What we are praying for when we pray for the gospel to spread

Last night the pastor at my church here was telling the story of his conversion. He said God meant nothing to his family during his childhood. None of the family believed or cared to follow God's ways. But when he was a teenager, first his sister and then his mother began going to church. He decided to investigate what this was all about, and he began to read the Bible. Not out of love for God, but out of curiosity. Then he said because of his reading the gospel message he began to be thirsty. That was not surprising to me.

Then he said he began to feel dirty. I wasn't sure I had translated correctly. He said he began to feel alone, and to feel very ugly. He said that before his encounter with the gospel as portrayed in the Bible he had been a very prideful person, content in his achievements and his intelligence and the pride of his family for these things about him. I knew that what he was saying made sense, but at first it struck me as very strange. And I realized that many people who don't know God simply don't feel a need for Him. And I realized, again, that the way to God dips into a valley before it climbs to heaven. We aren't taken from glory to glory until we've come face to face with the end of ourselves.

This has been a question I've had lately: how to pray for non-believers, when all they really need is God. At my church in America, sometimes they go and pray for people who don't know God, right in front of them. They ask what they need and pray for that. That's probably fine or they wouldn't be doing it, but I said "they" because I've not yet understood how that is supposed to work. It seems to be ignoring the most glaring and basic need in the person's life to pray for them and leave out the part about their heart encountering God, and yet it seems dishonest to leave that part out if you're planning to do it later so that they don't feel weird.

The truth is, when you find a person who is in need of God (aka everyone who doesn't walk with Him yet), what they need first to even be able to approach Him is a deep sense of unease with the way things are going. This might be why some of us describe encountering God as "having your life turned upside down" or "getting rocked" or even (okay, this is just me, in some dramatic moments) "having your life ruined." Because once you see the truth, going back isn't an option. There are no easy roads left to you once your ignorance has been stripped away. You have to do things that break your fleshly little heart, and yet not to do them is to turn your back on the one you love.

All this has been a surprise to me. It's dawned on me very, very slowly. And it's for this that I believe it's not up to us to make the gospel sound appealing to people. I once told a friend it's not like we listen for problems in someone's life and prescribe God to them like a medicine. He's not a product we're selling. We can't even exaggerate how great He is, but we can misrepresent Him sometimes if we try to make (or God forbid, succeed at making) the Christian life look cool. It's just not cool, okay? It's way better than the alternative, but it's not easier, and to tell someone it is can mess them up for a long time as they try to reconcile this paradox. It's not that we convince people into the kingdom; God chooses people, and calls them, and that's His divine initiative. And we can partner with His work by praying that the people we love will come to know Him.

But let's make no mistake about what we're asking. When I ask for someone's salvation, a person far from God who is pretty happy with their life, I am asking that they will be completely broken. That they will begin to feel dirty, and thirsty, and alone. Even ugly. Not that they will stay feeling that way forever with no comfort, but that they will get to that place and not be able to pretend it away anymore.

All through church I kept having more thoughts about this, and I thought, "maybe it's not so bad to pray for a little unhappiness in this life, seeing that it's so fleeting, and painful anyway, and that it could lead to eternal life. It's just like those metaphors about a doctor who gives a painful but life-saving shot, or who relocates a limb, or those people who have to push harder on the trap to free an animal or whatever."

And I also realized that prayers to get closer to God, which we might toss up so casually, knowing they are always a good bet, never the wrong thing to pray, might as well just be prayers for more sadness and more emptiness, so that God can comfort and fill us. It's impossible for Him to fill what is not empty.

I guess if there's anything good about this, at least for me, it is that whenever I am very, very sad (it happens) I am a vessel that can contain more of God's comfort, or when I am empty or alone, I can invite God to fellowship with me in a way that someone who is totally content just wouldn't be able to.

⁸ Even if I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it. Though I did regret it—I see that my letter hurt you, but only for a little while— ⁹ yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. ¹⁰ Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. ¹¹ See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. At every point you have proved yourselves to be innocent in this matter. --2 Corinthians 7:8-11

P.S. This idea, paraphrased, "Don't Just Pray For Someone's Happiness, You Fool (Because It Might Interfere With God's Work In Their Life)" was originally given to me about a year ago by good ol Oswald Chambers, and I've been working it through ever since, and continue to realize more about it all the time.

A "Guest Post": The Trial of Faith

Let me be very clear. This is a devotional I copied and pasted from My Utmost for His Highest. Calling it a guest post is stretching the truth to the breaking point. It's almost certainly illegal for me to repost it like this, but since I have about eight readers, I don't think it will be a problem. This is the original link: http://utmost.org/the-trial-of-faith/I found this incredibly helpful, even worth breaking the law for. Enjoy:

We have the idea that God rewards us for our faith, and it may be so in the initial stages. But we do not earn anything through faith— faith brings us into the right relationship with God and gives Him His opportunity to work. Yet God frequently has to knock the bottom out of your experience as His saint to get you in direct contact with Himself. God wants you to understand that it is a life of faith, not a life of emotional enjoyment of His blessings. The beginning of your life of faith was very narrow and intense, centered around a small amount of experience that had as much emotion as faith in it, and it was full of light and sweetness. Then God withdrew His conscious blessings to teach you to “walk by faith” (2 Corinthians 5:7). And you are worth much more to Him now than you were in your days of conscious delight with your thrilling testimony.

