Kanye West filed court documents Tuesday to legally change his name to “Ye.” He wants to get rid of his full name—Kanye Omari West—in favor of his longtime nickname with no middle or last name. His parents gave him the name he has carried for his forty-four years of life, but now he wants to rename himself.

In other news, researchers evaluated more than 5,800 foods and their impact on human health and the environment. Among their discoveries: eating a serving of nuts could add twenty-six minutes to your lifespan. However, eating a single hot dog could cost you thirty-six minutes of life. 

By contrast, prayer has been demonstrated clinically to lower depression and anxiety and reduce anger and aggression. Studies also show that prayer can foster a sense of connection with God and others and strengthen marriages. 

However, to pray in transformative ways, we need to “name” ourselves as our Father sees us. 

As we continue our weeklong series on the Holy Spirit, let’s explore today some practical steps we can take to pray in the Spirit in ways that change our lives and our world. 

A woman has an emotional affair with a chimpanzee 

A woman in Belgium has been banned from the Antwerp Zoo after her four-year-long emotional affair with a chimpanzee. Their relationship through the glass surrounding the ape’s enclosure has become so close that it is adversely affecting the primate’s relationships with the zoo’s other chimpanzees. 

We were created for intimacy with our Creator. When we seek intimacy outside his intention for us, the results can be damaging to us and others. 

Seeking such intimacy with the Almighty is urgent, for tomorrow is promised to no one. 

Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts made headlines with his death Tuesday at the age of eighty. A beloved Anglican pastor in Tennessee, the Rev. Thomas McKenzie, was killed with his daughter Charlie in a car crash Monday morning. The wreck occurred just thirty minutes after he announced on social media that he was driving her to her senior year of college. 

The good news is that our Father is as close as our next prayer. We are taught to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) because God listens “without ceasing.” He is not bound by the space-time continuum in which we exist, which means he has all of eternity to hear your next prayer. 

And he wants to: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). 

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is meeting with US President Joe Biden later today. Even though I have been to Israel more than thirty times and am a lifelong citizen of the US, I could not meet with either of them. The heads of some of the world’s biggest tech companies met yesterday with President Biden. I was not invited; nor were you, I suspect. 

But you and I can meet with the King of the universe right now. 

Praying on the Temple Mount 

Israel made headlines this week when it began allowing Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, an area previously reserved for prayer only for Muslims. I have prayed at the Western Wall more than thirty times and have visited the Temple Mount numerous times as well. However, due to coronavirus issues, I have not been back to the Holy Land in nearly two years. 

The good news is that I don’t need to be near the site of the ancient temple to meet God in prayer. He is as close as my knees. 

In fact, he’s even closer. 

Paul asks, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). Not only does the Spirit live in believers—when “we do not know what to pray for as we ought,” the good news is that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). What’s more, “the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (v. 27). 

When you and I pray, God’s Spirit prays for us and through us. We don’t need to worry that we don’t know what to pray, because he does. He knows “the will of God” and will always pray effectively as a result. 

In fact, the Spirit’s role in prayer redefines our role. Eugene Peterson observed, “If the Holy Spirit—God’s way of being with us, working through us, and speaking to us—is the way in which continuity is maintained between the life of Jesus and the life of Jesus’ community, prayer is the primary way in which the community actively receives and participates in that presence and working and speaking. Prayer is our way of being attentively present to God who is present to us in the Holy Spirit.” 

In response, Kristen Deede Johnson notes: “Scripture is promising that the Spirit himself is interceding for us all the time! We never fully know what we ought to pray for, and that’s all right. The Spirit will take whatever we offer, however rich or impoverished our words are, however present or distracted we feel, and intercede for us in accordance with God’s will. Thanks be to God!” (her italics). 

“God rebuilt my life of prayer” 

In addition, God’s Son is praying to his Father for us: “Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us” (Romans 8:34). Since he “always lives to make intercession” for us (Hebrews 7:25), you can know that Jesus is praying for you right now.

One more factor: God’s word helps us pray. 

Johnson quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s statement in Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible: “God’s speech in Jesus Christ meets us in the Holy Scriptures. If we wish to pray with confidence and gladness, then the words of Holy Scripture will have to be the solid basis of our prayer.” Johnson responds: “Praying with the borrowed words of the Bible was one way God rebuilt my life of prayer on a more solid basis, reminding me that prayer is answering God, not generating my relationship with God.” 

Here’s what we’ve learned so far: 

• God the Father is listening for your next prayer.
• God the Son is praying for you right now.
• God the Spirit is praying through you.
• God’s word will guide your words as you pray its promises and truths.

