Tag Archives: Prayer

New Barth Books

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Two new Barth books arrived in the post this week, all the more exciting because they are primary documents rather than new books about Barth.

The first A Unique Time of God: Karl Barth’s WWI Sermons contains thirteen sermons preached by Barth to his small congregation at Safenwil from July 26 through November 1, 1914 – the first three months of the war. Here is the young pastor Karl Barth, twenty-eight years of age, wrestling with the meaning of the war in the light of Scripture and theology. Nine of the sermons are based on New Testament texts, and four on the Old Testament. This is the first time these sermons have been translated for an English audience, and I am very much looking forward to reading this volume, together with its introductory essay by Canadian translator and editor William Klempa.

The second volume is also early Barth. The Epistle to the Ephesians were amongst the first lectures given by Professor Barth in the winter semester at Göttingen, 1921-1922, just months after Barth had ended his pastorate at Safenwil and finished the second edition of his Romans commentary. It seems Barth spent most of the course exegeting his way through the first chapter of the epistle, and then devoted the final lesson to chapters two through six! This volume also comes with introductory essays by Francis Watson and the late John Webster.

I have dipped at random into A Unique Time and present a brief excerpt (pp. 112-113):

So war, even this terrible war, has its place in God’s purposeful design of peace for us. Hence, for us men and women, what matters is that we have a living experience of the wrath and of the unspeakable grace of God, to which the European nations now tread so near. Nothing else will help us. In this time, victory and defeat can again be quickly reversed. For thousands of years the history of humanity has simply been a story of alternating victories and defeats. God has permitted time and again that humanity would go its way and on its way find only misery. Victory and success should no longer be what they want; what do they get out of them? Surely, we should all let God speak to us through the present storm, for which human beings are at fault. This will pass away, but you remain! As long as we keep on praying only for victory and success, God will not hear us, and we will continue to be confronted by new storms through our own fault.

Moveover, we Swiss should not think and pray in this manner. Yes, we want to pray for our beloved country, but not to a god of war and victory, in accordance with the practice of the ancient Jews and the pagans. Nor are we to pray that narrow-minded selfish prayer: “Spare our house; instead, burn down someone else’s!” Yes, and if the situation were to become serious, in no way could we boast about our just cause! Nor could we at all demand without question that the good Lord stand right behind our soldiers and cannons. We also are culpable in our whole being for the present world’s situation. Rather, we must pray as Jesus taught us: “Your kingdom come! Your will be done! And forgive us our sins! And deliver us from evil!”

Lord, set us free, not from the enemies but from the powers of darkness that are in and around us, from falsehood and arrogance, meanness and thoughtlessness. Lord, let us be victorious, not over foreign nations but over ourselves, over our selfishness. Lord, let us triumph, not in outward success but in letting ourselves be filled and empowered with your love, freedom, and justice. Dear friends, let this be our war prayer, the war prayer of a neutral nation. . . .  May God grant this. If we so pray, God hears us. 

Reading Karl Barth on Election (13)

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Selection: The Church Dogmatics II/2:122-127, Jesus Christ, Electing and Elected.

In his reflections on Jesus as the elected human Barth raises two issues worthy of additional comment. First, he provides a brief glimpse of his theodicy; second, is his portrayal of the prayer of Jesus as the true fulfilment of his creaturely existence.

In his discussion of the election of Jesus Christ as suffering, Barth explores the reason for this. God, for the honour of his own name and for the honour of the creature also, will not allow evil and sin, and Satan and his kingdom to overthrow his good work or to have the final word. Rather, in his Son, God determines to confront and conquer this evil. Nevertheless the question must inevitably arise concerning the origin of this evil. Here, Barth insists that “from all eternity judgment has been foreseen” (122).

For teleologically the election of the man Jesus carries within itself the election of a creation which is good according to the positive will of God and of man as fashioned after the divine image and foreordained to the divine likeness (reflection). But this involves necessarily the rejection of Satan, the rebel angel who is the very sum and substance of the possibility which is not chosen by God (and which exists only in virtue of this negation); the very essence of the creature in its misunderstanding and misuse of its creation and destiny and in its desire to be as God, to be itself a god. Satan (and the whole kingdom of evil, i.e., the demonic, which has its basis in him) is the shadow which accompanies the light of the election of Jesus Christ (and in him the good creation in which man is in the divine image). And in the divine counsel the shadow itself is necessary as the object of rejection. To the reality of its existence and might and activity (only, of course, in the power of the divine negation, but to that extent grounded in the divine will and counsel) testimony is given by the fall of man, in which man appropriates to himself the satanic desire. When confronted by Satan and his kingdom, man in himself and as such has in his creaturely freedom no power to reject that which in His divine freedom God rejects. Face to face with temptation he cannot maintain the goodness of his creation in the divine image and foreordination to the divine likeness (122).

