A Simple Acrostic for Prayer: A.C.T.S.

Christians often use a simple acrostic as a guide to prayer: A.C.T.S. Each of the letters in this acrostic stands for one of the key elements of prayer:

(A) Adoration

(C) Confession

(T) Thanksgiving

(S) Supplication

But not only does this acrostic remind us of the elements of prayer, it shows us the priority we ought to give to each.

The first element of prayer should be adoration, or praise. The Psalms, which are inspired samples of godly prayer, are heavily weighted on the side of adoration. I’ve noticed over many years that as we grow in the discipline and in the delight of prayer, it seems that we naturally spend more and more of our time on this first element.

Second, prayer should include confession of our sin; as we remember who we are when we come into God’s presence, we see that we have come short of His holiness and have need of His forgiveness.

Third, when we pray, we should always give thanks, remembering the grace and mercy God has shown toward us.

Fourth, prayer rightly includes supplication or petition, bringing our requests for the needs of others and ourselves to God.

I think this is a helpful acrostic for remembering both the elements and the priorities of prayer. Unfortunately, we often spell our prayer life something like S.C.A.T., because we start with supplication and spend very little time, if any, on adoration, confession, and thanksgiving.

The Lord’s Prayer

When we look at the Lord’s Prayer, we see adoration at least implied in the petition “Hallowed be Your name.” Jesus acknowledged that God’s name is holy. We certainly see confession in the petition “Forgive us our debts.” And there are supplications. However, it seems that the T is conspicuously absent. Where in the Lord’s Prayer do we find any overt expression of gratitude to God? It’s not there. That’s strange, for as the apostle Paul taught, thanksgiving should always be included in our prayers: “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6, emphasis added).

Even though thanksgiving is not explicitly mentioned in the Lord’s Prayer, I think it is implied in the petition: “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11). My reason for making this assertion is simple: we are to be alert not only to the need that we have daily for food, but to the reality of God’s daily provision for our needs. That realization, of course, should induce us to an attitude of thanksgiving.

This excerpt is taken from R.C. Sproul’s The Prayer of the Lord. Download the digital edition free through February 28, 2014.

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It’s Just Complicated — And Very Simple

The Christian life can be so complex — and oh so very simple.

That we would use such a fancy word as sanctification betrays the complexity. But that defining such a big word could be so easy hints at the simplicity.

The word sanctification is built on the Latin sanctus, meaning “holy.” Sanctification is the theological term we Christians often use for the process of being made holy. For the Christian, whose standard of perfect human holiness is Jesus, the God-man, sanctification is essentially becoming more like Jesus — being “conformed to the image of his Son,” as Romans 8:29 puts it.

Christian growth, or maturation, is another way to define sanctification. It’s a big word for the little-by-little progress of the everyday Christian life. That much is simple. But what it encompasses is enormous: how every professing Christian should live, where our holiness is heading, how fast the progress should be, and how it happens in real life. Here’s where it gets complicated and controversial.

Sanctification talk gets prickly quickly because it immediately involves so many massive realities in the Christian worldview and their coming together in daily life: grace and works, law and gospel, faith and the Holy Spirit, Christian obedience and pleasing God, love and good deeds, and much more. And sanctification gets very personal — it’s about the details of your life.

The stakes are high. Weak spots in our theology will turn up, before long, in our understanding, and pursuit, of sanctification. It doesn’t take much time before a wacky doctrine elsewhere begins to mess with our doctrine and practice of holiness. True Christian theology is a seamless garment, and every doctrine eventually relates to every other, but sanctification seems to call the question faster than the others, and has the tendency to accentuate our problem areas.

Because of the inherent complexity of sanctification, involving all these moving pieces, there is a great temptation to oversimplify things. Because sanctification with all its tentacles feels like an octopus larger than we can comfortably tame, we tend to prefer our own little theological house pets that we can easily train and remain captain of. It’s nice to have a slogan that can keep it simple for stupid humans and make us feel like we’re in control.