As a result, prayer is about positioning ourselves to experience the triune God in the guidance of his word. We need not worry about praying correctly—if we truly seek him, we will find him (Jeremiah 29:13; cf. Proverbs 8:17). If we will make time to listen before we speak, we will hear his voice through his word, worship, and world. 

What’s more, through our time of intimacy with our Father, his Spirit will mold us into the character of his Son (Romans 8:29). As a carpenter must touch the wood he shapes and a painter must touch the canvas she paints, so the Lord must “touch” us to sanctify us (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:23). He does this most fully and powerfully through prayer. 

“They end up less than human” 

Here’s our problem and our opportunity: you and I will experience the Spirit’s transforming power to the degree that we are yielded to the Spirit’s transforming power. 

As we have noted all week, we are commanded by God to be “filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18), surrendering daily to his cleansing, leading, and empowering. Have you taken the steps necessary to be filled by him today? If not, why not? 

One way the Enemy tempts us to resist being filled by the Spirit is to deceive us into believing that we don’t need what the Spirit can do in our lives. He knows that self-sufficiency is the enemy of the Spirit’s power. That’s why self-reliance is trumpeted every day by our fallen culture. 

According to author Thomas B. Smith, “If it is to be, it’s up to me.” Albert Camus claimed, “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” William Ernest Henley testified, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” 

In The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai’s Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom, cultural commentatorOs Guinness points to the postmodern “hermeneutics of suspicion” by which generations of college students have been taught that “all relations are negotiated solely by power.” Thus, “the best protection against the unwanted power of others is to approach everyone with suspicion. . . . The outcome is an aging society fueled by pervasive suspicion, mistrust, rumor, conspiracy theories, and cynicism. Nothing is what it appears to be and no one can be trusted, so suspicion is the best insurance against the mounting menace of manipulation by the power of others.” 

While we are taught to be suspicious of the “power motives” of everyone else, we are ironically encouraged to embrace our own. Guinness cites Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, which claims that humans will become “godlings” due to the fruits of artificial intelligence and biogenetic engineering. 

Guinness responds by quoting Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “When humans try to be more than human, they end up less than human.” 

“Only God can make a tree” 

By contrast, you and I can experience today the transformational power of the One who made humans and everything else in our remarkable universe. Joyce Kilmer testified:

I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest / Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day, / And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.

Now God is waiting on your next prayer. 

Let’s sum up what we’ve discovered today: 

• You were made for intimacy with our Maker.
• He longs for such intimacy with you.
• God the Father is listening for your next prayer.
• God the Son is praying for you right now.
• God the Spirit is praying through you right now.
• God’s word will guide your words as you pray its promises and truths.
• However, you must reject the culture’s insistence on self-reliance.
• If you submit your mind and life to God’s Spirit right now in prayer, you will experience his transforming presence and grace.

Robert Robinson prayed these now-famous words: 

Oh, to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the Lord I love.
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

Have you given your heart to Jesus yet today?

Denison Forum

Sometimes a news article catches your eye immediately, such as the New York Post headline, “Aussie news network broadcasts Satanic ritual accidentally.” As a news anchor reported on a new law protecting police animals, a clip was accidentally shown of a cloaked figure who “enthusiastically says ‘Hail Satan’ in front of an inverted cross and behind a red-clothed altar.” The anchor explained later that this was “a system error and rather unfortunate timing!”

Other stories are less likely to catch your attention. For instance, I’m not sure that you have been following with rapt attention the minutiae of congressional action regarding infrastructure legislation. As a result, you may not know (or care) that House Democrats narrowly passed a measure yesterday approving a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint while locking in a late September vote on a roughly $1 trillion Senate-approved infrastructure bill.

Meanwhile, another legislative debate is going even further under most people’s radar.

Five ways taxpayers could be funding abortions

The 2022 appropriations bill put forward by Democrats in the House of Representatives removes the following provisions:

• The 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibiting the Department of Health and Human Services from spending taxpayer dollars for most abortions
• The 1973 Helms Amendment restricting foreign aid funds from being expended on abortion
• The 1983 Smith Amendment that prohibits the Federal Employee Health Benefits program from funding elective abortions
• The 1989 Dornan Amendment that prohibits funding elective abortions within Washington, DC
• The 2004 Weldon Amendment that protects health care providers from discrimination on the basis of their refusal to pay for and provide abortions or refer women to have them

The Daily Signal adds that “a slim majority of Senators still support pro-life policy and may not follow the House’s approach.” That is good news, but if the House approach becomes law, my tax dollars will pay for elective abortions, despite my vociferous objection to this sin.

I’m not alone in my concern: nearly six in ten Americans (including one in three pro-choice advocates) oppose using tax dollars to pay for abortion. But abortion advocates in the House seem intent on ignoring the wishes of the majority of Americans by adopting unprecedented taxpayer abortion funding.

