SCRIPTURE: 2 Corinthians 3:18 (TM) – larger reading 2 Corinthians 3:4-18
All of us! Nothing between
us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are
transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more
beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.
STORY:
David Roher’s story: The motor home has allowed us to put
all the conveniences of home on wheels. A camper no longer needs to contend
with sleeping in a sleeping bag, cooking over a fire, or hauling water from a
stream. Now he can park a fully equipped home on a cement slab in the midst of
a few pine trees and hook up to a water line, a sewer line and electricity. One
motor home I saw recently had a satellite dish attached on top. No more bother
with dirt, no more smoke from the fire, no more drudgery of walking to the
stream. Now it is possible to go camping and never have to go outside. We buy a
motor home with the hope of seeing new places, of getting out into the world.
Yet we deck it out with the same furnishings as in our living room. Thus
nothing really changes. We may drive to a new place, set ourselves in new
surrounding, but the newness goes unnoticed, for we've only carried along our
old setting… The adventure of new life in Christ begins when the comfortable
patterns of the old life are left behind.
OBSERVATION:
We want change while keeping
everything the same. We study the Bible to gain information not transformation.
We really want our life to be God centered while keeping everything exactly as
it is. We say one thing, but act totally different. As one person said recently
concerning counseling: “I don’t need counseling there is nothing wrong with
me!” while the person’s life is coming apart… it is somebodies else’s fault,
problem, etc.
This prompted a thought: When
we pray who does all the talking? St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth century
mystic, shared that God’s first language is silence. Most of our prayer time is
too noisy. It is filled with layers upon layers upon layers of words as in us
telling God what we want him to hear or do or… Do we ever simply get quiet and
wait, in silence, for God to speak? Probably not. We are too busy and our “God
agenda” is too full.
Real transformation happens,
in my opinion, when we the “clay” allow the potter to shape us. The clay
doesn’t dictate to the potter how it should be shaped. It is simply silent as
the potter’s hands go to work. Transformation takes place when we are silent
enough to hear the silence of God speaking to our hearts.
Centering Prayer is such a
discipline. Getting quite. Moving out of our minds all concerns. Being in God’s
presence and allowing him to touch our spirit. Then the shaping
(transformation) begins to take place… not until. Centering Prayer is the
embracing of a spiritual reality that nothing stands between God and us. No
agendas. No wish lists. No desires. No longings. No words. Just the presence of
God’s reality.
I think that if we could have
walked with Jesus up into the mountains we would have been surprised by the
peaceful silence of the relationship Jesus had with the Heavenly Father. Oh,
there are times when words should and need to be used, like Jesus’ time in the
Garden, but most of the time silence is the wiser choice.
When God has to fight through
the barrier of words, which can act as a filter straining out God’s purpose and
intentions for us, we can become spiritually confused. The end result is that
we say, “I’ve prayed about this” and end up doing what we want to do all along.
Transformational Centering Prayer, when practiced regularly, clears the air of
the layers of words so that the silence of God is heard clearly and we are
wonderfully transformed into his person.
PRAYER:
May your silence oh God be so
deafening that we hear nothing other than your desires.
No comments:
Post a Comment