Good news

Yesterday I went in for my chemotherapy infusion.  The procedure is that I have blood drawn at 10am for lab work.  Then I wait an hour for it to be completed before I see the doctor.  We talk about how I am doing and he checks my labs and my lungs and my abdomen.  As I told him my ongoing struggles he said that I will only have to have the really bad chemo, oxyplaten, one more time.  The last two times I will just have the less toxic chemical, 5FU, which is infused through a portable IV pump I wear over 46 hours.  Presumably, those last two treatments should not be accompanied by the overwhelming weakness and lack of appetite and general malaise that has been my experience the previous 9 times.  I thank the Lord for this kindness while praying that he will use the chemicals as I will have received them to kill the cancer.  Thank you for praying for me.

The last chemo week, when I was feeling most down, both physically and emotionally/psychologically, in my daily reading I read Psalm 86, a psalm of David.  It was very helpful.  It is a prayer for God to help him when he is in distress.  Here is how it begins: "Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.  Preserve my life, for I am godly; save your servant, who trusts in you--you are my God.  Be gracious to me, O Lord, for to you do I cry all the day.  Gladden the soul of your servant, for to you, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.  For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you.  Give ear, O LORD, to my prayer; listen to my plea for grace.  In the day of my trouble I call upon you, for you answer me."

Here are the things he asks for:

• Incline your ear and answer me
• Preserve my life
• Be gracious to me: that is, do not treat me as I deserve, but show your favor in spite of my sins.
• Gladden the soul of your servant (Personally, this is what I most earnestly asked for that week).
• Give ear to my prayer, listen to my plea for grace

He gives reasons to God as to why God should answer him.  In order they are:

• "for I am poor and needy."
• "For I am godly", by which David means, "I trust in you, you are my God."  David is not saying that God should answer him because of what he has done but because of who he trusts in, relies upon, which is God himself.  Here is how Hebrews 11:6 states the principal: "And without faith it is impossible to please God because everyone who draws near to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who diligently seek him."  David here exhibits faith diligently seeking God in prayer.
• "For to you do I cry all the day"
• "For to you do I lift up my soul"
• "For you are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you."
• "for you answer me"

So David acknowledges his need and then goes to the only one who can help him, to God himself.  He trusts in God's goodness and grace and steadfast love and his promise to respond to all who will call upon him.  He asks God to both preserve his life but also to "gladden his soul" while yet in the midst of the trouble.  A soul is made glad as God assures the person of his love and of the glorious future that awaits all who will continue trusting him to the end of life.

May the Lord gladden your soul and mine with a sensible knowledge of his love for us in Christ.

What to pray when you have cancer VI

The last petition of the Lord's prayer is particularly important for those who have cancer or are afraid of getting cancer or experiencing any kind of significant suffering.  The petition is: "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil (OR "the evil one.")."  Aside from being a very important thing for anyone who suffers or is afraid of suffering to pray it is also a very strange request.  If I do not ask God to not lead me into temptation does that mean that God will lead me into temptation?  That is what it sounds like, don't you think?  How should we understand this strange request and what exactly are we asking God to do for us?

First we must be clear that God never tempts anyone to do evil.  Listen to how James says this is his letter (James 1:13-15), "Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God,' for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.  But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.  Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death."  We are tempted to sin, to disobey God by our own desires.

But the petition isn't "Don't tempt us" but rather, "don't lead us into temptation."  So what are asking God to do?  This petition recognizes that God is sovereign over all the circumstances of my life.  All that happens to me from lost keys to getting cancer is directed by God himself.  God says in Isaiah 45:7, "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things."  He tells Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 4:11), "Then the LORD said to him, 'Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?'"  Or again in Lamentations 3:37-38, "Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it?  Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come?

This petition first assumes that we do not want to sin.  The reason we don't want to be tempted is so that we will not sin.  This is the tension in the Christian life.  Every day I must confess my sins and ask God to forgive me for the sake of Christ.  However, I don't want to sin and so I ask the Lord every day to not lead me into those circumstances where he knows I am weak and easily led astray.  We are saying to the Lord, "You know me.  You know my weaknesses and my sins and so I ask you to not bring me into those situations where you know I will succumb to temptation and so sin against you."  In essence we are asking the Lord to fulfill the promise he makes in 1 Corinthians 10:13 where the apostle Paul writes, "No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it."  We are asking God to not place us in circumstances that are beyond our ability to withstand the temptation associated with that situation.

So if we are asking the Lord to not lead us into temptation then we know that whatever circumstance we find ourselves in that the Lord has brought us into it, not to harm us but to help us discover anew that Christ is better than everything else.  If we are praying this prayer then we do not need to fear the future or fear what bad thing might happen to us because we know that God is not placing us in situations that are meant to bring us eternal harm but eternal good.  So if I'm praying this prayer and I still sin, whose fault is it?  It is my fault because the Lord has promised that he would not put in a place where I would be unable to resist.  In every circumstance there is a way to resist the temptation and escape the sin.

