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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/15/2006 10:10 PM (GMT -6) |   | The following is meant as a helpful appendex to what Tom is thinking through; perhaps like some of Selah's comments have seemed sometimes to be.
This is GOOD! Here is a passage from a homily on the Lord’s Prayer written by St. Gregory of Nyssa describing the essence of prayer:
“The effect of prayer is union with God, and if someone is with God, he is separated from the enemy. Through prayer we guard our chastity, control our temper and rid ourselves of conceit. It makes us forget injuries, overcomes envy, defeats injustice and makes atonement for sin. Through prayer we obtain physical well-being, a happy home, and a strong, well-ordered society….Prayer is the seal of virginity and a pledge of faithfulness in marriage. It shields the traveler, protects the sleeper, and gives courage to those who keep vigil….It will refresh you when you are weary and comfort you when you are sorrowful. Prayer is the delight of the joyous as well as the consolation of the afflicted….Prayer is intimacy with God and contemplation of the invisible….Prayer is the enjoyment of things present and the essence of things to come.”
http://www.oca.org/CHRIST-thoughts-article.asp?SID=6&ID=236
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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 7/15/2006 10:19 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
But on the healing thing, Mephi, think about this. There's a general sense in which we can say God “wills” everyone to be healed. He wants peoples’ bodies to be ‘occasions’ where importance is perfected and the goodness and glory of God are celebrated, right? That’s God’s “will” for our bodies. But there’s another sense in which what God “wills” for a person’s sick body is necessarily conditioned by the person’s circumstances, God’s plan to use their healing or their sickness, etc. When you say God can "really will” their healing, which do you have in mind? When I use it, I'm describing what God wills to accomplish AFTER all the creational variables are taken into consideration. You seem to be using it to describe what God wills to accomplish BEFORE all the variables are taken into consideration. But from my point of view there's little point in describing what God "wills" BEFORE any of the varialbes are taken into consideration (except to demonstrate God's CHARACTER--which I'm assuming as an established thing). So I could argue, for example, that where God’s willing in the first sense is met with sufficient faith, healing IS guaranteed. For God not to heal in such cases God had some REASON not to do so, which simply means he didn't "will to heal." But where God wills in the latter sense, it isn’t guaranteed. When I say, "God wills my healing," I would normally mean something like “God has taken all the variable into consideration and has chosen to heal me,” in which case it’s gonna happen. But we can never know the variables. So I’d be inclined to say we can never know if God “wills” our healing. Does this make any sense?
I see and understand what you are saying. I also think that your post directly above this one was quite insightful. It makes sense. I think that we come to the same conclusions, yet from differing starting points.
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
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Starkman
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Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1747
| Posted 7/16/2006 2:16 PM (GMT -6) | | What gets me is how many Christians get sick but don't get healed. Oh, their bodies may heal over time, but seldom is that God comes in, waves His hand and the sickness is flat, plain gone. Why is that? How can there be "things" stopping God from simple healing? It sure can't be that we lack the faith in every instance.
I mean, when all is said and done in my life, I have found very few (VERY few) times when God has answered prayer in the plain and clear WHAM! There it is, at least when it comes to anything beyond the basics of taking care of me. That is the only time God visibly steps in. Mind you, I'm not complaining about that at all. All I'm saying is that most every other aspect of my life has been left wanting. There have been little, if any, desires of my heart fufilled. There has been no other (visible) activity in my life when it comes to God answering prayer. I have prayed for people, for ministry, for a motorcycle (that's about it, too, for "worldly" possessession), for some leading as to a career in order to make enough money just to pay my bills, to do a simple BA via distance learning...and nothing. Not a darned thing has ever resulted from it.
I have resorted to the conclusion that "NO" seems to be the answer to my prayers because of some fault of mine. I figure I'm the problem child, and that's why I never see any prayers answered beyond the basics (being taken care of). Yeah, I've screwed my life up royally in the past and payed for it, and then some, but I'm well beyond that now. But all I can figure, though, is that even where I haven't seen any of my prayers answered in the affirmative because I still must be screwing up. I still must be some sort of problem child or something.
