Intimate Encounter & Enemy Love

Quote:

[Prayer is] the risk of facing a God we’ve mastered talking about singing about reading about and learning about. It means risking real interaction with that God, and the longer we’ve got used to settling for the noise around God, the higher the stakes - Tyler Staton 

This quote comes from the book “Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools”.  It is absolutely the best book on prayer I have ever read and one of the best books I have read. The author Tyler Staton is the pastor of Bridgetown church in Portland in OR. I have been following the church for a number of years since I read Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer (the former pastor of the same). I heard about the book through JMC and then saw that one of my other favorite people, Tim Mackie, had written the forward. When looking for a new study with my mentor, I suggested this book and we have been reading it for a month now. It was so hard to pick one quote from this book.  Every chapter has been insightful, encouraging, down to earth, and practical. This chapter was titled “Be Still and Now” and was all about the posture in which we approach prayer.  As difficult as it was to pick, this particular quote was one of the few that elicited an audible response from me. When I listened to this I immediately went “Oooosh”. It struck a note deep in my own heart. After I finished the chapter, I went back and underlined this quote and sat for a minute thinking about how true this is of me. I feel like much of my Christian life has been characterized by talking about, singing about, reading about, and learning about Yahweh. I am so comfortable with all of those activities. But I always feel like I want to and could grow in prayer, in personally relating to and lovingly abiding with my Father (as Jesus taught us to relate to him). The noise around God is safer. It requires less surrender and less trust. God himself unknown, unmasterable, and dangerously good. To be exposed before the almighty creator is scary. For prayer to be genuine we need to realize our anxieties and fears ourselves and then bringing them before God. I want to accept the invitation that Jesus extended to his followers to confidently approach our Father. Don’t you?  

Scripture: ‭‭Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭43‬-‭44‬ ‭NLT‬‬

 ““You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!”

I have been spending a significant amount of time thinking about this passage as of late.  There are two particular fronts which make this passage worth prolonged meditation. 

First is the relation with this teaching of Jesus and the Law to which he is appealing. This entire chapter is the introduction to Jesus’s Sermon on Mount. Jesus is being presented as a new Moses with this being the first of his five teaching that parallel Jesus with the books of the Torah, traditionally connected to Moses. Here as he does five other times in this chapter, he introduces it with what they have heard either from Law or tradition or both and then he offers his authoritative interpretation.  We see here a mind saturated and meditated upon the Torah (Joshua 1, Psalm 1). It is his lifetime of memorizing and meditating that has led to this clarity.  The real meaning behind this, the heart behind this law is this. The same meditation that led him to see the heart behind the command to not murder being to not hate at all. 

The second thing is the instruction itself.  I feel like growing up there was not enough time or attention giving to the radical non-violent ethic of Jesus.  I listened through an amazing teaching series on this section of the Sermon on the Mount from Van City church which got my gears turning. Up next in my reading queue is “Nonviolence” by Preston Sprinkle. I cannot wait to read this and dive into a wholistic understanding of his non-violence ethic. Jesus never said something in a detached theoretical sense.  Jesus’s teaching were real life and applicable. He did not mean to love our enemies in a philosophical or idealist sense. He meant it literally. In the way that Jesus loved his enemies by dying for them (Rom 5:8). We were his enemies and he did not fight, did not resist, and was willing to die.  I do not see this attitude reflected in Bible believing, Bible preaching, Jesus following Christians.  I think we need to take more seriously these words of Jesus. One song that has been an anthem around this is Phil Whickam’s song the Jesus Way. These are some of the lyrics: 

If you curse me, then I will bless you

If you hurt me, I will forgive

And if you hate me, then I will love you

I choose the Jesus way 

If you strike me, I will embrace you

And if you chain me, I'll sing His praise

And if you kill me, my home is heaven

For I choose the Jesus way

I follow the savior of radical enemy love. Whatever anyone else will do, I choose the Jesus Way.