CCC Gainesville | Blog
Silas West is doing really well! We still don’t know when he’ll leave Shands.
Here he is!
My name is Steven Eicholtz and as of the middle of the summer I have been a part of the youth team and will be working with the youth for the upcoming year. Many of you might not know me well, so let me share with you a bit of my story and my desire to help out with youth. I grew up in a Christian home and went to a Christian school all the way through high school. I went to church weekly and constantly was hearing about Christ there and at school as well. I began to “know” God well, as one would “know” about a subject in school. However, I wasn’t truly living for God and seeking Him in all areas of my life. Things always seemed to come easily, so I often trusted my own abilities instead of trusting God’s sovereignty. It wasn’t until college when things didn’t come as easily that I began to learn my need to trust and rely on God in all areas of my life and to rest in His love and grace. Part of the way I have grown in this regard is through weekly teachings and community with other believers from RUF at UF. In high school, my youth group only had a handful of kids, and I often found myself not going because other activities would come up. One thing I wish I had was a strong youth group committed to growing in faith in God through weekly teaching and community. My desire in working with the youth is to help provide and enhance the community of the youth group amongst one another and the youth leaders, and I am excited to have the opportunity to do that in the upcoming year.
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Being a human person means that there are many times when we just have nowhere to go, except to God. Our finiteness, powerless, fear, and plain old tiredness have taken our “umph” away and we just have to say, “God help!”
Perhaps this little teaching will help inform and inspire you as you pray. There is never a week when this church doesn’t need your prayer. This week is especially one of those. Opportunities to trust God for His grace abound. Let’s boldly request His blessing upon each individual and family in our congregation—and the congregation as a whole.
He said to them, “When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.’” LUKE 11:2-4
God made us and has redeemed us for fellowship with himself, and that is what prayer is. God speaks to us in and through the contents of the Bible, which the Holy Spirit opens up and applies to us and enables us to understand. We then speak to God about himself, and ourselves, and people in his world, shaping what we say as response to what he has said. This unique form of two-way conversation continues as long as life lasts.
The Bible teaches and exemplifies prayer as a fourfold activity, to be performed by God’s people individually both in private (Matt. 6:5-8) and in company with each other (Acts 1:14; 4:24). Adoration and praise are to be expressed; contrite confession of sin is to be made and forgiveness sought; thanks for benefits received are to be offered; and petitions and supplications for ourselves and others are to be voiced. The Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4) embodies adoration, petition, and confession; the Psalter consists of models of all four elements of prayer.
Petition, in which the persons praying humbly acknowledge their need and express themselves as trustfully depending on God to meet it out of his sovereign resources of wisdom and goodness, is the dimension of prayer that is most constantly highlighted in the Bible (e.g., Gen. 18:16-33; Exod. 32:31-33:17; Ezra 9:5-15; Neh. 1:5-11; 4:4-5, 9; 6:9, 14; Dan. 9:4-19; John 17; James 5:16-18; Matt. 7:7-11; John 16:23-24; Eph. 6:18-20; 1 John 5:14-16). Petition, along with the other modes of prayer, should ordinarily be directed to the Father, as the Lord’s Prayer shows, but Christ may be called on for salvation and healing, as in the days of his flesh (Rom. 10:8-13; 2 Cor. 12:7-9), and the Holy Spirit for grace and peace (Rev. 1:4). It cannot be wrong to present petitions to God as triune or to request any spiritual blessing from any one of the three Persons, but there is wisdom in following the New Testament pattern.
Jesus teaches that petition to the Father is to be made in his name (John 14:13-14; 15:16; 16:23-24). This means invoking his mediation, as the one who secures our access to the Father, and looking to him for support, as our intercessor in the Father’s presence. We can only, however, look to him for support when what we ask accords with God’s revealed will (1 John 5:14) and our own motives in asking are right (James 4:3).
Jesus teaches that we may properly press God hard with fervent persistence when we bring needs to him (Luke 11:5-13; 18:1-8), and that he will answer such prayer in positive terms. But we must remember that God, who knows what is best in a way that we do not, may deny our specific requests as to how the needs should be met. If he does, however, it is because he has something better to give than what we asked for, as was the case when Christ denied Paul healing for the thorn in his flesh (2 Cor. 12:7-9). To say “Your will be done,” surrendering one’s own expressed preference to the Father’s wisdom as Jesus did in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39-44), is the most explicit way of expressing faith in the goodness of what God has planned.
