Words'nTone

Don’t pray for patience
Scares me when someone leads in prayer, “Lord, help us to be more patient.” I know—and we all should know—there is only one answer to that prayer: God will bring about things in our lives to make us more patient, i.e., trouble, anguish, hurt, irritation…I think you can supply the remainder of the list.  There is no worse prayer to pray, accept asking God to make you more humble.  Again, there is only one way God can answer that prayer…and it should scare the wits out of us.  You might sound pious praying such a prayer—but you will not find such in all of Scripture.  In fact, you can scour the Bible cover to cover and you will never—ever, never, nada, not one verse, or even a hint—read a command or even encouragement to ask God for more patience or humility.  In fact, we are simply commanded to be humble, seek humility, and have patience.

A pet peeve
I have, as my kids would say, a number of pet peeves.  One that gets me, which happens in most churches week after week at church: Regular attendees who constantly sit at the far ends of the pews (or row of chairs), that is the opening, the first sets of chairs or spaces, making every single person that comes in after them, including guests, older folks, and women with infants or small children) climb over them to get to open seats in the middle of the pew (or row of chairs).  I am not too bothered by guests doing this, but regulars…come on.  Not only is this unthoughtful, it is such an obvious display that our world revolves around ourselves—which is not supposed to happen at the most unselfish, character revealing, sin unveiling, and other-centered moment of our week: corporate worship of the Creator God and Savior Jesus Christ.  Now, granted this habit might be an unconscious one.  But what are we thinking?

Counting our individual, private sins and losing any sense of purpose
I have tired of hearing about personal, individualized sins that I might or might not be committing—especially when I hear about them from the pulpit.  Our corporate sins, our congregational responsibilities, our neglect of living out as a community the very things God wants in His community, the forgetting and neglect of the poor, the putting our corporate light under a bushel and refusing to be a City set on a hill gets lost in the call to repent of a thousand personalized, private sins.  Maybe if we would hear from the pulpit of our sins of omission as a congregation and calls for corporate repentance (one example is our neglect of the poor), maybe we wouldn’t have so many personal, private sins to repent of—there wouldn’t be as much time for them anyway.  Making every text of Scripture speak to the minutia of details in our lives drives us away from purpose, not toward it.  In fact, most texts (including the one’s read and referred to on Sunday) speak to our corporate character as a body of Christ.  But, I guess it is a whole lot safer to admit that I look at a porn website every once and a while rather than feel guilty for not ministering to the poor, and easier than contributing to the guilt of a body of people who neglect the poor.  Lot easier on the preacher too.

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