Tag Archives: Holiness

The Danger of Praying for Holiness

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“For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.”
(Hebrews 12:6)

Have you ever felt that your prayers were going unanswered?  We come to the Lord, as he has taught us, praying that we might grow in holiness, that we might be more loving, that we might trust in Him, and yet everything in and around us seems to be working against this prayer.  Is God not listening?  Is God not answering?

Recently I’ve come across this hymn by John Newton (most noted for Amazing Grace):

I asked the Lord that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace;
Might more of His salvation know,
And seek, more earnestly, His face.

’Twas He who taught me thus to pray,
And He, I trust, has answered prayer!
But it has been in such a way,
As almost drove me to despair.

This is the anguish of unanswered prayer, or so it would seem.  We read in the next stanza how we often look at prayer.  We come to God with right intentions, we want to overcome our sin, to find rest and peace – and we want God’s power to conquer and kill sin within us.  Give me holiness, give it now!

I hoped that in some favored hour,
At once He’d answer my request;
And by His love’s constraining pow’r,
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

What we find, what Newton teaches in the hymn, is that God often uses means and methods that we would never consider to answer our prayers and to bring us to holiness in Him.  When we would be free from sin, when we begin the journey to mortify sin in our lives, that’s when it seems that sin rears its ugly head even more.  Sin and its power in us assaults us, lays us low, until we cry out to God, “Will you pursue me to death?!”

Instead of this, He made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry pow’rs of hell
Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more with His own hand He seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
Cast out my feelings, laid me low

Lord, why is this, I trembling cried,
Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?
“’Tis in this way, the Lord replied,
I answer prayer for grace and faith.

Often this is the way that God answers our prayers for grace and faith, using our inward trials to break our dependence on the joys of this world, and to teach us to find our all in Him.

These inward trials I employ,
From self, and pride, to set thee free;
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou may’st find thy all in Me.”

When you engage in the war on sin, don’t give up when you find how deeply entrenched the enemy has become.  As you drive the enemy (whom Christ has defeated) from his stronghold – he will kick and scream.  He will accuse and curse.

But even this is from the hand of God.  Don’t kick against the goads, don’t chaff under the Father’s discipline.  As Hebrews 12 teaches, “Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.  In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood… For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives… For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”

These inward trials, this putting to death of the old life, weaning from the world, from self, from pride is painful – but it is necessary.  If you want to be more like Christ, you will, by necessity, become less like your old self.  The old orientation, the old desire – those things that came natural and easy – they are being replaced with the transforming power of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

SDG

Here is a link to listen:

Our Fruit Will Be What We Are

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“Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.”
(Matthew 7:20)

Being more than a bit behind this week, I thought I’d turn once again to one of my favorite authors for a “guest writer” today.  Here is an excerpt from A.W. Tozer’s The Root of the Righteous.

Our Fruit Will Be What We Are

Water cannot rise above its own level. Neither can a Christian by any sudden spasmodic effort rise above the level of his own spiritual life.

I have seen under the sun how a man of God will let his tongue go all day in light and frivolous conversation, let his interest roam abroad among the idle pleasures of this world, and then, under the necessity of preaching at night, seek a last minute reprieve just before service and by cramming desperately in prayer to try to put himself in a position where the spirit of the prophet will descend upon him as he enters the pulpit.  By working himself up to an emotional white heat he may afterward have reason to congratulate himself that he had much liberty in preaching the Word.  But he deceives himself and there is no wisdom in him.  What he has been all day and all week is what he is when he opens his Bible to expound unto the people.  Water cannot rise above its level.

Men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles.  The fruit of a tree is determined by the tree, and the fruit of life by the kind of life it is.  What a man is interested in to the point of absorption both decides and reveals what kind of man he is; and the kind of man he is by a secret law of the soul decides the kind of fruit he will bear.  The catch is that we are often unable to discover the true quality of our fruit until it is too late.

If we would be realistic in our Christian lives we must not overlook the tremendous power of affinity.  By affinity I mean the sympathetic attraction which certain things and persons have for us.  The human heart is extremely sensitive and altogether capable of setting up an inward relationship with objects far removed and forbidden.  As the needle of the compass has an affinity for the north magnetic pole, so the heart can keep true to its secret love though separated from it by miles and years.  What that loved object is may be discovered by observing which direction our thoughts turn when they are released from the hard restraints of work or study.  Of what do we think when we are free to think of what we will?  What object gives us inward pleasure as we brood over it?  Over what do we muse in our free moments?  Over what does our imagination return again and again?

When we have answered these questions honestly we will know what kind of persons we are; and when we have discovered what kind of persons we are we may deduce what kind of fruit we will bear.

It is one of the clichés of the evangelist that the true worth of a church member is revealed by his life on Monday rather than on Sunday.  There is a world of sober truth in that statement, and it is devoutly to be hoped that we who thus admonish others may ourselves remember to live the week through in the same atmosphere of sanctity that we desire so earnestly to inhabit on the Lord’s Day.

It is written of Moses that he “went in before the Lord to speak with him… and he came out, and spake unto the children of Israel.”  This is the Biblical norm from which we depart to our own undoing and to the everlasting injury of the souls of men.  No man has any moral right to go before the people who has not first been long before the Lord.  No man has any right to speak to men about God who has not first spoken to God about men.  And the prophet of God should spend more time in the secret place praying than he spends in the public place preaching.

As we dare not overlook the power of the human heart to establish affinities, so we dare not ignore the importance of the spiritual mood.  Mood is mental weather.  It is internal climate and it must be favorable to the growth of spiritual graces or they will not appear in the soul.  The Christian who allows day after day a chilly climate to prevail in his heart need expect no grapes of Eschol to hang over the wall when he goes before his Sunday school class, his choir, or his Sunday morning congregation.

One swallow does not make a spring nor one hot day a summer; nor will a few minutes of frantic praying before service bring out the tender buds or make the flowers to appear on the earth.  The field must be soaked in sunshine over a long period before it will give forth its treasures.  The Christian’s heart must be soaked in prayer before the true spiritual fruits begin to grow.  As the field has learned to live intimately and sympathetically with the rain and the sunshine, so must the Christian learn to live with God.  We cannot in a brief time make up for the long neglect of God and things spiritual.

God’s children live by laws as kind and as severe as those that govern nature.  Grace operates within those laws but never contrary to them.  Our fruit will follow its native tree, and not all our frightened prayers can prevent it.  If we would do holy deeds we must be holy men, every day and all the days that God grants us here below.

SDG