• You should remember to VOTE since our government, which “ God has appointed” (Rom 13.2), is one “ of the people, by the people and for the people.” That phrase, among several other elegant phrases crafted by Lincoln for Gettysburg, is honored by use in the current French constitution, drafted in 1958 (Title I, article 2).
• On the Men’s Night of Prayer (this Friday at midnight): First, get yourself down here and do it; you won’t regret it. I’ve thought often about the nature of prayer accompanied by some physical cost, such as fasting or (in our case) staying up all night. People worry about implied merit or works, that we’re assuming God will listen to us better because we’re suffering. Rather, all we’re doing is eliminating the intrusion of lesser desires — for one night pushing everything else off the table and setting in the middle the One Needful Thing: “…you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and all your soul” (Deut. 4:29 and very similar: Jer 29:13; 1 Ch 22:19).
• All of us know our lives are characterized by the inversion of this: letting all the things on the table push the one needful thing off the edge and out of sight:
“ Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things…. ”
• So, staying up all night, like fasting, simply brings focus to lives prone to blur the most important things while putting a laser-point on the most trivial (insert a mental image of people skipping worship to watch the Super Bowl). The night of prayer is about being intentional; it’s about the pursuit of God at the expense, for once, of everything else.
• I want to appeal especially to men in the generation behind mine, a generation cursed by apathy as mine was cursed by liberality. I’ll let Dorothy Sayers make that appeal: “The sixth deadly sin is…Sloth. The world calls it Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing for which it would die.”