I know that the cancer and the chemo-therapy and the brain injured son are circumstances God has placed me in, not so that I will sin and fall but so that I will trust Christ and escape the sin which I am being tempted to fall into by these circumstances.  Here we see why Jesus tells us to pray the second half of this petition which is, "but deliver us from evil (OR "the evil one")."  Every day I must recognize that I am in a fight to believe the promises of God rather than the promises of sin.  I must recognize that my adversary, the devil, is a liar and that, just as he did with Adam and Eve, he is seeking to get me to believe that disobedience to God is a more certain way to happiness than trusting his promises and living as he wants.  So I must ask each day that God himself deliver me from the lies of sin, the devil and the world.  This is the fight of faith.  When I pray this final petition I am joining in the battle.

What to pray when you have cancer V

I'm not sure I understand why but it is on my worst days, the Wednesday and Thursday after I receive chemo on Monday, that I feel my sinfulness most.  Perhaps it is because I am so self-focused on those days but my failures to love my family and to care for others and to be honest in all my dealings with others and etc. etc. loom very large in my thinking.  It is on those days I am so glad for Jesus' command to daily ask my Father in heaven to forgive me.  It is on those days that I am so glad for the reassuring promise of the gospel that though once I was dead in my trespasses and sins I am now alive in Christ and forgiven of all my sins, past, present and future because all my sins were nailed once and for all to the cross of Christ.  So it is very right for all who suffer cancer or any of the innumerable ways that humans suffer to daily ask their Father in heaven to forgive their sins for the sake of Christ.

However, it is the second half of this petition regarding forgiveness that causes us the most trouble.  Jesus commands us, when we ask our Father to forgive us, to also tell him that we have also forgiven everyone who is in debt to us.  In fact we ask him to forgive us as also we have forgiven others.  This makes it sound as if God's forgiveness of us is in some way dependent on our forgiving others.  Then to make the problem worse Jesus says, right after concluding the prayer, in Matthew 6:14-15, "For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."

The promise of the gospel is that our sins are forgiven by grace alone through faith in Christ alone and not by our works.  All of our sins are placed on Christ and he is killed in our place and all of his righteousness is credited to us so that we are justified completely apart from our performed obedience.  Yet this appears to say something different.  So how are we to understand this?

First, consider the logic that is being used if God's forgiveness of me depends upon my forgiveness of others.  Imagine I owed a friend, we call him Jim, $10,000 which I've promised to repay.  However, I suffer a severe financial setback which will prevent me from paying Jim back.  So before I go to Jim to ask him to forgive the debt I owe him, I go to another friend, Tim, who owes me $20 and I tell him I forgive him the debt, that doesn't have to pay me back the $20.  Then I go to Jim and after I ask him to forgive the $10,000 debt I tell him, by the way, I forgave Tim the $20 he owed me.  In what way could my forgiving Tim $20 obligate Jim to forgive me the $10,000?  That makes no sense.  My forgiving others cannot obligate God to forgive me.

What Jesus is saying here is that these two things always go together, everyone who is forgiven by God forgives others.  If you do not forgive those who sin against you it simply means you are not forgiven because everyone who is forgiven by God gladly forgives others.  The logic is very similar to the logic of 1 John 4:19, "We love because he first loved us."  Our love is the fruit of his love for us.  Thus John can say, as Jesus says here, "anyone who does not love does not know God (1 John 4:8). 

Jesus tells a parable in Matthew 18 to make this exact point.  He tells the parable in response to Peter's question (Matthew 18:21): "Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?"  Thus Peter wants to put a limit on how many times we have to forgive people who sin against us before we have the right to make them pay for what they have done to us.  Jesus tells the parable of a king who has a servant that owes him millions of dollars.  He justly demands repayment.  The servant, unable to pay the king back begs to be forgiven.  The king, graciously, forgives all his debt.  The forgiven servant leaves the throne room of the king and immediately sees a fellow servant who owes him several hundred dollars.  He grabs him by the throat and demands that he repay him immediately.  The fellow servant begs to be forgiven but the forgiven servant says no and throws him into debtors prison until he pays him back. 

When the king finds out what the forgiven servant did he calls him into court and says to him (vv.32-34), "'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me.  And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?'  And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt."  Jesus concludes the parable with this frightening sentence: "So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart."  Do you see the logic?  Being forgiven always produces people who forgive.  This is the logic of the gospel.  If we refuse to forgive it simply means we do not really believe the gospel, which says that we deserve an eternal hell but have been rescued from God's wrath and forgiven all our sins by the living and dying of the dear Son of God.