Barth provides an ontological account of the origin and mystery of evil. For Barth, evil arises as that which God does not will. It is the “shadow” cast by the light of what God does will. The mystery of evil emerges as it were almost as a consequence of the divine will. Evil has reality but not substance. The fall also has an ontological basis in the inherent creaturely incapacity to withstand the attraction or temptation of evil. Yet there is also a moral component to the fall: humanity “appropriates to himself the satanic desire” to be a god, and in so doing becomes, like Satan, a rebel. “In himself and as such man will always do as Adam did in Gen. 3” (122).

Humanity’s fall, then, is both inevitable and culpable. On account of human culpability it lies under the divine wrath; on account of human weakness, however, it is the object of divine pity. Jesus Christ as the elect human stands in humanity’s place under the divine wrath and for humanity suffers and dies taking their rejection upon himself. Yet Jesus Christ is also the electing God and although subject to the same weakness and incapacity that afflicts the rest of humanity, actually can do and does for humanity what humanity cannot do for itself: resist Satan’s temptation.

Why this imposition of the just for the unjust by which in some incomprehensible manner the eternal Judge becomes Himself the judged? Because His justice is a merciful and for this reason a perfect justice. Because the sin of the disobedient is also their need, and even while it affronts Him it also moves Him to pity. … Because in the powerlessness of sinners against Satan He sees their guilt, but in their guilt He sees also their powerlessness. Because He knows quite well that those who had no strength to resist Satan are even less able to bear and suffer the rejection which those who hear Satan and obey him merit together with him. Because from all eternity He knows “whereof we are made” (Psalm 103:14). That is why He intervened on our behalf in His Son (124).

That God did this is, of course, due to his own grace in which God elected humanity in his Son. The grace of election is also at once the grace of reconciliation for the same Jesus in whom we are elected is also the Judge who takes the place of the judged.

In the One in whom they are elected, that is to say, in the death which the Son of God has died for them, they themselves have died as sinners. And that means their radical sanctification, separation and purification for participation in a true creaturely independence, and more than that, for the divine sonship of the creature which is the grace for which from all eternity they are elected in the election of the man Jesus (125).

This sonship, this radical sanctification, this true creaturely independence seen in the steadfastness of the humanity of Jesus, and specifically in his prayer by which he “fulfils His creaturely office” (126). Jesus’ prayer is his intercession with God on behalf of his people. It is the human answer and assent to the will of God as it confronts his own will. It is his affirmation of the divine right in the exercise of holy wrath against human sinfulness to which he submits as victim, even as he is both priest and judge.

The election of Jesus Christ, therefore, stands as the pattern for the election of all, for they are elect in him.

The mystery of the elected man Jesus is the divine and human steadfastness which is the end of all God’s ways and works and therefore the object and content of the divine predestination. … Being elected “in Him,” they are elected only to believe in Him, i.e., to love in Him the Son of God who died and rose again for them, to laud in Him the priest and victim of their reconciliation with God, to recognise in Him the justification of God (which is also their own justification), to honour in Him their Leader and Representative, their Lord and Head, and the kingdom of God which is a kingdom above all other kingdoms. It is as they love Him and laud Him and recognise Him and honour Him in this way that they can have their own life, their rejection being put behind them and beneath them, rejected with His rejection. To believe in Jesus means to have His resurrection and prayer both in the mind and in the heart. And this means to be elected. For it is the man that does this who “in Him” is the object of the divine election of grace (126-127).

The Virtues of Prayer

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In his discussion of the usefulness of Scripture in moral formation, Allen Verhey, drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre, considers the virtues of prayer:

Prayer is learned in Christian community, and it is learned not only as an idea but also as a human activity that engages one’s body as well as one’s mind, one’s affections and passions and loyalties as well as one’s rationality. Prayer is an activity that focuses one’s whole self on God. In learning to pray, one learns the good that is “internal to that form of activity”; one learns, that is, to attend to God, to look to God. … In learning to pray, we learn to look to God; and after the blinding vision, we begin to look at all else in a new light.

In learning to pray, we learn as well certain standards of excellence that belong to prayer and its attention to God, standards of excellence that are “appropriate to” prayer and “partially definitive” of prayer. 

