2003 Annual Council

Sunday, October 12, 2003

United in the Fellowship of Prayer

Devotional by Linda Mei Lin Koh, Director of the Children's Ministries Department

[Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version unless noted otherwise.]

This assignment causes me to be both nervous and excited. Nevertheless, I certainly consider it a great privilege to be asked to lead a devotional study with our world Church leaders, scholars, theologians, and, of course, our very important support staff--without whom the bosses would not be able to maintain their efficient and effective ministries to the world field. I certainly would not be able to. I am no theologian. I am trained as a teacher. And I shall, with God's grace, speak in plain language.

The over-all theme for this Annual Council is "United in the Warmth of Fellowship." My assigned topic for meditation this morning is "United in the Fellowship of Prayer." Three things are mentioned in this topic--unity, fellowship, and prayer. Here we are dealing with several essentials of human life. We are talking about unity, community, and communication which are basic to human life. These are even more essential to Christian living within a fast- growing global Church that exists and works through church unity, fellowship, and prayer life. We need church unity, fellowship, and prayer to live a life in God and to do His work.

For our devotional study this morning, I chose to review a story loved, sung about, and commonly known by children as Jacob's Ladder. Let us turn to Genesis 28:10-15 (NIV). "Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the LORD, and he said: 'I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.'"

We may be different in many aspects and habits of life, but I believe that we all desire unity, harmony, and a wholeness of life maintained by a healthy sense of community through a network of communication to keep us in connection in one way or another. In the passage just read, the much sought after unity, harmony, and peace that belonged to the godly family of Isaac suffered a traumatic upheaval when the older son Esau vowed to kill his younger brother Jacob. Young Jacob was forced to leave home and parents and flee for his life. Jacob fled and came to a certain place and rested for the night in the wild. With a stone for pillow, Jacob lay down to sleep and in the night the Lord gave him a dream. In the dream Jacob saw a most extraordinary ladder spanning from heaven to earth with angels ascending and descending on it. From the top of the ladder the Lord spoke to Jacob and renewed the great covenant He had made with his grandfather Abraham. Jacob woke up and realized he was in the presence of God and he called the place Bethel, the house of God.

At least three lessons for Christian living can be drawn from this story of Jacob as we reflect on the topic, "Unity in the Fellowship of Prayer."

Lesson One--Church Unity and Fellowship Begin on the Knees

The God of heaven hears prayer because He is the living God. He is not just the Old Testament God or the New Testament God. He is the living God. It was not a waste of breath when the ancient Jews repeatedly called on the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, and so on. We serve an eternal, living God.

On Mount Carmel, the prophet Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to only one test to decide on the issue of the worship of the living and eternal God. The contest centered on the matter of prayer and the ability of the deity to answer prayer. The prophets of Baal, you will recall, danced and cried out the whole day until they were hoarse, but their god was silent and failed to respond. Their god was made with stone or wood, fashioned with human hands. Their god was a human invention. How could stone and wood speak except as commanded by the God of heaven to do so? Then Elijah, the prophet of God, prayed and heaven responded with fire streaming down to consume the sacrifice that was drenched with water. Elijah prayed again for rain to drench a land that was literally dehydrated after three years without rain. Heaven again responded with torrents of rain.

Only the God of heaven could thus speak and answer the cry of humanity, for He is the living God. He knows, He cares, and He hears prayer. David tells us in Psalm 34:6: "This poor man cried out, and the Lord heard him." And in verse 17 he continues, "The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles."

We can easily understand that God hears the prayer of the righteous because the God of heaven is a righteous God. But why would He listen to Jacob, who was twice the deceiver? Would the righteous God hear the prayer of a man like Jacob who schemed to get what he coveted? Amazingly, God did listen. The Bible tells us God forgave the sinful scheming heart of Jacob when he in sorrow turned to God. God heard the prayer of Jacob when he confessed his sin to Him, and God will hear and forgive any person who turns to Him. God hears our prayers, not because of how good we are but because of how amazingly gracious He is. This is the message of the Bible. I believe this is the heart of the sacrificial system of worship in the Old Testament, and it was signed and sealed in the cross of Calvary when the God of heaven gave His only Son to die for the sin of the world. There is no sin for which the cross does not provide cover and forgiveness, except the sin that is not confessed. In the cross God has heard the cry of humanity and responded with love and forgiveness to the sin of the world. One needs only to turn to Jesus Christ. That, to me, is the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ. That is the great love story we love to tell to the little children of the world. Little children gladly respond with childlike faith.

