Author: Chris Boggess

J.R.R. Tolkien is my favorite author (outside of Scripture). I am surely not alone, because his Lord of the Rings series was voted on many lists as the best book of the twentieth century. Tolkien was also a devout Christian and, according to C.S. Lewis, was instrumental in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.
Sometimes I forget that Tolkien was also a soldier who served on the Western Front in World War I. He endured brutal trench warfare. Years later, his sons both flew in the RAF during WW2, Christopher as a pilot and Michael as a gunner.

Tolkien sent letters to the boys to remind them to “make a habit of the praises.” He reminded them that there are prayers you can use when you don’t know how to pray, when you are at a loss because of your circumstances.

Tolkien drew on these common prayers from his Catholic faith:

The Gloria Patri
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

The Gloria in Excelsis
Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men of good will. We praise you, we bless you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory. Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty. Lord Jesus Christ, only begotten Son, Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us. Receive our prayer. You sit at the right hand of the Father; have mercy on us. For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

The Laudate Dominum
Praise the Lord, all nations; praise him, all people. For he has bestowed his mercy upon us, and the truth of the Lord endures forever. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

What all these have in common is that they focus on God, not circumstances. When you are going through a tough place, sometimes it can be hard to know how to pray. You can always pray and remind yourself of who God is. Even in your darkest times, God is still God.

Prayer is our line of communication with God. But it differs from every other type of communication we use. So much of our communication is filled with hidden motives and subtleties. We want people to see the best in us, and if we can help make that happen, we will. We post things on social media to show how wonderful we are. We use AI to make our creations look better, and we accuse anyone who makes something that we think is better than our creation of using AI because belittling someone else makes us look better.

The extreme of this is “catfishing.” It is when someone creates a false persona to lure people, or even a specific person, into doing what the “catfisher” wants them to do. Sometimes they want money, sometimes attention, or sometimes just to cause chaos in someone else’s life.

You can’t catfish God.

Psalm 139 says it like this:

O Lord, you have examined my heart
    and know everything about me.
² You know when I sit down or stand up.
    You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.
³ You see me when I travel
    and when I rest at home.
    You know everything I do.
⁴ You know what I am going to say
    even before I say it, Lord.

You are reading Digging Deeper, so I am going to take a wild guess and say that you are not new to the idea of prayer. Many of you have a rich prayer life that I would envy. Your intimacy with God is a solid part of your faith. If you’re in that stage of your faith, keep going! I pray you find something useful for yourself or someone you know this week.
But maybe you are reading Digging Deeper for the first time (or first time in a while). WELCOME! I pray we can give you some direction for your prayer life, not a formula, but a direction.
I think the third group of readers today are those of you who would say that you have had an intimate, growing prayer life in the past, but it has drifted into a stagnant place. You need some renewal. I pray that you will find your way back to that place of intimacy where God is waiting.

FIND A PLACE – Someplace quiet is usually best, but if you are in that stagnant place in your prayer life, then maybe a change of venue would help. Even if your prayer life is rock solid, going somewhere else can still make a big difference.

SET A TIME – Set an alarm and label it “PRAY,” then take a set amount of time and focus. If you can handle fifteen minutes, then start there. Writing prayers down is a sure way to make the time go by quickly. If fifteen minutes go by too quickly, then add more time, or set a second or third alarm; who says you can only pray once a day?

BE HONEST WITH GOD AND YOURSELF – Prayer matters. It’s most impactful when you take it seriously, draw close to God, and stay humble.

So humble yourselves before God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸ Come close to God, and God will come close to you. Wash your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, for your loyalty is divided between God and the world. ⁹ Let there be tears for what you have done. Let there be sorrow and deep grief. Let there be sadness instead of laughter, and gloom instead of joy. ¹⁰ Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up in honor. .James 4:7-10 (NLT)

Start today. I will be praying for you.

Let’s come back to something we talked about on day one: the first and last commandments.

I only recently noticed that the first and last commandments (you could call them the bread of the Ten Commandment sandwich) feel closely connected. All the other commandments have outward evidence that reveals whether or not you are obeying them. They also have tangible impacts on the people around you. If you create an idol, people can see it and might even be tempted to join you in worship. If you lie, murder, steal, or commit adultery, other people will eventually find out.

But putting God first and refusing to covet are different. You can claim to be obeying these commandments whether you actually are or not. Ultimately, observing these two commandments is between you and God.

We are called to put God first. When we covet, however, we place the things we desire ahead of Him. At its core, coveting reflects a lack of trust. Perhaps we believe God is holding out on us or giving others something better. I am not saying that having possessions—or even wanting them—is necessarily wrong. The problem comes when we want something more than we want God.

So, the first commandment can be summarized as, “Don’t put anyone above God,” and the last commandment as, “Don’t put anything before God.” God wants us to find our deepest and eternal satisfaction in Him instead of trying to fill our hearts with the things of this world.