We learn reverence, humility, gratitude, hope, and care. Prayer-formed persons and the prayer-formed communities — in the whole of their being and in the whole of their living — will be reverent, humble, grateful, hopeful, and caring. One does not pray in order to achieve these virtues. They are not formed when we use prayer as a technique. They are formed in simple attentiveness to God, and they spill over into new virtues for daily life and discernment. (Verhey, Remembering Jesus, 63-64.)

Scripture on Sunday – Isaiah 38:1-5

Scripture,
Prayerful Tears
Desmond Cole wipes away tears as he takes part in a prayer service in the aftermath of the police shooting in Ferguson, USA. Picture: Portland Press Herald, November 29, 2014.

In those days Hezekiah became mortally ill. And Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came to him and said to him, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live.’” Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord, and said, “Remember now, O Lord, I beseech You, how I have walked before You in truth and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in Your sight.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly.

Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah, saying, “Go and say to Hezekiah, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of your father David, “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; behold, I will add fifteen years to your life.

Several things in this passage have always arrested my attention. First, Hezekiah was at the end of hope: when even God says you’re finished, you’re finished. Second, Hezekiah did not ask God for healing, or to save or lengthen his life. He asked God to ‘remember’ him and he wept. The imagery of Hezekiah turning to the wall is evocative: he is turning away from all other support, help and comfort. He is confronted with God whose word is as implacable as a wall. But he turns.

The word of the Lord which came then to Isaiah said, “I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears.” It appears that Hezekiah’s tears were as much a part of his prayer as were his words, and perhaps, more so. Perhaps his tears were the greater part of his prayer, a soul vulnerable and broken-hearted before God; honest.

Jesus, too, prayed with tears:

In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety (Hebrews 5:7).

Such prayer is a world away from the polite and professional prayers of which I am so often guilty. Prayer can become so routine and run-of-the-mill it loses its heart. Hezekiah’s tears were his prayer as much as his words were. Although tears of brokenness and disappointment, they were not tears of despair: his continuing faith is revealed in the very act of prayer itself, in his turning away from all else to God alone.

Some expositors have suggested that the extra fifteen years given to Hezekiah were not a blessing but a judgement, for in those fifteen years seeds were sown which later led to the downfall of Judah. Miserable commentators!

This is one of those biblical texts that hints at the awesome privilege, power, mystery, and responsibility of prayer. God heard his prayer. God did remember. God changed his mind! God gave him his heart’s desire. We sometimes hear that God never changes, and that prayer does not change God. “Prayer changes things,” we are told. Or, “prayer changes us.” Certainly. But in this instance, God himself had said, “You shall die and not live.” And that which God himself had declared was turned when this man prayed.

Scripture on Sunday – Psalm 13

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Airplane-passes-over-an-eclipse-resizecrop--Read Psalm 13

How long O Lord? Will you forget me forever?           
How long will you hide your face from me?    
How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long will my enemy be exalted over me?

In these first two verses, the psalmist cries plaintively to the Lord who seems absent and unhearing, removed and uncaring. The words carry a sense of duration—interminable drudgery and aloneness, the fourfold repetition of ‘how long’ emphasising the silence and inactivity of God. The reader feels the tension; on the one side an unrelenting enemy and on the other an unresponsive God, the desperate psalmist caught helpless in the middle.

The enemy is singular, though the psalmist’s adversaries are multiple (cf. v.4). Craigie has no doubt that the enemy is “death” which is fast approaching, the singer being struck down with a life-sapping illness of some kind (Craigie, 142). Whether or not Craigie is correct, the circumstance is common in these early psalms of David: his enemies are ever present, and it seems they have the upper hand, their triumph assured. He has a sense of being alone and vulnerable in the world.

In the midst of this ‘dark night of the soul,’ the psalmist prays (vv. 3-4)—“lament is pointless unless it culminates in prayer” (Craigie, 142)—his faith evidently deeper than his experience, a bulwark against despair. Nevertheless, only the Lord can rescue him from the ever-present threat of death, and so he prays for God’s attention and action: “Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!” Kidner (77) notes that in the Old Testament “God’s ‘remembering’ and ‘seeing’ are not states of consciousness but preludes to action” (cf. Exodus 2:24-25). Thus the prayer is for deliverance, that God would turn again toward the psalmist, rather than ‘hide his face.’

