(PART 3 ) What to Do when your faith is being attacked
Family Talk
As we understand the position of a Christian, a believer, he is in the family of God. Therefore, prayer is family talk. It is a friendly, intimate, frank, unrestricted talking with God, and it is into this close and intimate relationship that every individual is brought by faith in Jesus Christ. By faith in Christ we pass out of the realm of being Strangers to God and aliens to the family of God into the intimate family circle of the children of God. It is easy to talk within a family circle, but think what harm is done to that intimacy if people refuse to talk within the family circle. Again, prayer, basically, is a conversation with God.
Now supplication is making some specific request. James says, “You do not I use you do not ask” (James 4:2). In our conversation with God it is perfectly proper to ask, because we are children and he is a Father. What Paul is saying is, “After you have put on the armor of God, after, you have thought through the implications of your faith in the ways that have been suggested previously, then talk to God about it.” Tell him the whole thing. Tell him your reactions, tell him how you feel, describe your relationships to life around yea and your reactions to them, and ask him for what you need.
Prayer is often considered to be such a high and holy thing that it has to be carried on in some artificial language or tone of voice. You hear this so frequently from pulpits. Pastors adopt what has been aptly called a “stained-glass voice.” They pray as though God were far off in some distant comer of the universe. But prayer is a simple conversation with a Father. It is what the Apostle describes so beautifully in the Epistle to the Philippians,
Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication [there it is again] with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, win keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:6-7).
That is a wonderful study in prayer. Paul is saying there are three simple things involved in prayer. First, worry about nothing: “Be anxious for nothing,” Christian friends, do you hear what that says? Worry about nothing! This is one of the major problems in Christian living today. Christians are either stumbling blocks to non-Christians or are a glowing testimony and witness to them depending on whether they worry or not. Christians are continually exhorted in Scripture to worry about nothing. Now that doesn’t, mean not to have a proper interest about things. Stoicism is not advocated here, but we are not to be anxious, fretful, worried.
Nevertheless this is so often the attitude of our lives. Someone said, “I am so loaded up with worries that if anything happened to me this week it would be two weeks before I could get around to worrying about it.” Sometimes we make an artificial attempt to cure our worrying by will power. As another has put it,
I’ve joined the new ‘Don’t worry’ Club
And now I bold my breath
I’m so scared I’m going to worry
That I’m worried half to death.
But the admonition is: Worry about nothing, and that is only possible when you have put on the armor of God. Do not try to attempt it on any other basis. Worry comes from fear, and the only thing that ‘will dissolve fear is facts. Therefore, to put on the armor of God is to face the facts. just as they are.
The second thing Paul says is involved in prayer is to “Pray about everything.” Everything! Someone says, do you mean that God is interested in little things as well as big things? Is there anything that is big to him? Of course he is interested in them; he says so. The hairs on our head are numbered by him. Jesus was at great pains to show us that God is infinitely involved in the most minute details of out lives. He is concerned about everything. Therefore, pray about everything.
And what is the result? “You will be kept through anything!” That is what he says in Philippians. “The peace of God, which passes all understanding.” It is a peace which no one can explain which is there despite the circumstances, and which certainly does not arise out of any change of circumstances. And it “will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Can there be anything more relevant than that in this troubled, anxious, fretful, weary, disturbed world?
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