Biblical Christianity from Peter DeHaan

Embracing the Rhythm of Daily Prayers

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date December 11, 2016

Talking to God on a Regular Basis Is Key to Life and Faith; Don’t Live Without It

The Bible talks about praying in the morning, at noon, and in the evening (Psalm 55:17 and Daniel 6:10).

Though never a biblical requirement, the idea of praying each day at 9:00 a.m., noon, and 3:00 p.m. became a regular practice for devout followers of God in both the Old and New Testaments.

In the centuries that followed, Christians upped the number to seven, praying at seven prescribed times throughout each day. I never liked the practice of the “Seven Hours of Prayer.”

The idea that I needed to pray at specific times felt too rigid. And when I have seen monks follow this, I perceived their prayers as rote recitations and ritualistic, far removed from the personal relationship that I crave with the godhead.

Yet over time I have formed my own practice of daily prayers:

Before I Rise

I see no point in getting out of bed if I haven’t invited God to spend the day with me. I share with him my plans and schedule, giving him permission to alter them. I confess my weaknesses and share my concerns.

I ask for his blessing on what I will do and for favor with people I will interact with.

Then I rise and embrace the day.

Morning Prayers

As I exercise each day (at least Sunday through Friday—I take Saturdays off), I pray for God’s blessing on family and friends. I also pray for his blessing on future generations. I follow a couple guides that itemizes godly traits and practices.

I focus on one item per day for each person on my list. After a couple months I’ve covered everything and start again with the first item.

Of course I also interject specific prayers based on what that person has told me and as the Holy Spirit prompts me.

At the Start of Work

Before my wife heads off to work, I say a prayer of blessing for her, her work, and her day. Then she does the same for me. What a difference that makes on our perspective and our work for the day.

Meals

A common Christian practice is to pray before each meal, following the example of Jesus. I like this in concept but have trouble implementing it with sincerity.

I don’t want to mumble a prayer from rote memory or speed through an obligatory invocation as I salivate for food.

I’m so vexed by my inability to give God a fresh, meaningful mealtime prayer, that I skip the attempt when I eat alone. (I wonder if I should revisit this decision.) Only when in groups do I embrace this practice.

Bedtime

Some people lay down each night, fall asleep, and wake up in the morning refreshed. I do not. I need God at night just as much as I do during the day. I ask him to bless my slumber and to corral my dreams.

I think the command to hold every thought captive applies to our nighttime dreams as much as to our daytime thoughts. I need God’s help with both. See 2 Corinthians 10:5.

During the Night

When I wake up in the middle of the night, my intent is to pray until I fall back to sleep. It usually doesn’t take much.

Note that I don’t pray that I’ll fall back asleep; I pray for other people and situations. Also prayer seems more imperative in the middle of the night, around 2:30 to 3:00.

Always

Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica to pray continually (1 Thessalonians 5:17). While Brother Lawrence could approach this, I cannot. But I do look for opportunities to pray throughout the day. Read about my efforts to pray without ceasing.

These are my seven daily times of prayer. I’m sure my practice will continue to change over time. While I don’t expect anyone to follow my daily prayer practice, I do encourage everyone to develop their own.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

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Tags prayer

Bible Insights

What’s Your Life and Legacy?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date December 6, 2016

Amon Did Evil in the Eyes of God and Did Not Humble Himself

A reoccurring phrase in the books of 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles is about people who “did evil in the eyes of the Lord.” In these four books it appears thirty-two times, including eight times in 2 Chronicles.

Most of these occurrences reference kings, evil kings who rebelled against God and led their people to follow their wrong path away from him and his expectations for right living.

The phrase applies to Amon in today’s text, as well as to his father Manasseh. Talk about teaching the wrong things to your kids. As the saying goes, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

But there was one thing Amon didn’t learn from his dad that he should have. Though King Manasseh spent his life doing the wrong things, once he was confronted about them he made a U-turn.

