All I Ever Wanted

“I know you have more pressing matters than who gets captain – I watch the news – but I could use any extra luck you could toss my way, ’cause I’ve worked my whole life to lead Truman High to nationals. It’s all I ever wanted since I was a kid.”

Bring It On (2012)

Bring It On is a stage musical about competitive high-school cheerleading¹ – fun story, brilliant score, phenomenal choreography, highly recommended all round – which, randomly enough, kicks off, after a few seconds of opening overture,² with a prayer.

God – and any other higher powers that might be listening – it’s me, Campbell. You probably already know that. So, today is the last day of school, and then I’m a senior, and tonight, my squad is holding tryouts to replace old seniors who are leaving our plane of existence. The tryouts are going to be led by our new captain, who gets selected at lunch, and that’s why I’m talking to you. I know you have more pressing matters than who gets captain – I watch the news – but I could use any extra luck you could toss my way, ’cause I’ve worked my whole life to lead Truman High to nationals. It’s all I ever wanted since I was a kid.³

 

Cheerleading. Impressive stuff.

Here come the spoilers: Campbell is chosen as captain and seems on the brink of fulfilling all her dreams, until she finds out during the summer that, due to a school redistricting, she’ll be spending her senior year not at Truman High with her beloved squad, but at some other school called Jackson. Thanks to that and a couple of other unfortunate coincidences, the role of captain ends up falling to the newest member of the squad, Eva. Or at least, we initially thought it was thanks to a few unfortunate coincidences; in actual fact, Eva engineered the whole thing, as she triumphantly declares in the second prayer of the show.

Dear God up in heaven, a prayer for Campbell:

Once she was my hero,

Now she’s a disgrace.

I’m here on top and she’s less than zero,

Dragging me down to save face.

She always worked hard, she was trusting and fair,

And, Lord, that’s the crux of her problem right there.

You need that killer instinct to give you the nerve,

To grab everything you want in life but may not deserve.

Like, if some girl’s in your way, there’s only one thing to do:

You blackmail your mother, who sits on the school board, to get Campbell transferred and ripped from the life that she knew,

And your dreams come true.

You’ll probably have gathered that, as the song goes on, it altogether ceases to constitute any sort of address to God, as Eva gets caught up in extolling the benefits of using her ‘killer instinct’ to get what she wants – which makes it all the more striking that the monologue even starts as a prayer in the first place. Maybe that initial, nominal supplication amounts to nothing more than an excuse for Eva to be saying this stuff aloud, since, at this point in the story at least, she’s maintaining a façade of amiable innocence in front of the other characters. Or maybe – and I prefer this possibility – it’s designed to encourage us the audience to draw a parallel between what Eva’s saying here, and what Campbell said at the start of the show.

At first glance, these two prayers look pretty different. Campbell’s prayer, on the one hand, consists of a genuine entreaty of whichever divine entity might hear, that he might intervene to aid the fulfilment of her dearest wishes. Eva, on the other hand, isn’t really asking God to intervene in anything on her behalf: her dreams are already coming true, and that was achieved through her own judicious employment of her killer instinct, with no outside help required. Her praying for Campbell is just part of her gloating; it’s a statement to the effect that, unlike herself, Campbell, poor thing, is frankly a bit rubbish and would require some serious help – like, divine intervention kind of help – in order to ever amount to anything.

That said, however, the crucial similarity between both prayers is that Campbell and Eva both express the same desperate desire: each has her heart set on captaining her cheerleading squad and taking it to national success, and will go to extraordinary lengths to achieve that aim. Campbell is willing to petition any supernatural entity she can persuade to listen if he will help her defeat her rivals; Eva is willing to furtively devise and execute complex, malicious plots to bring about her rivals’ downfall. At the end of the day, prayer is of value to each of these teenagers only insofar as it enables her obtainment and enjoyment of an opportunity she already dearly wanted. And at the end of the day, furthermore, neither of the two actually commits the situation into God’s hands: both take matters into their own.