Given the desperate tone of David’s lament, one is unprepared for the final couplet, where optimistic praise and trust seem incongruous with what has preceded. David has trusted in God’s lovingkindness, and so his heart shall rejoice in God’s deliverance. Because he has trusted, he will rejoice and he will sing. David’s faith is deeper than his experience because God is a deeper, more enduring, and more encompassing reality than his suffering. God’s love is steadfast despite his seeming absence; his salvation is assured; his grace is bountiful: therefore David will trust in anticipation of deliverance, and even rejoice and sing.

If the path is prayer, the sustaining energy is the faith expressed in verse 5. … However great the pressure, the choice is still his to make, not the enemy’s; and God’s covenant remains. So the psalmist entrusts himself to this pledged love, and turns his attention not to the quality of his faith but to its object and its outcome which he has every intention of enjoying (Kidner, 77-78).

The idea of being forgotten by God haunts us—could God, would God, actually forget us? Could God utterly overlook us or cast us behind his back? Does God hide his face from us, turn his back, keep his counsel, and ignore our hurt and dire straits? It is likely that no one who has tried to live a life of faith has not had the experience the psalmist describes here. It is an experience that Jesus, too, endured when on the cross he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Our experience is often at odds with our expectation, and to the extent that a Christian’s expectation is that their faith should exempt them from the common trials of life, their expectation is unrealistic. Our expectations with respect to God, however, are another matter entirely. We expect God to care—and not only to care, but to act. Is this also unrealistic? Not according to this psalm.

Kidner captures something crucial with his observations about God’s covenant and David’s faith. David’s faith was not a vague or amorphous hope, but conviction born of a lifelong awareness of God’s covenant love toward his people, including himself. Because God is the ultimate reality of all things David cannot help but pray. His being caught in the tension between God and his enemy is an inevitability on account of his faith.

Even if it makes sense to be a practical atheist, as Ps. 10 suggests, distrust of divine oversight is not psychologically possible for those who cannot but believe in both the loving-kindness and punishing judgement of God as the moral grounding of society. To believe otherwise is to succumb to a morally chaotic reality in which might makes right and personal agency is denied, further robbing the sufferer of power (Ellen Charry, Psalms 1-50, 64).

David laments because he has faith, and prays for the same reason. Indeed the power and astonishing boldness of his prayer lies precisely here: God’s own integrity is at stake. In this psalm there is no confession of sin, no self-blame or condemnation, no blaming of the victim: the reason for divine silence is not judgement on the psalmist’s sin. “On the contrary, God’s failure to act reflects badly on God, for it enables the enemy to gloat” (v. 4; Charry, 63). And so David calls God to account with a boldness born of a faith so deeply embedded in his soul it contradicts the seeming finality of his experience.

Years ago the Corrs, an Irish singing group sang “forgiven, not forgotten.” The words, if not the song, catch the reality of covenant existence with God. We are forgiven. We are never forgotten. God’s covenant lovingkindness is the deepest reality of our lives, and of all reality, something upon which we can trust, and so also rejoice and sing. Lament turns to praise because God’s covenant love and grace is the defining reality of the psalmist’s existence.

A Prayer on Sunday

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Mirza-Shoaib: Dancing on a Cloud

I bless you, O most holy God, for the unfathomable love whereby you have ordained that spirit with spirit can meet and that I, a weak and erring mortal, should have this ready access to the heart of him who moves the stars.

With bitterness and true compunction of heart I acknowledge before you the gross and selfish thoughts that I so often allow to enter my mind and to influence my deeds.

I confess, O God–

That often I let my mind wander down unclean and forbidden ways;
That often I deceive myself as to where my plain duty lies;
That often, by concealing my real motives, I pretend to be better than I am;
That often my honesty is only a matter of policy;
That often my affection for my friends is only a refined form of caring for myself;
That often my sparing of my enemy is due to nothing more than cowardice;
That often I do good deeds only that they may be seen of men, and shun evil ones only because I fear they my be found out.

O holy One, let the fire of your love enter my heart, and burn up all this coil of meanness and hypocrisy, and make my heart  as the heart of a little child.

Give me grace, O God, to pray now with pure and sincere desire for all those with whom I will have to do this day. Let me remember now my friends with love and my enemies with forgiveness, entrusting them all, as I now entrust my own soul and body, to your protecting care; through Jesus Christ. Amen.

(John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer, 75, adapted.
Photo: Mirza Shoaib: Dancing on a Cloud)

A Prayer on Sunday

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HauerwasSpirit of Truth,
Direct our attention to the life of Jesus
so that we might see what you would have us be.

