Tuesday Prayer: 47

This is my 47th 'Tuesday Prayer' post. I was lucky to be someone who had a look over pre-publication copies of my friend Robin Ham's book on Instagram. Robins book, Filtered Grace: Seeing Goodness, Desire and Meaning in the World of Instagram is a pithy, important eBook thinking about what the Christian Gospel has to say to the world of instagram. Robin's book covers a lot, but one thing about prayer that he had to say stuck with me;

"as we gaze on the world around us, it's critical we don't lose sight of what's going on spiritually. And we definitely shouldn't judge what we think we have spiritually by what we have materially. In fact a few sentences later Paul says his prayer for those Christians is that the "eyes of their heart" would be opened. It's not enough to be looking aroudn at the world with our eyes open in gratitude, he also wants us to have our 'spiritual eyes' open. Christianity is unashamed about declaring that God, the good Giver, has supremely given the world his Son, Jesus, as the greatest Gift, to bring us into a loving relationship with God"

My friend Robin is training for ministry, a lifetime surrendered and abandoned to Jesus, to the message of the Gospel and the work of the Kingdom. That doesn't make him perfect, by any means, but it gives him an interesting perspective on things. His little book, Filtered Grace, is a wonderful snapshot of what it means to apply the Gospel, the good news of Jesus, to an area of human activity, in this case, Instagram. Instagram - as with so much of social media - is a way of seeing the world, and sometimes changing the world, that is not totally real or totally transforming. I think the idea fo asking God to give us eyes to see as Jesus sees is vital. I want ot make that my prayer.

Sometimes I think that Prayer is all about thanking God, about celebrating his goodness. Instagram, or, at least, my feed, is often about good things, about the way that people want to be seen.  Balancing the reality of what we want and what is real is difficult - and it is a balance that we live in prayer. I think prayers are best offered with full awareness of both the goodness of God and the brokenness of the world. Prayers that come out of a gratitude for the Love and Forgiveness of God and an awareness of the world that means we need that love and forgiveness. 

I wonder - do we see the world as a place to be, see, pray and live, or as a problem to be solved? Are we blind to suffering - or does prayer open our eyes? Robin's book is challenging and thought-provoking - just as prayer should be. I hope this short Tuesday Prayer post gives you something good to reflect on.

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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, an Anglican Prayer for Advent, Peter Lewis, and most recently Tim Keller.