Faith by its very nature must be tested and tried. And the real trial of faith is not that we find it difficult to trust God, but that God’s character must be proven as trustworthy in our own minds. Faith being worked out into reality must experience times of unbroken isolation. Never confuse the trial of faith with the ordinary discipline of life, because a great deal of what we call the trial of faith is the inevitable result of being alive. Faith, as the Bible teaches it, is faith in God coming against everything that contradicts Him— a faith that says, “I will remain true to God’s character whatever He may do.” The highest and the greatest expression of faith in the whole Bible is— “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).

Cain and Abel used to bother me.

Yesterday in church I realized it bugged me that God seemed to accept Abel and reject Cain. Doesn't Acts 10:34-35 tell us that he's "no respecter of persons" (depending on your translation)? Doesn't 1 Peter 1:17 say the Father judges impartially, and are we not instructed to imitate God by doing "nothing out of favoritism" in 1 Timothy 5:21? And in James 3:17 the wisdom that comes from heaven is lots of things, and one of them is impartial.

But before I had even had time to think of those (I mean, who needs references to know God is fair, right?) I realized that I was overlooking part of the story. Genesis 4:4-5 says, "The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor." Not just Abel and Cain themselves. So Cain gets mad and sad (my paraphrase of Genesis 4:5b) and God, being a considerate person, asks him why. "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?"

I admit there's a lot going on in the original story that I don't understand, because I don't know if there's some significance to the difference between offering animals and plants (one has blood and includes death?) and I know that Abel kept flocks for a living, and Cain grew stuff, so what does that say about 2 Corinthians 8:12 "For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have"? But I think I know the answer already. It specifies right in the passage, "if the willingness is there."

The reading of the Cain and Abel story that does not bother me is as follows: Cain's and Abel's offerings have modern-day parallels that I can understand. Another word for offering in this case will be sacrifice. Modern-day sacrifices include all sorts of things. Like:

- sacrificing your right to speak up and defend yourself all the time (Jesus set us an example of this in 1 Peter 2:23, and it is every bit as relevant today as ever);

- sacrificing whatever amount of time you set aside daily for prayer, listening to God and reading Scripture;

- sacrificing watching movies or TV or listening to music that feels really good but also sort of tears apart your soul a little bit by setting a bad example (okay, I am referring to Gossip Girl);

- sacrificing the unlimited free music you could be having by choosing to pay out of respect for musicians;

- sacrificing your American Dream to pursue something less glam and impressive for Jesus' sake and the sake of the broken (example: doing that thing where you put a cap on your earnings and give the rest away);

- sacrificing a tenth of your dinero to give to church;

- sacrificing making out too much or at the wrong time in the interest of purity and showing you trust God that He's better than making out out of season.

and.. the examples are probably infinite, but those are what I came up with on the spot. If you were wondering, the making out one is my favorite example, lol. And I'd consider those to all be pretty good sacrifices. Sacrifices that are supernaturally motivated when you decide you want to honor God and ask Him for the strength to make them. I realize there are way bigger things to give up, and also way smaller. But I think the listed examples all require faith that there's more to life than what we can see. Hebrews 11:4 says that, "By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did." So I can believe that in my modern-day parallel story, Abel's sacrifice, his offering, was something like one of those or better. And as for Cain, well, his offering was probably more like the day you forgot to bring lunch with you and there's nowhere you can buy it so you realize halfway through being hungry that technically it could probably be referred to as a fast, and that's what you offer. Cain's sacrifice was probably like giving your last leftovers to God instead of the firstfruits He both wants and deserves way more than you, anyway. It doesn't take faith, because you didn't really do anything differently in your life because of it.

Frankly, I often have trouble with the binaries, or lack thereof, in the world. It's far easier to understand life in black and white. But God is a person, and like any person, doesn't fit into any kind of formula or predictability. So it's His divine right (and in this case, who could blame Him anyway?) to look favorably upon some offerings and not upon others. Some offerings are better, some come from a deeper place in the heart and thus contain more of us. More of our will, because they reflect more of the giver's intention (if I didn't already tell you, I think will and intention are the deepest part of someone's being). To use a dumb example, think of the difference between someone giving you store-bought cookies and home-baked ones. Sure, they are both cookies. And even if they taste the same (I think we all know the home-baked ones would be better in a non-hypothetical situation), heck, even if the home ones are worse, you will probably look more favorably on the ones that someone took time to plan and bake for you, which they did not have to do (evidenced by the fact that there is such a thing as store-bought cookies).

The rough part for me is that I can easily imagine myself in Cain's place: someone else totally spends more time with God, and I am jealous that they seem to be receiving more from Him. Well, should I be surprised by this? If I gave up what they have to pursue Jesus, would I not receive the riches I see them with?

Lastly, there's a verse somewhere (thought it was in James or Corinthians, but couldn't find it, and Google didn't help at all) about how we kill people or are mean to them or something not because of how bad they are, but how bad we are (awful, awful paraphrase I know). And this seemed relevant, and I would've added it if I could've.