Make us, like him, teachers of your good law.
Make us, like him,  performers of miraculous cures.
Make us, like him, proclaimers of your kingdom.
Make us, like him,  loving of the poor, the outcast, children.
Make us, like him, silent when the world tempts us to respond in the world’s terms.
Make us, like him, ready to suffer.

We know we cannot be like Jesus except as Jesus was unlike us, being your Son.
Make us cherish that unlikeness, that we may grow into the likeness
made possible by Jesus’ resurrection.
Amen.

(Stanley Hauerwas, Prayers Plainly Spoken, 27.)

Scripture on Sunday – Ezra 7:10

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EzraEzra 7:10
For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord and to practice it, and to teach his statutes and ordinances in Israel.

When I received my new Bible, I wrote this verse on the front fly page, together with a very pious prayer:

Lord, teach me from your Word and let it be for me a Word that shapes my life, and truth that guides my way; and grant me the grace to so live it and teach it that others also might walk in its light (September 1, 2002).

Why this verse—especially when Ezra-Nehemiah are amongst the most obscure books in the Bible for me? It has been ages since I have read them, and I have never really studied them in any depth. Yet this verse has been a benchmark in my life for many, many years. I came across it in the very early years of my Christian life, well before I was married, from memory.

The study had begun in Psalm 78:8: “And might not be as their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation; a generation that set not their heart aright, and whose spirit was not stedfast with God” (KJV). I searched through the Scriptures to discover what it meant to have a right heart toward God. Over and again I found reference to those who had ‘prepared their heart’ to seek the Lord. The phrase was especially prominent in 2 Chronicles, and I found it here in Ezra as well. Ezra prepared his heart to study the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach it.

What particularly attracted me to the verse was the order of the concepts: study, do, teach. A common saying is that one ought to practise what they preach. Although that might be true enough, this verse would shift the order and exhort us to preach what we practise. Chances are we would have many fewer and much shorter sermons!

Quite simply, the purpose of biblical study is obedience, understood in terms of a life shaped by the central vision of Scripture, as well as concrete obedience to specific precepts and commands where they apply. In my line of work this is a professional hazard. It is possible to study for other purposes: to prepare a sermon, to teach a lesson, to gain knowledge, to write an article—or a blog post, to prove a point, to dispute with a colleague, to win an argument, to make a name for oneself, to escape from less desirable activities, especially those where interaction with other people is required.

Not all of these other motives are necessarily wrong, although some are. Nor is it the case that the heart is missing, inactive or corrupt in them. Yet it may be. The biblical emphasis on the centrality of the heart is unmistakeable. The Lord looks on the heart… When the text says that Ezra set his heart, Fensham (The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah [NICOT], 101) notes that the word for ‘heart’ (lebab) connotes the entirety of one’s whole being. Ezra had devoted his life to this task, and, whether as result or as cause, “the good hand of the Lord was with him” (Ezra 7:6, 9).

Ezra’s study, practice and ministry was the focus of his life. He had become “skilled in the law of Moses” (v. 6). I suggest that his skill was not simply a mastery in terms of knowledge, but discernment and endurance with respect to application, as well as practical wisdom, understanding and passion in teaching.

Ezra is a prototype reformer, and I suspect the great reformers of the church have always been those who dig deeply into Scripture. They mine it to know God and his purposes more fully. They track back and forth through its pages to reappropriate the gospel in fresh ways for new generations, and to experience afresh the truth of the gospel in their own lives. They communicate it with power and passion in new times and conditions. They see a vision that demands their attention and obedience; they cannot help but proclaim it to others. I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but kept declaring…

I look back with some amusement at my pious prayer in the front of my Bible. I know that I have often failed to live up to the lofty sentiment it expresses. I know, too, that I have allowed a professional distance to infiltrate my spirituality with respect to Scripture. Further, being pious is also such poor form these days. Who wants to be holier than thou? Our Christianity, our hermeneutics are too sophisticated for that!

Yet I look back with some longing at my pious prayer in the front of that Bible. I recoil—rightly, I am convinced—from the narrow and legalistic kind of pietism that is so sure of itself and its truth that it cannot help but be holier-than-thou. But I long for a genuine, humble piety, a heart set right toward God, and so therefore toward others as well. It seems I have grown tired of the kind of ‘secular Christianity’ I see so much of. The hip kind of Christianity that is so biblically and theologically lite that it lacks any genuine substance, as well as the hip kind of Christianity that is biblically and theologically aware but jaded, cynical and spiritually fruitless. And so I pray,

Lord, teach me from your Word and let it be for me a Word that shapes my life, and truth that guides my way; and grant me the grace to so live it and teach it that others also might walk in its light (July 19, 2015).