Enticing as it sounds — and convicting as it may be to hear about if you’ve tried it — the well of sanctification reductionisms soon runs dry. “Let go and let God” — it won’t be long before that creates some problems. “Simply obey” — that won’t do it either. “Just get used to your justification” — attractive, yes, but there’s another reductionism at work here. Even “union with Christ as the key,” close as it may be, falls short of capturing the full picture.

It’s as if we find the biblical data to be just too numerous and complicated, and what we really need is to search for sanctification’s holy grail. It must be out there somewhere — surely, there’s some quick fix, some theological secret to discover, some doctrinal key that unlocks what holiness really is and how to have it.

But if there’s any key to sanctification, it’s this: abandon your search for the key. At least abandon the search for a shortcut. Let your quest for the holy grail of sanctification end right here and right now, and commit to a sanctification not of only, but of all — all the Scriptures, all of Christian theology, all the Bible’s salvific pictures, and, ultimately, all of Jesus.

What is needed for Christian sanctification is not some silver-bullet doctrine or fresh slogan or new overriding emphasis, but the whole of the Bible, theology, and Jesus. The same Jesus who is our righteousness for justification is the same Jesus who is our holiness for sanctification — and is the same Jesus we’re united to by faith to receive all God’s priceless graces.

By virtue of our Spirit-powered, by-faith union with Jesus, we have the new-creation spiritual life of regeneration, and the righteousness of justification, and the holiness of sanctification, and the familial affection and privilege of adoption, and the honor of glorification. This is big. It gets complicated. There are so many ducks that it’s hard to get them all in a row — and that’s just the way God would have it. After all, he is the sanctifier, not we. He would rather we always lean on him for holiness than supposing we have it figured out.

But even in all the complexity, there is a point of focus that can help us get our bearings and give us some semblance of simplicity. The beginning and end of Christian sanctification is none other than Christ himself. There is an initial relationship with Jesus that first sets us apart as definitively sanctified, and gets the gears going for our ongoing sanctification, but a deepening relationship with Jesus is the heart of sanctification, and knowing Jesus is the great goal of our sanctification.

Jesus is not only the preeminently sanctified one and the one who empowers our sanctification by his Spirit, but also he is the one whom the whole of our sanctification is shaping us to know forever (Ephesians 5:26–27). Knowing Jesus drives us onward in sanctification now (Philippians 3:8), and knowing Jesus is the eternal life that sanctification fits us for (John 17:3).

The greatest blessing of salvation is not mere forgiveness. It’s not just justification and being declared righteous. It’s not new birth. It’s not even sanctification. It’s not just the privilege of being united to him, but being united to him serves the greater goal of enjoying him.

The greatest blessing of redemption is Jesus himself. All aspects of the Spirit’s subjective application to us, and all of Jesus’s objective accomplishments for us, conspire to this one great end: knowing Jesus, enjoying Jesus, admiring Jesus, and treasuring Jesus for all eternity.

Simple Greatness: The Story of My Hmong Father

How is the gospel real to you? This was a question that I was asked in college.

As part of a campus ministry, I heard the word “gospel” thrown around a lot, but as for how it was real to me, that wasn’t as easy to explain. The short answer was that the gospel is real to me because it’s how God saved me. The truth of the gospel is alive to me because by it God made me alive. But as I looked closer at God’s work in my life, I began to notice a “tangible remnant” of Jesus’s love for me. It’s embedded deep in my story as a Hmong-American. Let me explain.

If you’re familiar with the Twin Cities of Minnesota, you’ve heard about a people group called the Hmong (the H is silent). We are a group of war refugees that immigrated to the Midwest in the late 1970s and early 80s, because of the Vietnam War. In the Twin Cities metro, there are over 66,000 Hmong people — the largest concentration of Hmong in the United States.

