Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury Has Some Advice for Advent Discipline

Escape from your everyday business for a short while, hide for a moment from your restless thoughts. Break off from your cares and troubles and be less concerned about your tasks and labors. Make a little time for God and rest a while in him. Enter into your mind’s inner chamber. Shut out everything but God and whatever helps you to seek him; and when you have shut the door, look for him. Speak now to God and say with your whole heart: “I seek your face; your face, Lord, I desire.”

Proslogion 1

Advent Meditation

From Anglican Mainstream.

In this time of year where we wish to have good will towards all and peace and harmony, we try to avoid the stories in life that let us know that amidst this good season there are people who suffer. Oft times the stories that are related are children who by no fault of their own contract terrible diseases or natural disasters decimating the poorest villages in Haiti. The pictures of such suffering on the news are sad beyond measure. It is often baffling to us why such events occur because in our mind and heart, we think the wicked should suffer; the good, kind, innocent and righteous should flourish. When this isn’t the case we are often confused about the role of God. In today’s Epistle, Paul addresses that that by speaking about the inevitability of suffering for the believer.

Engage the meditation.

Why Read the Bible: To Learn God’s Intentions for Our Interactions with Other Believers

So when we could stand it no longer, we thought it best to be left by ourselves in Athens. We sent Timothy, who is our brother and co-worker in God’s service in spreading the gospel of Christ, to strengthen and encourage you in your faith, so that no one would be unsettled by these trials. For you know quite well that we are destined for them. In fact, when we were with you, we kept telling you that we would be persecuted. And it turned out that way, as you well know. For this reason, when I could stand it no longer, I sent to find out about your faith. I was afraid that in some way the tempter had tempted you and that our labors might have been in vain. But Timothy has just now come to us from you and has brought good news about your faith and love. He has told us that you always have pleasant memories of us and that you long to see us, just as we also long to see you. Therefore, brothers and sisters, in all our distress and persecution we were encouraged about you because of your faith. For now we really live, since you are standing firm in the Lord. How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we have in the presence of our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith.

–1 Thessalonians 3:1-10 (NIV)

Today’s passage provides us keen insight into God’s intentions for believers, especially in times of trouble. It also speaks to us clearly about the very real danger of Satan.

We learn from today’s reading that God intends for believers to support and encourage one another in their faith journeys. Why is this necessary? Because the Gospel when preached and lived faithfully will always stir up opposition because it challenges the ways of God’s fallen world. We see this illustrated above in Paul’s great concern for the Thessalonians. In the context of the letter, the Thessalonian Christians were being persecuted because unlike the Gentile unbelievers living in Thessalonica (who were the majority), these believers had given up their idol worship and were suffering the wrath of unbelievers as a result. So Paul sent Timothy to strengthen and encourage them in the midst of their suffering because Paul loved them and wanted them to preserve their faith so that they would have real life. Presumably Timothy reminded them that believers should expect to be persecuted like their Lord, but that suffering for Christ’s sake was actually a badge of honor. Suffering for following Christ was (and is) indicative that we Christians are living faithful lives.

Lest we delude ourselves and think this kind of persecution is a thing of the past, we are reminded that Christians today can expect to face persecution of all kinds. Just recently, for example, several Catholics were murdered in Iraq by Al-Qaida, simply because they were Christians. In this country, the app developed by the Manhattan Declaration for Apple’s App Store in the iTunes Store was pulled when the forces of darkness complained that it was homophobic and contained hate language. Nonsense. The Manhattan Declaration simply reaffirms, in part, God’s intention for sexual relationships and marriage. But this goes against the values of those who are enemies of God’s word and the cross. That is why we can expect to be persecuted if we decide to follow Jesus. This is why we need each other for encouragement and support so that we do not fall away when times get tough for us because of our beliefs. This is God’s will for believers and one of his appointed means of grace available for us to draw on. Consequently, we ignore it at our own peril.

While the pulling of the Manhattan Declaration app from the iTunes Store is a much less severe form of persecution than what many Christians face around the world, especially in many Muslim countries, it is nevertheless persecution for the Name’s sake and it represents a direct threat to Christians’ freedom of speech and conscience in this country. We who call ourselves Christians should take a cue from Paul’s letter above, and expose these examples of darkness by shining the light of God’s Truth on them so that all the world can see what is going on because darkness always hates the light.

We should pray that God will make the scales fall from the eyes of those who make decisions for Apple’s iTunes Store, and who have succumbed to this darkness, and we should pray most especially for those enemies of the cross who are hell-bent to stifle and stymie the Gospel of God and replace it with their own broken and bankrupt values. Why should we pray for our enemies? Because our Lord commanded us to do so and because we love all people and want them to experience real life, life in Christ! No Christian should ever desire the destruction of any human soul and the thought that some might be permanently lost because of their stubborn refusal to believe the Gospel and actually oppose it in this life should be terribly grievous to us. As the Bible warns us repeatedly, those who steadfastly oppose God and his purposes will be subject to a terrible judgment and the thought of that should be intolerable to anyone who claims to love others.

Neither are we to take matters into our own hands when we face persecution, nor are we to advocate violence against our enemies. Rather, we are to give our enemies up to God in prayer. But in doing so, we are to also stand up to these kinds of evil by speaking the truth in love and exposing acts of darkness when we become aware of them. As Paul reminds us, God will use our efforts to help us love and support each other when we speak boldly against the powers and principalities because we will certainly arouse anger and opposition, and sometimes incur the wrath of our enemies.

Second, and related to the point above, Paul reminds us that behind acts of evil is the Evil One himself. We shouldn’t get caught up in anthropomorphic issues here. I could care less what Satan looks like. Rather, we should have a healthy awareness that he exists and is constantly trying to thwart the spread of the Gospel and in general God’s good will and purposes for his creation and creatures. We should also remember that we are no match for the Evil One. That is why we must pray to God to intervene on our behalf so that the Evil One’s plans will not succeed. And we must also remember that in the cross of Christ, the Evil One and his minions have been permanently defeated (see, e.g., Colossians 2.10-15, especially v. 15).

As Christians, we must always remember that we are at war. It is a war not of our own choosing but one that is initiated by the forces of evil. Our Lord himself reminded us of this (Matthew 10:34-42) and so did all of the NT writers. The combined forces of the powers and principalities are arrayed against us to silence and defeat us. But we need not fear because we remember that we are Christ’s, bought with his own precious blood on the cross, and that ultimately we will prevail, even if we must suffer for a season. We remember that the God we worship, the God of the Bible, is sovereign and his will be done, and nothing in heaven or earth will be able to stop his good will from being accomplished. Thanks be to God!

Another Advent Devotional

I have been featuring the Advent devotionals from Anglican Mainstream and will continue to do so. I also wanted to bring to your attention another Advent devotional from Biblegateway.com, an excellent resource in itself if you are looking for online tools with which to study the Bible. These are emailed to you daily and I have found them quite good, especially if you like variety.

Click here to read today’s devotional. Click here to subscribe to the devotionals. May the Lord bless your reading of these as well during the Advent season.