Author: Tim Morgan

“There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit” (Isaiah 11:1).

Prayer is strange. I’m not sure we register that. I’m not even sure we slow down enough to reflect on this strange thing we do. We carve out mental and physical space to address the unaddressable, to refer ourselves to to the unreferable. We don’t use language like this in our normal day-to-day. When we say things, they’re directed at something or someone. Even if our message is never received, its significance stays neatly packed within this world of people and things. Prayer, however, messes all that up. In prayer, our thoughts and words open up the world. In prayer, they’re released from the world, from places with addresses and words with referents and thoughts with things thought. For God’s people, even our prayer is released from the world of thoughts and words and feelings, released from our intentions, released to God. This is because “we do not know what to pray for as we ought” (Romans 8:26). The Holy Spirit, however, in subterranean labor, “intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:27; see Isaiah 11:2).

The heart of prayer, however deviant, is searching. The psalmist writes, “Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; from the end of the earth I call to you when my heart is faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I, for you have been my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy” (Psalm 61:1-3). We do not know the way to our refuge. We are lost on this road, without a map in hostile territory. Only God can guide the way, so we release our direction to him (see John 5:30); like our thoughts and words, we release the path of our footsteps to his guidance, “so will I ever sing praises to your name, as I perform my vows day after day” (Psalm 61:8). This thing we call “prayer” isn’t just a discrete activity, a set of words, an intentional mental exercise (although it’s not less than any of these!); rather, it’s a way of life. It’s a way we walk on this strange road. It’s how we get in on what God’s doing in Jesus’ coming. In prayer, we dispose ourselves to God’s world, where Christ reigns, life endures, and God himself testifies in behalf of us (Revelation 20:4-5; John 5:37).

Today, I’d ask you to reflect on your own practice of prayer. How can these times we set aside and these prayers we memorize or organize open us up to what God is doing in prayer?

Further Reading: Psalm 61; Isaiah 11:1-9; Revelation 20:1-10; John 5:30-47

Written by Guest House Theologian, Tim Morgan. These reflections are a complimentary addition to our Advent Blend Coffee Bags. Scan the QR code each day to read the most recent reflection. 

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More Advent reflections can be found here.

“Turn again, O God of hosts! Look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine, the stock that your right hand planted, and for the son whom you made strong for yourself” (Psalm 80:15).

Will God finish the work which he has begun in us? Have our errant ways exhausted his mercy? Were the glimpses of his work which we were afforded flights of naive passion? Were we an investment ill-made? All that power, all that light, the warmth of companionship, God the wind behind our back, Christ the hand upon our shoulder—it’s all gone. What are we left with?

The psalmist writes, “O Lord God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers? You have fed them with the bread of tears and given them tears to drink in full measure. You make us an object of contention for our neighbors, and our enemies laugh among us” (Psalm 80:6). Over these weeks we’ve spent reflecting together, many of the passages which have encountered us have directed us to the certainty of God’s work in the world. It’s happening. God’s doing it. However, part and parcel with the situation we’re in before the coming Jesus is the ambiguity and confusion of prayers apparently unheard, a world apparently closed, the intervals between our sobs and groans apparently filled with silence. Our hearts shake “as the trees of the forest shake before the wind” (Isaiah 7:2). We’re “tossed to and fro by the waves” (Ephesians 4:14). We keep sending out a dove, to see if the waters have “subsided from the face of the ground,” but the dove finds “no place to set her foot” (Genesis 8:8-9).

The psalmist writes, “Restore us, O Lord God of hosts! Let you face shine, that we may be saved” (Psalm 80:19). This desperate plea expresses the heart of our situation. We appear abandoned. God’s holy vine, his people, appear torn apart: “They have burned it with fire; they have cut it down” (Psalm 80:16); “the Lord will bring upon you and upon your people and upon your father’s house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah” (Isaiah 7:17). Here, in the silence, in the great tribulation, God speaks his word to us: “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20; see Matthew 1:22). God’s word, his transparency in our ambiguity, his clarity in our confusion, is Immanuel. The birth of Jesus makes good on God’s promises; it gets us in on what God’s been doing this whole time (Romans 1:1-2). God has not abandoned his investment. He has been working in us. His mercy is inexhaustible. As the apostle Paul writes, “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). When we are surrounded and indwelt by the acute tragedy of this life, we have God’s word who “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 1:4). This power, which brings life from death and holiness from depravity, is what’s at work in our blindness, what’s speaking in our deafness. It’s the power that’s at work in us—now!

