Western Christianity

Today's thoughts: people keep asking me why the gospel is proceeding in Africa while it's doing the opposite in Europe. Secondly people ask me why we see miracles in Africa while we don’t see them in Finland. Let me give you just a few of the many reasons: Prayer. Faith. Obedience. 

  First of all, why do we expect things to happen if we don't pray? And I don't mean a two minutes "thank you for everything may there be peace on earth"-prayer, but Spirit-lead prayer. Quality, quantity and frequency matter! Our Master Himself asked "Could you men not pray with me for one hour?" (Matt 26:40). We may have many reasons why not to pray, but it's all about the choices we make. Priorities. Susan Wesley had 16 children but she still prayed a MINIMUM of four hours a day. No wonder her son John became the great revival carrier whose work resulted in the Methodist Church.

  Research shows that an average believer prays about four minutes per day. Excuse me, but we're not getting anywhere with four minutes! Furthermore an average minister of the gospel prays for 17 minutes. Still not enough no matter how “quality time” it may be. I think we take the goodness of the Lord for granted and in some way just assume that He knows what we need and we don’t need to pray. Well let me tell you dear friend that assumption is very dangerous. Assumption is EXTREMELY dangerous. Never assume anything! The modern theology has made us seek God only when we really need Him, and the rest of the time just trust that He’s there beside us. That’s true of course, He IS there beside us, but unless we pray we’re not letting Him work in us, and unless He can work in us He can’t work through or maybe not even for us. We have made Christianity comfortable. We have built a new comfort zone around Jesus. Well you know what? Jesus is not always in the boat where it’s comfortable. Sometimes He’s on the stormy waters like with the disciples, and unless we step out of the boat we’ll never see the miracles. 

 So the first one is prayer. Can we please be more committed in our prayer life? If we want to see great breakthroughs in our lives, families and nations we need to pray like crazy! I know this very well cause I’ve seen the great difference it made in my life to take prayer seriously. I’m not saying that I’m some kind of super-Christian who prays several hours every day. I don’t pray four hours each day – yet. I believe God will give me the grace to one day be that far. But He has brought me this far. My prayer life has totally changed during my time in Kenya and I’ve realized the importance of prayer in a new way. It’s not enough to pray just a few minutes and then justify it with saying “Well God is almighty so He can do anything no matter how much or little I pray”. My goodness. Grow up. Read your Bible. 

 The second reason is faith. Like in the previous example people are saying that God chooses whom He uses and it has nothing to do with our own works. Well that’s not quite true. We are SAVED by grace and not by works (Ef 2:8-9), but if we want to get somewhere in our walk with Christ we need to put in some personal effort. Growth always requires personal involvement. I’m afraid people are misinterpreting the Bible sometimes. I know I used to do that before. No wonder the Word says “My people perish because of lack of knowledge” (Hos 4:6). One of the things is when Jesus is speaking about small children and He says that if we want to be great in the Kingdom of God we need to become like small children. Then people use that to justify their poor prayer life and faith that is taking them nowhere. I’m sure Jesus meant the opposite. A child has GREAT faith. In fact the most spiritual age for a human being is at the age of four (according to research). One of the great revival carriers was Hildegard who was ministering during the dark centuries in Europe. She was FOUR years when she started prophesying and speaking in new tongues. In other words we should strive to have that same, great faith that a small child has. I had a very good personal experience of this last year. One of my good friends has a son who is four years old, and he really likes small cars. One day I was playing with him and at some point I promised to bring him a shining new miniature of a fire truck the next time I would visit them. Three weeks passed. I went to see that family again, and I had the fire truck I had promised, but I was sure my little friend had forgotten all about it. To my great surprise the first thing he asked after greeting me was “Do-do-do-do you have the fire truck??”. Full of excitement! He had no doubts I would bring it to him! My goodness. We should have that same faith. The faith of a child who isn’t affected by all the discouragements and disappointments of life. The faith of a child who is SURE that if he asks – he will get. It is that kind of a faith Jesus wants us to have. That we could fully trust what He promised in John 14:14 without ANY doubts – no matter what we are asking for. Maybe it’s a new car, a healing, restoration, a financial breakthrough… Faith. Faith is to God what fear is to the devil, and when we know our God we should not live in fear but faith. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear”. (1 John 4:18) 

 Finally, sacrifice. This is one of the great things we want to jump over as we are reading the Bible. People just say “That belongs to the old covenant, and we live in the days of grace”. It is true, completely true that we live in the days of grace. Yet there are levels in our walk with God we will never reach unless we are ready to sacrifice. I’m not talking about animal sacrifices – no,no,no – but money, time and everything that is “ours” we should be ready to give to God. Actually we don’t own anything, but God owns everything (Ps23:1).  Even our money are His (Haggai 2:8). When we realize this it will become easier to give to Him. But back to sacrifice. Unless we are ready to sacrifice for example a meal of food (=fasting) it will be hard to reach what we desire.  Unless we sacrifice our time and our money, we will never be trusted with more. God is everlasting and unchangeable, right? In the Old Testament we see that when His people sacrificed, His presence was always there! Look at for example 2 Chron 5. Or look at Abraham! God asked Abraham to sacrifice his one and only son, and Abraham was obedient. We all know how it ends of course; Abraham didn’t have to sacrifice his son, but passing this test of obedience lead to a great blessing for Abraham. Or we can study Luke 18:18-23, talk about sacrifice! Or why not look at God. He gives us the best example. He sacrificed His only son for us, for you and for me. We live in the days of grace, and no more blood sacrifices are needed. Jesus was the final one. That doesn’t mean that no sacrifices are needed. In fact we should offer ourselves to Him as a living sacrifice! (Rom 12:1) 

 To sum this up, the Christianity in the West is a convenient version of the true faith. Unfortunately that Christianity won’t release the full blessings of our Father. The full blessings will come as a result of obedience and submission. Submission again is obedience without convenience! As long as we seek God only when we need Him, when we don’t evaluate our prayer life but only pray a few minutes daily and justify that by misinterpreting the Word, as long as we are unwilling to sacrifice (time, money, fasting) to Him – we will never reach the next level. And here comes a new problem. I’ve always been told “there are no different levels!”. Oh my. That makes people stagnant. Of course there are different levels! One who has been studying the Bible and spending time in the presence of the Lord is (should be) more mature than one who got born again just the other day. As Christians we should always be asking ourselves “Am I becoming?”. Our goal is to become more like Christ. This is an ongoing process and I think we should be evaluating ourselves and our life every once in a while. Unless we are further today than we were last month, then we need to ask ourselves what’s wrong! 

 These three things (prayer, faith and sacrifice) are waaay to wide and big to fully deal with over the internet. These would each need a deep study to really get what we are missing out on, but maybe we here have three things to think about and learn more about on our own. Prayer. Faith. Sacrifice.