He humbled himself. Today we might say he repented.

Years later King Amon ends up in the same situation. He is an evil king just like his dad, but instead of turning things around, he persists in the wrong path he has chosen for his life.

His pride keeps him from a humble response. In doing so, the Bible says he “increased his guilt.”

God may not give everyone a second chance, but if he does we had better take it. However, an even better approach is to live our life in such a way as to not need a second chance.

May we live a life and leave a legacy where we “did right in the eyes of the Lord.”

[Read through the Bible with us this year. Today’s reading is 2 Chronicles 31-33, and today’s post is on 2 Chronicles 33:22-23.]

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Tags obey God, pride

Christian Living

Should We Embrace a Social Gospel?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date December 4, 2016
2 Comments on Should We Embrace a Social Gospel?

Though Many are Quick to Criticize the Social Gospel, We Would be Mistaken to Do So

The primary way we learn words is through divining their meaning from context and everyday usage. That’s how children learn to talk and how most adults expand their vocabulary.

We presume their meaning, deduce their function, and discern how to use them. Basically we make educated guesses. And sometimes we make a wrong conclusion. Or at least I do.

Such is the case with the term social gospel.

Whenever I heard the phrase it was with negative connotations, so I assumed it was a bad thing. That was my first error.

Next, I assumed the negativity must arise from the social half of the term, certainly not the gospel half, the good news part. I then shifted social to socialize and envisioned a church that so majored in socializing that they forgot the gospel.

As a result I assumed the social gospel was a social church that had forgotten its original purpose, morphing into a purely social organization, like a country club.

I wanted nothing to do with a country club church, so I dismissed the social gospel as meaningless. That was my second error.

As an aside, we need the social part of church. We call it community. Community is critical. Consider the directive in Hebrews to not give up meeting together (Hebrews 10:25).

This is a call to live in community more so than an order to go to church on Sunday morning. Also consider all the “one another” commands as a charge to pursue community.

Now back to the social gospel. I wouldn’t have shared my misunderstanding of the phrase except for the fact that I’ve met others who similarly reached the same wrong conclusion.

The social gospel, however, is actually a call to move faith beyond a personal conversion experience to help others on a grand scale, specifically through social reform.

While some Christians want to segregate the two or dismiss making an impact on the world in which we live, the Bible has other ideas.

The first half of the above verse says we are to encourage one another to love others and to do good deeds (Hebrews 10:24).

Furthermore Paul tells the church in Galicia to persist in doing good (Galatians 6:9). James talks about the importance of proving our faith by what we do. He even says that faith without action is dead (James 2:14-26).

Whether we wrongly assume the social gospel is about community or rightly understand the social gospel as helping others, we need to do both.

The Bible says so.

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Tags community, gospel

Bible Insights

Choose With Care Whose Advice You Heed

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date November 29, 2016

King Rehoboam Made the Costly Mistake of Listening to His Friend’s Advice

Rehoboam succeeds his father, Solomon, as king. He inherits a sweet situation of a nation experiencing peace, enjoying power, and basking in wealth. It is his merely to maintain.

His detractor, Jeroboam, goes before him and asks for a reprieve for the people from the past burden of work and taxes. Rehoboam wisely says, check back with me in three days.

Then he asks his advisors, the same elders who served his father, what to do.

They tell him to back off a bit, be nice, and earn the people’s loyalty.

But Rehoboam didn’t like that recommendation, so he goes to his friends instead. They give him the opposite advice. He follows it, and most of the nation rebels against him to follow Jeroboam.

Rehoboam ends up with only one tribe willing to follow him, Judah. He listens to the wrong advice and loses big time.

This reminds me of kids. It’s common for small children to ask one parent a question, but not liking the answer, they check with the other parent for a more favorable response.

When they’re caught the results are never good. We do this as adults too.

Have you ever read a verse in the Bible that makes you cringe? I have. But instead of looking for ways to follow it, I look for a different verse that will let me draw a more favorable conclusion. I hold onto the second one and dismiss the first.

