A Jesus Prayer

Posted byChaplainmikePosted inSermons and Devotions

head_of_christ_hook.jpgAfter I finished reading The Shack, I wrote out some prayers, and this is part of one. -MS

Jesus, you don’t build institutions.

You don’t write catechisms. Or Systematic Theologies. Or critiques of someone’s theology or refutations of their catechism.

You don’t have a blog.

You don’t moderate debates.

You are the bread of life who gives himself for the salvation of the world. You are the one mediator between God and man. You are the bridegroom who loves his bride. You’re raising all of us like Lazurus. You’re healing all of us, casting demons out of all of us, calling all of us out of the un-real into the real.

The community that matters to you isn’t sitting behind some church sign. It’s not running around with some ridiculous label.

You aren’t submitting yourself to the teams built by men for their games with one another.

Jesus, you love the world. And you love those who are in fellowship with you. Not more or even in a different way than you love other persons, but only in a way that can be enjoyed and celebrated by all of us who are feasting at the same table.

You don’t have a database of membership. You don’t have 20 questions for me to answer. You are standing there before me, and your love is inviting me inviting me inviting me over and over and enabling me enabling me enabling me over and over. You’re taking me from where I’ve wandered, throwing me on your shoulders and beginning again. And again. And again. With all of us.

Jesus, you’re making crazy demands about trusting the Father. You’re saying ridiculous things about money and forgiveness. Jesus, you’re asking me to do things that are impossible.

You want me to trust you with the people I want to control. You’ve taken my prayers to change things and handed them back to me as the opportunity to let you love persons you love far, far more than I can imagine in ways I could never approach. Trusting you, by the way, is very difficult sometimes, but you never do quit asking, do you?

I’d rather theologize. I’d rather debate and score points.

I’d rather take care of me, do things my way and refer to you as my sponsor. I want you to be the god who makes my life work out; the god who makes my relationships “work.” You are the God who loves me, and loves all the people I pretend to love, with a love that’s overwhelming.

You want me to live my life in you. Not just quote the verse, but jump into the deep end of the pool with you there to catch me. You want me out of the boat, with you on the water. You want me to believe that you will never leave me or forsake me.

You want me. You’re very fond of me.

This kind of simplicity is very frightening. You are taking too much away. You are replacing it all with yourself.

Jesus, I need you a thousand ways. I can’t list them all, but I feel them, one by one by one, taking hold of me and pulling me away from you. I want that to end, and I want to hand all of my life to you, freely, in childlike trust and joy.

My emotions are following my perceptions and my perceptions are following my paradigm. I need you to take over all of it. All of it.

Jesus, you said you are the way, the truth and the life…and I told people I believed it. I didn’t believe it very much. I think I lie about these things a lot. But I want you to be the way, the truth and the life.

I’m afraid for it all to come down to just the two of us, but that’s the way it is, isn’t it? It’s the moment we all hear you, feel your gaze, realize you have singled us out for the Kingdom….but everything else must go: parents, wife, children, family, reputation, houses, lands, applause, security, health, normality. All of it goes, and you want the entire bet placed on you.

Lord Jesus Christ, Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on me.

12 thoughts on “A Jesus Prayer”

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  2. Michael,

    I never meant to imply otherwise.

    Although I might suggest healing from such trauma is possible, in God, even if most don’t become aware of it until after death.

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  3. Anna
    I know you mean well by what you say, and as a generalization, what you say is true. Nevertheless, there are some very much misunderstood exceptions.

