How Long Would Your List Be?
This month, we’re focusing on our financial commitment to the ministry of Calvary-St. George’s Church in the year ahead. And as a means of making this focus, Jacob and Ben and I are preaching a sermon series on “Mission: Immeasurable.” This Sunday, we’re delving deep into “Immeasurable Joy because of the Gospel.”
However, this coming Sunday, it looks at first as though it’s a bit of a stretch to see much joy or thanksgiving to make a pledge.
Here’s why. If I were to ask you to make a list of the things you have prayed about that have not come to pass, how long would your list be?
That’s why, at first glance, the lessons for this coming Sunday are a problem. It seems as though Scripture is telling us that if we pray hard enough, and long enough, and in the right way, we’ll get what we pray for. It seems as though we are being told that the key to answered prayer is our own ability to pray hard and long and right.
So what about my wonderful Christian friend who had leukemia and who had hundreds of people praying for her and who died at the age of 35, leaving behind a devoted husband and three young children?
Right here, of course, you can add all sorts of examples of your own, as well as stories of feeling like dropping out of this whole Christian business when our prayers seem to fall on deaf ears.
That’s why you and I really need to be in church together this Sunday, along with all of our unanswered prayers. Because waiting for us at Calvary-St. George’s will be:
One who prayed harder and longer and better than you and I ever have.
One who had his own (temporarily) unanswered prayer - “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
One who utterly identifies stands beside us with our own (temporarily) unanswered prayers.
One whose grace is the deepest answer to our deepest prayers, prayers that finally are always answered.
Because, as the writer Anne Lamott puts it, “God’s grace bats last.”
See you Sunday morning!
- Jim
P.S. Here are two other writers who will help us see God’s grace this Sunday: Watty Piper and Francis Thompson. I’ll have a prize for whoever can tell me the books by these fellows that I’ll reference.
P.P.S. If you won’t want to make a pledge by the end of our worship this Sunday in thanksgiving for God’s Amazing Grace, I’ll eat my socks.