Tough stuff to grapple with. When one prays like Bounds it humbles the rest of us trying to do our best. The floor of hisDesiring to pray like this...
Tough stuff to grapple with. When one prays like Bounds it humbles the rest of us trying to do our best. The floor of his prayers soar over us. Where we reach up he reached over. ...more
He does not see prayer as merely a way to get things from God but as a way to get more of God himself. Location: 469
Prayer tunes your heart to God. SiHe does not see prayer as merely a way to get things from God but as a way to get more of God himself. Location: 469
Prayer tunes your heart to God. Singing engages the whole being—the heart through the music as well as the mind through the words. Prayer is also a tune others can hear besides you. When your heart has been tuned to God, your joy has an effect on those around you. You are not proud, cold, anxious, or bored—you are self-forgetful, warm, profoundly at peace, and filled with interest. Others will notice. All “heare and fear.” Prayer changes those around us. | Location: 886
We must not decide how to pray based on what types of prayer are the most effective for producing the experiences and feelings we want. | Location: 911
Without immersion in God’s words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality. We may be responding not to the real God but to what we wish God and life to be like. | Location: 1,192
Augustine’s first principle is that before you know what to pray for and how to pray for it, you must become a particular kind of person. “You must account yourself ‘desolate’ in this world, | Location: 1,212
if we have made God our greatest love, and if knowing and pleasing him is our highest pleasure, it transforms both what and how we pray for a happy life. | Location: 1,262
Luther counsels the cultivation of prayer as a habit through regular discipline. He proposes praying twice daily. “It is a good thing to let prayer be the first business of the morning and the last at night. | Location: 1,328
Ordinary prayer, which is either completely extempore or based on a list of prayer needs, often cannot draw the mind’s attention fully away from what occupied it previously. The exercise of elaborating on the Lord’s Prayer commands the full mental faculty, and this helps greatly with the problem of giving God full attention. | Location: 1,331
praying the Great Prayer forces us to use all the full language and basic forms of prayer. If left to ourselves we are likely to pray only about the items that most trouble us at the moment. The petitions “hallowed be thy name” and “thy kingdom come” lead us to pray for the progress of the gospel in our community and society and relationships. “Thy will be done” presses us to accept some things that God has allowed that are troubling us. “Forgive us our debts” brings us to list our most recent sins and failings, while “as we forgive our debtors” forces us to ask ourselves about our resentments and grudges. Praying the Lord’s Prayer forces us to look for things to thank and praise God for in our dark times, and it presses us to repent and seek forgiveness during times of prosperity and success. It disciplines us to bring every part of our lives to God. | Location: 1,350
“If in the midst of such thoughts the Holy Spirit begins to preach in your heart with rich, enlightening thoughts, honor him by letting go of this written scheme. . . . Remember what he says and note it well and you will behold wondrous things in the law of God” | Location: 1,355
He expects that the Spirit, as we reflect on the biblical truth before God, will sometimes fill our heart with rich thoughts and ideas that feel poignant and new to us, even when we are thinking about a text or truth that we have heard hundreds of times before. Location: 1,399
Calvin warned against the common medieval (and modern) view that prayer was a way of putting on your best spiritual clothes, as it were, to impress God with your devoutness. He completely rejects the idea that God could be “appeased by devotions” or that he would hear prayers for “the sake of mere performance.” Location: 1,660
Prayer is therefore not a strictly private thing. As much as we can, we should pray with others both formally in gathered worship and informally. Why? If the substance of prayer is to continue a conversation with God, and if the purpose of it is to know God better, then this can happen best in community. Location: 1,693
Work—Prayer Is a Duty and a Discipline Prayer should be done regularly, persistently, resolutely, and tenaciously at least daily, whether we feel like it or not. Location: 1,716
Responding to the Word—Prayer Is Conversing with God | Location: 1,732
Prayer Is a Balanced Interaction of Praise, Confession, Thanks, and Petition | Location: 1,743
Grace—Prayer Must Be “In Jesus’ Name,” Based on the Gospel | Location: 1,758
Fear—Prayer Is the Heart Engaged in Loving Awe We | Location: 1,779