    Listen awhile to my cousin, now deceased, who lived in a small village in the Ukraine around 1925, overrun by anarchists who plundered, killed and raped (including his mother) before his eyes, during the troubling times when the communists were establishing their power in the Soviet Union.
    Sit awhile with my aunt, who, when she lay dying, would go into vivid hallucinations of terror about Russian soldiers entering her room.
    Visit awhile with a dear Christian friend who’s father was murdered by the Ukrainian anarchist gang led by Nestor Makhno, and who’s parents’ home on the banks of the Dnieper became headquarters for the Makhno gang. Listen to him as he relates how the Soviet army loaded their wounded soldiers on a train and sent them intentionally to their death into the gorge of the Dnieper river after the bridge at Einlager (which had been the longest single span bridge in the world at that time) had been blown up by the Germans.
    Work alongside another cousin of mine, who, as a teenager, after the war, along with seventeen other boys was dragged by the Soviet army from Germany into Siberia because of the deal the allies had made with the Soviet Union, to work themselves to death building the Siberian railway. Who related that when the Siberian railway was built, most every railway tie had a dead corpse under it to bury those who died working there, to the cold and poor working conditions without adequate food, shelter and clothing (He and another person were the only two of the eighteen who came out of the ordeal alive because they escaped).
    Consider his brother in law, who not only heard about but saw the war crimes committed both by the Nazis at Auschwitz, as well as those committed by the Allied troops as he watched the fire bombing of Dresden from a distance.
    Many of these people never thereafter were emotionally normal– perhaps somewhat emotionless, because of the layers of emotional scar tissue that had built up during those times in order to withstand the horror.
    And yet, all of these, though often misunderstood because of their seeming lack of zeal and Christian involvement, retained their faith, lived Godly lives and raised successful families.
    I was born in Canada, away from those terrible times, observed, and at one time did not understand why some of these people were “different”. But now I do.
    To those who see one who does not meet their definition of spirituality, please don’t judge people too hastily for what appears to be or even may even be a lack of joy and zeal, but rather learn to understand.

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  4. Nicholas,

    The inner self, the heart, must move towards God. If you do his will because it is his will, then your heart is turning towards God. And this will bring life. Not just in the next world, but now, too. (See 1 Tim 4:8). But this is life in a deep sense, not in the sense of continually or even occasionally happy emotions.

    Have you read the recent Times article on Mother Theresa? (If not, you can find it here: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html). For 50 years she did God’s will with only “darkness” in her emotions. But, once she believed that there was a purpose to that darkness, once she understood it as an unexpected answer to something she had prayed for, she writes “I have come to love the darkness… Today really I felt a deep joy.” The emotional darkness had not gone away (and never did, after that). But she was aware of something on a deeper level. Joy, despite misery.

    Here is another description of someone experiencing something deep while being emotionally dry: http://et-tu.blogspot.com/2007/09/sugar-pill-and-real-thing.html

    What Michael contrasts is not “feeling” God versus doing his will. Rather, he contrasts an actual movement of the heart (away from the self and towards God) with thinking that we are holy because we talk about holiness.

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  7. We would all desire to live an emotionally satisfying faith and life, but what about those who’s emotional makeup is defective when measured against the status quo, who simply cannot attain and do not experience the euphoria others experience? Must they be torn from the Heavens, removed from the Calvinist elect, or the pietist “born again”? Can they not even find forensic justification in Christ? Are they forever doomed, condemned to an eternal hell, both emotionally on this earth and in eternity, simply because their emotions are defective and they cannot “experience” emotional fulfillment? Is emotional well being part of the atonement as presented by Christ? Is living a passionate, feeling oriented life the life of faith, or is it not?
    When one reads about the heroes of faith in Hebrews, it seems to me that non of them lived by how they felt, but rather, they spoke and did what they believed. Actually, many lived contrary to what they felt, with emotionally and materially unfulfilled lives. They in obedience to God made the difficult journey to the promised land and were seemingly abandoned there as vagabonds, with only promises. They refused the glory of Egypt, chose the afflictions of the children of God instead, and were refused entry into the promised land by God. They risked their lives for the glory of God and were abandoned to the enemy. They spent a lifetime of preaching the Truth and had no followers. Many were tortured and died in exile.
    Yes, God has given some fulfilled lives, but others, of equal or even greater faith, God has left to the mercy of dogs, because the so called church does not seem to understand. Why? Where is mercy? Where is justice? Where is equality?
    Nevertheless, as spiritual children of Abraham, we by faith seek a city who’s builder and maker is God (Heb 11:8-10).

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  10. All I have to say is, “Amen, and again I say Amen.”

    I long for the time when we can share one table, one worship. We do share one Lord, one Master, one Savior.

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  11. It seems to me that non-transferrable mystical spiritual experiences are as much a part of our faith as are the doctrine. It is what Martyn Lloyd-Jones called theology on fire.

    Last Sunday a young, inexperienced, female worship leader took the stage in our traditional male-minister centered church. The difference for me was that I felt God’s presence like I’d not felt him in a long time as she led music. That’s the difference. I think God delights in tossing our theology on the sidewalk from time to time.

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  12. I may not agree with all your theology, Michael, but I think that we can agree on this: Lord, have mercy on us: you, me and on the whole world.

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