There is no tension or inconsistency between the teaching of Scripture on God’s sovereign foreordination of all things and on the efficacy of prayer. God foreordains the means as well as the end, and our prayer is foreordained as the means whereby he brings his sovereign will to pass.
Christians who pray to God sincerely, with reverence and humility, with a sense of privilege and a pure (i.e., purified, penitent) heart, will find in themselves a Spirit-given filial instinct prompting prayer to and trust in their heavenly Father (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:15), and a desire to pray that outruns their uncertainty as to what thoughts they should express (Rom. 8:26-27). The mysterious reality of the Holy Spirit’s help in prayer becomes known only to those who actually pray.
My old professor, Jerram Barrs, has written a fabulous book of reflections on Christianity, Literature and the Arts.
Barrs gives us the three key elements for evaluating great art. He then puts those qualifiers to the test by investigating five of the world’s most influential authors—empowering us to better understand the character of God and helping others to know him too.
“Echoes of Eden is the most accessible, readable, and yet theologically robust work on Christianity and the arts that you will be able to find. It is biblical, theologically sound, filled with examples, and edifying. It anticipates and answers well all the most common questions that evangelical people ask about the arts. I highly recommend it.” –Tim Keller
Here is the table of contents:
1 God and Humans as Creative Artists
2 Imitation, the Heart of the Christian’s Approach to Creativity
3 Building a Christian Understanding of the Artist’s Calling
4 How Do We Judge the Arts?
5 Echoes of Eden: God’s Testimony to the Truth
6 The Conversion of C. S. Lewis and Echoes of Eden in His Life
7 Echoes of Eden in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
8 Harry Potter and the Triumph of Self-Sacrificing Love
9 Shakespeare and a Christian Worldview
10 Jane Austen, Novelist of the Human Heart
Appendix: The “Outing” of Dumbledore
Read the first twenty pages? Yes please!
Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
Yesterday I briefly touched on this passage and how it tells us to praise God for wherever we find beauty. One article that helps summarize my understanding of this principle contains this quote:
Misunderstanding Philippians 4:8
If holiness is so important, it seems reasonable to argue that we should withdraw from anything that fails to measure up to the standard Paul gives in this text. Anything that is not true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy is, therefore, out-of-bounds for the believer, and must be set aside. And, since precious little in Babylonian culture comes even close to passing this test, it is inappropriate (at best) and dishonoring to Christ (at worst) to get involved with it, regardless of the reason.
I believe this understanding of Philippians 4:8 is mistaken. Let me explain why.
We live in a fallen world. A world which, though created by God and declared to be good by him, is now abnormal and under his judgment because of our sin and rebellion. It’s not merely that human beings occasionally commit some sin, but that by nature we are sinners. It is not surprising, then, that the effects of the Fall permeate all that we are and do. Since we are created in God’s image we bear true significance, but we are also fallen which means that everything about us is tainted by sin. It’s not just non-Christians of whom this is true, but Christians as well. We are all sinners, and thus all fall short of God’s glory. Even if we are redeemed by God’s grace and deeply desire to honor our Lord above all, we realize that even our worship is incomplete, at best, and flawed, at worst. We seek as believers to live to God’s glory, but we are well aware that this can occur only by grace. Until our redemption is consummated, even our service to him is imperfect, affected by the inevitable ripples of the Fall.
This means that nothing anyone does or makes in this fallen world (except for Christ, of course) measures up fully to the list Paul gives in Philippians 4:8. Everything falls short in one way or another. As a result, trying to use this text as a measure by which to draw lines for our involvement in a non-Christian world ends up being a rather subjective affair. We don’t intend that, of course, but how could it be any different? If nothing in this bent world fully meets this standard, we end up drawing our lines arbitrarily. We rule out the things we tend to be uncomfortable with, and then conveniently, we tend to ignore the fact that what we have ruled “in” doesn’t meet the standard, either. –Dennis Haack