If you are struggling with forgiving others you need to go back to the gospel and consider what has actually been done for you.  It is only by knowing the wonder of God's forgiveness that you can forgive others.  And when you know the wonder of his forgiveness you will gladly forgive others.

What to pray when you have cancer IV

Later this morning I go for my 8th cycle of chemotherapy out of 12 total.  I am praying for the ability to endure the coming sickness and to not lose heart.  I am also continuing to ask the Lord to kill the cancer by these means.  Thank you for your prayers.

I have suggested in previous posts that what those with cancer should pray is the same thing that those without cancer should pray.  What we should ask our Father in heaven to do has been told us by the Lord Jesus when he gave us what is called the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13).  Today I want to reflect on what is perhaps the most difficult part of the prayer to understand.  The fifth petition of the prayer goes like this (ESV): "Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors."  We will consider the first half of the petition today and the second half later.

Jesus commands us, each and every day (That this prayer is to be prayed every day is seen in the previous petition, "Give us today our daily bread"), to ask our Father in heaven to forgive us our debts.  The way that Jesus states this petition shows that the concept of forgiveness comes out of the world of economics.  Each and every day we "borrow" or "take" something from God which belongs to him and we use it for ourselves thus placing ourselves in debt to God.  We are legally obligated to pay him back but we have no resources by which to pay him back, thus each day we ask him to release us from the debt, to forgive the debt. 

How do we put ourselves in debt to God?  It is by our sins.  This can be clearly seen when Jesus repeats this prayer in abbreviated form in Luke 11:4.  There Jesus states this petition like this: "and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us."  Here the concepts of sin and debt are combined.  So how are we to understand our sin?  Everything we are and have has been given to us by God.  He gave us our life so that we would love him, be delighted with him, desire him above all other things.  As Jesus said, the first and greatest commandment is to love God with our whole being: heart, soul, mind, strength.  Jesus also said that there is a second commandment that is like the first; we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.  God aims for us to use all that he has given us to joyfully serve our neighbors.  Thus every failure to love God and to love our neighbor during each day is to take the "wealth" that he gave us and to squander it on ourselves.  We've not given God what we owe him, that is, we've sinned and thus we are in his debt.

Our situation with God is like the person who gets a small business loan from the bank to start a new business.  However, instead of using the money to start a business the person takes the money and goes to the Ho Chunk casino in Wisconsin Dells and loses all of it gambling.  He owes the bank and has no way to pay the bank back as he has no business from which to get income.  In a similar way when we use all that God has given us to serve ourselves and not to love God and others we are in his debt with no way to pay him back.  Thus our only hope is if God will forgive us.

This leads to another issue.  Jesus commands Christians to ask their Father to forgive them each day.  However, the NT makes very clear that all the sins of Christians have already been forgiven by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.  Consider these few NT texts, out of scores that could be cited: Colossians 2:13-14, "And you (those who have faith in Christ, see Col. 1:2-4), who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross."  Romans 4:5-8, "And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works: 'Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not account his sin.'"  Hebrews 10:14-17, "For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.  And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us; for after saying, 'This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds,' then he adds, 'I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.'"

If it is true that all of our sins have been forgiven by Christ's death and that God no longer remembers our sins and lawless deeds, then why does Jesus command us to ask the Father to forgive our sins each day?  The answer to that question is clearly stated by the apostle John in his first letter.  In 1 John 1:8-9 he writes: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us."  John says that if we are not daily (present tense verb: confess) confessing our sins, then we are saying that we have no sins.  If we say we have no sins then we deceive ourselves, the truth is not in us, we call God a liar and his word is not in us.  Thus, all true Christians make it a regular practice of asking the Father to forgive them their debts.  They confess, acknowledge their sins.  Are we forgive because we confess, because we ask?  No.  We are forgiven, as John says, because God himself is faithful and just.  This means we are forgiven because God placed our sins on Christ and killed him in our place and he promised, on the basis of Christ's death to forgive everyone who believes in him.  Thus we are forgiven by what Christ has done and one of the evidences that this is true for us is that we regularly confess our sins, ask the Father to forgive us our sins.

What to pray when you have cancer III

Due to the Memorial Day holiday last Monday I did not receive my chemotherapy treatment until last Tuesday.  Amazingly (to me at least) this delay of one day radically interfered with my work and my life.  I was unable to work and thus unable to preach on Sunday.  Thank you to my associate Steve (and his family) who ably filled in for me.  I was able to care for Jared on Saturday and Sunday but not much else.


