A Battle Worthy of Real Men and Women

Experiencing the Contemplative Tradition and the Prayer-Filled Life
Psalm 46:1-11; Ephesians 6:10-20; Luke 4:1-13

In our culture and perhaps in most cultures, women are more oriented than men toward developing and practicing skills in relationships, intimate communication, and inward reflection on feelings. How many of you women have noticed that? (lots of women’s hands were raised). We need those skills in a community of faith, but…I don’t know about the rest of you men, but that is scary territory for me as a man. Being in a room where a group of women are talking about relationships and feelings gives me uncomfortable shivers. I may force myself to sit still, and I may know in my conscious mind that a little of this is good for me, but my subconscious mind is looking for all the exit doors. I know that there are exceptions among both men and women to my general observation, but I think that it is at least three-fourths true.

So, when we define contemplative prayer as deepening our relationship with God through prayer and meditation, lots of men say to themselves, “Oh, that’s women’s stuff,” and tune out. Practical men may tend to view contemplative prayer as being for people who are out of touch with the hard realities of the world, for people who are of no earthly use. But that association of contemplative prayer with irrelevance, other-worldliness, and exclusively with femininity is a great and tragic mistake.

Let me make the counter-suggestion—just to balance things out--that real contemplative prayer, rightly understood, is not for sissies, but only for tough-minded men and women who want to make a real and practical difference in the world. Indeed, Jesus shows that contemplative prayer is for those who wish to engage the world in hard, disciplined spiritual battle. We need strong men who will enter this battle, father figures who will pioneer and model such life for their children. Of course, we also need women and mother figures like this. But today, on Father’s Day, I am especially challenging the men.

Authentic contemplative prayer might be described as:
pursuing prayerful listening and practicing personal reflection
in order to purify our divine hopes, desires, and callings.

Real contemplative prayer is a deep inward journey that results in focused effectiveness in outward ministry and mission for the glory of God.

Our best model for contemplative prayer is what happened in the temptation of Jesus. Immediately after Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. Under the Spirit’s direction, Jesus fasted, prayed, and dealt with Satan’s temptations for forty days. The Holy Spirit put Jesus in this position not so he would succumb to Satan’s temptations, but so that he would, in prayerfully resisting, be prepared to resist Satan’s temptations again and again when those temptations would inevitably rush upon him in the midst of his busy and high pressure ministry.

At his baptism, Jesus had received confirmation that he was to live in such a way that he would be, on the one hand, the Royal Son of God and agent of the reigning power of God, proving that God is more powerful than any forces evil can muster, and, on the other hand, the Suffering Servant of God, giving himself sacrificially for the redemption of the God’s wayward children and, indeed, for the restoration of all creation. This was an immense task. How can one be at once both victor and victim?

Jesus had to live out his calling as a real life story orchestrated by his heavenly Father. Jesus had to coordinate his actions like a symphony, with the twin contrasting themes of the triumphant King and the slain Lamb, and the great underlying and ultimately unifying theme of God’s redeeming love.

Satan would try to misdirect him so that the symphony of Jesus’ life and ministry would never accomplish its purpose. Satan’s basic tactic was to appeal to Jesus to make his symphony go straight to the triumphant theme and to play it with no contrasting theme and with no underlying unifying theme. Such a symphony about a powerful king might have excited some initial attention, but it would never have dealt with the depths of our sin, it would never have won our hearts, and it would never have saved the world. Every time Satan tempted Jesus to focus solely on his power as the Son of God, Jesus recognized the temptation as a lie contrary to the will of God and quoted Holy Scripture to defeat the lie.

The forty days contemplative prayer that Jesus spent in the wilderness were well spent indeed, for in approximately three years of ministry, he always remembered to get his signals straight with the Father, and to resist any tempting shortcuts that would have ruined his life’s symphony. He remained always the Royal Son of God, always the Suffering Servant of God, always our loving Kinsman Redeemer. Each theme might come to the fore in its own time, but none were ever forgotten. All three themes remained woven together in the symphony of Jesus’ life and ministry.

Sometimes Satan’s temptations of Jesus to forget some strand of his ministry came to Jesus through those he loved most dearly: his family, his disciples, even the one disciple he had picked to lead his church after his death. But Jesus engaged regularly in contemplative prayer and, whenever temptation reared its head from whatever source, he was able to say, “Get behind me, Satan!”

It would have been far easier for Jesus to take the path of least resistance, the path of common sense, the path of worldly wisdom, the path of comfortable compliance, the people-pleasing path. But he loved us too much to do that. He kept his mission always before him, and he stayed prayed up so that he would not go off course. He stayed strong and tough because he engaged in contemplative prayer. Because he did, we are here this morning. We would not be here without the focused purpose and toughness that Jesus maintained with his prayer life.

We too have a mission. We have done our best as a church to discern our mission as, “Building a Community of Hope through Jesus Christ: drawing people to Jesus, becoming more like Jesus, and doing the work of Jesus.”

That mission statement is now the reason for our being. It contains the seeds of the answer to almost any question we can ask regarding what we should do about anything.

How should we worship God? By “Building a Community of Hope through Jesus Christ: drawing people to Jesus, becoming more like Jesus, and doing the work of Jesus.”

