Charlie Wear’s Notes

When I was growing up in the church one of my favorite hymns was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

What a friend we have in Jesus,
all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry
everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
all because we do not carry
everything to God in prayer.

–Joseph Scriven 1855

Friends talk with one another. They spend time together. It’s hard enough to maintain friendships with flesh and blood people, especially if they live in a different geographic area. I think it’s fair to say that it is even tougher to maintain a friendship with a God we can’t see or touch. Sometimes these conversations with God seem to dribble off of our lips and bounce off the ceiling.

One of the things I really like about John Wimber was the simplicity of his prayers. It probably helped that he wasn’t raised in the church. When I was growing up our church services had a “pastoral prayer,” just another sermon while we were all on our knees. In his personal testimony, “I’m a Fool for Christ, Whose Fool Are You,” John describes a scene where he has come to the end of his rope. He drives out into the Las Vegas desert, looks up at the stars, and cries out to the heavens for help. In the aftermath of the experience he questioned his own sanity. Thinking he needed to check himself into a hospital he went back to his hotel. On his arrival an answer to his prayer arrived in the form of a phone call from his wife.

At that point in his journey with God he didn’t have any experience with talking to God and certainly he didn’t have any experience with hearing God speak to him.

I think I really began to learn about effective prayer while I was attending the Calvary Chapel Packinghouse in Redlands in the Mid-80′s. At 6 a.m. on Friday mornings men would begin to show up at the prayer room which was located just off the sanctuary. After we had gathered, we sang a few songs, and then the pastor would say, “Anything we need to be praying about, or praise reports?” For the next few minutes men would share their concerns for their loved ones who were sick, or going through a tough time. Some would mention a spiritual need. Then the pastor would say, “Let’s pray.” And for the next hour or so we would pray about the things that were on our hearts. No sermonizing or religious sounding phrases, just conversation with a Father we knew cared about the things we cared about.

When we began meeting with a home fellowship we experienced this same kind of praying. It was non-orchestrated and informal, and powerful. And prayers were being answered in a tangible way. People were being healed and living through the tough times of life. This was very different from the way I was raised in the church of my youth and I really liked it.

It was later that I learned about simple prayers of desperation from John Wimber. One of his favorites: Oh God, Oh God, Oh God! Talking to God takes attention and focus, but it should be just as natural as talking to your family or your co-workers. Then there is the listening part of prayer. Most of the time I am too busy to listen to God. Or there are too many distractions vying for my attention. Sometimes God has to really work to get my attention. Nudges and whispers just won’t work.

Now if you were raised in a tradition that doesn’t believe that God speaks to his people today, that’s okay, it doesn’t hurt God’s feelings. In fact, I have discovered that with God, honesty is the best policy. I really like the honesty of the father in Mark 9 who when talking to Jesus said, “I believe, help my unbelief.”

All of this talk about spending time with God reminds me of another old hymn:

I come to the garden alone
while the dew is still on the roses,
and the voice I hear falling on my ear,
the Son of God discloses.

And he walks with me, and he talks with me,
and he tells me I am his own;
and the joy we share as we tarry there,
none other has ever known.

–Charles Austin Miles, 1913

My grandmother was sleeping in the hospital bed my dad had set up in her dining room. The chronic blood disease she had suffered for many years had caused a stroke impairing her ability to speak and making her bed-ridden. Communication was difficult. It was a Saturday afternoon. As we gathered around her bed we sang “In the Garden” and other hymns from church. The tears began to well up in my grandmother’s eyes, and as we joined her, we all sensed that we had been joined by the Son of God. My grandmother knew God as a friend.

A few years later I had been through a disappointing time in the church. A proposal I had made to church leadership had been rejected and I felt distant from God. On vacation in Hawaii I was listening to the latest album of worship music:

Draw me close to you
Never let me go
I lay it all down again
To hear you say that I’m your friend
You are my desire
No one else will do
Cause nothing else can take your place
To feel the warmth of your embrace
Help me find the way
Bring me back to you

You’re all I want
You’re all I’ve ever needed
You’re all I want
Help me know you are near
–Kelly Carpenter, Copyright © 1994 Mercy/Vineyard Publishing. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

When the singer got to the phrase, “To hear you say that I’m your friend,” my eyes filled with tears and I made that song my prayer over and over again as I listened to it and it touched my heart. The prayer of Draw Me Close to You, is in its honesty. We are not close to God, we have lost our way and we need him to bring us back. We feel far away because we know that we want so many things that are not God, and while he can fulfill all of our needs, we live distantly from our friend. We pray, “Help us know you are near.”

Having regular conversations in words, thoughts or in song is one way we can deepen our friendship with God.

We look for God. We see him in the sky, the sun, the moon and the starts. We see him in nature, through beautiful mountain vistas and desert landscapes. We hear preachers preach about him and teachers teach about him. Our parents tell us about God. Sunday school teachers tell us about Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Joseph, Moses and David. We watch movies, videos and Bob and Larry!

John Wimber used to say: “God’s got a book out!” We study the Bible. We attend Bible studies. We study Study Bibles. We try different versions. We look for God. Out of this search we come to know “God as we understand him.”

Somehow as I was growing up, the Bible became a textbook. I attended Christian school in grade school, high school and college. One of the required courses was Bible. I learned all of the parts of the Bible that my teachers thought were important to support the doctrines of my brand of church.

Later in life, when I had teenagers of my own, they were taking a course in the New Testament and asked for my help on their homework. As we talked about the assignment and I began to help it became clear pretty quickly that my children had never read the Bible for themselves. They knew John 3:16, but not the context. They had years of Bible as a required course in their education, but had never read the Bible!