Campbell, having formed some accurate suspicions about what Eva’s been up to, decides to wreak her revenge by reappropriating Jackson High’s hip-hop dance crew as a cheerleading squad and competing against her former teammates. The only snag with this plan is that she has to convince her new Jackson friends to turn their hand to cheerleading, which she manages by means of several well-chosen lies. She tells Nautica and La Cienega that the winning squad will be featured in a twelve-episode reality series on MTV; she tells Cameron that his hero Michael Jordan used to be a cheerleader; she tells Danielle that each member of the winning squad is awarded a scholarship to a university of his or her choice. Such false promises carry her as far as the regional round of the contest before their inevitable exposure. Her friends have done a bit of Googling and found out that all they’ll actually get if they succeed at nationals is a trophy and a fancy hoodie, whoop-dee-doo – so off they trot to confront Campbell about her deceit.

 

Yeah, not quite the same as a university scholarship.

She attempts to defend herself: “Look, it was this girl, Eva, at the other school: she manipulated the system to get me out so she could become captain, and I just wanted to get revenge.”

“Hold on,” interjects Danielle. “Back up … You’re telling me some girl came in on turf that wasn’t hers, and lied and cheated and manipulated until she was running the whole show?”

“Exactly!” exclaims Campbell, in relief at having been understood. Not very long-lived relief.

“I’m not talking about her,” retorts Danielle. “I’m talking about you.”

That moment is a pivot point of the whole story. For all she seemed to be the better person of the two, Campbell ended up betraying her friends in the same way Eva had betrayed her, because of the same single-minded pursuit of the same coveted goal. Campbell’s prayer may have looked different to Eva’s on the surface, but the core of what it meant was the same: I want what I want and I am willing to do whatever it takes to get it.

Whence (come) fights and whence (come) quarrels among you? (Is it) not hence, from your desires waging war in your members? You set your heart on (something), and you don’t have (it): you murder. And you covet and you are not able to obtain: you quarrel and fight. You don’t have, on account of you not asking. You ask and you don’t receive, because you ask evilly, so that you might spend on your desires.

That’s from the start of the fourth chapter of the supremely convicting letter of James,⁴ which I don’t suppose we are meant to imagine Campbell ever having read, although, from what it says, this chunk could have been written directly to her. Why did she end up in conflict with all her friends? Because of her desires: because she set her heart on something and she didn’t have it. Though she asked, she asked evilly, for the sake of obtaining her preexisting desires: asking God was just another strategy to try in pursuit of that.

It’s interesting how she framed her asking, though. “I know you have more pressing matters,” she conceded. There was an acknowledgement there that God was probably more interested in things other than her being made captain, but all the same, that didn’t stop her making her request as if it really were the most important thing she could be asking for.

How often do we pray like that? I know you have other priorities – like your glory, and my sanctification, and the building up of the Church – but God, what I really, really want is this. And contained implicitly in that: I know you say you have other priorities, but God, if you really cared about what’s best for me, you’d give me this.⁵ We’re not committing the situation into God’s hands; we’re just using prayer as one strategy in our pursuit of our preexistent desires. One strategy, indeed – if our desires are what are driving us, we’ll be bound to try other strategies as well to obtain them. We’ll quarrel and fight, like James’ addressees; we’ll lie and cheat and manipulate, like Eva and Campbell. God’s glory and our sancticification and the building up of the Church will fall by the wayside.

The root of all this, as I already hinted, is not trusting that God really cares about what’s best for us. As easy a thing as that is to start believing faced with the General Suckiness of Life, though, it’s a totally doolally suggestion in light of the cross. How will he who did not withhold his own Son, then withhold anything? How will he who has already laid every curse due us on our righteous Lord, reserve anything but blessing for us? How will he who has adopted us as his own, dishonour himself by failing to be an ultimately good Father to us?

Seriously, though, stop and dwell on that for a moment. The more we get the sheer gracious extent of what God has already done for us into our heads and hearts, the more our desires will align with his. We’ll seek his kingdom and his righteousness instead of whatever it is we think we need in this life. “If, therefore, you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children,” said Jesus, “how much more will your Father from heaven give the Holy Spirit to those asking him!”⁶ Not, how much more will he give those who are asking their worldly desires; but how much more will he give them the blessing they really need, the Holy Spirit. “You don’t have, on account of you not asking,” wrote James – and indeed, why would anyone ask, of all things, for the Holy Spirit, unless he had set aside his worldly desires because of his certainty that his ultimate good was to be found in pursuit of God’s will?

