Relocating To Elfland

I think my most difficult pastoral task is praying for God’s people. I know exactly what Paul meant when he said, “We do not know what to pray for as we ought.” Any individual life, every household, presents a mountain of needs – often really heart-wrenching stuff, the kinds of things that bring you to tears if you think about them long enough. And there’s no point in pretending I have time to pray for each one of these needs. I don’t. This may be just as well, however, since God surely doesn’t need me to keep Him up to speed on the various troubles in the lives of His saints; and when I look at the lives of people, I can see that laundry-list prayers miss the mark, anyway. God’s people need something much deeper and broader than healing after a surgery, a lift of heart after bereavement, stable employment, wisdom to sort out marital difficulty, and so on. They need (as intangible as this may seem) what one might call the whole-life healing of divine grace. They need God to turn back the degenerating power of sin at every level, in every sense, in every dimension of their lives. They need the loving, cleansing, renovating rule of God to flood through their lives from one end to the other, rushing into all the cupboards and closets and corners, driving out all that is unclean and polluted and shameful; and then to spill out into their whole world, until all things are fresh and clean and whole. . . . But how on earth does one seriously pray for this sort of thing? It sounds delusional.

I am comforted by the fact that when I read Paul’s prayers for the churches of his day, I find him praying something much like what I have described. In his prison epistles, where he opens up his prayers in some detail, they invariably center on knowledge or wisdom. In Ephesians 1, he prays for “a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of [God]”; in Ephesians 3, that the saints “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge”; in Philippians 1, that love “may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment”; in Colossians 1, that the church “may be filled with the knowledge of [God’s] will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.”

And when we explore what it is Paul desires the saints to know – what he seeks for them in the way of wisdom’s content or substance – we find that it all has to do with what God is doing in the world through His Son. Wisdom is fundamentally knowing “the mystery of [God’s] will, according to His purpose, which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:9); and it is this knowledge that God has “lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight” (Eph 1:8). In knowing the master plan of God’s world-restoring grace in His Son, we ourselves participate in that restoration. God by His Spirit brings knowledge of His world-restoring, world-reconciling grace-in-Christ into the citadel of our hearts and minds (Eph 3:16–17), and as a result we are rooted and grounded in love. Our whole way of thinking about, and responding to, everything is fundamentally altered. We are changed from the inside out by a world-embracing “vision” of divine grace. We understand (by grace) the hope to which He has called us, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe (Eph 1:18–19); and the glory of it all works transformingly in us.

This is, of course, why preachers are to keep the gospel central in their preaching, and not simply to offer “practical helps” from the pulpit. We preach the master plan for the same reason we pray the master plan: because God’s people need more than relief from immediate pressing problems. They need such relief, to be sure, but above all they need to know what God is doing in the earth, so they may count their afflictions light, so they may remain grounded even when things are evil to the eye, so they may bring forth from their inmost hearts grace and truth for the world around them (Jn 7:37–38); or as Paul puts it, so they may bring forth “the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Phil 1:11) and “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col 1:10).

To my own congregation: the next time I pick up the church directory and pray for you by name, this is what I will be praying. And precisely because I believe in the master plan, I believe God will hear from His throne in heaven and answer for the sake of His Son.

“Doubt and distrust in the cause we champion renders us powerless in the battle.” (Bavinck, p. 1.515)

The Bible doesn’t simply supply answers to our questions; it gives us the right questions.

I remember an evening class during my first semester in seminary, in which we were discussing repentance and confession of sin. I think we may have been working on Westminster Confession of Faith 15.5, “Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance, but it is every man’s duty to endeavor to repent of his particular sins, particularly.” I remember telling the prof how hard this has always been for me, because I commit so many sins that, to confess them all, I would have to be confessing pretty much every waking minute. 

I doubt many Christians struggle with this kind of obsessive thinking. But perhaps some do, and if so it may be a relief to them (as it has been to me since that evening) to understand that when the Bible tells us to confess our sins, it is not telling us we must confess every single episode of every single sin. Take a fellow who has become ensnared in pornography. He must confess his lust and idolatry (and other related sins) particularly; he must not content himself with a general confession, “Dear God, I have sinned, please forgive me, amen.” But particular confession does not mean he must recount to God every look at every magazine, including date, time, and place. 

I say this because confession is vitally important in Christian piety, and I wonder if some are not driven away from it because we know we sin daily in thought and word and deed, and it is hard to find enough hours to confess it all. Perhaps we have missed the point: God does not ask us to come to Him as in a confessional, recounting every act of sin (which tends to breed superficial thinking about sin, in any event – as if sin consists primarily in acts). Rather, He commands us to confess our sins, particularly, by name, and this need not take long hours of time: “Father, I have frequently spoken in anger today. I say of that angry speech what You Yourself say of it: it is a falling short of Your glory, it is an attempt to control others, it is murder in seed-form. I am unworthy of the least of Your mercies, but for the sake of my Savior, Your beloved Son, be faithful and righteous to forgive me, and to cleanse me from this and all unrighteousness.”