Scripture on Sunday – Proverbs 16:32

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Dog, Self-ControlProverbs 16:32
He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty,
and he who rules his spirit than he who captures a city. (NASB)

Like a city that is broken into and without walls,
is a man who has no control over his spirit (Proverbs 25:28; NASB).

In these two proverbs a contrast is made between the one who rules their spirit and the one who does not. In both cases the image used is that of a city surrounded by its walls, a primary and enduring means of defence in the ancient world. Strong walls may not guarantee victory, but lack of walls or broken walls may well guarantee defeat. A city without walls was vulnerable to every passer-by. One need only remember the downfall of Jericho (Joshua 6) or Nehemiah’s tears to understand the importance of sound walls in good repair. As long as Jerusalem’s wall was broken down, the inhabitants there were in “great distress and reproach” (Nehemiah 1:3-4).

The message of wisdom, of course, is that one must “rule their spirit,” and yet this is easier said than done. Indeed, the first text suggests that it is more difficult to rule one’s spirit than to capture a city. It may be possible that a person of unrestrained anger might prove a ferocious warrior, perhaps even a resolute commander who can conquer cities. Yet better is one who rules his or her spirit.

English translations of 16:32 differ, many rendering “rule one’s spirit” in terms of anger, and so making the second part of the verse more explicitly parallel with the first part. So the NRSV translates: “One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and one whose temper is controlled than one who captures a city.” The Holman Christian Standard Bible captures the sense in a memorable manner for English readers: “Patience is better than power, and controlling one’s temper, than capturing a city.” Nevertheless, Roland Murphy’s suggestion that the word for spirit refers to a person’s appetites and passions perhaps allows us to extend the meaning of these texts beyond a narrow application to anger alone (Murphy, Proverbs (WBC), 194). Many passions and appetites vie for expression in the human heart, and not all of them good. Anger may be a prominent and suitable example, but others include pride, envy, greed, lust, sloth and gluttony—all of the classic deadly sins. Other emotions such as fear, guilt and shame might also be included. The wise person, it seems, will rule them all.

Taking our lead from the biblical example of anger we gain some hints into how this might be achieved. The text speaks of being “slow to anger.” Sometimes anger smoulders, sometimes it explodes, and sometimes it roars into flame after smouldering away for a long period. Being slow to anger suggests that one stops and “counts to ten” in the face of provocation, and that one keeps one’s regular temperature cool rather than heated, so that small things do not cause us to “boil over.” In other words, we practise restraint, keeping a sharp rein on our temper, considering other perspectives, possibilities and options. A wise person will maintain a “cool spirit,” seeking to subject the affections to reason (cf. Proverbs 17:27).

Another strategy for ruling one’s spirit is to practise the virtue that stands in opposition to the vice. Proverbs 19:11 is an example: “A man’s discretion makes him slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook a transgression.” To practise forgiveness is a glory whereas to flame into anger is foolish (cf. Proverbs 14:29). A third strategy is to recall the promise given to us by God and live toward that hope. In light of what is at stake, Jesus advocated a ruthless exercise of self-control in the face of sexual temptations and lust: “If your right hand offends you, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell” (Matthew 5:30).

Of course the problem is that I have only two hands and two eyes… And so in the end, we must pray. Self-control is, after all, a fruit of the Spirit’s work and activity in our lives (Galatians 5:22-23). So, too, Jesus counselled his disciples saying, “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation” (Matthew 26:41). I am reminded of one of the sayings of the desert fathers:

They said of Sarah that for thirteen years she was fiercely attacked by the demon of lust. She never prayed that the battle should leave her, but she used to say only, “Lord, give me strength” (Ward, The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, 36).

A Prayer for Sunday

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Girl at Prayer William Henry Hunt from Wikigallery.org
Girl at Prayer William Henry Hunt from Wikigallery.org

Dear Father,
Take this day’s life into your own keeping.
Lead and guide all my thoughts and feelings.
Direct all my energies. Instruct my mind. Sustain my will.
Take my hands and make them skilful to serve you.
Take my feet and make them swift to do your bidding.
Take my eyes and keep them fixed upon your everlasting beauty.
Take my mouth and make it eloquent in testimony to your love.
Make this day a day of obedience, a day of spiritual joy and peace.
Make this day’s work a little part of the work of the Kingdom of my Lord Christ,
in whose name these my prayers are said.

Amen.

(from: John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer, 41; updated and amended)