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This is my 45th 'Tuesday Prayer' post. In the process of gearing back up for the New Year (Which now seems to be terrifyingly 'happening'!), I've been reading The Lord's Prayer: The Greatest Prayer in the World, a brilliant book by Nottingham preacher, and former Minister of Cornerstone Church, Peter Lewis. Early on, Lewis challenges us;
"Awe is in danger of becoming the forgotten emotion in evangelical Christianity today. In 1995 an American writer, Donald W. McCullough, wrote a fine book, The Trivialisation of God which had the subtitle 'the dangerous illusion of a manageable deity'. In it he notes, the New Testament warns us "to offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for indeed our God is a consuming fire" (Heb. 12:28-9).
But reverence and awe have often been replaced by a yawn of familiarity. The consuming fire has been domesticated into a candle flame, adding a bit of religious atmosphere perhaps, but no heat, no blinding light, no power for purification...
We prefer the illusion of a safer deity, and so we have pared God down to manageable proportions"
The challenge that Lewis brings to us is profound. It is also important. I think the quote he brings our so well is damning for many of us, myself very much often included. Are you caught in 'the dangerous illusion of a manageable deity'? It is easy to get caught thinking that God is not that bothered, not that interested, and no longer listening to our mumbled prayers or passionate intercessions.
When was the last time you thought of God as a 'consuming fire'? A light that purifies? A God who drives us on and into him - rather than a beige, tasteless sandwich of a deity, mouldering in some spiritual garage fridge. The God of Scripture, the God we see supremely revealed in Jesus, is not beige. God is not manageable. God is a consuming fire. It is not for nothing that the Holy Spirit fell at Pentecost 'like tongues of fire'. Have we forgotten what God is like, have we made him to small? When we do that, our prayer life is negatively affected, damaged, stunted.
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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, Mary Prokes, J. C. Ryle (again!), Andrew Murray, Martyn Lloyd Jones, Hudson Taylor, recently about Ffald-y-Brenin, some of my own words, and my friend Nick Parish, Joyce Huggett. More recently I've shared a prayer of remembrance from the C of E, some of the words of Paul, and last time an Anglican Prayer for Advent.
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