Overcoming Prayer: Teresa's Third Mansion

It is really a perfect misery to be alive when we have always to be going about like men with enemies at their gates, who cannot lay aside their arms even when sleeping or eating, and are always afraid of being surprised by a breaching of their fortress in some weak spot. Oh, my Lord and my God! How canst Thou wish us to desire such a miserable life as that?

(Teresa of Avila, St.; Peers, E. Allison (2010-10-07). Interior Castle (Kindle Locations 729-731). Wilder Publications. Kindle Edition.)

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A great moment in the life of a disciple of Jesus is the moment of overcoming.  In that moment grace is found to be sufficient for more than mere forgiveness.  In that moment God's pity on my ruined life is not the top rung of the ladder of spiritual growth.  In that moment I find that God grants some security in this life and that spiritual dryness does not always have to lead to backsliding.

One of the greatest barriers for spiritual growth in my life is the suspicion that things will never get better and will always get harder.  The struggle against the "pet sins" in my life have seemed to be endless.  The simple reason is that I have returned to them instead of leaving them.  In order to get over this "hump," I have needed a few things.  First, I needed to know that it is possible in God's grace to overcome sins in my life.  Next, I have needed to move beyond the desire to change into some real plans and actions.  Finally, as I began to overcome, I have experienced and reflected on a "security of conscience," as Teresa calls it. In this security I am not always armed and fearing "the enemy at the gates," but able to look forward and ahead to what God has worked out next in my life.

I have also had to come to terms with spiritual dryness in my prayer life.  As long as I blame God or circumstances for this dryness, I fall back into other forms of comfort, even sinful ones.  I have had to admit that such dryness comes mostly from how I want to deepen my practice of prayer and relinquish sins in my life, but do not take the steps to do it.  Like the rich young man who came before Jesus, I hesitate to so what he asks.  Even when I have ventured to "try out" what is needed, I lack the patience to wait at the door of the King.  I think I deserve to be invited immediately in.  Really this dryness is a time when I will develop either humility or restlessness, depending on my attitude toward the Lord.

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Overcoming has not so much to do with the enemies outside, but the enemies within.  Although I must first want to overcome sins in my life, I must move beyond desire into intention and action.  An overcoming life will look different from one that does not even if the desires are similar.  Spiritual dryness tests such desire.  When trust moves my heart away from restlessness, I will find that God will give "peace and resignation to His will," even if prayers continue in dryness for a time.  Such peace will be more welcome than even great moments of prayer.

I must desire to move from struggle into God's security enough to take action with God in my life.  He will meet me there.  I must not mistake spiritual dryness for God's lack of concern and attention, but as a moment to be humble before him, waiting for his response and strength to endure.  God's overcoming grace will come.  My part is not to leave the door before it opens.  "Do not suppose God has any need of our works; what He needs is the resoluteness of our will."  (ibid, 790-791)

Lord, grant me the grace to be an over-comer, a permanent pillar in your temple worshiping and praising you.  Amen.

A Long Obedience: Worship that Rests

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.  For six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.  On it you shall not do any work."  (Exodus 20:8-9)

 The Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath.  (Mark 2:22)

WORSHIP AS REST

God's command for rest on the Sabbath seems akin to a husband who "commands" his wife not to do anything while he takes care of dinner and kids on a day when she's sick or tired.  The holiness of such  rest is holiness that comes from faith and trust.  "Please trust me," he says, "I'll take care of everything."  Fortunately, God can do a better job that many of us husbands can.  The sentiment seems similar to me, though.

The danger of refusing such rest is not the same, however.  "There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience."  (Hebrews 4:9-11)  This does not raise Sabbath-breaking to the height of ultimate sin.  Instead, Sabbath-breaking becomes a picture of a life oriented away from God.  A life without resting in God is a life without faith in God.

So I find Sabbath-keeping not merely a matter of going to church, nor of staying at home and recreating.  It is resting from my desires and seeking God's.  In a message to the people of God in a time in which they just practiced a religion and did not really seek God, Isaiah records God words:

"If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath

    and from doing as you please on my holy day,

if you call the Sabbath a delight

    and the Lord’s holy day honorable,

and if you honor it by not going your own way

    and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,

then you will find your joy in the Lord,

    and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land

    and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.  (Isaiah 58:13-14)

Again, it is easy to see this as a threat to "worship and honor God or else."  Perhaps, though, God is pleading with his people to come back and trust in him, seek his fullness and goodness, and ponder and reflect on his greatness and glory, but not for his good, but for ours.  Maybe we cannot make it without such rest.

WORSHIP AS AN APPETIZER

What does such rest bring?  Why would God be so insistent?  Eugene Peterson writes,

[One hour of] worship does not satisfy our hunger for God - it whets the appetite.  Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship - it deepens.  It overflows the hour and permeates the week.  The need is expressed in a desire for peace and security.  Our everyday needs are changed by the act of worship.  We are no longer living from hand to mouth, greedily scrambling through the human rat race to make the best we can out of a mean existence.  (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p. 56)

If what he says is true, then our everyday needs are changed by not participating in worship.  We will find ourselves "living from hand to mouth, greedily scrambling through the human rat race to make the best we can out of a mean existence."  I think he hits it pretty close to the mark.

Peterson describes our desire for peace as a desire for a "wholeness that results from God's will being completed in us, . . . the work of God that, when complete, releases streams of living water in us and pulsates eternal life."  (56)  The desire for security

has nothing to do with insurance policies or large bank accounts or stockpiles of weapons.  The root meaning [of the Hebrew word] is leisure - the relaxed stance of one who knows that everything is all right because God is over us, with us, and for us in Jesus Christ.  The security of being at home in a history that has a cross at its center.  It is a leisure of the person who knows that every moment of our existence is at the disposal of God, lived under the mercy of God. (57)

A SHARPENED LIFE

Unfortunately, such wholeness and leisure are at odds with the lives most of us live in the secular and religious spheres.  The secular part of our lives are often engaged in frantic entertainment when work is put aside.  The religious part of our lives now looks surprisingly similar: entertainment and work with little time for a trusting rest that brings wholeness and that "relaxed stance."  How might we explain such wasted time to such a pragmatic society?  To the parts of myself that resist any waste of time?

Look at the mower in the summer's day, with so much to cut down ere the sun sets.  He pauses in his labour - is he a sluggard?  He looks for a stone, and begins to draw up and down his scythe, with rink-atink, rink-atink, rink-atink.  Is that idle music - is he wasting precious moments?  How much he might have mowed while he has been ringing out those notes on his scythe!  But he is sharpening his tool, and he will do far more when once again he gives strength to those long sweeps which lay the grass prostrate in rows before him.  (Charles Spurgeon, quoted in A Long Obedience, p. 57)

Lord, let me not become blunt with frantic and meaningless labor.  Let me be sharpened by spiritual worship, gathered with those who worship in truth.  I do not want the activity of worship, but one that acts as an appetizer to the meal of a life with you.  Amen.