Let’s not pray like Campbell: I know you have other priorities, but what I really want is this. Instead, let’s remind ourselves of everything God has done for us, and that if that’s true, there is nothing but blessing in his will for us. Which being so, why should we be driven by any desire except to do his will and know him better?

Footnotes

¹ Not to be confused with the 2000 Kirsten Dunst film of the same name, which, though I’ve not seen it myself, I can gather from online synopses has nothing in common with the musical except that it’s about competitive high-school cheerleading.

² Some kind human has uploaded the original Broadway cast soundtrack to YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnjsz42Q_DA&list=PLF1GqpgdUI_BlykrwaxaHC3sSOQVBuD-b, though I anticipate it’s likely also available on whatever your preferred music-streaming platform happens to be.

³ Thanks to Toms River High School North for putting a full recording of their performance of the show up on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt34NNwofgA, such that I could consult it for accurate citation of relevant bits of dialogue not covered by the soundtrack.

⁴ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+4&version=ESVUK. As a bit of a side note, I’ve now quite got in the habit of giving my own translation when I quote the Bible on my blog, but do be comparing and contrasting: no translation is ever totally accurate.

⁵ Credit for establishing this point in my mind is due to Elyse M. Fitzpatrick. Because He Loves Me is taking me a long time to read because it’s so emotionally exhausting, but it’s all colours of brilliant. Y’all should check it out: https://www.10ofthose.com/uk/products/13788/because-he-loves-me. (Or ask to borrow my copy when I’m done with it.)

⁶ Luke 11:13.

Non-Prophet Organisations

Martin:             Why God suddenly feels the need to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people escapes me. You should ask him about it while you’re in there. He’d probably say he moves in mysterious ways.

Philomena:       No, I think he’d say you’re a fecking idiot.

Philomena (2013)

The notion that it might be rather a good idea to write this blog post came to me as a result of all the conversations I’ve been having with fellow-believers about 1 Corinthians 14 of late. The chapter in question is highly relevant for my views about how church ought to work,¹ but, as so often happens, my referring to it often tends to throw up a number of other issues as well. In this case, it’s struck me that I’ve been back-and-forth-ing with various people about “let two or three prophets speak” and “you can all prophesy” and “the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets” and so forth, without taking the trouble to pin down what prophecy actually is. Honestly, it’s kind of hilarious: the church circles in which I tend to hang out are ones where nothing explicitly given the name ‘prophecy’ occurs in any meeting at any time of the week, and obviously the same has often been true of my colloquist.² There we are arguing about the details of how prophecy ought to be done in church, when prophecy has not ostensibly been part of the church experience of either one of us, ever. The churches to which we have belonged have been – if you’ll forgive me – non-prophet organisations.

 

The idea is of being prevented from speaking. Best I could come up with.

It seems to me that a lot of us are none too sure about what prophecy is, and therefore we don’t do it (or, if we do do it, don’t recognise that prophecy’s what we’re doing when we do). Well, that’s clearly a massive problem, given how insistent the New Testament is that prophesying is a really good and desirable thing – if you opened 1 Corinthians 14 last paragraph, give it another skim now and you’ll see what I mean – so I thought it might be rather a good idea to go and search the scriptures and see what they say about prophecy and take my best shot at defining it. And then pop the conclusions I reached here for you lovely people to peruse, should you wish.

Here’s what I think: ‘prophecy’ refers to two different but related things. On the one hand, it’s a general term for being in communication with God and relating what he says to others. On the other, it denotes a specific spiritual gifting that consists of speaking to God’s people on his behalf, to encourage and rebuke them so that they might remain faithful to him. In both cases, crucially, it’s a thing that human beings are enabled to do by the Holy Spirit. I shall now present a selection of the evidence.