Helplessness—Prayer Is Accepting Weakness and Dependence | Location: 1,800
Perspective—Prayer Reorients Your View toward God | Location: 1,818
Strength—Prayer as Spiritual Union with God | Location: 1,844
Spiritual Reality—Prayer Seeks a Heart Sense of the Presence of God | Location: 1,873
Self-Knowledge—Prayer Requires and Creates Honesty and Self-Knowledge | Location: 1,895
Trust—Prayer Requires and Creates Restful Trust and Confident Hope | Location: 1,921
Surrender—Prayer Requires and Creates Surrender of the Whole Life in Love to God | Location: 2,009
Persons who meditate become people of substance who have thought things out and have deep convictions, who can explain difficult concepts in simple language, and who have good reasons behind everything they do. Many people do not meditate. They skim | Location: 2,192
Like Martin Luther—who knew that sometimes the Holy Spirit begins immediately to “preach to you” and sometimes he does not—Owen is quite realistic. He admits that sometimes, no matter what we do, we simply cannot concentrate, or we find our thoughts do not become big and affecting, but rather we feel bored, hard, and distracted. Then, Owen says, simply turn to God and make brief, intense appeals for help. Sometimes that is all you will do the rest of your scheduled time, and sometimes the very cries for help serve to concentrate the mind and soften the heart. | Location: 2,198
Even if your meditations give you only a “renewed gracious sense of your own weakness and insufficiency,” that is by no means a waste of time. It is bringing you into greater touch with spiritual reality. Then, he adds, our expressions of grief at the sense of God’s absence are themselves ways to show love to God, and they will not go unappreciated by him. | Location: 2,276
It is possible for Christians to live their lives with a high degree of phoniness, hollowness, and inauthenticity. The reason is because they have failed to move that truth into their hearts and therefore it has not actually changed who they are and how they live. | Location: 2,496
Yet I must say that I had rather be among them who, in the actings of their love and affection unto Christ, do fall into some irregularities and excesses in the manner of expressing it . . . than among those who, professing themselves to be Christians, do almost disavow their having any thoughts of or affection unto the person of Christ. | Location: 2,682
A Method for Prayer. The | Location: 3,101
The theological thinking and self-reflection that should accompany supplication takes time. Prayer lists and other such methods may lead us to very speedily move through names and needs with a cursory statement “if it is your will” without the discipline of backing up our requests with thoughtful reasoning. | Location: 3,103
“if we are going to take time to think our way into the situations and personal lives on which our intercessions focus,” we may not be able to pray for as many items and issues.
Day 8: Our souls are so little accustomed to hold fellowship with God; the God on whom we wait so often appears to hid Himself. We who have to wait areDay 8: Our souls are so little accustomed to hold fellowship with God; the God on whom we wait so often appears to hid Himself. We who have to wait are often tempted to fear that we do not wait aright, that our faith is too feeble, that our desire is not as upright or as earnest as it should be, that our surrender is not complete.
The one lesson our text teaches us is this, that when we set ourselves to wait on God we ought beforehand to resolve that it shall be the most confident expectation of God's meeting and blessing us. We ought to make up our minds to this, that nothing was ever so sure as that waiting on God will bring us untold and unexpected blessing....more
Certainly not what I expected or was hoping for. I'm certain I have reaped some benefit. Using the Meyers-Briggs personality tests this book applies tCertainly not what I expected or was hoping for. I'm certain I have reaped some benefit. Using the Meyers-Briggs personality tests this book applies these types to saints like Augustine, Aquinas, Francis and Ignatius and then suggests that we understand our own type and develop others in order to have a more fulfilling prayer life.
At several points I felt the book became a little too mystical (the word "transcendent" appeared often), but maybe that's just my personality type. Definitely written from a Catholic perspective (which was also kind of a hindrance to me) and made heavy use of lectio divina with all personality types which remains a struggle for me....more
Wright' short book breaks the Lord's prayer down into the significant clauses which is not a new tactic but he never fails to find surprising insight Wright' short book breaks the Lord's prayer down into the significant clauses which is not a new tactic but he never fails to find surprising insight and application in a well-worn text:
Some of the quotes may require context...
