Pastor’s Note: Analysis vs. Prayer

Pastor’s Note: Analysis vs. Prayer

• My generation and, if you’re under 40, your generation especially, is far more eager to terminally analyze the problem than embrace the answer. Your generation’s tendencies (sadly) are a by-product of my generation — the psychologized generation — and connected to the Pandora’s Box that Freud opened in the generation before mine. We have a kind of fascination with what went wrong in our childhoods, how it emerged unbidden and unnoticed in our teen years, then came home to roost in our 20s and 30s. It’s an unattractive, and ineffective combination of self-absorption and analysis-paralysis.

• I’m getting ready to preach Colossians. No one knows exactly what problem Paul was addressing with the Colossian church. But that doesn’t keep NT scholars from endless (and fruitless) speculation. It’s weird. There’s a kind of miserable fatalism here in which we feel we can’t move forward until we really understand the problem, and yet we never have enough data to know exactly what went wrong. Augustine, in his incredible section on memory in the Confessions, wonders aloud if it’s even possible to use the human mind to understand the human mind. If you’re looking for objective, useful information, isn’t your own head the wrong instrument?  

• Speaking only elliptically of the problem, what Paul offers the Colossians is the pure, unclouded, and exclusively-powerful answer: Christ “in whom all things hold together,” and in whom “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” and who is “the head of all rule and authority” (1:17; 2:3,10). If such a being truly exists, and you are permitted to come before him with freedom and boldness, it would be wise to skip the analysis and go to him.

• Paul, through suffering and the subsequent stripping-away of lesser pursuits, is as obsessed with Jesus as the answer to the human dilemma as we are with the dilemma itself. In this, Paul has chosen the better portion. So there are questions we should confront. Do we believe Christ is alive and present to us? If so, do we believe he is really the essence of all wisdom and knowledge? And in the Cosmos (and in our lives, our marriages, our homes) does he stand alone, bearing all rule and authority? If you can answer “yes” to these, then you should pray to him, now and continually. In him, and in him alone, you have real answers.

• Finally, there’s something important that will happen if you are able to pursue this process. The problems over which you have obsessed will begin to diminish and become insignificant to you, like a shrinking tumor or a fading infection. You will wonder at your own former preoccupation, and why you would have traded the gloriousness of Christ for a rat’s nest of unfathomable woes. At any rate, go to him. Do it now. He ever lives to intercede for you and, in that, waits on you this minute.

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