I shouldn’t need to wonder what God thinks about that, because as a parent I already know.

God gives us the Bible for a reason. We need to follow it. All of it.

[Read through the Bible with us this year. Today’s reading is 2 Chronicles 10-12, and today’s post is on 2 Chronicles 10:3-15.]

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Tags obey God, read the Bible

Christian Living

What Are You Thankful For?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date November 27, 2016

Take Time to Tell God What You’re Thankful For on Thanksgiving and Every Other Day Too

The church I attended several years ago had a Thanksgiving practice of having members stand to share what they were thankful for. From my perspective this never went well, with too much silence or too much forced sharing and sometimes both.

One year a man kicked things off by saying how thankful he was for his wife, spending too much time listing her many attributes, which I perceived as overly generous exaggerations.

Though I’m sure he earned points from his beloved, his gushing made me squirm.

With the precedence set, the second man to speak did the same thing for his wife. Now we a had a pattern.

Going forward, each person—both male and female—who spoke, opened with a spousal tribute. Anyone who did not do so would surely look like a clod and risk spending the night on the couch.

This all came to mind a few days ago when church asked us to write a note of what we were thankful for.

As a writer, you’d think I’d be all over this, but I write in solitude and can’t come up with a single cogent thought when trying to write in public.

Besides, my wife was sitting next to me eyeing my blank paper. I had to list her first, right? (By the way, I am thankful for her.)

After her, I’d need to follow with all members of my immediate family. (I’m thankful for them, too.) But how far should I go?

At whatever point I stopped, the implication would be that I wasn’t thankful for the next person in my family tree. It’s a slippery slope.

Next I thought about friends: best friends, close friends, valued associates, casual acquaintances, the neighbor I wave to but haven’t yet met, the clerk at the post office, my best friend from high school who I haven’t seen in years, and that one guy I met one time who God keeps reminding me to pray for.

Where do I draw the line?

Then I thought about things. Yes, I’m thankful for them, too, but to make a list of valued possessions would paint me as materialistic. Can’t have that.

What about less tangible things: good health, a job, the ability to work, the chance to help others, having family nearby and all living in the same state, a comfortable life, and so on?

Listing these things might seem like boasting of God’s blessings on my life, thereby causing pain for others who weren’t so fortunate. I would never want that.

I was running out of time to make my list. Some people had finished theirs, but my paper was still blank. Then I came up with a great idea. What if I wrote down the one thing I am most thankful for? That might be doable.

The answer came quickly: God. But he’s the answer to most everything. I needed to be more specific. Then I found clarity: I’m thankful for the love of God.

If we have God’s love, which we do, everything else is secondary. Yes, I’m thankful for family and friends and possessions and blessings, but mostly I’m thankful that God loves me—and that God loves you, too.

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Tags holiday, thank God, Thanksgiving

Christian Living

Is Spiritual Truth More Important Than Christian Unity?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date November 20, 2016

Arguing Over What is True Has Divided Jesus’s Church for Centuries

I’m a huge advocate of Christian unity, that as Jesus’s followers we should all get along and live in harmony. Denominations and theological perspectives don’t matter; Jesus does.

In the book of John Jesus prays that his future followers will play nice with each other, that we will be as one.

This is so others will get to know him. In praying this Jesus realizes that discord among his people will serve as the biggest deterrent to growing his church (John 17:20-26).

Paul likewise writes that we need to strive to live in unity. He commands it (Ephesians 4:3-6). He says there is only one body; there is only one church, not 42,000 variations that we call denominations.

This disunity is the downside of the Protestant Reformation.

When I tweeted about the importance of unity, one person messaged me with the stipulation that the basis for unity must be truth. The problem with using truth as a litmus test is agreeing on what is true.

In effect this person was justifying disunity.

