Ever hear a memorized prayer repeated by someone? I am not talking about “the Lord’s prayer” or
the 23rd Psalm being recited by someone. I am talking more about the prayers like …
“now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep”. Often these kind of memorized prayers become
just a series of words to the speaker.
Very little time is given to examining each word, each phrase, and then
putting meaning behind the message.
The same thing tends to happen at meal time. We ask for God’s blessing (when not too embarrassed
by our faith in public) over our food, as Christ did being our example. But after a while, praying 2-3 times a day to
bless food gets to be routine. We say
the same 3 or 4 prayers, or slight variations on each, over and over, until
most of what we get out of our prayers is a routine habit, not a meaningful
request to “bless” our food. Let’s face
it, few of us expect to break 5 loaves and 2 small fish for over 5000 eager
listeners (as the remainder of our example story would have listed was the
“blessing” requested).
But as we have discovered, the real meaning of Salvation is
to be saved from our sin, from ourselves, and made free from our pain, free to
love. This saving process is not
something intended to start once we get to heaven, it was intended to bring us
immediate relief. It was intended to
ease our suffering and bring us even closer and closer to our God right
now. We have learned that once we
eliminate “self” trying so desperately to take on the responsibility of
removing sin from us, and instead surrender completely to God who alone is
capable of such feats – that real victory is not only possible – it is real, it
is here, and it is now.
But the process of Salvation is not one that is begun and
ended in a day, as our dependence on Christ cannot last for only a day and be
deemed sufficient. We depend on Christ
for our entire lives, each and every day.
Contained herein is the secret I was talking about. What was it the apostle Paul said, “I die
daily” (1 Cor 15:31). What did he mean
by that, obviously it could not have been a physical death? Only Kenny on South Park seems to be able to
do that (of course he is cartoon). Paul
was talking about dying to self.
Removing self from the process of getting rid of sin is how surrender begins
to work.
Daniel the Prophet of the Old Testament, seems to take
Paul’s practice and raise it up a notch.
For Daniel, he opened his windows that faced old Jerusalem (where the
temple that had contained the physical presence of the Lord in those days was
located) and prayed 3 times to God, thanking Him every day. No, this was not a meal prayer. And when you consider that worshipping a
“foreign” God in the land of Babylon should have seen him killed, he was never
embarrassed by prayer in plain sight.
This was Daniel’s daily ritual and it not only saw him through the
Lion’s den; when you examine the life of Daniel in the Bible, you find almost
no faults in his character. Outside of
Christ, he sets an almost perfect example of humble service. Was his secret the same as Paul’s?
But lest you think that the number of prayers is the secret
to success, let’s step back even further in time, all the way before the flood
to the days of Enoch. Enoch raised the
game of Paul and Daniel, by actually walking with God on a daily basis. The 2 grew so close that eventually … “God
took him” home with Him. Enoch was
translated to heaven without seeing death, and at that time, with only the hope
of a savior, not having seen the implementation of Gods plan to save us. Enoch lived in days like ours, for Christ
compared the days of Noah with the last days on planet earth. Wickedness surrounded Enoch, the likes of
which we are only recently beginning to experience once again here on planet
earth in our day.
But surrounding horrific conditions did not prevent Enoch
from walking with God every day, talking with God every day, depending on God
every day, and surrendering to God every day.
In so doing, Enoch was made pure, and Enoch was taken to heaven without
seeing death – a first fruits example of what will occur at the end of
days. The horrible conditions of being
taken captive by a foreign dictator with absolute power over life and death,
did not stop Daniel from praying. Nor
did the horrific oppression of the Roman Empire, and established Jewish Church
stop Paul from dying daily. Nor have we
any excuse not to find ourselves being able to surrender in the world we find
ourselves in today.
It is not the surrounding horrific conditions that bring
about purity. It is not the number of
times we pray to God throughout the day that somehow increases our
righteousness on a scale. It is the
meaning behind our petitions that counts.
It is the deep need we feel when we utter the words of surrender that
make the difference between meaningless routine, and life altering change. We are not asking for an unknown “blessing”
over our meals. We are asking that our
God SAVE US from the sin we would otherwise commit right in front of Him. We are asking that He intercede for us,
dominate our natural sinful instincts, and save us in spite of us. This is the meaning of dying daily. And it must occur each day without exception,
at the beginning of the day, in order for us to face the day. Moments before our prayer of surrender, are
moments of extreme risk of failure on our part.
We have demonstrated this countless times.
All through scripture, when servants of God have sacrificed
daily to His will, they have found themselves the beneficiary of God’s
success. Note, I did not say that THEY
were successful; I said they were the beneficiaries of God’s success. Victory over sin does not belong to man on
any level. We screwed up in the garden,
and have not recovered since. No,
victory over sin is the domain of the Lord.
He proved it already living a perfect existence prior to earth, and then
on it, in human form. Christ lived even
His life on earth, in daily dependence on His Father’s will. Even His dying prayer in supreme agony was a
surrender of His earthly will, to that of His Father’s divine will. And He succeeded. This is our secret.
How sad, that the power of the gospel has been lost sight of
over the years. What an aching
commentary on Christianity that we remember forgiveness, but have lost
reform. We replaced loving each other
with judging each other, and in so doing, we polluted the gospel to the point
where we look just like the world, and the world has NO reason to seek answers
from those who claim the name of Christ.
Relying on self has been the core of ALL sin, and making self
responsible for removing sin in our lives has been the devils greatest
achievement in the Christian church at large.
As long as we continue to embrace the idea of independence over complete
surrender, we are doomed to fail, doomed to miss the blessings God intended,
and doomed to never see the road Enoch walked.
It is time to wake from our collective sleep. It is time to put oil in our lamps, the oil
of the Spirit. It is time to forsake the
ways of our past, and embrace the truths of our present. The Kingdom of God is come. It came many years ago. It came to free us from our sin, not keep us
enslaved to it. It came to remove the
pain and ugliness that ALWAYS accompanies every sin in our lives. Sin is not the reward, it is the punishment. Freedom from sin is the reward, and this is
what Christ died literally to give us.
We must humble ourselves before God, and daily surrender to His will. Not on a mere intellectual basis, not because
it is a habit we form, but because the purification of our lives depends on
it. This is the secret that lies in
plain sight in the Word. Let us become
different as we experience Salvation in our lives every day, rather than simply
hear about in the lives of others.
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