To kick off, here are the first few mentions of prophecy in scripture; I’m looking at instances of the Hebrew words נָבִיא (nāvīʾ, ‘prophet’) and נבא (nbʾ, ‘prophesy’). In Genesis 20:7, God says to Abimelech in a dream: “And now return [Abraham’s] wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you, and you shall live; but if you do not return her, you shall surely die, you and all who are yours.” Strikingly enough, the key characteristic of Abraham as prophet here is not actually that he speaks for God, but rather that God hears him.³ In our next instance, though, in Exodus 7:1, God says to Moses: “See, I have given you as God to Pharoah, and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet. You, you shall speak all that I command you, and Aaron your brother shall speak to Pharoah, that he should send out the sons of Israel from his land.” What a helpful physical illustration: Aaron is Moses’ prophet in that he passes on Moses’ God-given message to its intended recipient. So from these two first references together, we see that a prophet has to have a two-way communicative relationship with God: God hears him when he speaks on behalf of others, and he speaks to others on behalf of God.

Our next reference is the following little story out of Numbers 11: “And the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and he took some of the Spirit that was on him and gave it on the seventy old men, and it came to pass as the Spirit rested on them that they prophesied, but they did not do it again. And two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the second named Medad, and the Spirit rested on them – and they were among the recorded, but they did not go out to the tabernacle, and they prophesied in the camp. And the young man ran and told Moses, and said, Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp. And Joshua the son of Nun, minister of Moses from his youth, answered and said, My lord Moses, restrain them. And Moses said to him, Are you jealous for me? Would that he would give the whole people of the Lord as prophets, that the Lord would give his Spirit on them!” So here we see that people prophesy that when God gives his Spirit on them. And we also see that under his covenant with Israel, he only did that for certain people at certain times. (Watch this space, folks.)

So, some people were prophets, because God had given them his Spirit that they might communicate with him and for him; some people weren’t necessarily known as prophets, but did prophesy on occasion, like Saul for example;⁴ and some people just weren’t prophets. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that many more people were prophets than have books of the Bible named after them. For example, someone called Obadiah managed to hide a hundred prophets when Queen Jezebel went on a killing spree, which kind of implies that there were substantially more than that altogether. Similarly, Ahab mustered some four hundred prophets to give a verdict on his planned attack on Ramoth-gilead. And fifty from Jericho alone (not that city’s whole population of prophets, either) followed Elijah and Elisha to the Jordan one time.⁵

 

A vintage print of the River Jordan. Not quite as vintage as Elijah and Elisha though.

As we progress through the scriptures, moreover, we see emerge the second, more specific prophetic role I mentioned above. Check out the following:

“And the Lord sent to you all his servants the prophets – sent and sent,⁶ but you did not listen nor incline your ears to listen – saying, Turn around, each from his evil way and the wickedness of your deeds, and dwell upon the ground that the Lord gave to you and to your fathers, from forever and until forever.” – Jeremiah 24:4-5

“And I sent to you all my servants the prophets, sent and sent, saying, Turn around, each from his evil way, and make your deeds right, and do not go after other gods to serve them, and dwell to the ground that I gave to you and to your fathers – but you did not incline your ear, nor listen to me.” – Jeremiah 35:15

“And I sent to you all my servants the prophets, sent and sent, saying, Do not do this thing of abomination that I hate!” – Jeremiah 44:4

“Do not be like your fathers to whom the first prophets cried out, saying, Thus says the Lord of hosts: Turn around from your evil ways and evil deeds – but they did not hear and they did not listen to me, says the Lord. Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers? And they turned around and said, As the Lord of hosts purposed to do to us, according to our ways and according to our deeds, thus has he done with us.” – Zechariah 1:4-6

“And they abandoned the house of the Lord, the God of their fathers, and they served the Asherim and the idols, and wrath was upon Judah and Jerusalem in this guilt of theirs. And he sent among them prophets to turn them back to the Lord, and they testified against them, but they did not listen.” – 2 Chronicles 24:19

“And they were disobedient and rebelled against you and cast your Law behind their back, and they killed your prophets, who had testified against them to turn them back to you, and they committed great blasphemies." – Nehemiah 9:26

I could go on – and do go and investigate further for yourself – but it’s a strikingly consistent picture, isn’t it? God sent prophets to speak on his behalf, but specifically he sent them to tell his people to stop their evil and their idolatry and turn back to the Lord and his ways. In one way, this second definition is only a logical follow-on from the first: if you’re speaking on God’s behalf, well, then, it seems pretty likely that that message is going to contain exhortations to serve God and live the way he wants. But I do think it’s worth drawing the distinction between the general role and the specific one, not least because it makes sense of how this stuff comes out in the New Testament.