Specifying a requirement of truth provides an excuse to avoid being one church. Christians have used this pretext for five centuries and divided the church of Jesus into religious factions as they argued about what is true.

The Age of Enlightenment, part of the modern era, brought with it the assumption that over time, through ongoing iterations, human thought would eventually converge on a singular comprehension of truth.

This didn’t happen. The opposite occurred. Truth became multifaceted, the product of each person’s individual logic and bias.

Christians have fallen victim to this thinking over the past few centuries, with otherwise well-meaning people assuming their comprehension of spiritual truth was correct. Ergo everyone else was wrong.

As a result we have separated ourselves into denominational schisms, subverting the intended unity of God’s church in the process. How this must grieve him. It certainly grieves me.

Spiritual truth is important, but we must hold it loosely. After all, our comprehension of what is true just might be wrong, mine included.

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Tags Christianity, follower of Jesus, Jesus, Protestant Reformation, unity

Bible Insights

As Followers of Jesus We Need to Live in Harmony

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date November 15, 2016

Pursue Christian Unity

The last thing Jesus does before his arrest and execution is to pray. The last part of his prayer is for the unity of his future followers (John 17:20-26).

Yet two thousand years later, we still wait for Papa to answer this imperative request from his Son. We are not one, far from it.

When John records Jesus’s prayer for unity, he uses a poetic flare. But when Paul later writes about the necessity of unity, he is direct and unequivocal.

Paul says we must “make every effort” to live in unity, to pursue peace. To underscore this essential need for us to live in harmony, Paul reminds us that there is one church and one Spirit.

We have one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism (that’s a hard one for many folks to accept), and one Father God.

With all of this oneness that surrounds our faith, why do we feel a need to divide it and divide us? It is our sin that causes division. It is our human nature that results in us moving in direct opposition to Jesus’s prayer and Paul’s command.

Our selfishness and lack of godly righteousness has resulted in a plethora of churches to pick from on any given Sunday and the 42,000 denominations in our world today. That’s a lot more than the one that Jesus and Paul envision and desire.

Jesus prays for our unity. Jesus and his Father model unity. Paul commands unity and then explains why a lack of unity makes no sense.

Yet we persist in our division with ungodly fervor and in unbiblical error, when we should make every effort to live as one.

[Read through the Bible with us this year. Today’s reading is Ephesians 4-6, and today’s post is on Ephesians 4:3-6.]

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Tags denominations, Jesus, Paul, unity

Bible Insights

Why Do You Fast?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date November 8, 2016

Some Things are More Important Than Religious Practices: Focus on What Matters Most

I plan to fast one day a week. While I’m not as consistent as I would like, I follow through more often than I miss. Fasting is a spiritual act of worship for me.

It better connects me with God and sharpens my prayers. I (mostly) anticipate my fasts.

Fasting provides me with spiritual focus—providing I fast for the right reasons.

As such, I must fight against fasting for lessor, secondary benefits: saving time in meal preparation and eating, increased productivity throughout the day, and a means to keep my weight in check.

Those may be good, but they miss the main point of fasting.

Sometimes I fast with the right perspective, and other times I don’t do so well. It seems Zechariah has my struggle in mind when he cites God asking, “Was it really for me that you fasted?” Y

es, we can fast for God or we can fast for ourselves.

The first brings glory to God and the second, detracts from God. If we’re going to fast—or engage in any spiritual discipline, for that matter—we need to do so for the right reasons. If we fast, may we do so appropriately.

Yet a few verses later Zechariah seems to offer a better alternative to fasting. Again quoting God, he says to “Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another.”

When done right fasting honors God. However acting with justice, mercy, and compassion honors God and benefits others. While the first is good, I suspect the second is better.

[Read through the Bible with us this year. Today’s reading is Zechariah 5-7, and today’s post is on Zechariah 7:5-9.]

