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On September 22, 2023 By In Culture

Praying in the Dark

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How many times have you faced an overwhelming and seemingly hopeless scenario, only to look back later and recognize the kind (though difficult) providence of God at work in that situation? Most of us have probably had moments in our lives that we imagined we could not endure, when despair had a death grip on our hearts, when sorrow and fear seemed certain to drown us. But God. The Lord is rich in mercy, and he promises to work all things together for the good of those who love him (Rom. 8:28), but that sovereign good does not always appear dramatically. In fact, sometimes we may miss it entirely. God is there, but as in the book of Esther, he stands hidden amid the shadows. Somehow we survive. Somehow we begin to breathe again and move on. We did not perceive the moment of rescue. We cannot put our finger on a sudden deliverance. We simply came to the moment of defeat and despair, and then the moment passed, and we were still alive.

When did you look back and realize you had survived? Was it the next time you faced an unwinnable trial or unendurable adversity? Did you think back to the last time you were in a similar situation and only then reflect on the fact that God had brought you safely through it, even though you took little notice at the time?

I was reflecting on this recently while lying awake worrying and praying in the middle of the night. It was almost a moment of deja vu, but this wasn’t a glitch in the Matrix. I realized I had prayed to the Lord in the midst of similar anguished anxiety, many times before, and often in the middle of the night. You’ve probably been there too. “It’s me again, Lord. I’m worried about something, and I’m not sure you can fix this one.” Because this new worry is so different from all those that came before, right? We are justified in our sin of unbelief because the Lord has only delivered us 7,327 times, and everyone knows it is the 7,328th that is the really hard one.

If we are lying awake at night praying in bed, it’s probably not because we are praying the psalms. Sometimes we may do that too, but more often those middle of the night prayers are both prompted and dominated by the worry and fear from which Christ’s victory and sovereign rule have set us free. But there we are again, doubting his ability to rescue us, returning to the slavery of fear that is so familiar to us because we wore its chain so long. Anxious prayer usually centers on my worries, fears, and concerns. Even if they are not about me, per se, but my wife, my children, my family, or brethren, those prayers still focus, in large part if not in whole, on the immediate crisis that drove sleep away and compelled fervent prayer.

There was a man in the first church I pastored who related to me the story of when he first spent an entire night in prayer. He had never attempted or thought to do so until his young daughter was injured and taken to the hospital where doctors worked to save her life. Her father found it easy to stay awake and pray all that night.

Personal prayers in times of crisis are good and appropriate, a means of grace for battling doubt and fear. It is right that we pray earnestly, even if fearfully, because even when we are sinfully anxious, praying about it is an act of obedience to God. Such prayer confesses that I am a sinner who cannot cope with or carry this burden of sorrow. I cannot withstand the temptation to doubt in such cases, so we pray, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!”

Our prayers in the midst of crisis are important, but they ought to arise within the larger context of a life devoted to prayer. If the only time we pray is when we are fearful, we will find our prayers weak, and we may discover little comfort in them. This is when we open the Psalter, retrieving lines from our memories if praying in a dark bedroom, or stumbling downstairs and opening the prayer book of King Jesus, reading, singing, and praying God’s word and promises back to him. Suddenly we discover that our fears and trials are nothing new. No temptation has overtaken you except such as in common to man. God’s people have been here before, and we are praying with them. It is not only my children who need God’s gracious intervention; it is God’s children in India, Eritrea, North Korea, Sudan, and Canada. I am neither the first nor the last nor the only one at this present time who faces a seemingly unbearable situation. I am praying with the saints throughout the world. We are interceding for each other: I for them, and they for me, even if we have never met and do not know each other’s names.

These prayers in private crisis grow out of lives of ordinary, everyday prayer. Morning and evening sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving, confession and intercession, supplication and meditation on God’s word, works, and wonder. On the Lord’s Day God summons his people to worship in order that he might bless us. Together the Church offers her prayers to the Father in the Name of the Son with the help of the Holy Spirit. God knows the needs of every individual. He heard your prayers at midnight and the deep and unutterable cries within your heart even now. But now we are not praying alone in our bed or closet. The Church has gathered and entered the Holy Place. Together with one voice we cry: “Lord, hear our prayer!” And he does. And he will. Not just our prayers on Sunday. Not just our prayers at the family dinner table. Not just our prayers in the middle of the night. Our faithful God hears all of them, and accepts them, not because we are righteous in ourselves. We are the doubters and unbelievers who imagine this hardship will be different. Maybe the Lord won’t show up this time around. But he always has. He always will. He is patient with us, even though we are often impatient with him.

