Author: Bryan Richardson

Re:Verse passage – 1 John 5:14-15 (day three)

“If we know that he hears … we know that we have…”

When your voice surprises a loved one with joy, when an important person answers your call, when your favorite musician takes your request, you’ve been heard. There’s a deep assurance that you matter. Being heard is so important to the core of your being that the actual details of your petition become less of the central issue, because being heard in your deepest place of longing affirms that you are valuable. With God, hearing and providing are two dimensions of the same attribute – his love for you. The one who takes the time to hear you will take the time to care for you in a way that will fill you with comfort, hope, and an unsurpassed experience of well-being. The one who made you will hear you.

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 9:1-23 (day three)

“The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him.”

The first clause of the above passage of scripture is news; the second clause is gospel. Where in all the world will be found pity and pardon despite adversarial behavior? Only with God. These are the tidings from heaven that Paul never got over: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Repentance and salvation are both swept up into that joyous summation. Indeed, throughout the entire cosmos ring these words from Daniel which announce all is not lost: “even though.”

Re:Verse passage – Luke 11:1-4 (day three)

“Lord, teach us to pray…”

You might ask why it would ever be necessary to pray that God wouldn’t lead you into temptation. It would seem to go without saying that God would refrain from such a thing. But you could say the same about other components of the prayer: it would seem to go without saying that God would care that people regard him and his activity highly; that heaven would prevail; that God would provide for one’s needs daily; that God would give mercy and forgiveness to human beings. And yet, here’s this prayer asking that God do all these things. If all that goes without saying, why pray? Because you don’t live in an impersonal, algorithmic universe. You live in a personal one. Life proceeds in conversation with this person – God – or it doesn’t proceed at all.

Re:Verse passage – Nehemiah 1:1-11 (day three)

“The wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates are burned with fire.”

Whatever your experience of your actual home, there’s a longing in you for a place where people welcome you, where they are patient with you because they know you and make space for you and wait for you. That longing is what lends weight to the words hometown, homecoming, homeland, homesick. Nehemiah had heard all his life of the place from where his people had come, and though he had never been to Jerusalem, that was his home. If the dream of home is shattered, the soul is cut to the quick. Have you lost your dream of home? The Savior has lived that sadness. Our Lord had no place to lay his head. He will cradle yours.

Re:Verse passage – Mark 11:22-25 (day three)

“All things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you.”

When a child says, “Don’t go to work,” her words request that you skip going into the office. But is that the heart of what she asks? Or is she rather saying, “Help me feel you close to me so that I know I won’t lose you?” Maybe you can take a day away from your job, maybe you can’t. But either way, you can address the request beneath the request, the heart of her longing: that you help her feel your closeness. Roger Ebert used to say, “A movie is not about what it is about, but about how it is about it.” There’s something underneath your request to God. It’s the heart of your longing. And God always attends to that.

Re:Verse passage – John 17:20-26 (day three)

“I have made your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

There’s a deeper source of loneliness and despondency than one’s conclusion that God is unknown, and that is one’s conclusion that God cannot be known. To remain permanently sealed off from even the possibility that inquiry and exploration could lead to an experience of God’s existence would be the kind of life in which atheism would make sense. In such a reality, belief in God or religious inclination would make no practical difference to a human being whatsoever. In his prayer, Jesus reaches through and beyond such a chasm between divine and human. He’s getting a message out from heaven that God is here. All things are now possible.

Re:Verse passage – Ephesians 3:14-21 (day three)

“that [God] would grant you…to be strengthened with power…in the inner man…”

That’s a lot of power from the Holy Spirit that Paul prays would flow to the core of your being. Will it overwhelm you? Not at all. Consider the concept of thermal runaway, by which a system – such as a car battery – receives so much power in a recharging attempt that a positive feedback loop leads to the explosion of the battery. Why wouldn’t your inner being do just that when it receives God’s power? After all, you’re “only human,” and Paul’s talking about universe-creating potency. Well, that “only human” phrase is completely contrary to what God has created. There’s no such thing as “only human.” The human creature comes into being in God’s image. God made good stuff. That’s why God’s power will strengthen you and not destroy you.

Re:Verse passage – Luke 18:1-8 (day three)

“Now [Jesus] was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart…”

Jesus confirms that demoralizing prayer experiences are a thing. The very reason for the existence of this parable, Luke states, is Jesus’s concern for the toll such experiences take on the human spirit. It’s those moments of meagerness and frailty that matter to Christ: the poor woman possessed only two coins to give; the crowd had only two fishes and five loaves; and the desperate person feels only despair in prayer. To all who know such circumstances, Jesus declares that no anguished heart will go unanswered. Thus, Jesus honored the poor woman as the biggest giver of all; Jesus fed everybody until they could eat no more; and to the person at rope’s end, Jesus says, “Tell me more.”

Re:Verse passage – Luke 11:5-13 (day three)

“…yet because of his persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs.”

One of the recurring assurances Jesus makes is that you are not at the mercy of the universe, but rather at the mercy of God. The created order – gravity, space, time, light, quantum particles, chemical reactions – is impersonal. God, on the other hand, is a person, and good. This is why when you ask, seek, knock, you will receive, you will find, the door will open. God responds and the universe yields. Asking, seeking, knocking – these actions are forms of persistence, and this impersonal cosmos will open up to beings created in God’s image. You’re not shouting into the void; you’re shouting into God’s ear.

Re:Verse passage – Romans 8:26-27 (day three)

“He intercedes for the saints…”

Paul’s words are a straight line from Jesus’s promise to send a comforter, his promise never to leave or forsake. Paul is not restating Jesus’s promise here. He’s not saying, “Remember what Jesus said.” Rather, he’s telling you in this passage that he has experienced what Jesus promised. He couldn’t have written these words with such clarity and such a sense of actuality unless he had witnessed such intervention from heaven firsthand. And in the way he phrases his words, you can hear that Paul isn’t claiming that his experience is an outlier. Paul often takes pains to communicate that he faces life’s drudgeries and pains just as you do. If somebody like him has known the Spirit’s presence when he hadn’t a clue how to proceed, you will too.