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Tags fasting, glory, worship

Christian Living

What is Your Spiritual Litmus Test?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date November 6, 2016

Most Christians Carry Unexamined Criteria that Others Must Agree with Before They’re Accepted

I was once interviewed for a volunteer position at my church. The pair of interviewers cranked through a series of pre-assigned theological questions to determine my supposed worthiness to lead.

For some queries the answers were straightforward; others, not so much.

On these tougher questions, instead of responding with simplistic answers, I shared a more complex perspective, one packed with more questions but backed by biblical support.

I answered with shades of gray, but my inquisitors wanted black and white responses. I knew what they wanted to hear, but instead I was honest.

I suppose that in a sense I should have responded with the religious equivalent of political correctness.

For my candor I earned a one-on-one meeting with the senior pastor. He had five areas where he sought clarification. We worked through the first four without issue; he accepted my grayscale answers.

Though I don’t remember what it was, the fifth area was problematic. As he drilled down I realized I was at a tipping point. If I gave the pat answer he wanted to hear I was in. If I vacillated, I was out.

I wanted to serve my church in this capacity and, more importantly, I felt God had called me to do so—more succinctly, he told me to.

With only a tinge of guilt I gave the easy answer that would assure my acceptance. Pastor smiled and shook my hand. I was in. I passed his spiritual litmus test.

We all have spiritual litmus tests. Though I try not to, I know I do. So do you. Of a larger concern, churches have their litmus tests, too. These litmus tests are why our world is saddled with 42,000 Protestant denominations.

After all, if we agreed on everything there would be no reason to take the unbiblical step of separating from one another, of dividing the church that Jesus prayed would experience unity.

While most everyone draws a spiritual line in the sands of theology that cannot be crossed, none of this should matter.

Whether it’s disagreeing about baptism, communion, which version of the Bible is best, the song selection, pews or chairs, the color of the lobby, or even if men need to wear ties to church, Jesus wants us to be one.

Unity is more important than theology (and personal preference). That’s what matters most.

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Tags church, denominations, theology, unity

Christian Living

When and Where is the Kingdom of God?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date October 30, 2016
2 Comments on When and Where is the Kingdom of God?

Should We Consider the Kingdom of God As Our Future in Heaven or As Our Present Reality on Earth?

The Bible often talks about the Kingdom of God, sixty-eight times in all (in the NIV). Five biblical authors—Mark, Luke, John, and Paul—cover this topic in ten of the New Testament’s books.

Luke writes the most about the kingdom of God, accounting for half of the mentions.

Of course most of the teaching about God’s coming kingdom comes from Jesus himself.

Most people equate the kingdom of God with heaven, our future reward, something to anticipate in a glorious afterlife.

In reading the Bible it’s easy to understand the kingdom of God as a forthcoming event that will change everything—for the better.

As such the kingdom of God looms as our future outcome in heaven; it is valuable, something for us to pursue with glorious expectation.

Many of the verses support this understanding of the kingdom of God as something in our future, but others don’t align so nicely with that interpretation and some even confound it.

Consider Jesus saying that the kingdom of God is near (Mark 1:15), with some translations, such as the International Standard Version, saying the kingdom of God is now.

While we might postulate that Jesus’s birth or his public ministry ushers in this understanding of the kingdom of God, at the “last supper” Jesus says he will not eat with his followers again until after the kingdom of God comes.

Then he dies, rises from the dead, and later shares a meal with his people, confirming that the kingdom of God has come.

So the kingdom of God comes two thousand years ago and is still here for us today. We are living in it, or at least we have the potential to.

What Jesus says about the kingdom of God and what Paul writes about it in the Bible is more than a future possibility, it is a present reality for us to live in today—we are willing.

If the kingdom of God is closer to us than heaven, it becomes a present day proposition, something for us to consider, to pursue, and to embrace in our everyday lives.

Jesus is the kingdom of God, which emerges when he rises from the dead to prove his mastery over evil. The kingdom of God is here for us to embrace now, and it’s waiting for us to experience fully after we die.

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Tags kingdom of God