His Spirit also, will make the places she travels, springs—pools of blessing and refreshment.   But those she’ll meet, some who have been persecuted for His sake,  who have sacrificed that He be made known to many, draw the deepest, sweetest water for others.

An Interview with the King

Mary Winslow has become a dear friend and mentor to me through just such passages as this, though I will not meet her ‘til the other side:

How sweet is close, confidential communion with Him!  How fully we can then unveil all our hearts to him – disclosing every secret, and making known every want; and bring our hidden enemies—our corruptions-- to Him, that He might slay them before our eyes.

I have just been favored with a most precious interview with the King of kings.  He admitted me, even me, into His royal presence-chamber, and encouraged me to open my mouth wide, telling Him all that was in my heart; and you may be sure that I did presume to make large demands upon His goodness, His well-known benevolence.  How condescendingly did He seem to listen to all I called upon Him for!  My heart was dissolved into love and my eyes into tears.  I wept that ever I could sin against such a God, grieve that blessed Spirit by whom I am sealed unto glory.  But such an interview!  Oh, believe that God is near you at all times.  Cultivate a close acquaintance.  Let Him not be out of your sight.  If we walk at a distance from a friend, and see him but seldom, our knowledge of him is but limited;  but if we live with him, dwell in the same habitation, we learn His character.  Now this is a case in point.  God unfolds Himself to us in Jesus.  This is His habitation—God in Christ reconciling us to Himself.  If we dwell in Christ, we know what God is to us; and as we make His habitation our secret dwelling place, so we know more of the character and love and dealings of our God and Father…

--Mary Winslow, Heaven Opened

Since Mothers Weary Not of Their Children

Some peculiar discouragements have assailed me the last few days, and last night one of our daughters felt low in spirits as well, she who is the sunshine ray and the servant heart who blesses and serves as a favorite hobby, yet feeling the necessities of life pressing in and shutting out the ability to do thus.  This is the girl who cleans her brother’s room for sport, brought us tea and flowers on a platter as one of her daily subjects like math, most of her elementary years.  Yet she shows that we do not know how many blessings we leave trailing behind us when our hearts are given to loving others, even when we feel that we have done nothing.

We had a good heart to heart talk and she rose feeling lightened, and I, deeply glad that I could encourage her.  So then, reading this from Spurgeon this morning had even more meaning:

“As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.”  Isaiah 66:13

A mother’s comfort! Ah, this is tenderness itself.  How she enters into her child’s grief!  How she presses him to her bosom, and tries to take all his sorrow into her own heart!  He can tell her all, and she will sympathize as nobody else can.  Of all comforters the child loves best his mother, and even grown men have found it so.

Does Jehovah condescend to act the mother’s part?  This is goodness indeed.  We readily perceive how He is a Father; but will He be as a mother also?  Does not this invite us to holy familiarity, to unreserved confidence, to sacred rest?  When God Himself becomes the comforter no anguish can long abide.  Let us tell out our trouble, even though sobs and sighs should become our readiest utterance.  He will not despise us for our tears; our mother did not.  He will consider our weaknesses as she did, and He will put away our faults, only in a surer, safer way than our mother could do.  We will not try to bear our grief alone; that would be unkind to someone so gentle and so kind.  Let us begin the day with our loving God, and wherefore should we not finish it in the same company, since mothers weary not of their children?

Regarding the Inheritance as Mine

My first thought when I read the following (first paragraph) was that I do not deserve this, and so I shrink from embracing it as my reality, somehow as if it lacks humility to think on these things.  My second thought was the realization that this is the Story God has written, already revealing it in Scripture; and so I dishonor Him by not accepting it, rejoicing in it, and living in a way that befits it – with overwhelming wonder, joy, and gratitude infusing every thought and action of my day.

   

The sight of Jesus is the joy awaiting me.  My hope is set on Him.  I shall walk with Him, and talk with Him.  I shall share His glory.  With my own lips I shall tell Him how much I owe Him.  With His own lips He shall answer me, "To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in My throne".

Those are some elements in the beauty and excellence of the inheritance towards which I am a traveler.  I am emboldened to regard it as mine, because One who is my Savior and my Elder Brother has taken possession of it for me.  In the days of heaven which come to me on earth, I have foretastes of its victory, its holiness, its peace; and these whet my appetite for the banquet within the veil.  But I would not miss the practical influence which such soul-filling prospects ought to wield over me.  They are not accomplishing their proper mission unless they are purifying the whole circle of my beliefs, my motives, my decisions, my words, my activities.  The anticipation of the world to come should be a constant and supreme incentive to patience, to separation and consecration, to courage and endurance, to seriousness and yet to gladness, in the world that now is.  The poet delineates the grammarian of the Renaissance, who went on conjugating his Greek verbs with deliberate care..  He refused to hurry, for haste would merely mar his work; and had he not all eternity before him?  It is what I should feel:  I have all eternity before me, and let me behave myself as an heir of God and a joint heir with Christ.

And thus the everlasting tomorrow will cast its light and glow across the evanescent today.

--Alexander Smellie