Timothy's Thoughts

T he Bible has a number of unusual stories. In Genesis 32 we find the account of Jacob’s name being changed to Israel. The unusual thing is what happened before God changed his name. Jacob was alone and wrestled with a man. Why he wrestled with the man isn’t clear, but Jacob wrestled with this man all night and refused to give up until the man blessed him. The man Jacob wrestled with was God. Many of the details of this story aren’t clear, but God felt it was important that it be included in the Bible. I have to think that there’s something more here than just that Jacob’s name changed. Oh the audacity of Jacob to wrestle with God, but Jesus spoke of how men ought to pray and not faint in Luke 18. He told of an evil ruler and a woman who came to him for help. He wouldn’t have helped her, but she was persistent and he helped her because of her persistence. Jesus contrasted God with that ruler, saying that God would avenge his elect speedily, but he also talked about them crying unto hi...

S cientific studies concerning the results of prayer are mixed. Some studies seem to show that it helps while others seem to indicate that it could actually have the opposite effect. Most of these studies have been done concerning the healing of sick patients. The purpose of one study I saw was to determine if prayer could be used as an effective treatment to speed the recovery time from surgery. The result was that the people who knew they were being prayed for had somewhat longer recovery times. So maybe prayer doesn’t work. That’s what that study seems to tell us. But to be honest, I’m not really surprised, given the conditions of the study. It has the appearance of putting God in a test tube to see if we can bottle him and put him to good use. So many times, what people are looking for is for there to be some kind of power in the action itself. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what prayer is. People want prayer to be a type of magic that they can control. They want to pray...

I n the Washington Post , Kathleen Parker states a strong opinion about the Christian doctrine that the only way to God is through Jesus Christ. She took aim at Franklin Graham who was jilted by the Obama administration for his belief that non-Christian religions such as Islam and Hinduism are evil because they pull people away from the truth. She sites statistics saying that 47% of Protestant pastor view Islam as “a very evil and very wicked religion.” I actually find that shocking. I expected it to be higher. Have we learned nothing from 9-11? She also sites a survey that shows that nearly two-thirds of evangelicals under 35 believe non-Christians can go to heaven, vs. 39% of those over 65. She also mentions a study in which it is revealed that our brains light up the same way when we pray, no matter to whom we pray. I have a few things to say about this. That’s a scary thought if two-thirds of young evangelicals believe that non-Christians can go to heaven. Why is that scary? Becau...

S aying something against prayer seems like a bad thing to do, but recently I have had a few reminders that prayer isn’t always a good thing. I saw a blog post recently about “praying the Psalms.” I’ve often wondered if God bothers to listen to prayers that people read out of a book or have memorized. The Psalms are great for meditation and if that leads someone to pray about something personal that’s great, but I sometimes get the impression that people think they can use prayers written by other people as some form of incantation. It doesn’t work that way. Somehow I get drawn into some of the strangest discussions. The other day Michael Hyatt had a post on his blog about the tension we authors experience concerning self-promotion. I disagreed with the guest blogger and she took far greater offense at what I said than what I could have anticipated. She had included the words of one of her fans and had disagreed with that fan. I basically said that I thought the fan was right, so some...

P aul wrote to Timothy in order to give him special instruction on how people in the church should behave themselves. In I Timothy 1:3, 4 that the church at Ephesus had problems with false doctrine as well as problems with people spending too much time talking about fables and endless genealogies. So, Paul tells Timothy what they should be doing instead. What does he tell him is the most important thing people should do when the church assembles? Pray. ( I Timothy 2:1-4 ) These days, we hear a lot about styles of worship, how many services we should have or whether we should have small group meetings during the week or on Sunday morning. In all of that, we may have lost sight of this simple truth. The most important thing for a church to do when it comes together for worship is to pray. We are to pray for our needs. We are to intercede for others. We are to give thanks to God. We are to pray. We are to pray for all men. We are to pray for those in authority. Why? So, that we may have...

In her column “I Wish I’d Said That,” Maggie Chandler recently wrote about the meaning of the word Amen . The meaning of the word is along the lines of “let it be so” or “so be it.” She told how she asked her Sunday school class about its meaning and her daughter responded, “whatever.” I could have thought at about the meaning of that word for a long time and not have come up with that answer. Along the same lines that Maggie took with what she said, we take the whatever to be a somewhat disrespectful term. It implies that a teenager is telling a parent, “I don’t agree with you. I know you won’t listen well enough to understand, but I’ll yield to you. Whatever.” But the parent is thinking, “why can’t she just accept that I know better than her?” When we look at the Lord’s prayer in the garden, isn’t that how he ended it? Doesn’t “not my will, but thine be done” mean exactly the same thing as whatever ? Jesus may have been more sincere, but the meaning’s the same. To so the question fo...