(105) Corrective Granting
Even such as ask amiss may sometimes have their prayers answered. The Father will never give the child a stone that asks for bread; but I am not sure that he will never give the child a stone that asks for a stone. If the Father say, ‘My child, that is a stone; it is no bread;’ and the child answer, ‘I am sure it is bread; I want it;’ may it not be well he should try his bread?
From MacDonald’s sermon: “Man’s Difficulty Concerning Prayer”
(106) Why We Must Wait
…perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is necessary to its arrival. To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our consciousness is to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf whence it issues: in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With his holy influence, with his own presence, the one thing for which most earnestly we cry, he may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that he is answering our request–has answered it, and is visiting his child.
From MacDonald’s sermon: “Man’s Difficulty Concerning Prayer”
Thanks. I am grateful for these insights on prayer–I guess I had had a bit of chronologic snobbery, not realizing how much people in the 19th century (and earlier) wondered why we even pray. He’s certainly surpassed me in his musings about reasons.
A comparable thing actually happened to me: my short excursion to med school (at the age of 43… I always have to throw that in ; - ). I thought I wanted it, I was given multiple providential confirmations in my going (things that just don’t happen normally… not entirely unlike Maggie’s and Rich Stearns’), I crashed (a difficult providence), but then another series of things (‘co-instants’) confirmed my leaving and which rescued me. (One of those co-instants was also a very helpful and surprising providence to a young Christian couple as well as myself.) The timings and placings of several were not much short of startling, if any. So I am glad and thankful I was given the stone I wanted.
(I certainly did not ask for kidney cancer, but I’m glad and thankful I was ‘given’ it as most regulars here know: my nephrectomy.)
Or perhaps another way of looking at it is that God might have a miraculous capability of taking the stones we’ve asked for (and after we’ve realized their true nature) … and ends up turning those stones into bread in ways that never occured to us. A dangerous thought, I know. One should never try to justify or rationalize away potentially evil choices we’re considering.
That’s not another way of looking at for me. Might have?! 
That’s exactly the way I look at it and that’s exactly what he did. I’m interested in doxologizing him, and he turned something difficult into something cool… and in several ways that never would have occurred to me. There’s a CCM song* that says he turns pain into gain. I don’t see any dangerous thoughts – it’s not like I had been idolizing going, which would have been evil. And of course, we should never tempt God by presuming he’ll bail us out of the consequences of evil that we’ve done or might do, but he is a good and strong Father. So I can’t see your last two sentences in the picture at all in this narrative. (Asking for a stone instead of bread isn’t evil in itself. It may not be too wise, and it certainly isn’t clever if what you really need is bread. 
)
*When I was composing this on my iPad, I was leaving the text entry field by tapping the V-shaped grapheme in the upper right corner that collapses it. By a quirk in the Discourse GUI in the portrait mode, if you retract the virtual keyboard first before collapsing the text entry area, it takes you way up page in the thread.
Anyway, all that was to say, speaking of CCM songs, it took me right to my post three weeks ago about the Laura Story song that I frequently refer to, about praying for blessings and sometimes what we get are difficulties (difficulties by which we can sometimes glorify God, rejoicing in the cool ways he providentially intervenes getting us out of them):
I sure hope so. I need it.
(107) God’s Vengeance
Of course, no prayer for any revenge that would gratify the selfishness of our nature, a thing to be burned out of us by the fire of God, needs think to be heard. Be sure, when the Lord prayed his Father to forgive those who crucified him, he uttered his own wish and his Father’s will at once: God will never punish according to the abstract abomination of sin, as if men knew what they were doing. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ he says: with a right understanding of it, we might as well pray for God’s vengeance as for his forgiveness; that vengeance is, to destroy the sin–to make the sinner abjure and hate it; nor is there any satisfaction in a vengeance that seeks or effects less. The man himself must turn against himself, and so be for himself. If nothing else will do, then hell-fire; if less will do, whatever brings repentance and self-repudiation, is God’s repayment.
Friends, if any prayers are offered against us; if the vengeance of God be cried out for, because of some wrong you or I have done, God grant us his vengeance! Let us not think that we shall get off!
From MacDonald’s sermon: “Man’s Difficulty Concerning Prayer”
(108) The Way of Understanding
Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. It was not for our understandings, but our will, that Christ came. He who does that which he sees, shall understand; he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness. He has not that in him which can understand that kind. The gospel itself, and in it the parables of the Truth, are to be understood only by those who walk by what they find. It is he that runneth that shall read, and no other. It is not intended by the speaker of the parables that any other should know intellectually what, known but intellectually, would be for his injury–what knowing intellectually he would imagine he had grasped, perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the wayside.
From MacDonald’s sermon: “The Last Farthing”
…Which will be the source of 108 through 118
Sadly, the pendulum can swing too far in the opposite direction. Years ago, and I may still have the book, I saw a chart of church history which pictured a pendulum swinging back and forth between various movements of intellectualism and emotionalism (or non-intellectualism if you prefer).
Maggie was so visited, and certainly not imperceptibly in the last!
He did not so for the “snakes and vipers brood”. The soldiers are a different case, in a different category.
There are many parables of the Truth in the Gospels that do not have favorable outcomes for all concerned.
So … you think there is a category of sinners that are within the reach of God’s love and grace, and a separate category that are beyond God’s redemption? I think there may have been a few religious leaders from a couple thousand years ago who thought just like that too. And in many of Jesus’ parables, it is often those very ones for whom things don’t “end well”.
I think there is such a thing as skeptical theism that calls for humility. (The Wikipedia article may be more quickly accessible for any unfamiliar with it… skeptical theism, that is, not humility. )
You’ll have to be more direct if you want me to understand your point here. I’m not planning to wade through sites about skeptical theism to try to find your point. Call me dense - and I’m sure I am, but you’ll have to spell things out for me if you want my reaction to it.
Just read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, and then think that there might be something about God’s justice that we cannot get our proud heads around as well.
It’s not that deep – you won’t even have to roll up your knickers.
Oh, well sure it will be true that we’re not privy to all God’s thoughts and counsels. But God gives us a good enough understanding of what justice looks like so that we know right from wrong and what that should look like at least once sufficient truth is known about a situation. If we weren’t given such a sense by God, or at least the potential to develop it, then we could hardly be expected to be agents of justice and mercy - which we very much are. And we are called to do so because that is what God is like and we are called to emulate that. That will be a real problem if someone’s view of God is that God delights in torturing people that don’t love him.
You haven’t been paying attention if you haven’t seen that I’m open to the theology of conditional immortality/annihilationism. And if you are so against any kind of coercion, including maybe even solitary confinement, you should be joining or founding an activist group that wants to open all prison doors. Your town first.
Read Matthew 23 again. Preachers should emulate Jesus there as well.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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