We are beginning a new series on “Becoming Like Family” as our online community begin to share the daily challenges with friends, and we begin to gather our larger community together.
We want to have five main characteristics, and the first is to be bound together by some common learning experiences.
In October I attended my university’s homecoming reunion, and reconnected with a lot of friends. Our friendships were forged through four years in a common learning experience.
The same weekend, I went to a church where I’d done a student placement. There was personality, familiarity, and comfort there, too. We were gathered around a common purpose, to learn about and grow as followers of Jesus.
We want to be that kind of community. It’s hard in suburbia, especially if you are commuting, but we have our own unique way of pursuing a common learning experience through mobile apps, social media, and our web site.
Our next step is to become a network of groups, where we build strong relationships with existing friends and family members, where one of the things that binds us together is we are all learning the same things through discussion, challenge, encouragement and prayer.
Question: Who was your best learning group or team? What made it so?
Coffee Hours this Week:
Have questions about the challenges, do you want to meet others exploring the same content, or connect with Ryan?
Join us for our coffee shop drop-in this Wednesay, October 30th from 7:30pm-9:00pm at the Starbucks in the Ajax Chapters. Look for Ryan Sim in the drink line, or a Redeem the Commute postcard on a table.
If you know in advance that you’re coming, please RSVP here http://bit.ly/1aHVTy2
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Jesus is challenging those who pray in public in order to get ahead, to look religious.
He says they got the reward they wanted, immediately. People saw them, were impressed. Done.
Problem is, empty reward.
What is God's reward for prayer?
It's him. A relationship with him.
This happens to be what true prayer is about anyway…talking to God…spending time with him.
God makes himself, the reward, available to all who will receive him.
Closet prayer is like training, shutting out all ulterior motives until we learn to pray for God alone.
God is the best spectator for prayer - he sees prayer and motive.
Even the worst prayer - God sees the right motive.
Even the best prayer - God sees the wrong motive.
The word "closet" in this reading is not where someone kept their clothes. It comes from the Greek "tameion" which means storeroom. This suggests there are immediate "treasures" when you pray for God alone.
When we pray for God and God alone, we are seeking God, and he is ready and willing to hold up his side of the relationship by giving us what we were seeking.
When we pray for others to see, we’re clearly not seeking God but our own benefit, so he gives us that reward we sought, but that's all.
If we want applause, he says we can have it. But we're settling for second best.
I once got a phone call, informing me that someone was taking Christianity 101 student because he wanted to be baptized in hopes it would helps him immigration case.
In the end, I was happy for him to take the course, and would even baptize him if he decided to follow Jesus as his Lord. Those things are highly rewarding in and of themselves! An eternal relationship with God through Jesus Christ – nothing is more rewarding.
What about the immigration thing? I doubt it would have helped. One might have a case as a persecuted refugee if they were a baptized Christian at home, before coming to Canada. But immigration authorities probably wouldn’t care if he was baptized in Canada last year.
If he took my course, and was baptized, all because he wanted to improve his chances at immigration, he would quickly discover it was an empty reward, nowhere near as good as the real reward.
We settle for second best sometimes.
We pursue rewards in life, on earth, when we could be pursuing rewards in heaven!
We can do this with prayer. We say a bunch of things about God, and call it prayer, when we could be talking to God.
We say some words we don’t really believe, simply because someone told us we should.
Question: Have you ever tried to regularly spend time in prayer alone with God? What did you find easy comfortable, or difficult and uncomfortable about the experience?