Returning to my special favourite 1 Corinthians 14, I’ll remind you that Paul there says to the Corinthian believers, “you can all prophesy”. But just a couple of chapters ago, he’d rhetorically exclaimed, “Are all prophets?” in such a way as to clearly indicate that no, not all are. I think this apparent discrepancy is pretty easily solved by applying the same two categories I just pulled out of the Old Testament. “You can all prophesy,” as in, you’re all qualified to communicate with God and speak on his behalf – and indeed, unlike God’s covenant with Israel, the new covenant in Christ gives God’s Spirit to every one of us who believes, and, furthermore, as a permanent seal, not just a one-off.⁷ In that sense, we are all prophets, and whenever we speak on God’s behalf, we are prophesying. But in terms of particular spiritual giftings, some of the saints have been given the specific ministry of exhorting the people of God to repent from their idolatry and evil ways and turn back to their Lord, and others haven’t. Consider in this respect Acts 15:32: “Judas and Silas, also being prophets themselves, through many words encouraged the brothers and strengthened them.” The role of the prophet is to encourage and strengthen, which is actually the same thing as to call to repentance, because it’s through constant acknowledgement of our need for the cross that we become most strongly rooted in the one who died on it.

Of course, that’s not to say that nobody except a prophet can ever do any encouraging or rebuking, any more than nobody except an evangelist can ever preach the gospel to unbelievers. (Indeed, as a bit of a side note, I think this matter of two definitions, a general and a specific, is true of all the ‘higher giftings’ – that is to say, in one sense, everyone in the Church is an apostle, a prophet, an evangelist, and a teacher and pastor, but in another, each has his or her own gifting or giftings and not the others – but I won’t make this post even longer by going into massive detail about that here.) Still, the role of prophet is clearly a specific one and a highly significant one. The Church needs prophets, just as Israel did: we need people who are able, in the Spirit, to encourage and strengthen us in the faith by calling us to repent and believe. The sad thing is that we don’t seem to be very good at recognising that.

Prophecy, as a gifting, is not, in my experience of the church at least, identified and nurtured the way that, say, teaching is, and this is a crying shame of gargantuan size. We the Church, by neglecting to encourage the prophets among us to exercise their gifting, are cheating ourselves out of precious encouragement; and we are also leaving them unsure as to how they are able to minister to their brothers and sisters. We are leaving them questioning whether they even have a ministry, or are some sort of sub-par Christian with no ‘higher gift’ to offer in service of the Church. That is an injustice. We need to do better.

So if you know any prophets – and I hazard you very likely do, whether or not they’re yet aware that they’re prophets – do be encouraging in their ministry. They’ll learn to do what they were made for, and the whole Church will reap the – ahem – profits.

Footnotes

¹ See my post ‘Those Pesky Nicolaitans 2: What Church Leadership?’, under June of this year in the box on the right. Fun fact: it’s currently my most-viewed post. Oh, and here’s 1 Corinthians 14 in case you’d like to recap: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+14&version=ESVUK.

² Whether ‘colloquist’ is a real word seems up for debate, but I think it ought to be, because ‘conversation partner’ is the next shortest alternative and is still a little unwieldy. Webster’s 1913 dictionary acknowledged it: https://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/Colloquist.

³ This isn’t an isolated case, either: check out Jeremiah 37:3, and 42:1-4.

⁴ As in this story: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel+10&version=ESVUK. Saul wasn’t a prophet, but then the Spirit of God came upon him and enabled him to prophesy, and everyone went, oh hey, is Saul a prophet now then?

⁵ As related in 1 Kings 18, 1 Kings 22, and 2 Kings 2 respectively. Admittedly, in the Ahab episode, his four hundred prophets prophesied falsely, but that was because of a lying spirit sent from God, and I don’t think the way the story is told suggests that none of these prophets was genuine.

⁶ Here and elsewhere this is my rendering of a phrase which literally refers to getting up early in the morning and sending: the idea is of doing the thing persistently over a long period of time. This is probably a good point to mention that all quotations in this post are my own translation, but you probably already guessed that from the clunkiness.

⁷ Excuse to go and read Ephesians again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+1&version=ESVUK. You’re welcome.