My parents relied on weekly church attendance and “Sunday School” teachers to teach me about God. One of my favorite activities were the Bible “races.” The teacher would call out a text address: John 3:16! Psalms 23! First Corinthians 13! We students would turn in our Bibles as quickly as we could to the text and then jump to our feet and read out the verses. I learned the books of the Bible and where they were located and that it was good to find the verse quickly! There were prizes involved!

It wasn’t until much later in life that I ever sat down and read the Bible, not to find the answer to an assignment, or to win a prize but to get to know God. While this is only one way to find God, it is a good way.

When I was growing up, the Bible translation we used had been done in 1611 as commissioned by the King of England. With all the thees and thous and believests it seemed that God had hired Shakespeare to write his book. I was a teenager when the Good News for Modern Man version was published. One of my high school Bible teachers gave us the assignment to paraphrase passages of the King James Version in our own words. This was a great exercise for a teenager in the 60s!

About a year ago I spent a very driven six weeks paraphrasing the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. When I finished I was a different person inside.

Last year I had lunch with Tony and Felicity Dale, two followers of Jesus who have been practitioners of “Simple Church” for a number of years. I asked them how they helped new believers start on their spiritual journey. I loved their simple response. “First we get them baptized, then we usually start with the Gospel of John.” I had read their book, The Rabbit and the Elephant and knew that there Bible study method did not rely on deep scholarship or professorial teaching, but on letting God speak through the text.

The Gospel of John is a great place to start:  ¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. [John 1:1-5, NIV via Biblegateway.com]

Growing up in God means getting to know him. It involves “getting in the Bible and getting the Bible in you.” John Wimber used to teach that the Bible is like a menu in a Denny’s Restaurant, with pictures of a Grand Slam, Steak and Eggs or a Hamburger. He taught that some of us behave as though the menu is the meal! We try to eat the pictures. He was saying that there is more to a life in God than the consumption of the Biblical text. That reminds me, it’s time for breakfast. I think I’ll go get a Grand Slam.

It is hard to remember the good old days when an encyclopedia took up an entire bookcase and required a knowledge of the alphabet and excellent reading skills to access it. Now we have the internet and Wikipedia and the earth’s trees and rain forests have breathed a sigh of relief. Imagine my surprise when I googled the phrase “Fake it till you make it” and discovered a brief article.

From the Wikipedia article: “Fake it till you make it” (also called “act as if“) is a common catchphrase that means to imitate confidence so that as the confidence produces success, it will generate real confidence^[1]. The purpose is to avoid getting stuck in a self fulfilling prophecy related to one’s fear of not being confident, e.g., by thinking, “I can’t ask that girl out because she would sense my lack of confidence.”

One of the buzzwords of the last several years is “authenticity.” “Get real,” might be the way we express this idea to one another. Let’s face it, most of us spend a lot of time wearing a mask that hides our true intent and emotions. This isn’t new information, is it? We spend a lot of time “faking it.” It’s how we get through our lives. It’s how we get other people to do what we want them to do. It’s how we maintain the “illusion of control.”

I was talking to a friend yesterday and confessing that I am angry, maybe with God, but certainly with some other Christians. At the beginning of the year I was experiencing a kind of personal revival. I was also involved in a new home group and was attending the church that sponsored it. I was excited about the possibility that the “Spirit was on the move.” I was a little bit afraid of one thing: that when other people got to know what I believe and who I really am, they wouldn’t want to be involved with me. Do you ever deal with that one? It is one of my favorites.

However, because I wanted to be “real.” I decided that I would try to be myself rather than where a mask. When the group leaders went around a circle and asked its members if they wanted to watch a video series on “Marriage Communication,” I gave an honest reply. I said no, I wasn’t interested. Oops! Later as we kept meeting from week to week, each member of the group was asked to share their personal testimony, their spiritual journey. My wife didn’t want to share. “Oh, but you must, I’ll help you,” group members urged. I asked my leader-friend to give me no warning when it was my week. I would have had a difficult time if I had to think about what I might say for a week. What sins to confess, what to leave in and what to take out, these questions would have driven me bonkers!

The night came. I gave my personal testimony. I tried to be as authentic and honest as I could be. A few weeks later, I had a meeting with the pastor and his wife, who were also members of our home group. During the course of the meeting they made it clear that they did not want to “fellowship” with me. I’ll have to admit, it really irritated me. But I controlled my emotions, exited the meeting and didn’t attend their church any more. A few weeks later the home group disbanded.

So there you have my dilemma in a nutshell. There was lots of “God” activity in the first part of the year, and now not so much, and I am angry. Angry with Christians, who claim to be followers of Jesus, but who can’t “fellowship” together. We get offended. We get away from one another.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about this situation and he said something like “our unwillingness to be “real” with one another and work through our offenses is one of the ways that we try to control and manipulate other people.” Another way of saying it, “It’s how we keep the peace.” So much for Jesus’ prayer: “My prayer is not for them alone (his disciples). I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, ²¹ that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” (John 17:20 NIV via biblegateway.com)

This is what I am thinking about in the early morning hours. The way we attempt to control and manipulate each other. My 8 yr. old does it through what we lovingly call “meltdowns,” which his parents immediately attempt to suppress. But as we have grown older our methods have become more subtle. We speak sweetly when we are face to face, but internally, or when we get a chance to gossip, our speaking is not quite as sweet! We have become adept at regulating our interactions to get what we want. Of course, too much of this can lead to emotional suppression, which according to Wikipedia, can make us fat!

As my mentor, John Wimber, used to say: “I want to grow up before I grow old.” Right now, I don’t feel much like growing up, I feel like throwing a good old-fashioned temper tantrum. Who knows, maybe one day I will stop trying to control and manipulate others by showing and withholding my true self. Maybe one day I will find a group of people who would rather “Get real.” Maybe then I can stop faking it till I make it.