It takes faith to see God’s faithfulness in our lives, and perhaps that is why we so often fail to perceive it. The same lack of faith that fills us with fear and despair in crisis makes us unable to recognize the quiet but powerful providence that has delivered us time and time again. Those prayers in the middle of the night are a means of grace. They change the world and events in our lives, to be sure, but they change us most of all. Someone once said we cannot pray one way and live another for very long. So as we confess our fears and doubts and beg God for mercy once again, his Spirit strengthens us, enabling us to see the past providence that we had overlooked or forgotten and assuring us that the Lord will be near us this time as well. I will never leave you nor forsake you. This is God’s promise, so we can continue to pray with boldness, even in the midst of anxiety, and be confident that he will hear and, once again, come to bless us.

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On September 2, 2023 By In Culture

An Encouraging Thought

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J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a work of Christian imagination structured and permeated by a biblical worldview that will ensure that series of books endures for many generations as a true classic. Many books and essays have been written over the years discussing the Christian worldview in the Middle Earth trilogy. One of them, Donald William’s An Encouraging Thought, takes its title from Gandalf’s remark to Frodo in Chapter Two of Book I in The Fellowship of the Ring:

“Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”

Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic and inarguably my second favorite papist next only to Chesterton. If you asked Tolkien whether he was a Calvinist, no doubt he would have scoffed and denied it in an inimitably British sort of way. (I trust that Tolkien, Chesterton, and Calvin have made up their differences by now, and if not, will eventually do so in the dazzling brightness of the beatific vision.) Tolkien, like Chesterton, knew only the desiccated form of joyless puritanism, just as many of the Reformers saw the worst expressions of Roman sacerdotalism and reacted, rightly, against it. But what Calvin, Chesterton, and Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy share is a cheerful vision of divine sovereignty.

Tolkien was not, self-consciously, a Calvinist. He was a Christian, and as such, he could not help but be Calvinistic when he thought of divine providence. Calvin was not self-consciously a Calvinist either, and he would probably be offended, dismayed, and inclined to righteous invective if he saw us using his name in such a sectarian way. What these men had in common, besides a genuine love and reverence for Christ, was a sense of the Maker’s grandeur. They served a God who is not only in charge but actively and irresistibly in control of all that is and ever will be. God’s sovereignty did not preclude Sauron’s wickedness, Saruman’s treachery, Gollum’s sin-induced insanity, Boromir’s idolatry, or Denethor’s despair. Yet over, above, behind, and around all of these actors on the stage stood the Maker, standing in the shadows, guiding the story “by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will… yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established” (WCF 3.1). Tolkien would not have appreciated me citing the Westminster Confession in interpreting the events of Middle Earth — he did not intend it to be an allegory, and it is not — but read Chapter 5 of the Confession on Providence and then try to explain that The Lord of the Rings is not an epic myth about the providence of God. You cannot do it, because that’s exactly what the Ring trilogy is.

It seems to me we need a wee bit less (by which I mean a whole lot less) theological sectarianism and a greater sense of the size, strength, and sovereignty of the God we serve. Reformed Christians have far more in common, in this regard, with traditional Roman Catholics like Tolkien and Chesterton than any of us have with the evangellyfish in our community and their worship leader who paints his fingernails. I say this not as someone who is less committed to the tenets of historic Calvinism but as someone who has become more convinced the longer he has been a self-conscious Calvinist that those tenets of divine sovereignty are simply biblical and christian and are shared, implicitly if not explicitly, to a greater or lesser degree, by all those who love Christ and take the word of God seriously. Tolkien was not a Calvinist, and one day when we all have died, none of us will be either. We will be simply followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, children of God, and brothers and sisters in his household.

The Enemy who forged the ring of power did not intend for it to fall into the hands of a hobbit from the Shire or to come into the possession of his nephew. Readers of the trilogy will remember that it was not the strength or goodness of either Frodo or Bilbo that saved the day in the end. It could not be. Both eventually fell under the ring’s power, but another hand not only guided but determined its destruction. It was the same hand who placed the ring in Bilbo’s palm inside a dark cavern and on a chain around Frodo’s neck on that long, cheerless journey to Mordor. It was One greater than Sauron and Saruman and Gollum and Wormtongue all combined. And it was this same power that led to the denouement, which happens not on Mt. Doom and in the destruction of Mordor but later in Book VI of The Return of the King when Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return to their beloved Shire.

We serve a mighty God, the Maker of heaven and earth, Lord of creation, Master of history, Author of the Future, who holds eternity in his hand. Tolkien was a literary master, but he was only a sub-creator, as he himself admitted. What makes The Lord of the Rings true and timeless is not his creativity but the story’s resonance with biblical revelation. It reflects the glory, power, and wisdom of the true Myth-Maker, the God who wrote the story of cosmological history, and whose breath gave us life as characters on that stage.

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