Day 9

Oswald Chambers’ reading yesterday (October 26) for My Utmost for His Highest  - read one day late, caught my eye this morning. It says:

WHAT IS A MISSIONARY?
"As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you." John 20:21

A missionary is one sent by Jesus Christ as He was sent by God. The great dominant note is not the needs of men, but the command of Jesus. The source of our inspiration in work for God is behind, not before. The tendency to-day is to put the inspiration ahead, to sweep everything in front of us and bring it all out to our conception of success. In the New Testament the inspiration is put behind us, the Lord Jesus. The ideal is to be true to Him, to carry out His enterprises.

Personal attachment to the Lord Jesus and His point of view is the one thing that must not be overlooked. In missionary enterprise the great danger is that God's call is effaced by the needs of the people until human sympathy absolutely overwhelms the meaning of being sent by Jesus. The needs are so enormous, the conditions so perplexing, that every power of mind falters and fails. We forget that the one great reason underneath all missionary enterprise is not first the elevation of the people, nor the education of the people, nor their needs; but first and foremost the command of Jesus Christ - "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations."

When looking back on the lives of men and women of God the tendency is to say - What wonderfully astute wisdom they had! How perfectly they understood all God wanted! The astute mind behind is the Mind of God, not human wisdom at all. We give credit to human wisdom when we should give credit to the Divine guidance of God through childlike people who were foolish enough to trust God's wisdom and the supernatural equipment of God.

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I translated and reinterpreted that into “What is an Intercessor?”  - the second line striking a chord:

“The great dominant note is not the needs of men but the command of Jesus.”

I realized that in praying for others, we can so easily get caught up in their needs rather than God’s answer. Mercy, or maybe more accurately human sympathy, makes the best of us and we want their prayers to be answered just as they requested it.

Today in our staff meeting, Jenny who is 9 months minus 2 weeks pregnant (she’s due Nov 13) asked, “Pray that my labor starts right after I drop Grant off at preschool in the morning. That way I’ll be all dressed, Grant will be taken care of while I’m in labor, and basing it on Grant’s 8-hour labor, I should have the baby just in time for Carl to pick up Grant from school and then visit me in the hospital.”

Jenny was kidding – okay, only half kidding because it would be really convenient for it to work out that way – but she was honest enough with her friends to share her specific request with God, and we loved her for it.

God doesn’t mind; but he also doesn’t always answer in those specific ways. Because then Who would be God? Who would be in control and without knowledge and understanding of how all the other pieces of the puzzle fit. As Oswald writes, we want the answer to be “our conception of success.”

Now it’s one thing to request that of God – and that’s totally okay because we are limited in our perception of the possibilities out there, so we plan and ask for what is possible.

But an intercessor, if we want to truly pray the best for those for whom we intercede, we need to lay down the request and ask for the even more that is God’s answer to prayer.

There is no way that we can anticipate God’s better, fuller, more complex, elegant, indescribable solution. I am learning that the best we can do is anticipate a semblance of what that might look like but leave the details up to God.

As intercessors, we must cultivate a playfulness, a willingness to change the rules, the rewards, the winner. It’s what Chambers says in the last line: [we must be] childlike people who were foolish enough to trust God's wisdom and the supernatural equipment of God.

That says to me that we can delight in God’s answers if we trust him.

The other thought I have been playing with today came up in my Sunday small group as we talked yesterday about Predestination and being chosen – or in non Presbyterian terms, knowing that we have an eternal life with God. We know the end story. We know what will happen at the end of this earthly life, and we know that God will make a new heaven and earth at the end of the world’s story.

If we know the end, then, perhaps our concern should be not what happens at the end but our journey there. How will we spend that journey? God has given us extreme freedom in getting to the end, and we can choose how will we work through the process. Will it be with Him or without Him? Will it be alone or with others? We can choose to fight God and others all the way. Or we can choose to appreciate the company God’s given us and laugh, cry, learn together. We can choose to disagree with God and act the distasteful contrarian. Or we can indulge ourselves in the myriad of experiences that God wants to see us through.

Who would have thought this 40  Day Fast would hold so much? At the outset, I thought of it as a desert, a deprivation, a getting through. But I am learning to much, its like every cactus has a flower, every desert an oasis, and I’m learning to walk in the cool and dark of the night.

Posted by email from 40 Day Fast (posterous)