I love this quote by John Piper from Living in the Light: “When the truth is suppressed, and the light is rejected, and the glory of God is disregarded, something always takes their place. The human heart hates a vacuum. We may never merely leave God because we value him little; we always exchange God for what we value more.”

Take a moment and consider your heart. Is there anyone or anything you are placing above God?

I grew up in church and always thought I knew the Ten Commandments. I mean, they’re right there on the page and seem pretty straightforward. So, I was surprised to learn from a Roman Catholic friend that my numbering wasn’t the same as his.

You see, this list, often referred to as the “Decalogue,” is important enough to God that it appears twice in Scripture.

Catholics use Augustine’s numbering, which is based on the Deuteronomy 5 account of the commandments rather than the Exodus 20 account that we’ve been studying on Sundays. In Augustine’s numbering, what we call the first and second commandments (“You shall have no other gods before Me” and “You shall not make for yourself a carved image”) are combined into a single commandment. Then, at the end of the list, coveting your neighbor’s wife is counted as the ninth commandment, while coveting your neighbor’s possessions is counted as the tenth—taking what Protestants count as one commandment and dividing it into two.

One more interesting fact: Judaism numbers the Ten Commandments differently from both Catholics and Protestants. The first commandment is Exodus 20:2: “I am the LORD your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of your slavery.” Then what Protestants number as the first and second commandments (Exodus 20:3–6) are combined into a single commandment.

So, is coveting one commandment or two? I would argue that it doesn’t matter whether you are coveting a person or a possession. They don’t need to be separated. In fact, we could say that coveting a person is a form of objectification. That person simply becomes something we want, while their humanity, personality, and desires are pushed aside.

Treating people like things is something God repeatedly speaks against through His prophets, and it certainly violates the second greatest commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Take a moment to evaluate your own heart. Are there people in your life whom you may not be coveting, but whom you are failing to treat with the dignity due to someone created in God’s image? Ask God to forgive you, and perhaps you also need to ask that person for forgiveness.

I, like probably many of you, grew up on Saturday morning cartoons. At a time when there was no streaming—not even VHS tapes or DVDs—you had to get up early and stay planted in front of the TV until around noon to enjoy all the colorful goodness! Even getting up to grab a bowl of cereal or use the bathroom was a race to beat the end of the commercial break.

Even the commercials were pretty cool sometimes. In between episodes of Scooby-Doo or Super Friends, there were ads for Hot Wheels, Micronauts, and Stretch Armstrong. But we all knew they were just commercials, so it was okay if we missed a few while enjoying the main shows.

TV networks were also required to include educational programming during commercial breaks, and that’s where the classic Schoolhouse Rock! segments came in. Everyone of a certain age just started hearing “Conjunction Junction” playing on repeat in their heads…you’re welcome.

Then the FCC relaxed its rules about marketing to children, and in the 1980s, the lines between commercials and cartoons began to blur. Was He-Man a cartoon, or was it really a long-form advertisement? It seemed like every toy line had its own TV show designed to boost sales.

The goal of the advertising was to make kids see those toys as not merely things they wanted, but things they needed. Coveting was the objective. You would watch the show and then see a commercial featuring kids just like you playing with those toys in a bedroom or backyard that looked just like yours. You’d think, “That could be me,” or, even more intensely, “That should be me.”

So you begged your parents, wrote requests to Santa, or “accidentally” left birthday wish lists where your parents were sure to find them. But inevitably, when we finally got those toys, they never lived up to the promise of the commercials. Those things never satisfied the longing that the marketing had ignited.

Some of us may still have trouble shaking off the programming that was instilled by G.I. Joe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The world wants us to covet. Advertisers want us to look outward for satisfaction in things, but God wants us to look to Him. The “things” we believe we need will never truly satisfy us.

Take a moment to reread Paul’s words to the church at Philippi that are quoted at the beginning of this post. Where do you need to learn contentment? Where in your life are you more tuned in to the commercials playing around you than to the blessings you already have?

Jeremiah 17:9 is a verse that I quoted many times during my years in student ministry. Adolescent brains develop from the back to the front; the parts of the brain that control feelings and desires mature before the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for reasoning and decision-making. In a sense, our “heart” is really in the middle of our brain. For a teenager, that “heart” is often the loudest voice in their head.

We have all lived through this stage of life, and we know that many of the decisions we made as teenagers were not especially well-reasoned or insightful. In fact, many of them were downright foolish. This is one reason I am so thankful my teenage years predated social media, so there isn’t a permanent record of all my bad decisions. The problem for many of us is that, like teenagers, we continue to trust our emotional hearts and rationalize their desires.

