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Tuesday Prayer Room – 9am 

“So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He acted as if he were going farther, but they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent.” So he went in to stay with them. 

Luke 24:28-29

PRAYER GUIDE

The disciples wanted Jesus’ presence. Their hearts were consoled and encouraged by his exposition of the Scriptures. But after hearing Jesus teach the scriptures, they longed for something more…they longed for his presence. 

This is why the text says “they urged him strongly,” to stay with them. It wasn’t merely out of a sense of duty to show hospitality to a stranger, it is because they were drawn to this man and wanted to spend time with him. There was something about his presence that comforted them and caused their hearts to burn with rekindled hope. 

Many of our initial interactions with God come through his word, shared, preached, studied. But at some point, information about God, content about God is not enough. We must long for his presence. And for more of his presence.

The disciples have spent two to three hours on the road with Jesus, but when it comes time for them to part ways, they can’t pull themselves to do it. They don’t want the time to end…as with an enchanted dinner with friends, or on a date when you’re falling in love. You just don’t want the end to come. You don’t want to part ways. You want to linger in the presence of the other.

As Americans in an age of hurry, one of the primary obstacles to revival may be our inability to linger in a God moment. What if these disciples had been anxiously checking their inboxes, or twitter feeds, or calendars. If they had had a raft of pressing engagements or work or appointments, when it came time to part ways with Jesus? Would they have asked him to linger? Would they have sat down with him at the table? Broken the bread? And had their theophany? 

But for revival, we must recover the art of lingering in God’s presence. When that initial chapel service didn’t end at Asbury last year, the worship leader made a fateful decision: “I’m not going to stop worshiping until the last person leaves the auditorium. I’m going to linger in God’s presence.” The last person did not leave for over three weeks, until after tens of thousands came from all around the world to linger in the presence of Jesus. But it all began with one decision. Let’s not end this encounter with Jesus. Not yet at least. Let’s stay here until the Lord is done working in our hearts. That’s what the disciples at Emmaus did. They stayed with Jesus until he ended the meeting. And then they ran back to Jerusalem, declaring, “We have seen the Lord!”

PRAYER PROMPTS

• How much do you long for God’s presence? Are you content with ideas about God or do you have a hunger for God Himself?
• Ask God to increase our longing for him. To increase the longing of his people to be with him.
• Ask for an openness to God’s kairos time to invade our chronos time. To linger in God moments until Jesus is done.
• Ask for the church in New England to begin a new habit of lingering in God’s presence until our hearts burn and we race away with the gospel on our lips.  
• Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past. Be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in the scriptures and the breaking of the bread. Grant this for the sake of your love. Amen. (Book of Common Prayer)

Tuesday Prayer Room – 9am 

“He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” – Luke 24:25-26

PRAYER GUIDE

Jesus understood his suffering, not to be an accident or a detour from God’s plan, but at the very heart of his calling. The two on the Emmaus Road are surprised, shocked, disillusioned by Jesus’ suffering…but Jesus himself understood from the beginning that his road to glory would pass through the cross.

This is why Satan’s temptation in the wilderness was a real temptation. The kingdoms of the earth belonged at that point to Satan, having been handed over by Adam and Eve to the serpent in the garden. Satan was offering to give them to Jesus. But the temptation was not becoming king of the world…this was, after all, Jesus’ destiny. It was spoken of in all the Messianic psalms of the Old Testament (Psalm 2, 110, etc). God would install his King in Zion and the nations would come under his rule. The temptation was instead for Jesus to become the world’s true king without suffering, without the cross. 

Not only is the cross Jesus’ pathway to glory, in another sense, the cross itself is Jesus’ glory. John the Evangelist consistently refers to Jesus’ destiny as being “glorified,” by being lifted up on the cross. Jesus’ willing sacrifice on the cross is his glory. It is the great act of human obedience and suffering love that reverses all the other failures of humanity, dating all the way back to Adam and Eve. It is Jesus’ victory at the second tree that redeems Adam’s failure at the first tree. And this victory had to come through suffering. 

As Isaiah writes of Israel’s calling, which is fulfilled in Israel’s representative, Jesus: 

“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)

The mystery is deep; God enters into our suffering, suffering with and for us, to redeem it and us. It is hard for the Emmaus Road disciples to understand, as familiar as they are with the Scriptures. It is just as hard for us. We are all foolish and slow of heart to believe. And yet, the mystery remains – Jesus had to enter into the deepest, darkest part of our suffering – to taste and experience all of it – in order to heal us and to enter his glory.

