Solomon's Porch Christian Community

One of the things that bugs me about modern Christianity is how incredibly impractical it is. A lot is said about what to believe these days (badly and vaguely, as a general rule), but very little is said about how to live and what to do. We want to do both well at Solomon’s Porch because discipleship involves the mind and the body. Soul work is an embodied work, and sanctification is radically body-oriented. 

In the last few “Dispatches,” I have taught aspects of God’s character that draw us into deeper contemplation of His nature and otherness. The Incarnation, the Trinity, the Creeds, and Confessions of the early church– the “sacred deposit”– gifted to help guide us as “aids” to our understanding of what the Scripture teaches about who God is and what we mean when we call Jesus the only-begotten. The Westminster Divines come along later and build our confession on theirs. These all, with their explanation of the nature of God, have one thing in common. What is that? They all cause us to raise our eyes by elevating our minds to meditate on Who exactly it is we worship and Who exactly He is through Whom we worship the Father. Having provided fertile ground for our Christian meditation in recent weeks, which is how we participate in transforming and renewing our minds, let us now turn ourselves to the practical subject of prayer. 

We must be practical and theoretical. If you think about it, you can see we already have other “practical” discipleship tools. Our prayer book, the Opus Dei, our Memory and Meditation verses, our catechism questions beginning in a couple of weeks, our discipleship themes, and even our discipleship exercises are all meant to provide practical discipleship because “practical discipleship” requires discipleship practices. Take another step back, and you will find us talking about “Giving, Praying, Fasting, Serving, and Resting (Lord’s Day Sabbath)” as the means of grace that should permeate the Christian life. What do we mean by “means of grace?” We mean the practices through which grace is communicated to the believer by faith. Now, let’s get practical.

Are you all ready for a pearl of wisdom that will change your life and improve your discipleship? Here it is: Make an Intercessory Prayer list with specific names and prayers you are committing to pray, and then, here’s the important part: make vigorous use of it every day. It is a rare person in any age that possesses the focus of mind to pray and watch without some kind of memorial aid. In the modern age, we have incredibly short attention spans and ranges of short-term memory. As “Come Thou Fount” teaches, we are “prone to wander, Lord I (we) feel it.” However, it also teaches us to “raise an Ebenezzar,” a memorial reminder of our weakness and need of God’s assistance. The Cross is the ultimate memorial of our weakness. However, prayer lists serve as lesser memorials. They are testimonies to the practical clay we are made of. The kind of clay that gets distracted, that forgets, and that grows spiritually numb sometimes. The lesson is to build a big altar in your life, like the one the tribes on the eastern side of the Jordan River did, one you can see from a long way off, one that won’t let you forget. Make an intercessory prayer list and use it. The new prayer book and every book thereafter will have a place for you to do just that. In the prayer book we now have a tool we can use to read together, memorize together, pray together, pray individually, sing together, and, in short, walk together. AND, AND, if you have the time, you can even use modern technology to your advantage to join WITH the church via the Opus Dei up to two times a day six days a week.

Make vigorous use of the means.
Make regular memorials.
Worship God.

Go forth to love and serve Him,
Pastor Jeremy