My sermon prep begins with me, a cup of coffee, and my Bible. Only the coffee is optional. While I know my Bible well enough to have an opinion on a given text’s meaning and how it fits into the overall story of the Bible, I like to focus and pray through specific words and phrases in the passage. This helps me “steep,” or soak in the text so I can encounter God through the text. – Darrin Patrick
Darrin Patrick, pastor of The Journey Church in St. Louis, shares some helpful reflections on his own spiritual journey wiht prayer and Scripture reading. He points us to George Muller, a great man of faith who started five orphanages on Ashley Down and filled them with hundreds of abused, neglected, and abandoned children. He had the faith of ten thousand church planters, but beneath his great faith and prayer for God’s provision was a goal even more noble that housing and caring for orphans, a goal greater than ministry or church planting. This goal was to be happy in God, and to bring others into that happiness. Darrin shares some of Muller’s thoughts on this:
Darrin on Mueller
I have always struggled with prayer as a Christian. I was sharing my frustration one day with my seminary professor and spiritual disciplines guru Don Whitney. Dr. Whitney shared with me a quote for George Müller, a godly giant of the faith who also struggled with prayer. This is from an entry in George Müller’s diary, dated May 7, 1841.
Mueller on Happiness in God
As I continue to read through A Praying Life, I find myself pausing, repenting, rejoicing, deepening in prayer. In the chapter “Spending Time with Your Father”, Miller makes the point that Jesus acted like a child. Whenever asked about his Father, his comments were laced with affectionate dependency and admiration. Was this Jesus just “saying the spiritual thing, the right thing”? After all, he is Jesus; isn’t he powerful enough to do all the miracles on his own, to fulfill his calling on his own?
Miller asserts that “Jesus was the most dependent human being who ever lived.” Why? Because his entire sense of self is not self-reliant, self-centered. Rather, Jesus is because the Father and the Spirit are.
Unlike us, “Jesus has no separate sense of self, he has no identity crisis, no angst. Consequently, he doesn’t try to ‘find himself’. He knows himself only in relationship with his Father. He can’t conceive of himself outside of that relationship.
Here we have a very practical unpacking of perichoresis. Prayer was a constant expression of his identity as Jesus-in-relationship-with-the-Father. There is no other Jesus. Our trouble is that we have a self that is created out of relationship with the Father, a sinful, self-reliant not God-reliant self. Prayer returns us to our proper place of self, restores our identity as Jonathan-in-relationship-with-Father-Son-Spirit. Prayer reminds us of who we really are, where we find our identity, where we are most loved and best fathered. We spend time alone with God in prayer, not because it is a Christian duty, but because he is our father, because we love him, and we spend time alone with those we love most. We pray because we live with Him.
In this article, Mark Bjorlo lays out the danger of planting your church too rapidly or, better put, over-working as a church planter. Overworking is a real temptation and danger for planters, often an issue of unbelief in the gospel and, conversely, belief in their absolute necessity to effective church planting. The wreckage is everywhere—sexual failure, embezzlement, bitter wives, neglected children, failed churches, broken disciples, church splits, wrecked faith. No matter where you are on this, the article is worth reading. An excerpt:
The first year, I didn’t take a day off. I didn’t work less than ten hours a day. I really didn’t know how to shut it off. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. More times than I am comfortable confessing, I went to sleep with the laptop open. Often, I would wake up several times a night to only pick it up and begin working again. I had breakfast meetings, lunch meetings, dinner meetings, evening meetings, and then would often work late into the night. Somewhere along the way all planters have to come to a conviction that God loves His church more than they possibly can.
