Lynne Baab

Praying about the flow of time: Why Jesus had to come

Lynne Baab • Tuesday December 3 2024

One of the best preachers I’ve ever heard is Paul Windsor. He taught preaching at Carey Baptist College in Auckland, then moved to Langham Partnership. He teaches preaching for Langham worldwide and trains local Christians who teach preaching. He is passionate about understanding our cultural context as well as the Bible. He talks about “the importance of listening to both Word and World.” [1]

He wrote a fascinating blog post in which he describes the major lessons of each of his six decades of life. In describing his 50s, he writes about “a way of exegeting.” He gives one example of that process. He went through the whole New Testament, looking for the imagery used to describe the world as it exists apart from God. He writes, “I discovered 12-15 such pictures, but settled on six: darkness, emptiness, blindness, foolishness, groaning, and slavery.” 

I want to commend those six word pictures to you as we prepare for Jesus’s coming. These words represent the reasons why Jesus had to come. Through his life, death, resurrection, and the sending of the Holy Spirit, Jesus saved us from “darkness, emptiness, blindness, foolishness, groaning, and slavery.” Those words also describe why we long for Jesus to come back. Our world today has not been fully redeemed from those six sad things. We see too much “darkness, emptiness, blindness, foolishness, groaning, and slavery” in our hearts and in the lives of others. We long for this world and our hearts to experience God’s shalom, to be fully whole and healthy.

Here are prayers and reflections triggered by those six sad words and their opposites:

Darkness/Light. Light of the World, shine your light into our darkness. Bright morning star, guide us.

Here in Seattle at the 47^th parallel north, we have a lot of darkness this time of year. Every light bulb, candle, and fire in a fireplace reminds us of Jesus as the light in our darkness. My artist husband, Dave, and I spent a decade of Christmases in the Southern Hemisphere, with lovely long days full of light. Being outside and enjoying all that light reminded me of the abundance of God’s light. Either way, we know we need the Light of the World every day.

Emptiness/Abundance. Jesus, you promised that your grace would be so abundant that our hearts would overflow. You said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38). We ask for your living water in the moments we experience emptiness. We pray for people who feel empty much of the time.

I hope that you don’t experience a lot of emptiness. If you do, God grieves with you and wants to fill you. We can all pray for feelings of emptiness in others. The US Surgeon General has described an “epidemic of loneliness.” One of my sons talks about friends who feel trapped in jobs they hate because of their high mortgage payments, and their lives feel futile. Too many people in our own country and worldwide experience empty stomachs. We grieve for their feelings of physical or emotional emptiness and pray for God’s abundance for them. At the same time, we thank God the times Jesus's abundance fills our lives with meaning and joy.

Blindness/Sight. Jesus, you cured a man blind from birth and talked about the way arrogance can bring about spiritual blindness (John 9). Help us see your gifts. Give us sight and awareness of our need for you. Help us avoid the kind of spiritual blindness you grieved about.

I find it so easy to see what I believe to be spiritual blindness in others. I need the Holy Spirit’s daily empowerment to humbly draw near to God over and over for the ability to see what matters.

Foolishness/Wisdom. Only wise God, I have a hard time admitting I am ever foolish.  A part of me knows I need your wisdom every moment of every day, but another part persists in thinking I know a lot.

Of the six pictures of our world's brokenness that Paul Windsor found in the New Testament, I find foolishness the hardest to pray about. I experience the other five with humiliating frequency— darkness, emptiness, blindness, groaning, and slavery. I don’t often experience myself as foolish. Is this a gift or a form of spiritual blindness? I definitely pray for wisdom for myself and others frequently. Maybe I am unconsciously acknowledging the reality of a great deal of foolishness in our world and in me.

Groaning/Joy. God of mercy and kindness, you heard your people groaning in Egypt and freed them (Exodus 2:23-24). We praise you for that deliverance. Creator God, your servant Paul says the whole creation groans (Romans 8:22-23). Deliver us, we pray. Comfort us when we groan. Protect us and guard your beautiful creation. Let your joy fill us.

