Tuesday Prayer: 34

This is my 34rd 'Tuesday Prayer' post. This week - after an unannounced holiday freed me from the laptop - it is the first return of a writer, this time J. C. Ryle. On holiday, I read Eric Russell's excellent 'J.C.Ryle: The Man of Granite with the Heart of a Child'. In that book, some words of Ryle struck me afresh;

“Banks may break and money make itself wings and flee away. But the man who comes to Christ by faith will still possess something which can never be taken away from him”

As I read this, on the beach, grateful for God's provision, I was sharply challenged. The Bible - and Jesus' words in particular - have a lot to say about money and the potential pitfalls. Here, and Ryle wrote this at a time of great strife and transition in his younger years, we are reminded of the ultimate possession (which is both possessed by us, and that which utterly holds and has us), the ultimate security: Christ.

And how does this work? We 'come to Christ by faith'. In prayer. Prayer is the way, in an ultimate sense, that we 'come to Christ'. We pray in faith - not because our faith makes our prayer powerful, but because our prayer is undergirded, accepted, used, by Christ himself. I wonder, when you pray, is your reliance on Jesus, or do you expect money, power, relationships, opportunities, education, skills, etc; to answer your prayer? If you lost all of one of these tomorrow, would you still be able to pray. Ryle's words are a challenge - his father lost everything, in worldly terms, yet Ryle gained Christ, setting him on a path to become one of the greatest Anglican Bishops of the last 300 years...

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Don't forget to check out the previous posts in the series, featuring quotes from Tom Wright, John Wimber, Richard Foster and Don Carson, the great J. C. Ryle and theologians Alister McGrath and James K. A. Smith. Since then, I've shared quotes from Justin Welby, E.M. Bounds, Vineyard Pastor Ken Wilson, C. S. Lewis,  Norwegian O'Hallesby, Paul Miller, John Piper. Recently, we've heard Matthew Henry, Charles Finney, Andrew Murray, Tim Chester, Vaughan Roberts, Oliver O'Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Bunyan. Then we got rather retro, with quotes from Church Fathers John Chrysostom and Tertullian, before returning to more recent thinkers with Rowan Williams, Mike Reeves and Peter Jackson and Chris Wright and Andrew Case, R. C. Sproul, and (representing a slight change of tack) the Westminster Confession. Recently we considered Karl Barth, and Donald Macleod and last weeks quote was from Mary Prokes.