When my husband asked my two-year-old son to jump down to him from the old chest he was on, twenty pounds of warm energy immediately landed in my husband's hands. You do not want to do this sort of thing too often. Today, my grown-up boy, who is 30 years old and weighs 190 pounds, would not think of repeating such a foolhardy stunt, and neither would my husband. But have we unconsciously gauged the reliability of God by the unreliability of our human experience? Our prayer life is to bring us closer to God and make us more like Him with each encounter. Would we, as we grow older, become less trustful of the God we loved in our first love?

God hears because He is the living and loving God. We sing the testimonial song, "I serve a risen Saviour, He's in the world today." Beyond mere singing, however, we must experience the living presence of God in our lives to translate our singing into a living power. I believe that it is in the prayer life more than other spiritual activity that we may encounter the living presence and power of God. Through our prayer life God communes and interacts with us. Through our prayer life God manages our desire and longing, our struggle, our doubt, our joy and sorrow, our praise and petition, our gratitude and frustration, our elation when we experience answered prayer, our anxiety when we experience unanswered prayer, and the many other concerns we include in our prayer experience. The living and loving God hears and knows all these and interacts and leads us in His ways.

In John 10:10 Jesus has promised to give us the great abundance of life. I believe that we enter into the source of great abundance when we approach Him in prayer, for He is the source of life. When our prayer life becomes slack and weakened, how easy it is to look for an alternative source of life power to fill in the vacuum. But could there really be another power source for the followers of Christ? There wasn't for Paul. He knew of one and only one source. In Acts 17:28 he told the Athenians that ". . . in him [God] we live, and move and have our being." Amplifying the same point, Paul told the amazed, worldly-wise Athenians that the God of heaven was not far away from them even though they could not see Him. The Lord of heaven is indeed near and around us.

The God of heaven heard the prayer of Jacob some four thousand years ago. But would the same God of heaven hear the cry of his children today? Here is the assurance Jesus himself gave in Matthew 7:11: "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!" This assurance has no border of time or space.

These words of Jesus remind us how little we know of the God whom we call our heavenly Father. In prayer we find a great teacher who shows us a living knowledge of God. In prayer we experience the meaning of fellowship, for prayer is communion with God, fellowshipping with God. And in fellowshipping with God in prayer we are drawn by Him and to Him in unity. Christian fellowship and church unity indeed begin on our knees. When more Christians spend more time on their knees, Christian fellowship and Church unity are sure to come, for at the center of all is Jesus Christ. This brings us to the second lesson of Jacob's ladder.

Lesson Two--Jesus is the Ladder to Church Unity, Fellowship, and Prayer Life

The ladder reveals the true nature and meaning of prayer. Patriarchs and Prophets, pages 184 and 185, identifies the ladder as representing Jesus who is the only means capable of bridging the gulf between heaven and earth. What causes the gulf? Our sin, of course. People today try to shrink this word into meaning things like bad judgment, inappropriate behavior, or an alternate lifestyle. Whatever it may be, sin causes a gulf, a separation, an alienation that separates the human being from his Creator God. That alienation multiplies among the human family, spills over to our physical environment, and will sooner or later destroy us and our environment. Sin causes separation. It alienates and destroys. That is its nature and its work. Because of sin we have lost our unity, community, and communion with God. We should have a healthy respect for the horror of sin and its destructive power. No made-man device can bridge the gulf made by sin and heal the wound of broken relationships, save that ladder that spans the distance between heaven and earth in Jacob's dream. The great ladder reestablishes the line of communication and rebuilds community and unity between heaven and earth. In

2 Corinthians 5:19, Paul puts in words what Jacob saw in the dream of the ladder--that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.

To me, that heavenly ladder demonstrates the nature of prayer. In the name of Jesus we approach the throne of grace and through His intercession in the heavenly sanctuary the God of heaven hears our prayer today. In our prayer life with Jesus we live on a firmer ground of unity and enjoy a genuine fellowship among the people of God. Martin Luther said prayer is the "breathing of the soul." If we do not breathe, we cease to live. Would any normal being need a reminder or an urging to breathe? Yet Ellen G White, in the chapter on prayer in the book Steps to Christ, laments over the scene she saw in which many Christians are reluctant to pray. We can understand her deep concern when we view prayer as demonstrated by Jacob's ladder. Prayer is coming to God through Jesus. Prayer is experiencing a life in Jesus, for He is the means of experiencing a life in God. He is the relater as well as the relationship in God.