How should we win disciples and gain church members: By “Building a Community of Hope through Jesus Christ: drawing people to Jesus, becoming more like Jesus, and doing the work of Jesus.”

This may begin to sound a bit repetitive, but how should we serve our community? By “Building a Community of Hope through Jesus Christ: drawing people to Jesus, becoming more like Jesus, and doing the work of Jesus.”

And, yes, even, how should we raise funds? By “Building a Community of Hope through Jesus Christ: drawing people to Jesus, becoming more like Jesus, and doing the work of Jesus.”
Who are we as a church? We are a people who are—say it with me--“Building a Community of Hope through Jesus Christ: drawing people to Jesus, becoming more like Jesus, and doing the work of Jesus.”

As we unpack those words, there are many ways that they can help us resist temptation. Sometimes those words will help us resist the temptation to do things the easy way, to take the worldly-wise shortcut that undermines the integrity of our mission.

But, if those words are not just to be an empty slogan, they must be grounded in contemplative prayer, sharpened through a deep and broad meditative interaction with the Scriptures, empowered by the Holy Spirit who moves in our lives in answer to our prayerful obedience to his calling and gifting of us.

The members of this church need to decide that we will spend the time in prayer to purify our hearts and minds so that we can live in total obedience to what God is putting into our hearts. We need to determine that we will resist Satan’s distracting temptations toward short cuts and comfortable paths. We need strong men and women who will sit down and reflectively determine that we will pay the cost to answer the call that God has put upon our lives.

But, you object, I am not a strong person. That does not count as an objection. None of us are strong by nature, but the miracle of the gospel is that God can make of us far more than we can ever even imagine making of ourselves. And he has provided the spiritual armor that can make us strong to stand against the lies of the enemy. That armor is put on with mediating on God’s word and praying in God’s Spirit. It is put on through contemplative prayer.

Contemplative prayer is not for sissies. A person who engages in contemplative prayer will have to get ruthlessly honest with himself or herself, answering questions such as, “What are my real motivations? What are my real commitments? What faith am I actually living out with the way I spend my time, energy, and resources? What lies, what false narratives, are shaping my daily life and decisions? If I am to become free to serve God more fully, what demons must be cast out and replaced by the gospel of Jesus Christ?

No army drill sergeant, no football coach, ever asked tougher things of those under him than Jesus asks of all of us, but the pay-off for Jesus’ toughness is even greater than that of either the drill sergeant or the football coach. (1) Jesus does not ask anything of us that he will not do himself. (2) Jesus goes with us as we do the tough things to give us strength, comfort, and renewal. (3) When we pick up our crosses to follow him, what looks on the front end like the toughest thing we ever did turns out to bring with it the easing of many other burdens, for, from the perspective of obedience, his yoke is easy and his burden is light. (4) When we follow Jesus, no matter how tough the road may seem for a time, we always, always, always, win in the end!
A true disciple of Jesus Christ has to be ready to do inner battle for the truth of the Christian message and mission on a daily basis. And inner battle is the very toughest kind of battle, but it brings the greatest victories.

Jesus’ enemies came at him with flattery, bribery, and offers of honor and influence. They came at him with hostility, threats, shame, and pain. Not once did they knock him off course. The most stunning thing about Jesus is the way he stayed free from the traps his enemies set for him. The great freedom with which Jesus operated in ministry can be traced to his regular practice of contemplative prayer.

It may seem that I am about to wander off topic, but I plan to bring everything quickly back together as we draw near the conclusion of this sermon. I wish to offer one warning in the area of contemplative prayer. Some people who claim to teach contemplative prayer are really teaching either Gnostic philosophy or Eastern religion. What these two schools of thought have in common is an attempt to rise above or to detach from material creation. They seek to get you into a meditative state that convinces you that nothing material matters, and they tell you that this is spiritual progress. Nothing could be more contrary to true, Bible-based faith.

The Bible begins with a good creation and ends with a restored and unified new heaven and new earth. At the heart of the Bible’s story of redemption is Jesus Christ’s bodily incarnation, his embodied ministry to embodied human needs, his bodily crucifixion, and his bodily resurrection. The writers of the New Testament are consistently clear that what we do with our bodies matters. It is no improvement to convince ourselves that we have risen above our bodies. Indeed, it is a denial of the central truths of Christian faith.

The contemplative prayer to which Jesus calls us is a call to real and authentic bodily life, first in the bodies with which we were born in this fallen creation and then in the bodies with which we are raised for life in the perfect and eternal new creation.

Contemplative prayer is not about how we escape bodily life, but about how we live our bodily existences in this fallen world in ways that point toward and glorify God’s perfect purposes for our bodily lives in the new creation. That is a tough battle, but it is a battle worth fighting, and, by God’s gracious work in our lives through Jesus Christ, it is a battle worth winning. It is a battle worthy of real men and real women.

When we commit ourselves to be disciples of Jesus Christ, when we are immersed in his life and ministry, his death and resurrection, his holiness and grace, his redeeming love, we are embarked on a great adventure from which there is no turning back, but a journey on which only those who are prayed up can stay on the path. It is a battle worthy of real men and real women.