Suffering, as it turns out, is not just for Jesus. It is for us as well. Paul writes to the Philippians: “It has been granted to you for the sake of the Messiah, not just to believe in him but to suffer with him.” To the Colossians, he writes: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” Instead of suffering as an aberration or a mistake, Paul understands it as a central aspect of what it means to follow in Jesus’ footsteps. 

We would prefer to avoid suffering. We do not enjoy it and we want nothing to do with it. Like the two on the road to Emmaus, we struggle to make sense of it when it comes. But the reality is, that just as the Messiah had to suffer in order to enter into glory, so do we. Jesus did not suffer instead of us, he suffered ahead of us. Our glory and our suffering are in fact, two sides of the same coin – we cannot have the one without the other. The glory is to our sufferings – as a sunset is to the clouds in the sky. Nobody enjoys a cloudy sky…until the sun sets beneath it and illuminates it from below. When this happens, it literally takes our breath away. So it is with the Messiah and his cross. And so it is with us. The mystery of our faith is that Jesus was most glorified when he was most rejected and abandoned on the cross. It is for his sufferings that Jesus will be worshiped and adored for all eternity by all the Hosts of Heaven and the Church Triumphant.

Paul reassures us, also in Romans, that “our present sufferings will not compare to the glory that will be revealed in us.” We, the Messiah’s people, are glorified as we join our King in his sufferings. Paul puts it this way: “Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.“

PRAYER PROMPTS

Pray for God to give you and all his people a deeper understanding of the meaning and glory of his sufferings, and of our own.

Pray for the ability for you and God’s people to reinterpret present suffering in light of Jesus’ cross and our calling to be like Jesus.

Pray for God to encourage and comfort you and those around you in our sufferings.

Pray for yourself and the whole church to embrace our vocation to pray and groan with all creation at the very places where the world is in pain. 

Tuesday Prayer Room – 9am 

25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself….
32 They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” – Luke 24:25-27, 32

PRAYER GUIDE

We assume Jesus could have revealed himself to the two disciples on the Emmaus road at any point. Indeed later on in the account, their eyes will be opened (v. 31) when he is revealed to them in the breaking of bread. But here, while his risen identity is still hidden from them, instead of just saying, “Guys, it’s me,” he takes them back to the Jewish scriptures (our Old Testament). 

Historians have often highlighted the distinction between an event and its meaning. Indeed, this is the central work of history – to set events that happen in spacetime within a context that helps us understand their meaning. The Allied tanks rolling through Paris in the summer of 1944 to cheering crowds who threw them flowers and gave them kisses is certainly a curious spectacle – but we cannot fully understand it without referring back to what had just taken place over the past several years. In 1940, the Nazi tanks rolled into the same city and occupied it for the past four years. It is this context that gives the liberation of Paris its meaning. 

We cannot understand the resurrection of Jesus except as the answer to a set of lingering questions posed by the history of Israel and the Old Testament? Jesus, for his part, felt that the pivotal first step in these two on the Emmaus Road in becoming resurrection people, was understanding the story in the Old Testament as an unfinished story that finds its fulfillment in Himself. At this point, it was more important for the disciples to understand the Scriptures than it was to understand that they were talking to the risen Jesus.

One of the great needs of our day is for people to understand the Scriptures. Indeed, if we don’t, while we may agree Jesus has risen from the dead, we won’t actually understand what that means – until we understand the context of this event, which we find in the story of the world and of Israel in the Old Testament. While those of us alive today have access to more information and tools and resources about the Bible than any other age in human history, we are quickly becoming increasingly Biblically illiterate. Renewal and revival in the church always involves a recovery of the Scriptures. Even for Jesus himself, risen from the dead, his first move with these disillusioned and disappointed disciples was to open the Scriptures to them. 

Once their minds are opened to understand the Scriptures, and even before Jesus revealed himself to them – they noticed that their hearts, previously wounded with despair, were now burning with resurrected hope. Lord, may it be so with us. 

PRAYER GUIDE

• Let’s ask God to open our minds to understand the Scriptures as individuals, as a church, and as a society. Let’s ask for the ability to understand them as one unified story that points to Jesus. 
• Ask for wisdom to help parents and adult teachers to teach the Bible compellingly to the next generation – so that it takes root in their hearts
• Ask for God to increase Biblical literacy among his people and in our society. Ask for people who had formerly dismissed the Bible to begin reading it.
• Ask for God to draw non-Christians to Bible studies and programs like Alpha. Sanctuary hosts another Alpha starting in May.
• Ask for burning hearts that truly understand not just that the resurrection happened, but what it actually means.