The Hmong are an agricultural people group, known as the “hill tribe,” originating from the mountains of Laos. Some historians even trace them back to western China. Many of the Hmong people were persecuted by the surrounding Laotians and Thais because of their independent way of life and unwillingness to conform to the dominant society. In fact, the reason the Hmong people lived among the mountains is because they wanted to be independent, even though it’s a harder agricultural lifestyle when compared to the fertile low land.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government allied with the Hmong because of the Hmong’s strong anti-communist views. Hmong men were trained to conduct hit-and-run tactics against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), guard secret U.S. radar stations and bases, and rescue American pilots shot down over Laos and Vietnam. A promise was made that anyone who fought with the Americans would get a free pass to the States if the war was lost and the Hmong no longer had a home. Many of the young Hmong men joined up and started fighting against the communists, that is, the NVA and local Laotian communist groups.

My father was one of these men.

My father and his brothers were recruited by the CIA and trained in guerrilla warfare. They were paid a small wage and given weapons to fight for the United States.

After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the American troops moved out of Vietnam and all of South East Asia, including the villages of their Hmong allies in northern Laos. Left completely vulnerable to the communists, many Hmong people were hunted down and killed. The communist soldiers invaded one village after another, killing the children, raping the women, and torturing the men to death. Many were sent to “re-education camps” and were never heard from again.

Some Hmong people were given asylum in the States, but the majority of them where left behind to fend for themselves. To escape this genocide, the Hmong people started fleeing west towards Thailand. Parents carried their children into hiding and slowly made their way through dense jungle, until they came to the Mekong River (the Mississippi River of Southeast Asia). Crossing the Mekong River had to be done at night, in the dark, with makeshift floatation devices from bamboo. Many Hmong people drowned on this river because of enemy attacks, the strong current, and harsh conditions. (Both my parents lost their spouses at the Mekong crossing and were widowed when they met each other in Thailand.) If they crossed the river, then they would be able to settle in the refugee camps in Thailand. That is where my siblings and I were born, and where I spent the first five years of my life.

Since my father fought for the United States, it was easier for him to get a pass to the country. I still remember going through customs and getting my picture taken for my residential alien card. I was entering a brand-new world. It wasn’t until about seven years ago that my grandmother told me the whole history of my father back in Laos.

He never talked about it, but my father, in the midst of intense hardship, was a leader in his village. He had a commanding presence and was highly respected by the other men. He would have been considered as something similar to a mayor.

But when the opportunity came for him to move his family to America, he left it all. Away from his work, away from his comfort, away from his high social status — my father walked away from it all to live in a country whose language he didn’t speak and whose culture he didn’t know. He abandoned his authority, and the respect he had won, to welcome jobs and endure insults sadly typical for a middle-aged immigrant in America who doesn’t speak English.

And he did it so that his children would have a better life. I didn’t know what I needed. I didn’t know the extent of the danger around me. But my father became nothing so that my siblings and I could live in peace.

My father has worked hard to provide for us, but even more than that, he has fought for our family as our spiritual leader. When I was in high school, I remember waking up early one morning to find him kneeling in his dirty work clothes, praying for each of his children by name. That image has stayed with me since, and I would learn that he and my mother repeated this routine everyday before he left for a long day of work.

The message of the gospel is that we need a Savior. We’ve turned away from God in our sin and deserve his wrath. But Jesus, though he was rich, became poor for us so that we, in his poverty, might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). He left his status so that we might know a new one: righteous, forgiven, at peace with God.

So how is this real to me? How do I stay alive to the gospel’s wonder?

Everyday I see glimmers of the gospel’s light in my father. He is a simple man in American terms. He still doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t have an education. He works hard with his hands to earn a living. But for three decades, he has preached the gospel to me with his words, and exemplified it with his life. He laid his life down for my siblings and me, which as Jesus says, is the way that he loves, and the greatest kind of all (John 15:12–13).