In our culture today, we often place extra emphasis on those desires. We use phrases like, “My heart is set on it,” or, “The heart wants what it wants.” We justify our desires with sayings such as, “Follow your heart,” or, “Trust your heart.”

But Jeremiah encourages us to do the exact opposite! He warns us not to trust our hearts, reminding us that they can deceive us. What our hearts want is often not what God wants for us. At its core, coveting is choosing to trust our hearts more than we trust our God.

Trusting God is the opposite of trusting our hearts. I love what Jeremiah 17:10 tells us—that God examines our hearts and rewards us according to our ways and the fruit of our actions. It is important to note that God is not merely concerned with our outward behavior but also with our motives. Our relationship with God is not rooted simply in what we do but in what is in our hearts.

Just like yesterday, take a moment to examine your heart. Are you trusting your heart more than you are trusting God?

Years ago, I remember there being a big kerfuffle about whether the Ten Commandments should be displayed in courthouses. The pro-display crowd argued that the Ten Commandments were a legal document and therefore had a place in modern courthouses.

I always thought this argument was a little off. The Ten Commandments definitely give us a template for how to live in harmony with one another and with God, but as a legal document, they are severely lacking. They identify offenses but provide no indication of the punishments for violating them. Then they conclude with the unusual commandment, “Do not covet.”

Unlike stealing, murder, or adultery, coveting does not directly affect those around me. It is not an action but a thought. And last I checked, we do not make laws about thoughts.

At first glance, the commandment about coveting seems a bit out of place among the other nine. It stands out because it can be hidden away. It is a commandment that only you and God know whether you are keeping.

But there is one other commandment like it: the first commandment, to have no other gods before Jehovah. I believe these two commandments are the key to understanding what God is telling His people through the Ten Commandments.

I believe Jesus was helping His listeners understand what these commandments were truly teaching when He addressed two of the biggest ones on the list: adultery and murder. Instead of focusing only on the actions themselves, Jesus pointed out that these sinful actions begin in our thoughts—with the desires and impulses that come before the action.

Jesus addressed two commandments that are clearly tied to outward actions and explained that the actions themselves are not the root problem. Rather, they are symptoms of an issue within the heart.

Take a moment for some honest self-reflection. Is your heart aligned with God today? What have you allowed to come before Him in your life?

Surrender those things to Him. Get your heart right, and obedience to the other commands will follow.

Most of us would be pretty familiar with the two scenes above. This passage is leading up to the climactic account of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Here, we have two scenes that serve as the final setup for the violence to follow.

Jesus knows Judas is going to betray Him, and He lets Judas know that He knows, but He does not make it abundantly obvious to the rest of the disciples. I picture this exchange being whispered between mouthfuls of bread as they recline among the other chatting disciples. I feel like if it were a louder exchange, the disciples might have had some questions for Judas.

That line, “You have said so,” gives me chills every time Jesus uses it. He says it again at the trial before the high priest:

“But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to Him, ‘I adjure You by the living God, tell us if You are the Christ, the Son of God.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven’” (Matthew 26:63–64, ESV).

It is Jesus’s way of saying, “You are speaking the truth in your own words.” In both cases, He is pointing out that they really know the truth, whether they say it directly or not. So Jesus knows that Judas is about to betray Him.

With that in mind, my friend Ryan Hoffer pointed out a word that is truly mind-blowing in the scene where they come to arrest Jesus. Jesus calls Judas “friend.” Jesus had every right to curse Judas, to push him away with disdain, but instead, He draws him in with the word “friend.”

It is astonishing, and it should fill us with hope.

If Jesus can call Judas a friend, then there is hope for us, too. Take a moment to come before Jesus in prayer. Tell Him honestly who you are and what you have done. Then, in a moment of silence, receive the mercy and forgiveness He offers as He calls you “friend.”

I don’t know about you, but I love karma. When someone blows past me on Jiles Road while I’m doing the speed limit—and there’s one of Kennesaw’s finest waiting just over the rise—those blue lights flash, and I cheer. They got instant karma!

But in most of our lives, karma doesn’t hold up. There are many more times when the car blows past me and nothing happens—except they make it through the next light while I catch the red. We mostly don’t get what we deserve.

That’s why the Gospel is “good news.” It says we don’t get what we deserve; rather, we get what we don’t deserve. That is what Jesus is saying in this passage: act more like your Father in heaven. Give the people you come in contact with what they don’t deserve.

So many times, we treat life as a transaction. Our interactions with people are based on how they treat us. Notice that Jesus dismantles that idea by telling us not to treat people as they treat us, but as we wish they would treat us. That’s not a game changer; that’s a world changer!

Try it as you go through your day. Be intentional about it. Look for ways to give without expectation, to love someone through your actions in ways they can never repay. Let that kind of open generosity begin to replace the desire for people to “get what they deserve,” and instead allow you to love them as God loves you.