One essential element in establishing a lasting, meaningful relationship in life is time. We need time for meaningful fellowship--time to build a strong, bonding relationship of love, trust, and confidence in each other. Remember the time when you fell in love? There was always time for the loved one. Or was there?

I sometimes wonder if God might not feel the same way about our prayers or conversations with Him. When we hurriedly run through our prayers in the morning and then rush off to work or other appointments without stopping to wait for His counsel, we may be unconsciously showing by our actions that we consider other things more important than time spent with Him.

No wonder Ellen G White cautions us: "Many, even in their seasons of devotion, fail of receiving the blessing of real communion with God. They are in too great haste. With hurried steps they pass through the circle of Christ's loving presence, pausing perhaps a moment within the sacred precincts, but not waiting for counsel. They have no time to remain with the divine Teacher. With their burdens they return to their work."--Ed 260

We who are commissioned to build church unity, develop Christian fellowship, and present the message of God in power to the fragmented world need to begin strategic planning on our knees. Heaven is not in short supply of power to accomplish God's work on earth. One mighty angel could more adequately do it, but God has given us a great ladder to climb.

We teach our children to sing the song, "We are Climbing Jacob's Ladder." Adults should know that in reality it is not Jacob's ladder, but the Lord's ladder. I wonder whether our children are singing sound theology when they sing this all-time children's favorite. The astonishing thing is that the Lord's ladder has become for Jacob his own ladder to climb, for there is no other means of approaching heaven except through climbing that ladder provided by God. Just as the Lord has asked us each to carry our own cross as we walk with Him who carried the cross for the world, I believe too that the Lord's ladder should become our own ladder--ours to climb in our daily Christian life with Him and in Him. One cannot be with the ladder unless we are climbing on it. The vine and the branches exist in each other. The indwelling Christ in our lives means Christ lives in us as we live in Him. Unless we are in Christ we are not part of Him. A prayer life on a consistent and persistent basis keeps us in close fellowship with God and our fellow Christians.

Lesson Three--Covenantal Responsibility through Prayer Life, Fellowship, and Church Unity

Jacob was laden with overwhelming guilt for the deceptions he had practiced. He was fearful, but he was tortured even more by guilt. He was looking for a quick removal of his crushing burden. As Patriarchs and Prophets points out, Jacob was looking for forgiveness, but the Lord offered him a Saviour. He was sorrowful for the way he obtained the spiritual birthright, but the Lord offered him a renewal of the great covenant made with Abraham.

In reading the SDA Bible Dictionary on the topic of biblical covenants, it appears to me that the various covenants God made with man center on the privilege as well as on the grave responsibility of the covenantal people. The privilege and responsibility of the covenant relationship finally has to do with God's great work of salvation. It is a great privilege to be entrusted with the message of God's great salvation for the world. It is an equally great responsibility we have been given to bring the message to the world. It was promised that through Abraham the world would be blessed. The blessing for the family of Abraham was intended to be shared with the whole world. That is God's covenantal design. That covenantal design was extended to Jacob's descendents, particularly in the creation of ancient Israel.

Ancient Israel utilized the privilege but became unfaithful in its responsibility to share God's message of salvation with the world. Unfaithfulness in the covenantal responsibility led ancient Israel to regard the rest of the world as unworthy of salvation. That unfaithfulness paved the way for their final rejection of Jesus as the Messiah of the Jewish nation and the Saviour of the world. Unfaithfulness in the work of God led the people of God to turn against their own God.

Conclusion

The lesson of ancient Israel is before us to see and learn. The danger still exists in our prophetic movement today. We believe this Church was raised up to prepare the world for the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, just as ancient Israel was commissioned to prepare the world for the first Advent of the Messiah. With a great sense of humility and gratitude this Church has received the privilege of the great gospel commission for these last days of this world's history. With an even heightened sense of passion for our work, we are to spread the good news of the glorious return of Jesus Christ. The covenantal responsibility of sharing God's message of salvation to the world through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, God's people through the ages, and this prophetic movement in these last days must, by God's grace and power, be finally accomplished through God's means in our time. We need to galvanize unity in order to move forward in one accord. Unity is never to be taken for granted. With diligence we are to develop and maintain and enjoy in it. For many, unity is a much sought-after goal and result. Christian unity, however, is also being nurtured in the process. It is born on our knees, in communion with God. It is further nurtured through fellowshipping within the community of the saints. United with Christ in prayer, we shall unite in the fellowship of the Church. With united effort, through the empowering of the Holy Spirit, we shall go forth to accomplish God's gracious work on earth.