Paul writes that we groan because we long to put on our heavenly dwelling (2 Corinthians 5:2-4). I groan because of physical pain in my aging body and because I am deeply sad about so many things in our world. Joy from God comes in moments. Let's pray to relish those beautiful moments.

Slavery/Freedom. God who liberates, you are constantly freeing us from the things that bind us. Please do that for us again today. Please free those who are enslaved in any way throughout the world.

The words “slave” or “slavery” appear 146 times in the Hebrew Scriptures and 171 times in the New Testament. Paul writes frequently about being a slave to sin. He describes something that I have experienced far too often: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it” (Romans 7:15, 18). Oh my goodness! We need God’s liberating power so much.

I hope that one of these prayers will help give words to your need for God. I hope this awareness of need will guide you into rejoicing in Jesus’s coming. I hope you will pray for yourself and others for God's wholeness in these six areas. God in Christ, through the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, delivers us from those sad words and gives us light, abundance, sight, wisdom, joy, and freedom.

֍ ֍ ֍

I wrote a series of posts about what I learned from Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere:

• Advent and Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere: The light
• Advent and Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere: Our bodies
• Christmas food in the Southern Hemisphere
• Intentionality and Space in the Southern Hemisphere

Next week: O Come Immanuel.

Illustration by Dave Baab: A Christmas concert at the Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand. See the green trees out the window? December in New Zealand, of course, is summer.

֍ ֍ ֍

Two ways to subscribe.

If you’d like to receive an email when I post on this blog, sign up below under “subscribe.” That email and the posts on this blog are free and accessible for all.

If you’d like to help me cover the expenses for this blog and website, plus get a bonus post every month, you can subscribe on Patreon for $3 or $6 per month. My bonus posts focus on one or more of the hundreds of vivid quotations I’ve collected over five decades.

[1] This and the other quotations from Paul Windsor come from the August 26, 2024 blog post “A life of unpacking”on his blog, “The art of unpacking.” Paul recently moved his website to a new address: paulwindsorblog.com.

Lynne M. Baab, Ph.D., is an author and adjunct professor. She has written numerous books, Bible study guides, and articles for magazines and journals. Lynne is passionate about prayer and other ways to draw near to God, and her writing conveys encouragement for readers to be their authentic selves before God. She encourages experimentation and lightness in Christians spiritual practices. Read more »

Lynne is pleased to announce the release of her two 2024 books, both of them illustrated with her talented husband Dave's watercolors. She is thrilled at how good the watercolors look in the printed books, and in the kindle versions, if read on a phone, the watercolors glow. Friendship, Listening and Empathy: A Prayer Guide guides the reader into new ways to pray about the topics in the title. Draw Near: A Lenten Devotional guides the reader to a psalm for each day of Lent and offers insightful reflection/discussion questions that can be used alone or in groups. 

Another recent book is Two Hands: Grief and Gratitude in the Christian  Life, available in paperback, audiobook, and for kindle. Lynne's 2018 book is Nurturing Hope: Christian Pastoral Care for the Twenty-First Century, and her most popular book is Sabbath-Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest (now available as an audiobook as well as paperback and kindle). You can see her many other book titles here, along with her Bible study guides.

You can listen to Lynne talk about these topics: empathy, bringing spiritual practices to life. Sabbath keeping for recent grads., and Sabbath keeping for families and children.

Lynne was interviewed for the podcast "As the Crow Flies". The first episode focuses on why listening matters and the second one on listening skills. 

Here are two talks Lynne gave on listening (recorded in audio form on YouTube): Listening for Mission and Ministry and Why Listening Matters for Mission and Ministry.

"Lynne's writing is beautiful. Her tone has such a note of hope and excitement about growth. It is gentle and affirming."
— a reader

"Dear Dr. Baab, You changed my life. It is only through God’s gift of the sabbath that I feel in my heart and soul that God loves me apart from anything I do."
— a reader of Sabbath Keeping