I figure that there's a lot more going on as to why God doesn't answer prayers in the affirmative than just that He cant or that He's prohibited in some manner or another. I figure that God must see something seriously wrong and inappropriate in these days (at least in a lot of the lives of Christians I know) to answer affirmatively. I don't know what it is, but it really gets tiring.
Starkman
My teacher used to say that whenever he read Scripture, he would always ask the question, "What does this have to say about the character of God?" Working off his thinking, as I read Scripture, I have come to ask, "What does this have to say about the heart and passion of God's desire for relationship for us?Post Edited (Starkman) : 7/16/2006 2:20:57 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Corey
Five with a Four-wing
Date Joined Feb 2003
Total Posts : 1893
| Posted 7/16/2006 5:56 PM (GMT -6) | | | Keith: What gets me is how many Christians get sick but don't get healed. Oh, their bodies may heal over time, but seldom is that God comes in, waves His hand and the sickness is flat, plain gone. Why is that? How can there be "things" stopping God from simple healing? It sure can't be that we lack the faith in every instance.
Corey: In my more reflective times, this can really get to me. Here's what I wrote exactly a year ago, when Meph was learning, "God is weird and wonderful":
I'm not sure this really ties in here, but I want to express how deeply disturbed I was today to hear the autopsy report about those three kids who suffocated to death in the trunk of a car in New Jersey. Seriously, I feel like I just don't know God at all when I hear how they died slowly, screaming unheard, for an estimated 36 hours in a hot and dark confinement. I wept, "Oh God! NO! This can't be!"
All theological theories aside, I just can't picture an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God who didn't help here. He KNEW where they were! All these people looking, presumably hundreds praying, and NOTHING! We talk, almost casually, all the time about a personal God who speaks to us. Why didn't he speak here? Or was just no one receptive to hear? No one?!! These are little kids, probably not much different than my own daughters!
Natural evil is more difficult for me to understand than moral evil, and this particular kind of natural evil is even more difficult for me to understand. It's not like the tsunami which swept in killed quickly before people could really react or pray for God's intervention. But 36 hours!! Little kids suffering and scared while I'M SURE people were engaged in prayer looking for them.
My picture of God must be off. This is "weird", but I think in a bad way. | | Back to Top | | |
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Starkman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1747
| Posted 7/16/2006 9:14 PM (GMT -6) | | I remember that post, Corey.
You know, it isn't even that God doesn't do anything sometimes about these kinds of tragedies that's so disturbing—I have to believe He really is a loving God; it's not knowing why He doesn't do anything. If we all could at least be clued in on the game plan, the playing field and the rules of engagement, it would save a lot of wasted prayer time, it would help us to make peace with what can't be, and it would enable us to focus in on what can be done.
But, as it stands, we don't have a clue. The one possible clue we have (Book of Job) doesn't seem to fit into too much of the stuff we're talking about here.
Starkman
My teacher used to say that whenever he read Scripture, he would always ask the question, "What does this have to say about the character of God?" Working off his thinking, as I read Scripture, I have come to ask, "What does this have to say about the heart and passion of God's desire for relationship for us? | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/17/2006 12:59 PM (GMT -6) | |
Starkman said...
What gets me is how many Christians get sick but don't get healed. Oh, their bodies may heal over time, but seldom is that God comes in, waves His hand and the sickness is flat, plain gone. Why is that?
From the church bulletin, Sunday, is this verse from Romans 7. Notice particularly there is BOTH a changed and an unchanged, a healed and an unhealed aspect -- both are present at the same time. I'll comment on that.
Romans 7
18 For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not.
19 For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.
20 Now if (I) do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
21 So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand.
22 For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self,
23 but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 5
Notice that in 22 he tells us about the victory, that in his *inner self* he delights in God's law. And notice that in 23 his *members* which he called *flesh* in 18 are allthewhile still captive to the sin and death of the fall.
Likkewise, we should not think that God is inactive when sickness is in the world.
