• Give it a shot: join us for Selah tonight at 7:00p. Beautiful music and the presence of God in prayer. We pray in small groups divided by gender. For those who are quiet or shy, no daunting moments of praying before the entire gathering. Tonight we’ll be praying through Ps. 25 — a meditation on walking with the Lord in his grace and justice — as a response to last Sunday’s passage on the widow’s gift at the Temple.
• Someone both Shiv and I admire is Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who left a promising career in medicine to preach in his native Wales beginning in the 1920s. The Church was in decline. In the 20 years since turn-of-the-century revivals, Sunday school attendance had dropped by 100,000 in a country with a population roughly equivalent to King County. Church leaders had panicked and, in order to pull people back, had shifted from preaching the word to entertainment. Lloyd-Jones, however, was a fierce preacher of the word. As his church slowly filled, the deacons realized they would need to remove the stage that had been installed for entertainment. When they asked Lloyd-Jones what to do with it, he suggested they burn it to heat the building.
• All through his ministry, Lloyd-Jones believed in and depended on the presence and working of the Holy Spirit. Here’s a description of a gathering in the 1920s from Ian Murray’s biography. “Prayer meeting, once so poorly attended, could not now be contained within two hours on account of the numbers who were ready to pray and offer thanks. One Monday night, in May of 1931, prayer meeting began as usual at 7:15pm and was stopped by Dr. Lloyd-Jones at 10:00pm.” Notice that the praying hadn’t stopped, but Lloyd-Jones had stopped the meeting. The Holy Spirit can make time stand still.
• We pray for this, that our hunger for God would override all other considerations. One day we will stand dumbstruck in the presence of God and experience the redefinition of what matters. No doubt all of us will find that much of what we did with our lives was structured according to trivial pursuits. When we are in that place where the Four Living Creatures never cease to say, night and day, “holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty,” that place where the twenty-four elders “fall down before him who is seated on the throne,” we will likely wonder how we could have been so blind to the reality of who God is. Some of that is inevitable. Certainly my own life reveals such blindness. But some of it is not inevitable. Our understanding of the God before whom we walk every hour of every day can grow and deepen right now. Join us tonight as we seek that new understanding.