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I have spent much of my ministry life thinking about and (with varying success) practicing the art of prayer.  Some years ago, I was drawn to the prayer of Jesus in the Gethsemane garden as a model prayer.  What especially struck me was Jesus’ boldness and frankness at this criticial moment.  It still remains utterly amazing to me that Jesus could ask God to release him from the way of the cross (even though he had long seen and taught that his vocation was to suffer and die, and afterwards to be raised up).  Gethsemane startles us when we take it seriously.  But it also opens up what is the true gift of the gospel: the confident and free expression of our selves before God in prayer and what this actually does to us and in us as we participate.

The exploration into the Gethsemane prayer was part of that process where I was learning that the point of prayer was its exploration of true relational confidence.  I came to see that prayer meant nothing if we did not express our truest self to God.  But there was more.  I saw further that what Jesus finally accomplished for us, his fully yielded will to God’s purposes, was realized precisely in this freest kind of prayer.

So prayer meant at least these two things: the freedom to express myself truly before God, and the way to overcome the short-sightedness of my human perspective and self-will.  This was the essence of what Jesus modelled in Gethsemane.

I am adding The Gethsemane Prayer of Jesus.  It is a substantial piece with varying subtleties of argument.  But I hope that you will see what I have come to see, that in Gethsamene, on the night of his arrest, Jesus modelled a prayer that was in sync with what he always taught: the prayer we call The Lord’s Prayer.

The issues of leadership are in the air this fall.  Faced with national elections in the U.S. and Canada along with an economic meltdown we have not seen for generations (and of course there is always the ongoing moral meltdown), the question of who will lead us is a defining question for our time.  For many, the call for strong leadership is met with a lack of consensus as to what that leadership should look like.  Leadership, as always, is shaped by ideology and worldview.

I have added Spiritual Leadership as Representative, with the hope that it would point out some of the unique issues involved in discerning a leadership appropriate to the church’s need in this hour of history.  My proposal is that spiritual leadership is more of a representative and symbolic nature, and less functional than other kinds of leadership.  Of course, church leaders do have responsibilities, and this is naturally part of what they provide their communities.  But I contend that spiritual leadership is of such a nature that the ultimate value of a spiritual leader is found more in what they stand for than what they do.  What are your thoughts?

I am adding a sermon I recently shared at Westside King’s Church.  It is entitled A Voice Behind the Written Words, and is part of the Unwritten series at the church.  The idea of the series is to talk about the gaps in our knowledge and experience, and is built on the idea that there are books that have not been written.  I took that idea and stretched it a bit to fit something I believe to be a defining deficiency in our time: the lack of appreciation for the living voice of God.  Perhaps because of the way some have overplayed this idea, making a mockery out of hearing and speaking for God, or because of the shyness we have about being too “mystical”, it seems to me that the sense of God as a living and speaking voice seems to have fallen out of favor.  I certainly do recognize the dangers and pitfalls of this issue, but I also affirm that God is a living voice, and that behind and in the written words there is a presence that speaks.  God is not limited by the errors and follies of our age.  There is a way to understand the enduring truth of God’s living voice and to bring mature and considered judgement to how we can listen better.

But first we need to affirm simply that he does speak.  And so I wrote this piece to “prime the pump”, as it were.  I can never escape Philip Yancey’s penetrating thought, that the thing God hates most is being ignored.

I value your feedback and comments.