And then remember the parable of the wheat and the tares, which might be stretched enough to remind us that God *could* call us home today -- but if he doesn't it is certainly BECAUSE he has given us another day to "metanoia" and change, repent, be disciplined, etc.
And perhaps it is for that reason, by GRACE that we suffer.
And perhaps we misunderstand the new meaning of suffering if we think it is only a single, individualized thing. "Bear one another's burdens." When one suffers we all suffer.
As Mother Theresa said, "God does not call us to be effectvie. God calls us to be faithful." When one dies in her arms it is not necessarily the expiration that has the greatest clarity into the true meaning of the event. But it is that she recognizes that God has deamed the other worthy to suffer (and Christ suffered) and that she could minister mercy to that dear one, and insodoing ministers directly to Christ. That is the meaning. A villian is, by the Spirit and our flesh transformed into a bit of the new kingdom. Sure, we'd like to see all problems swept away quickly. But the Bible represents that delay on God's part as mercy. Can we think of places in the New Testement that talk about it that way?
And the 7th chapter of Romans shows us, here, that part of the victory IS NOW, and that bit by bit the victory is spilling over from the *inside* to the outside.
Maranatha.
(o)Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 7/17/2006 1:04:33 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/17/2006 1:11 PM (GMT -6) | | Starkman said...
You know. . .it's not knowing why He doesn't do anything.
Comment:
He's maybe given you the job of praying, and of arguing, and lifitng your voice saying "Lord have mercy."
Starkman said...
If we all could at least be clued in on the game plan, the playing field and the rules of engagement,
Comment: We know the final plan from the end of Revelations, and we know the immediate plan of "weap with those who weep, etc. Sometimes I feel the temptation of wanting that intermediate plan of "when's half time" -- sluggard that I am. 
Starkman said...
it would help us to make peace with what can't be, and it would enable us to focus in on what can be done.
Comment:
Like Mother Theresa, maybe it is not so much what "can be done" but what "must be faithfully attempted.''
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Truth Aficionado
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 2003
Total Posts : 1544
| Posted 7/20/2006 3:57 PM (GMT -6) | | A prayer we can count on:
The apostle Paul suffered many things himself – beatings, shipwreck, stoning, hunger and thirst. As usual, he demonstrated a unique perspective on his suffering. Musing over his experiences, he declared, "But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed" - (2 Corinthians 4:7-9, NIV ).
What happens to you is not as important as what happens in you. Although God has not promised us immunity from suffering, He has promised to be with us as we go through it.
Love is like a ball in a game of catch: throw it and it will come back to you; hold onto it and that ends the game. Post Edited (sparknheart) : 7/20/2006 4:11:39 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/21/2006 12:35 PM (GMT -6) | |
AMEN!
sparknheart said...
A prayer we can count on:
The apostle Paul suffered many things himself – beatings, shipwreck, stoning, hunger and thirst. As usual, he demonstrated a unique perspective on his suffering. Musing over his experiences, he declared, "But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed" - (2 Corinthians 4:7-9, NIV ).
What happens to you is not as important as what happens in you. Although God has not promised us immunity from suffering, He has promised to be with us as we go through it.
AMEN!
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 8/2/2006 5:26 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
Important issues to deal with (yes? no?) in writing:
1) The reality and nature of War (i.e., warfare worldview),
2) Six WWV theses (how necessary is mentioning them all--I'm thinking "sphere of influence" is the crucial one when it comes to prayer),
3) Rules of engagement,
4) Reality and nature of ambiguity,
5) What is "trust" and what does divine "faithfulness" amoutn to?
6) How does a suffering person experience God's faithfulness?
7) What are we "guaranteed" biblically speaking?
What else should I make sure I hit?
For #4, I'm assuming that you would talk about some of the "queen being sacrificed for the rook" kind of stuff that adds to the ambiguity...AND the idea of "acceptable risks"
For #5, I'm also assuming that you will be talking about God's functional finitude concretely...and what that really means for people who "trust" in God's divine leading in particular areas.
With those things in place, you've pretty much got it going on with what you have. Having something that actually DEALS with what you are mentioning would be very helpful.
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
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