Event Date: 22/08/2013

It’s been 10 years since the North event began

First Price Break 30th April!

The bible and church history attest to both long, ground out years of prayer with not much seeming to change and sudden, dramatic answers to prayer where the room gets shaken and everyone and everything is different in a nanosecond. Depending on your history as a Christian and/or your particular theological or ecclesiological biases these two views of prayer may be seen as faithless, dead and unspiritual on one hand or flighty and immature on the other!

If we don’t reconcile in our hearts and heads that both of these forms of prayer are equally valid and equally spiritual then we might find that they work to cancel each other out and produce an awful, cynical fudge of ambivalence in our prayer life (personally and corporately).

Let’s consider for a moment some biblical pray-ers and their prayers.

Nehemiah, while in exile, prayed for five months and he only prayed one thing, “God, grant me favour with the king!” (Nehemiah 1).

In Acts 4 the believers pray and the room gets shaken as they are all filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 4.31).

I don’t know whether you have a tendency toward Nehemiah prayers or Acts 4 prayers, or whether your bias toward either immediacy or patience works against the long grind of prayer on one hand or the sudden and dramatic on the other. God clearly answers both. 

Here’s a thought that might save us from cynical, ambivalent fudge-land. The great golfer Gary Player was once asked by a cocky interviewer for his thoughts on the luck he seemed to possess on the golf course. Player answered,  “Well it’s funny, because the more I practice the luckier I get!”

This week of prayer presents us with the opportunity to both grind out faithful, long-sighted and God-honouring prayers on one hand, but to also expect the sudden and dramatic intervention of the Holy Spirit. Again, God clearly trades in both. But to paraphrase Gary Player, perhaps the more we do the grinding out prayer of Nehemiah, the more we will see the suddenly’s of Acts 4!

Let’s do this thing! Have a brilliant week!

My friend Arnold Bell passed away yesterday. He was a husband, a father and a friend. He was a pastor, a preacher and a man of God. He was a man with a wicked sense of humour. He was a man who knew his own mind and more importantly, his heart. He was a man who loved buses!

He will be sorely missed by very many people, not least his dear wife Mary and their son Jonathan and daughter Esther.

Do you remember Eleanor Rigby, the Beatles song? There’s a line in the song that goes, “Eleanor Rigby, died in the church and was buried along with her name; nobody came”

That might seem like an odd line to recall, but it reminds me of a verse in 2 Chronicles 21, ”[King Jehoram] was thirty-two years old when he began to reign, and he reigned eight years in Jerusalem. And he departed with no one’s regret.”

Tragic

Death is tragic.

More tragic still is a death like King Jehoram’s; a death preceded by such a wasteful, reckless and God-mocking life that it was regretted by no one.

For Arnold Bell, nothing could be further from the truth.

Arnold ran his race well, finished strong and believed God until the end. As I reflect on his life and on his death, my prayer is that I might live well and finish strong and that like Arnold, there may be no words further from the truth when I die than the words written about King Jehoram.

You’ll be sorely missed mate.