From the prologue: Jesus’ message summons us to focus our thoughts on the coming of the Kingdom of God. Because that is a huge and difficult idea, I here focus that thought, too, on one small point: namely, the prayer that Jesus taught, the so-called ‘Lord’s Prayer’. We live, as Jesus lived, in a world all too full of injustice, hunger, malice and evil. This prayer cries out for justice, bread, forgiveness and deliverance. If anyone thinks those are irrelevant in today’s world, let them read the newspaper and think again. The more I have studied Jesus in his historical setting, the more it has become clear to me that this prayer sums up fully and accurately, albeit in a very condensed fashion, the way in which he read and responded to the signs of the times, the way in which he understood his own vocation and mission and invited his followers to share it. This prayer, then, serves as a lens through which to see Jesus himself, and to discover something of what he was about.
On ways to read the Lord's prayer: First, there is the time-honoured method of making the Lord’s Prayer the framework for regular daily praying. Take each clause at a time, and, while holding each in turn in the back of your mind, call into the front of your mind the particular things you want to pray for, as it were, under that heading.
Second, some people use the Lord’s Prayer in the same way that some use the Orthodox Jesus-prayer. Repeat it slowly, again and again, in the rhythm of your breathing, so that it becomes, as we say, second nature.
pg. 21 we are called to be the people through whom the pain of the world is held in the healing light of the love of God.
pg. 22 This, then, I dare say, is the pattern of Christian spirituality. It is not the selfish pursuit of private spiritual advancement. It is not the flight of the alone to the alone. It is neither simply shouting into a void, nor simply getting in touch with our own deepest feelings, though sometimes it may feel like one or other of these. It is the rhythm of standing in the presence of the pain of the world, and kneeling in the presence of the creator of the world; of bringing those two things together in the name of Jesus and by the victory of the cross; of living in the tension of the double Advent, and of calling God ‘Father’.
p. 34 The ideal posture, they would tell us, is relaxed but not slumped; poised but not tense; alert but not fidgety; above all, humble but happy in the presence of the Creator whom you are learning to call ‘Father’.
p. 39 The banquet, the party, is a sign that God is acting at last, to rescue his people and wipe away all tears from all eyes. Jesus’ parties, and his feeding of his followers in the wilderness, were intended, for those with eyes to see, to pick up this whole theme and celebrate it. As so often, the most powerful things Jesus said were in actions, not words.
pgs. 46-47 The Eucharist is, first, the way in which Jesus himself taught us to remember him, to think of him. If the Lord’s Prayer is the prayer which summed up his own life and work, enabling his followers to breathe in his life and love and make it their own, the Eucharist is the symbol which did the same thing, pointing particularly to his dying and rising. As we do this in remembrance of him, we are taken back in heart and mind, and in sacramental time and place, to the very life of Jesus himself, as he feasted with his friends, as he celebrated one last kingdom-party. This is the Kingdom-banquet, and we are the honoured guests. That, as we saw, is where this clause in the prayer began.
pg. 57 we are now called to be the people through whom the unique victory of Calvary and Easter is implemented in and for the whole world. The church is to be the advance guard of the great act of Forgiveness of Sins that God intends to accomplish for the entire cosmos. Justice and peace, truth and mercy, will one day reign in God’s world; and the church, who could almost be defined as the people who pray the Lord’s Prayer, is to model and pioneer the way of life which is, actually, the only way of life, because it is the way of forgiveness.
p. 68 We therefore have to come to grips with the fact that Jesus gave this prayer to his disciples, but that when he prayed it himself the answer was ‘No’. He put it together with an earlier part of the Lord’s Prayer (‘Thy will be done’). When he held the two side by side, he found that God’s will involved him in a unique vocation. He would be the one who was led to the Testing, who was not delivered from Evil.
p. 71 This prayer, in its setting within the whole Lord’s Prayer, keeps the proper balance. Jesus intends his followers to recognize not only the reality of evil but the reality of his victory over it.
p. 80 Here, by contrast, is the young king in Bethlehem, born with a price on his head. He represents the dangerous alternative, the possibility of a different empire, a different power, a different glory, a different peace. The two systems stand over against one another. Augustus’ empire is like a well-lit room at night. The lamps are arranged beautifully; they shed pretty patterns; but they haven’t defeated the darkness outside. Jesus’ kingdom is like the morning star rising, signalling that it’s time to blow out the candles, to throw open the curtains, and to welcome the new day that is dawning. Glory to God in the highest—and peace among those with whom he is pleased!
pgs. 86-87 We cannot, then, pray this prayer and acquiesce in the power and glory of Caesar’s kingdom. Augustus would have known quite well what was going on if he’d heard anyone praying this prayer, and he would have trembled on his throne. If the church isn’t prepared to subvert the kingdoms of the world with the kingdom of God, the only honest thing would be to give up praying this prayer altogether, especially its final doxology.
p. 88 to pray in Jesus’ name is to invoke the name of the Stronger than the Strong; it is to appeal to the one through whom the creator of the world has become king, has taken the power of the world and has defeated it with the power of the cross, has confronted the glory of the world and has outshone it with the glory of the cross. When people in Jesus’ world backed up a request with the Emperor’s name, people jumped to attention. How much more, when we pray in the name of the true King of kings?
