Effective Prayer

Psalm 5:1-3 Give ear to my words, O LORD, consider my meditation. Hearken unto the voice of my cry, my King, and my God: for unto thee will I pray. My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.

Prayer is a necessity in the Christian life; it is the stream from which we receive our strength and vitality, yet so often the brook seems dried up and it becomes a mere duty. These first few verses from the Psalm really struck me as I was studying them in my morning devotions and reading Spurgeon's commentary on the Psalms. These 3 verses are a wonderful source of instruction on prayer.

There are two types of prayer given here: the spoken prayer and the silent longing. David talks about his words and his meditations, the Lord hears them both. My words may be, and often are, but poor feeble things before the great God of heaven and earth yet He can see into my very soul and read the longing there. Likewise He can see beyond the well worded rote prayer that has no root in the heart.

Charles Spurgeon said so well, "Let us cultivate the spirit of prayer which is even better than the habit of prayer. There may be seeming prayer where there is little devotion. We should begin to pray before we kneel down, and we should not cease when we rise up."

This Psalm also gives us advice to our conduct before and after prayer. The first teaches us to prepare for prayer. The word direct, Spurgeon says, has to do with the arranging of gifts upon the altar prior to sacrifice. In such a careful way as the priest prepared the sacrifice, so must we prepare ourselves to enter the presence of the Holy God, the King of Kings.

The second lesson that is taught is expectation. How often do we pray, little expecting an answer to our prayers. We come to God with a sort of desperation, but with little expectation. Instead we should bow our heads in prayer and then raise them in hope, looking for the answer to our prayer. An answer does not necessarily mean that everything will fall out exactly as we planned or prayed; even David in vs. 8 asks the Lord "make Thy way straight before my face". We need to come before the Lord in prayer desiring to know His will and purpose not expecting an affirmative answer to our every whim.

"Let holy preparation link hands with patient expectation, and we shall have far larger answers to our prayers." C.H. Spurgeon

Semper Reformanda

I was challenged with this doctrine at the Reformation Conference that I attended this July. I found the concept to be both encouraging and challenging. I found it encouraging because it allows for the fact that no one man or woman will ever get it all right. We are all learning and God is gracious in taking us step by step. Always Reforming...it is not a single act performed in a single day, but the work of a lifetime.

At the conference, the doctrine of Semper Reformanda was presented in light of the Reformation where our forefathers learned some very important truths which we have either ignored or forgotten when we could have picked up from where they left off and gone even further. Somewhere between the Reformation and our generation the baton was dropped or not completely passed on. There have been times when it has been picked up (the Great Awakening, Spurgeon's revival in London), but it has been only at certain times or isolated instances. (That does not mean that there have not been small and obscure examples of faithfulness throughout history. The Lord always preserves to Himself a remnant, but I am speaking of large scale reformation in society and the world at large.) We have lost the concept of faithfulness in generation after generation.

The LORD told Israel in Deuteronomy 11, "And ye shall teach them (His words) to your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. "

He warned them in Deuteronomy 4, "Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them to thy sons, and thy sons' sons."

God has blessed us with great abundance here in America, a blessedness that was bought by the blood of thousands of brave men and women throughout the centuries of our history. Yet...we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the source of all of our good. We (as a nation) have neglected to impress our children with an appreciation for God's hand in America's past.

The warning that I have always found to be a most sobering reminder to me is in Deuteronomy 6 where God says. "And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, and houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full; then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage".

Isn't that what has happened in America today? We are enjoying the privileges of a blood bought freedom, yet we do not fully appreciate the worth of it because we have not had to work to gain it. God is the author and sustainer of all the freedom that we enjoy, yet we shrug our shoulders and turn our backs on the very author of our being without realizing that He who gave us all that we now enjoy can just as easily take it all away again.

I desire, by God's grace, to make sure that I pass on a legacy of faithfulness to God and to His statutes to my siblings and someday my own children. I want faith in and love for God to strengthen with each passing generation, not weaken and eventually die out.

Word vs. Walk

"Purity in our way and walk is the truest blessedness." ~Charles Spurgeon~

I love theology. I always have since I was very young. I love to study the Bible and have been very blessed to grow up in a church that fed me spiritually from a very young age. However, my greatest difficulty has always been to put into daily practice what I know to be right from the Scripture.

Psalm 119:1 speaks about those that "walk in the law of the Lord". The Christian life is not lived in an easy chair at a desk surrounded by Biblical commentaries and theological works. It is a walk, lived out in the daily grind of normal life. It is good to be able to read the Word of God with understanding , but how much better it is to be able to live it out in our daily lives.

The Christian walk is not static, but is a steady moving onwards and upwards. Spurgeon said, "The holy life is a walk, a steady progress, a quiet advance, a lasting continuance". It is not a sudden burst of flame that soon dies out, but a steady glow that grows in strength and intensity. Proverbs 4:18 says that "the path of the just is like the shining sun, that shines ever brighter unto the perfect day." Our light needs to grow in brightness as we become more like our Saviour until we reach glory and the process of sanctification ends in our glorification when "we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is" (John 2:2).

The law of God needs to be our guiding star. We need to live in it, not just consult it every morning in our devotions or seek its comfort in times of trouble.

What would our lives look like if we truly walked in in the law of the Lord?

Psalm 119

For my 21st birthday I received the full 7 volume Treasury of David by Charles Spurgeon. It should keep me busy for a while. :-) I picked up the volume on Psalm 119 and have just started reading it.

Psalm 119 has always seemed to be a favorite Psalm of many godly men and women both past and present and, though I have read it many times, I have sometimes wondered what was the unique treasure that they found within its lines. I found a sound rebuke for my own lack of depth in Spurgeon's words, "Many superficial readers have imagined that it (Psalm 119) harps upon one string, and abounds in pious repetitions and redundancies; but this arises from the shallowness of the reader's own mind..."

So I have begun to go over Psalm 119 again with the aid of Spurgeon's commentary and I am eager to see if I can dig below the surface of its sacred verses. Augustine said of Psalm 119, "In proportion as this psalm seemeth more open, so much the more deep doth it appear to me; so that I cannot show how deep it is. For in others, which are understood with difficulty, although the sense lies hid in obscurity, yet the obscurity itself appeareth; but in this, not even this is the case; since it is superficially such, that it seemeth not to need an expositor, but only a reader and listener."