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You cannot grow in prayer without some measure of effort and discomfort, self-discipline and self-denial.
Susanna Wesley
are there any good books on Susanna Wesley?
Francis of Assisi,
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Lord, help me not to worry about the words, but address you with the language of the heart. . . . I simply present myself to you; I open my heart to you. . . . Teach me to pray. Amen. FRANÇOIS FÉNELON
The first Christians may not have donned crash helmets in worship, but they certainly understood the sovereignty of God in a way that we don’t or can’t or won’t. Scan the narrative of Acts, reflect on the spontaneous doxologies of Paul or the apocalypse of John, and you quickly come to the conclusion that their God was—frankly—bigger than ours. They knew how to kneel. They understood the “fear of the Lord,” the reverence he deserves, and even the “dreadful thing” it can sometimes be, as the writer of Hebrews says, “to fall into the hands of the living God.”[11]
I don’t understand why Sammy has not yet been fully healed (God knows, we have prayed). I definitely don’t understand why he does some miracles and not others—it often seems so arbitrary. But I am learning to understand that I may never fully understand. I am learning to be a bit more okay with not being okay. Life sometimes hurts, but I’ve discovered that deleting God from the equation doesn’t actually help. It merely removes all meaning and morality from the mess and all real hope from the future. And so I’m sort of stuck with God, even when I don’t understand him. Even when I don’t
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this is good material for sermon on suffering
nineteenth-century philanthropist and pastor George Müller,
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God invites us to ask him for the basics but has never promised to make us all millionaires!
God asks us to ask for at least three reasons. First, because the act of asking is relational in a way that mere wishing is not.
If Bartimaeus had been healed in the crowd by the mere vapor of Christ’s passing, he would never have met Jesus, and we would
The second reason that asking is necessary is that it is vulnerable. To make a request is to admit to some area of personal need.
Third, asking is intentional. It involves the activation of our wills.
He comes where he is welcomed and waits to answer until he is called.
Praying in the name of Jesus means wanting what God wants, aligning our wills with his will, our words with his Word, and our personal preferences with his eternal and universal purposes.