I began last week to seek to make the point that Jesus has told us what we are to ask God to do in every circumstance of our life, even when we have cancer.  He has done this by giving us what is commonly referred to as "The Lord's Prayer."  I've talked about the first three petitions in previous posts.  Today, the fourth petition in the Lord's Prayer is "Give us this day our daily bread."  There are a number of questions that this apparently simple request pose.  First, what does Jesus mean by "bread"?  I love Martin Luther's description of bread in his Small Catechism.  He writes: "Bread includes everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body, such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, land, animals, money, goods, a devout husband or wife, devout children, devout workers, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, self-control, good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbours, and the like."  Thus Jesus wants us to ask our Father in heaven to provide everything we need to sustain and maintain our physical, social, cultural, political life on this planet.  Obviously this would include the request that God would be pleased to kill the cancer in my body and to heal my son of his brain injury.


The use of "bread" is also instructive in that Jesus is clearly expecting that we will evaluate our requests in terms of need vs. want.  In Jesus' culture bread is the most basic of needs for sustenance.


A second question is this: if we do not ask God to supply all of our needs does that mean we will go hungry or homeless or get cancer?  The Bible repeatedly says that God gives "all men life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:25.  The Psalmist says, "The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.  You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:15-16)."  Jesus says about his Father in heaven, "he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5:45)."  Not only does God say that he is going to provide for all humans whether they pray or not but he also says, in particular, about us that he already knows what we need without our asking (Mattthew 6:8 & 32).  So if God knows what we need and has already committed himself to giving all humans what we need then why does Jesus command that we ask God to give us what we need for life on this planet?

There are several reasons.  First, what would it say about a child who never asked his or her parents for anything he or she needed?  It would be an act of contempt and disdain for his or her parents.  An entirely independent child is a child who has forgotten who she is and who her parents are.  For a Christian to not ask God to provide is an act of unbelief in the goodness of God and an act of rebellion against him.  Second, as every parent teaches his or her children when you ask for something and it is granted to you, what do you say?  "Thank you" is the appropriate response for favor given in response to request.  Thus we are to ask God to give us our daily bread so that we will not forget to thank him when he provides for us.  Third, asking God to provide our daily bread is an act of faith in God's sovereign goodness.  It is an acknowledgement that he is in control of everything that is happening on this planet.  It is a confession that God is the owner and ruler and sustainer of this world.  Thus, asking him to provide is an act of worship, of ascribing honor to him as the only one who has the right and the power to give this world's good gifts to us.

A third question: Why does Jesus emphasis "this day our daily bread?"  Jesus aims for us to pray about our daily needs as means to combat two of our greatest sins: greed and fear.  The emphasis on "daily" reminds us to not pray for the accumulation of money and possessions "for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions (Luke 12:15)."  We are to ask God for what we need to live today, not for what we will need to live tomorrow.  As Jesus says later in Matthew 6, the unbelieving world runs after all these things but we, in contrast, are content with having our needs for physical life met (See 1 Timothy 6:6-10).  Fear is a powerful and destructive emotion which is most often associated with our future condition.  Thus, concentrating on what we need today and asking our Father to provide it will be an antidote to fear of the future. 

Does it mean it is wrong to pray for future concerns?  Would it be wrong to ask God to provide adequate financial resources for our now 5 year-old child to go to college?  Would it be wrong to ask for that same child that God would provide a faithful Christian spouse in the future?  Would it be wrong for the farmer to ask God to supply the right measure of rain through the growing season as he finishes planting his crops in the spring?  While I do not think it wrong to pray for future needs (Paul asks the Roman Christians to pray for a successful future visit to Jerusalem, Romans 15:30-33), yet most of our prayers regarding our needs in this world are to be focused on the near term, not the long term.

Fourth, what is it "our" daily bread?  We are not to only be concerned for our own private needs but the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ are also to be regularly brought before our Father.  Jesus means for us to ask our Father to meet the needs of the rest of his family, not just our needs.

Finally, does Jesus commanding us to pray this prayer mean that we will never go hungry, that we will never get cancer, that we will never be homeless?  The answer is no, this is no promise of a middle class lifestyle in American.  It is not promise that we will not go hungry.  How can I say this?  Jesus prayed this prayer and he was homeless (Matthew 8:20).  Paul prayed this prayer and he was hungry and often without food and homeless (2 Corinthians 11:27).  We pray this prayer and our heavenly Father promises to provide us with everything we need to live upon this earth in the circumstances that will most bring glory to him and eternal good to us for as long as he wills that we live upon this earth.  He has a plan for us that includes all the sufferings and losses of this life and our asking him to provide all that we need shows that we actually believe he is in control and will do what needs to be done for us.  It prepares us to gratefully accept whatever circumstances in which he places us.