After reading this book for a second time (April-May 2016) I realize how much it has influenced how I view, perform and survive in ministry. Much of tAfter reading this book for a second time (April-May 2016) I realize how much it has influenced how I view, perform and survive in ministry. Much of these insightful authors' truths have proved themselves to be true and valuable in my years of ministry.
Some highlights: Sabbath-keeping: separating ourselves from the people who are clinging to us, from the routines to which we cling for our identity, and offering them all up to God in praise. p. 21
We don’t have any rules for preserving the sanctity of the day, only the commitment that it be set apart for being, not using. Not a day to get anything done but a day to watch and be responsive to what God has done. p. 23
Two questions I find helpful when meeting with others are: (1) When this week did you feel closest to God? and (2) When did you have a discipleship opportunity, the chance to experience growth yourself or to help others grow, but ignored it? The first question leads to a greater awareness of our experience and relationship with God, and the second sensitizes us to opportunities for growth. p. 23
A few things have to happen for identification to produce lasting change. You need a leader/persuader who’s viewed as attractive and desirable. There’s no absolute standard. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. The more winsome the source, the greater the pull of identification. Second, the one to be influenced has to define himself in relationship to the attractive person. Sometimes it’s a whole-hog desire to be just like his hero, like a star-struck Little Leaguer modeling his every action on Pete Rose, including the way he combs his hair. Other times it’s a reciprocal role—lover, employee, disciple, daughter—in which the influenced party tries to live up to the other’s expectations. Either way, he has to know what’s wanted. Finally, the attractive source will hold sway only as long as the relationship is important to the admirer. p. 91
Søren Kierkegaard tells the parable of a prince who falls in love with a peasant maiden. First he thinks he will bring her to the castle so he can woo her. Plan B is to go to her humble cottage accompanied by his chariots, soldiers, and horses. But he realizes that neither course would be fair. How could she help but be dazzled by such princely splendor? So he resolves to cast off all royal advantage. He dons the garb of a poor woodsman and proceeds to her home to plead his cause. Kierkegaard presents this story as an analogy of Christ stripping off his prerogatives as God and coming to earth as a mere mortal so men would not be roped into the kingdom of God without an honest chance to say no. pgs. 91-92
How does it work? In the first place, it takes a credible leader. He has to have some recognizable expertise so his words will have the ring of truth. That was Bill. He’d won my respect by the quality of his deeds. His actions spoke louder than words. The next requirement is that the person being changed has to have some specific needs or desires that are up-front in his life. In my case, I desperately wanted to be effective over the long haul in serving the poor. Equally important, I wanted to get off my high-speed treadmill. Bill’s suggestion tapped into these felt needs. It wasn’t just a happy coincidence. By being a good listener, he was able to spot these desires. He then tied his advice into my overriding values. Even though his solution was outside my previous experience, I was hooked. Unless you see yourself as a mere coordinator, at least part of your job as a leader involves persuasion. You have to select a strategy of influence. It is necessary for you to put yourself into the shoes of the persons you’re trying to move. p. 98
Pastors are angry at their leaders for not leading and at their followers for not following. They are angry at those who do not come to church, and angry at those who do come for coming without enthusiasm. p. 142
Having enough of the mundane in my life makes me see the futility of the world and the wonder and delights of the Christian life. I cannot continue to work seventy- and eighty-hour weeks for many reasons, not the least of which is that they don’t allow enough time to be away from the church so that I love it when I come to it. p. 165
there comes a time in every preacher’s life when the queasy-making parts of the Bible can no longer be ignored, when it is time to admit that the Bible is not a book about admirable people or even about a conventionally admirable God. It is instead a book about a sovereign God’s covenant with a chosen people, as full of holy terrors as it is of holy wonders, none of which we may avoid without avoiding part of the truth. pgs. 241-242
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