The Secret of Answered Prayer

Posted on February 9, 2013 by vincentsmithauthor

There’s a wonderful line in Solzhenitsyn’s famous novel ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’. The story is set in the hell of a Soviet prison camp, and one day Ivan is praying silently with his eyes closed, when a fellow prisoner notices him and says, ‘Prayers won’t help you get out of here any faster.’ Opening his eyes, Ivan answers, ‘I do not pray to get out of prison, I pray to do the will of God.’ That simple statement says more about the true reality of prayer than most of the sermons I’ve ever heard. It’s what Jesus was trying to teach us in the Lord’s Prayer, when he taught us to pray, ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ If we get that part of the Lord’s Prayer right – that part that tells us to align our will with God’s – there’s no problem about believing that our prayers will be answered.

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Spiritual Furniture

Posted on February 6, 2013 by vincentsmithauthor

The eminent psychologist Martin Seligman said that we need to ask ourselves why our grandparents didn’t become depressed in the same way we do when they were thwarted, when the people they love rejected them and they didn’t get the job they wanted, and when their children died. The reason, he said, is that they had what he called ‘spiritual furniture’ that they sat in when things went wrong – things like belief in God who gave them strength and a believing community that stood with them in their pain. But Seligman went on to say that this spiritual furniture has become threadbare in our lifetime, and that’s why we cope so poorly.
But the good news is that no matter how threadbare yours may be, Jesus still says to us: “Come unto me all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’

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Don’t Worry; Be Happy!

Posted on February 4, 2013 by vincentsmithauthor

They say that a dense fog covering seven city blocks to a depth of a hundred feet, if it could be condensed into water, would contain less than one glass of liquid. Now compare this to the things we spend our energies worrying about. Like fog those worries block our vision and condemn us to gloom even though they usually have little substance to them. Jesus knew that you don’t change lifetime habits of anxiety just by thought alone. That thought has to be translated into action. He said, ‘Your Heavenly Father knows perfectly well what you need, and he’ll give them to you if you give him first place in your life and live as he wants you to.’ What he meant was, if you are going to worry, worry about doing what you know God would have you do, and then you can rest secure knowing that he will look after the other details

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Stop Grinning, You’re in Church

Posted on February 1, 2013 by vincentsmithauthor

The humourist Irma Bombeck once included a sad piece in her newspaper column describing an experience in church when she had watched a small child who kept turning around and smiling at everyone. His mother finally jerked him around and in a stage whisper said, ‘Stop that grinning! You’re in church! Then she gave him a belt, and as tears rolled down his face she said, ‘That’s better,’ and returned to her prayers.
Irma concluded by saying, ‘What a fool, I thought. Here was a woman sitting next to the only light left in our civilization – the only hope, our only miracle – our only promise of infinity. If he couldn’t smile in church, where was there left to go?’
Sadly, I think there are many versions of that story. It’s the same sort of perverted religion that crucified the Son of God. The good news, though, is he still lives on, despite it.

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Intuiting God

Posted on January 27, 2013 by vincentsmithauthor

Some people wonder why God, if he exists, doesn’t make it easier for us to take notice of him; why he doesn’t remove all doubt by making an appearance – like breaking in on the TV waves and saying, “I’m still here, so straighten up your lives.” Well there are many things in life that we only learn intuitively, rather than deductively. We learn the laws of nature deductively by observation and logic. But things like love and beauty are discovered intuitively. Psychologists tell us that the two hemispheres of the brain control the way we take in information. The left side controls the way we learn deductively, and the right side the way we learn intuitively. And like love and beauty, the way most of us get to know God is by listening to those deep yearnings at the very core of our being – that God-shaped hole in our hearts that only He can fill

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Finding Happiness

Posted on January 23, 2013 by vincentsmithauthor

The American Constitution, among other things, guarantees ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ – not happiness itself, just the pursuit of it. One cynic claimed that happiness is built on the unhappiness of others. Albert Schweitzer thought that happiness was nothing more than good health and a poor memory. But I think C. S. Lewis was right when he said: ‘We try to be our own masters as if we had created ourselves. Then we hopelessly strive to invent some sort of happiness for ourselves apart from the one who did create us. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history…the long terrible story of people trying to find something other than God, which will make them happy.’
That’s why Jesus said: ‘Happy are those who long to be just and good, for they shall be completely satisfied.’

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If I Were a Rich Man

Posted on January 15, 2013 by vincentsmithauthor

At the height of his fame the writer Rudyard Kipling was invited to address a large gathering of university students in Canada. In his address he made this profound statement: ‘Some day,’ he said, ‘you will meet a man who doesn’t care for wealth, for position or for fame. Only when you meet him will you know how poor you are.’ There are three great motivating drives in human society: the desire for wealth; the desire for prestige; and the desire for power. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong in any of those things, our obsession with them is the cause of all our woes and our poverty of spirit. Jesus taught that what is important is not what you gain, but what you give; not the prestige that you acquire, but the way you honour others; not the power you exercise over people, but the way you empower them.

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Believing When You Can’t See

Posted on January 11, 2013 by vincentsmithauthor

One of my favourite inspirational sayings was found scratched on the wall of a cellar in Germany after the end of World War 2. Beside it was a Star of David that indicated It had been written by some nameless Jew who had obviously been hiding there. It said: ‘I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I don’t feel it. And I believe in God even when he seems to be silent.’ It is that sort of faith that sustains people when outwardly all is darkness, and gives them hope. The Bible says that we are ‘saved by hope’. And that hope, along with faith and love, are the only things that will stay with us forever. Hope,’ the Bible says, is an anchor for the soul that, when it is well dug into a foundation of faith, will see us through the worst of life’s storms. Seen or unseen, God is still there.

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It’s the Last Laugh that Counts

Posted on January 5, 2013 by vincentsmithauthor

Listening to the more strident members of the current batch of atheist fundamentalists one might easily get the impression that they have a monopoly on intellect, dismissing faith and belief in a spiritual reality as nothing more than ignorance and superstition. But when one of their own defects from their ranks, as did Professor Antony Flew, who for the past half century set the agenda for modern atheism, but then just before his death wrote a book entitled: ‘There is a God – How the World’s most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind’, they respond with an off the cuff dismissal, saying: ‘he went senile.’ But, as the old saying goes, ‘He who laughs last laughs longest;’ and I suspect Antony Flew is having a chuckle right now – like God, of whom the scripture says, ‘He who dwells in the heavens looks at our rantings and laughs.’

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Made for Something Bigger

Posted on December 31, 2012 by vincentsmithauthor

There’s a lovely poem by Wordsworth called ‘Intimations of Immortality’ which includes these words:
‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea…’

It reminds me of those poignant words from the Book of Ecclesiastes, “God has set eternity in our hearts.” There are times when we catch fleeting glimpses of it and realise again that we are destined for something far more than the limitations of this present life. That’s why even the very best of this life never proves fully satisfying, because we were made for something bigger.

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