Underground Exiles

I really would appreciate ya’ll praying about this, because I think it’s important.

It’s come to my attention, again, that my passion comes across as anger. I freely admit that for the majority of my life I’ve been a pretty angry guy. I’ve been described more than once as being emotionally closed off; personally, I’d disagree, not because it isn’t accurate, but because it doesn’t even scratch the surface.

There is one emotion, and just one, that I can tap at will. It’s anger. I freely confess that I’ve been an angry, angry guy for the majority of my life. It’s extraordinarily hard for me to contact any emotion other than pure, unadulterated rage. Because of this, I bleed anger, even when I’m not angry.

Five years in the US Army didn’t make any of it better, it just makes it worse. It added an arrogance to my personality that isn’t winsome or appealing at all. Now, what you get when you talk to me, despite a lot of work on my part, is angry arrogance.

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“We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.”

I start our series on First John with this verse because it seems to provide the background and the setting for what will be taught by the whole letter. I know many people, both believer and unbeliever, that find this letter somewhat confusing and difficult to understand; there are numerous reasons for that. The message of First John is essentially quite simple; it’s author’s manner and style is one that will lead us to a certain amount of confusion if we don’t keep a very firm grasp on the the great principles of his teaching.
This letter absolutely illustrates the case of being in danger of missing the woods for the trees, so we start with one of the three great key verses to understanding what’s written. The other two are:

“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.” 1 John 5.13

And,

“And we are writing these things so that our¹ joy may be complete.” 1 John 1.4

It is in these three statements that we have the great objective which was in the mind of the Apostle John.

In other words, the theme of this letter is the Christian in the world, what is possible to him; how is the Christian to face the world; how is he to stand up to it; what is his relationship to this world that he finds himself in?

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1. some manuscripts read your [↩]

Since we’ve finished up the short series on prayer, I’ve posted one prayer request, and now I’ve got a new one for you.

The African nation of Chad his been in a downward spiral of violence that has recently calmed down, but is apparently not over. Chad has had a large spill over of refugees from the ongoing conflict in Darfur, and much of this violence has been spawned by Sudanese backed rebels.

Chad, a part of France’s African holdings until 1960, has endured three decades of civil warfare as well as invasions by Libya before a semblance of peace was finally restored in 1990. The government eventually drafted a democratic constitution and held flawed presidential elections in 1996 and 2001.

Here’s the challenge:

Spend one week praying for the nation of Chad. Here’s what you can pray about:

1. Infant mortality is high: 91.45 deaths out of 1,000 live births.
2. Many Chadian Muslims have been recruited as mercenaries to attack and kill Christians in Nigeria.
3. The country is almost equally divided between Muslim northerners, who are politically more powerful, and increasingly more marginalized Christian/ethnic religion southerners. Pray for continued peace and freedom in all ethnic and religious communities.
4. There are more unreached peoples in Chad than anywhere else in Africa. Pray for ongoing support and protection for missionaries already working here. Pray also that God would call many to dedicate years to learning the languages and building the Kingdom in Chad.

Prayer is a practice that requires discipline, and discipline is the one thing I consistently seem to lack. It is an easy thing to fall into a habit of slack, infrequent prayer, and that’s lately what I’ve done.

“Prayer is the nearest approach to God and the highest enjoyment of Him that we are capable of in this life.” - William Law, A Serious Call To A Devout And Holy Life

I am a pattern-oriented kind of guy, and if I don’t set a pattern, then I am not likely to follow through on anything, and I know this about myself. I need a set time and place where I engage in prayer every day, and I’ve let that practice slip.

On this particular topic I highly recommend the work that I’ve quoted above, A Serious Call To A Devout And Holy Life, by William Law. There is much of that particular work that I just don’t find helpful at all, but there is much that I have found very helpful. For instance, there is this quote:

“It is as much your duty to rise to pray, as to pray when you are risen. And if you are late at your prayers, you offer to God the prayers of and idle, lazy worshiper that rises to prayers as idle servants rise to their labor.”

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Praying for the cross in our own lives requires seeing the cross for what it is.

It’s not a golden symbol just to be hung around our necks as an ornament, or to decorate our walls. It’s not a magical sign we can wave in front of our faces to ward off evil. It’s an instrument of death.

We must bring the cross to bear in every area of our lives, so that we may slay our sin with it, and be crushed under its weight.

A few weeks ago, I realized that Jesus doesn’t say that we are to take up His cross and follow Him, but to take up our cross and follow Him. There isn’t a single person that is qualified to take up anyone’s cross but their own, much less the cross the God-man, Jesus Christ.

Prayer, earnestly pray, that Christ would reveal your cross to you, so that you may shoulder its burden, and get started dying. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in his book, The Cost of Discipleship, that when Jesus calls a man, He calls him to come and die. The method of our death will be the cross that God has appointed for us from eternity past.

It’s high time that as Christians we pray for the Cross, and get busy dying…