Benjamin Watson’s brilliant defense of life

Here’s a related story that has likewise received little media attention: the FDA determined last April that abortion-causing drugs could be mailed to patients during the coronavirus pandemic without requiring a visit to a doctor or clinic. Now abortion advocates are fighting to make so-called “abortion by mail” permanently legal in the US.

Benjamin Watson, a former Super Bowl champion and NFL tight end, recently wrote a brilliant article in USA Today in which he stated that “preborn babies don’t have to prove their worth” to us. Unlike football players who are judged constantly by their performance, he states, “Our dignity as humans—our fundamental worthiness to exist—doesn’t have to be proven; it is an endowment we receive at the moment of conception and keep forever until our natural death.”

He adds: “Nobody should have to pass a test to deserve to exist.”

However, Watson reports, thirty-nine states in the US let you abort a baby “for reason of sex selection,” killing the unborn child specifically because of his or her gender. In addition, forty-six states let you abort a child specifically because of his or her race.

What does God think about children? His word calls them “a heritage from the Lᴏʀᴅ” (Psalm 127:3). Jesus said of them, “To such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14).

In Jeremiah 32, the Lord grieves that his people “built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech” (v. 35), a reference to child sacrifice. God calls this horrific practice an “abomination,” from  the Hebrew word toebah describing something that is “detestable,” “loathsome,” or “horrifying.”

If abortion advocates in the Congress have their way, taxpayer funds will soon be paying for such a toebah in America.

Relativism is infecting the church

How could this happen in a nation founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” with the “unalienable” right to “life”?

Americans were united in World War II against the threat of Nazi Germany, as when our soldiers liberated Paris from Nazi occupation on this day in 1944. Humans must deal every day with objective realities such as the laws of physics; for example, the world’s fastest roller coaster in Japan suspended operations after four reports of people breaking their backs or necks on the ride. Mortality is a fact for us all, as illustrated by the death of the tallest man in the US, who was seven foot, eight inches and died of heart disease at the age of thirty-eight.

But recent generations have been taught that truth itself is a subjective construct, resulting from the subjective way our minds interpret our senses. With regard to abortion, your body is yours to do with as you wish, or so we’re told. The same moral relativism is applied to sexual orientation and gender identity, euthanasia, and a host of other ethical issues.

Such relativism is infecting the church as well. For example, according to a new study, more than 60 percent of self-described born-again Christians between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine now say Jesus is not the only way to salvation, claiming that Buddha and Muhammad are also valid paths to salvation.

Let’s test ourselves personally. I recently saw this quote by Ella Fitzgerald: “Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” Fitzgerald was one of the greatest singers in history; as the first African American woman to win a Grammy Award, her story of overcoming racial discrimination is truly inspiring.

But are “love and inspiration” all we need to not “go wrong” in life? Are right and wrong this subjective?

Paul Simon on “the way we’re ignorant”

This week, we’ve been exploring the role of the Holy Spirit in catalyzing the moral and spiritual transformation our culture so desperately needs. On Monday, we focused on steps you and I must take each day to be “filled” and empowered by him. (Have you taken these steps yet today?) On Tuesday, we discussed the urgency of being empowered by the Spirit before we face the crises endemic to this fallen world.

Today, let’s consider what is perhaps Satan’s most pernicious strategy in keeping God’s people from experiencing God’s power through God’s Spirit.

Remember that the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit. Sin blocks his work in and through our lives. This is why we are commanded, “Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). We are likewise commanded, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30).

However, if we believe the lies of postmodern relativism, we will not consider our sins to be sins. As a result, we won’t feel the need to avoid them when they tempt us or to confess them when we commit them.

This is a vicious cycle: if we ignore the reality of sin, we grieve and quench the Spirit in our lives, which further weakens us and makes the allure of temptation and the effects of sin even worse. Not only do we lose the “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22) and thus the joy of the Lord, we also decimate our witness and demean our Lord.

In “So Beautiful or So What?” Paul Simon sings:

Ain’t it strange the way we’re ignorant
How we seek out bad advice
How we jigger it and figure it
Mistaking value for the price

The formula for spiritual victory

The answer is to begin each day by surrendering that day to the power and leading of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:18), then turning every temptation we face immediately over to him for his strength, perspective, and help.

I have learned this fact over the years: Satan is better at tempting than I am at resisting. He knows me better than I know myself. As a result, he knows those temptations I can easily resist and seldom wastes his efforts with them. He also knows those temptations I cannot resist without the Spirit’s help and uses them to entice me into sin.

However, he obviously doesn’t want me to turn to the Spirit for help, so along with the temptation, he tempts me to resist it in my strength. He wants me to believe that I can say no to this sin, that I can stop that behavior before it gets worse, that I don’t need God’s power.