Today, I’d ask you to sit with a worthy saying: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Romans 8:11). This Spirit, from whom Immanuel comes (Matthew 1:20) amidst the question mark of our lives and by whom Immanuel is raised from the question mark at the end of our lives, is “the guarantee of our inheritance” (Ephesians 1:13), the presence of God’s future transparency, his future clarity in the coming Jesus.

Further Reading: Psalm 80; Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

Written by Guest House Theologian, Tim Morgan. These reflections are a complimentary addition to our Advent Blend Coffee Bags. Scan the QR code each day to read the most recent reflection. 

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More Advent reflections can be found here.

Image of “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” painted by Salvador Dalí taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_of_Saint_John_of_the_Cross

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—

Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

– As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame, Gerard Manley Hopkins

“For the Lord God of hosts will make a full end, as decreed, in the midst of all the earth” (Isaiah 10:23).

The world we inhabit is non-sensical. It rages against order. It fragments with every effort at coherence. Our personal goals put us in competition with one another. There’s only so many resources to go around. We can’t share the same space in the same way. Somebody’s got to move. Either you give or I give, but someone’s got to give. The psalmist writes, “My companion stretched out his hand against his friends; he violated his covenant. His speech was smooth as butter, yet war was in his heart” (Psalm 55:20-21). In our world, friendship goes as far as shared interests; companionship lasts until the road’s too small for two people; the well of trust is filled with the water of leverage—until the well runs dry, that is. As the prophet Jeremiah writes, “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 8:11). There is no common good, because no good can be shared in common!

This incoherent world’s life is self-affirmation. Its every breath is self-preservation. Our times are littered with truisms which bare this not-so-hidden reality: “Don’t change for anyone,” “you do you,” “be yourself,” “do what you’re passionate about,” and so on. Our shared moral vision is characterized by allegedly unrestricted self-expression. Until, that is, my expression of self inevitably runs up against yours. This isn’t so far from the apostolic saying we find in Jude, “‘In the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.’ It is these who cause divisions, worldly people, devoid of the Spirit” (Jude 18). Ours is a world of “violence and strife” (Psalm 55:9), “passion, evil desire, and covetousness” (Colossians 3:5). In the coming of Christ, however, “the Lord God of hosts will make a full end, as decreed, in the midst of all the earth” (Isaiah 10:23). Jesus’ coming is the “Omega Point” of the world, it is the unity of everything which happens in judgment and salvation.

It’s fairly typical these days to perceive in the Lukan dating of John the Baptist’s ministry (Luke 3:1-2) a historical situation of both John and Jesus’ ministries within the broader, secular context (Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod, etc.). This is when John the Baptist showed up. This is what was going on at the time. However, I suspect that it’s precisely the opposite that’s happening. These historical landmarks are relativized in the face of God’s word. They are situated before the coming of the Lord. The world is reconfigured by this decisive central axis (Luke 3:4-6). These varying interests, internally and externally contesting with one another, are placed under the absolute judgment of God. The war drum of the world falls under the inescapable wrath of Christ (Luke 3:7). Indeed, “men of blood and treachery shall not live out half their days” (Psalm 55:23). God will “divide their tongues” (Psalm 55:9; compare Genesis 11:5-7). As John the Baptist declares (and this to those who thought they were God’s people!), “Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:9). When every vestige of disease is uprooted, “though your people Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will return” (Isaiah 10:22). This great judgment boils our world, boils God’s people unto reduction. In the end, “the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the house of Jacob will no more lean on him who struck them, but will lean on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth” (Isaiah 10:20). In all this, Jesus’ coming is the unity of the great judgment. He is the end of the world.

However, he is also the beginning of God’s world. Jude writes, “But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life” (Jude 21). The total renovation of our selves, our disentanglement from the world of our delusion, our de-creation and re-creation which happen in faith all happen in view of the coming Jesus. In him, “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6). As we wait, God’s people proclaim, “He redeems my soul in safety from the battle that I wage, for many are arrayed against me” (Psalm 55:18). As opposed to those “who cause divisions” (Jude 19), God’s people “have mercy on those who doubt” and “save others by snatching them out of the fire” (Jude 23). Jesus’ coming is the unity of salvation, the unity of what God’s doing in the world.

Today, I’d ask you to reflect upon the ways we try to unify our world which are fated for failure. Here, the end of our efforts is the beginning of God’s truth (Matthew 16:24-27). Christ, not our projects, is the unity of the world, because he “is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy” (Jude 24). He is able to unify the world.

Further Reading: Psalm 55; Isaiah 10:20-27; Jude 17-25; Luke 3:1-9

Written by Guest House Theologian, Tim Morgan. These reflections are a complimentary addition to our Advent Blend Coffee Bags. Scan the QR code each day to read the most recent reflection. 

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More Advent reflections can be found here.