The Hidden Life of Prayer, Chapters 7 and 8

The week we finished off The Hidden Life of Prayer by David McIntyre, reading the last two chapters. Chapter 7 concerned the personal and private benefits that come from prayer, what McIntyre calls “the hidden riches of the secret place,” especially a growing holiness and increased intimacy with Christ. Chapter 8 discusses the direct answers to the petitions we make in prayer.  

Here’s what McIntyre writes about the petitions we should make:

[W]e Christians may ask our Father for all that we need. Only, let our desires be restrained, and our prayers be unselfish. The personal petitions contained in the Lord’s Prayer are very modest—daily bread, forgiveness, and deliverance from sin’s power. Yet these comprise all things that pertain to life and godliness.

Bread and water, and a place of shelter amont the munitions of rocks, are assured to us… . But we are not often reduced to such simplicity of supply: God is so much better than His word. He feeds us with food convenient; and if ever He should suffer us to hunger, it is only that our spiritual nature may be enriched.

But man does not live by bread alone. Health and comfort, the joys of home, and the pleasures of knowledge, are blessings which we may rightfully ask, and they will not be withheld unless our Father judges it best that we should be deprived of them. But if He should bar our repeated requiest, and refuse to receive our prayer, we must then reply with the First-born among many brethren, “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto Thee; howbeit, not what I will, but what Thou wilt. When we reach the end of ourjourney if not before, we shall be able to say, “There hath not failed one word of all His good promise, which He promised.”

Thankful Thursday

I’m thankful that God is immutable. An immutable God is one who can be trusted. Because our God is unchanging in both his counsel and his character, the hope we have is an “an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast.” The plans of our immutable God comes to pass and his promises are kept with certainty. He can be counted on to be forever as he is and to do forever what he says. From his steadfast character and standing counsel comes his complete faithfulness.

But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
(Lamentations 3:21-23 ESV)

It’s God’s immutability that stands behind mercies that are “new every morning”—ever fresh mercies from our constantly merciful God.

Now that’s something to be thankful for!

What Wondrous Love Is This!

From Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution by Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach

The Lord Jesus Christ did not come into the world to meet with his friends. He came to die for his enemies. He came to a people who had rejected his law and killed his prophets, who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, trampling his courts in the hypocrisy of their self-righteous religious observances. He came to nations that had exchanged the truth of the living God for a lie, the glory of the immortal God for man-made images, and the fountain of living water for cracked and broken cisterns. He came to a world stained with violence, to a people whose hands were full of blood and whose righteous deeds were like filthy rags, to a complacent humanity who proclaimed ‘Peace! Peace!’ while they waged war with God.

This is the biblical portrait of the people for whom Christ died. We were objects of wrath, rightly facing the unmitigated, everlasting fury of an incensed God, but now in Christ we have found mercy. We have been brought from death to life, from corruption to glory. We were slaves to sin, the world and the devil, but are now adopted children of our heavenly Father. We were stained with the filth of a wicked life and tormented by the pain of a guilty conscience, but are now pardoned and forgiven, standing blameless before him as a pure bride, clothed in the clean, white robes, of Christ’s righteousness.

Now contemplate the blistering holiness of our God, the Holy One of Israel, the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity. His eyes are too pure to look on evil; his voice shakes the heavens; at his sight the angels in glory hide their faces. Who can dwell with this consuming fire, with this everlasting burning? Who can ascend the hill of the Lord? Who can stand in his holy place? Yet this God took pity on us, this God stopped down to us and lifted us up to enjoy the blessing of restored relationship with him, that we may gaze upon his face for all eternity.

A penal substitutionary view of Christ’s death gives us an understanding and appreciation of God’s love. “If we blunt the sharp edges of the cross, we dull the glittering diamond of God’s love.”