He likes to turn the lights down gradually so that my eyes adjust to the dark before I realize my danger. Or, to change metaphors, he wants to drag me into deadly quicksand an inch at a time until I am trapped before I know it.

As a consequence, I must turn to the Spirit immediately whenever I face temptation. I must remember that if I could defeat this temptation myself, I wouldn’t be facing it. The same is true for you.

Here’s the formula: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). Submit, then you will be empowered to resist, and then you will have the victory. But only in that order.

Dark tunnels and wind catchers

Corrie ten Boom was the only member of her family to survive the Nazi concentration camps. She experienced human depravity and suffering at their worst. She therefore had the moral authority to say, “When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.”

Is your train going through a spiritual tunnel today? If not, it likely will tomorrow. When it does, trust the Engineer.

“Wind catchers” are structures first perfected by the ancient Persians that funnel passing winds from the tops of buildings to the rooms below. They have been making a comeback recently. As Ryan Denison explains in his latest website article, “the fact that conventional air conditioning currently accounts for roughly a fifth of all electricity consumption worldwide means that we’re likely to see more wind catchers dotting the skies in the coming years.”

Ryan notes that the same Greek word (pneuma) was used by early believers both for spirit and for wind “because the latter concept so aptly describes the former.” He adds: “Just as the ancient cultures relied upon working with the wind to harness its power and improve their lives thousands of years ago, we too must learn to work with the Spirit” to experience the power of God.

Is the wind of the Spirit free to work in and through your life today?

Denison Forum

If you’re from the south (or have ever visited during the summer), you’ve probably asked yourself how people survived in a time before air conditioning. 

Turns out, people didn’t wait until the first air conditioner was invented in the early 1900s to decide that question needed an answer. Evidence suggests that humans have been finding ways to beat the heat for the better part of three thousand years. 

The ancient Egyptians appear to be the first to find a solid solution, though they mostly relied on harnessing the wind rather than creating their own. As is often the case, later generations would continue to improve upon the technology, and you can still see some of the best efforts today in places like the Iranian city of Yazd. There, the ancient Persians perfected structures, called bâdgirs, that sat high atop their buildings and funneled the passing winds down to the rooms below. 

And while the structures have largely fallen out of favor in recent centuries, given that the wind was often accompanied by dirt and pests, they’ve started to make a comeback in recent decades. 

In the UK, for example, roughly seven thousand versions of the wind catchers were installed on buildings constructed between 1979 and 1994, including the Royal Chelsea Hospital in London and various supermarkets in Manchester. Closer to home, the visitor center at Zion National Park in southern Utah also employs a wind catcher to help regulate the summer heat. Scientists have recorded a temperature difference of roughly 29 degrees Fahrenheit between inside and outside of the building. And that’s with people regularly passing through. 

While not every location will allow the wind catchers to work well, the fact that conventional air conditioning currently accounts for roughly a fifth of all electricity consumption worldwide means that we’re likely to see more wind catchers dotting the skies in the coming years. 

Are you working with or against the Spirit? 

Wind is a powerful force, and learning how to work with it rather than against it has often proven to make a profound difference in the degree to which a culture prospers. 

The same is true, from a spiritual point of view, for us as well. 

There’s a reason that Scripture frequently references the Holy Spirit as akin to a gust of wind. In fact, early believers used the same Greek word (pneuma) for spirit and wind because the latter concept so aptly describes the former. 

As Christians, learning to work with the Holy Spirit’s presence and power in our lives instead of against it is one of the most important factors in our maturation as believers. And the key to working with the Spirit is embracing the kind of lifestyle God can bless. 

In Galatians 5, Paul famously writes that the fruit of the spirit is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23). However, to experience that fruit in our lives, we must first heed the instruction that comes a few verses earlier: “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law” (Galatians 5:16–18). 

Just as the ancient cultures relied upon working with the wind to harness its power and improve their lives thousands of years ago, we too must learn to work with the Spirit by living in accordance with God’s desires as revealed throughout Scripture and through his daily guidance if we want to experience his power and fruit in our lives today. 

So take a moment to step back and ask God to help you use this Spirit-focused perspective to evaluate your walk with him. Does it feel like that relationship is pushing against the wind or moving with it? 

But note that the latter does not necessarily mean everything has gone smoothly or that your days have been problem-free. In fact, it’s often when the tough times arise that we can gain the greatest clarity into the state of our spiritual life. 

The degree to which it seems like we are able to face our problems without being robbed of the fruit described above is perhaps the best way to gauge whether we are working with or against the Spirit’s presence in our lives. 

Which best describes your relationship with him today? 

Denison Forum