More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Pete Greig
Read between
January 25 - February 7, 2023
Third, asking is intentional.
The great French philosopher Blaise Pascal said that “God has instituted prayer to impart to his creatures the dignity of causality.”[14] We are God’s partners in the great project of creation, and we exercise this extraordinary privilege primarily through prayerful imagination, and secondarily through practical innovation.
To pray in the name of Jesus means asking for things that are consistent with his character and aligned with his purpose. When my prayers line up with God’s plan for my life, he says yes, and when they don’t, he says no. What a relief! If every earnest, heartfelt prayer I’d ever prayed had been answered, I’d have become a zookeeper and married the wrong girl at least four times before meeting Sammy.
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. It also speaks of family privilege. To ask in the name of Jesus is to approach the Father in the company of his own dear Son.
Faith is found in the person of Christ. If you want to trust Jesus more, get to know him more. Look at him more, listen to him more, spend more time with him.
The second way to grow in faith is by practicing trust. I say practicing because that’s exactly what it takes: practice, repetition, neural realignment, accumulated muscle memory. Faith has often been described in precisely these terms: as a muscle that gets stronger with regular exercise.
You’ll get an immediate green light from God! Others won’t ever be answered, no matter how long you persevere. They’ll be met with a red light, and this may be deeply painful and perplexing (more on this in chapter 7). But there are other prayers—perhaps even the majority—that get neither an immediate yes nor a firm no. They are yellow lights requiring us to wait and persevere.
The great preacher D. L. Moody died fifteen years before the invention of traffic lights, so he wouldn’t have understood this analogy, but he certainly knew all about waiting and persevering in prayer. In fact, he carried a list of one hundred non-Christians for whom he prayed daily. Over the years, whenever one of them gave their life to Christ, Moody would cross their name off the list. By the time of his death, no fewer than 96 of those 100 people had become followers of Jesus. What an amazing testimony to the power of perseverance. Even more remarkably, the remaining four surrendered their
...more
Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire? CORNELIA “CORRIE” TEN BOOM
How quickly I complain about life’s hardships while taking God’s manifold blessings entirely for granted.
IT IS AN ARTICLE of Christian faith, and a consistent theme of universal Christian experience, that sicknesses can sometimes be healed, curses broken, churches revived, communities shaped, catastrophes prevented, governments redirected, and the future formed by the simple power of intercessory prayer.
Our whispered prayers can seem feeble, foolish, and futile against the sheer scale of life’s troubles—a butterfly confronting a cliff.
To be in Christ is to be drawn up into his intercession for the world. To be filled with the Spirit is to be filled with an interceding spirit. Where once we could ignore the problems of others, we begin caring deeply. We are sensitized to the world’s brokenness. We yearn for our friends to know Jesus. Our lives take the shape of a single prayer: “Your kingdom come.”
As Oswald Chambers says, “The real business of your life as a saved soul is intercessory prayer. . . . Prayer does not fit us for the greater works; prayer is the greater work.”[14]
That which God abundantly makes the subject of his promises, God’s people should abundantly make the subject of their prayers. JONATHAN EDWARDS,
By identifying relevant promises in God’s Word and focusing them on a particular person, place, or situation, you can be sure that you are interceding for them in line with God’s purposes and therefore in the name of Jesus.
Intercessory prayer is spiritual defiance of what is in the way of what God has promised. WALTER WINK
If everyone just prays on their own privately at home, it’s not the same thing at all. There is a unique power vested in the united intercession of God’s people.
have one passion. It is He, only He. COUNT ZINZENDORF
The Bible is more honest about unanswered prayer than the church. The Gospel writers make no attempt to hush up the fact that Jesus himself experienced disappointments in prayer.
On one occasion, a blind man he prayed for was only half healed. He could see people, but they looked like trees. So Jesus had to pray again.[2] In the garden of Gethsemane, he pleaded with his heavenly Father, “Take this cup from me,” but the Father said no.[3] On the cross he cried out, in the throes of complete abandonment, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” but the heavens remained silent.[4] And there’s at least one of his prayers that remains unanswered to this day. In his Great High Priest prayer, Jesus prayed for us: “that they may be brought to complete unity.”[5] But
...more
Whether your struggle with unanswered prayer relates to a physical illness, mental health, or a spiritual void in which God seems to have abandoned you, Jesus truly understands. He’s gone ahead and shown how to endure disorientation and pain.
Jesus wanted his three best friends by his side in his darkest hour. He didn’t try to put on a brave face. He didn’t pretend to be okay. He chose to include them in his distress, and even asked them to watch over him in prayer.
Jesus resolutely anchored himself in the Father’s love. His starting point in prayer was “Abba, Father.”
It’s important to remember that we are perfectly able to trust that which we cannot understand: “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD.”[10]
Jesus prays five of the most surprising words in the entire Bible. He asks God for an alternative to the cross. This is Jesus at his most vulnerable, and he appears to be praying “unbiblically.”
let me just suggest that most unanswered prayers can be attributed to either God’s world, God’s war, or God’s will.
God has intricately established certain governing principles that make the world work best for most people in most places most of the time.
The laws of science are explanations of the ways in which God mostly chooses to act, but sometimes he exercises his right to go off-book.
As C. S. Lewis says, “That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith.”
He adds, however, that “the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.”
Some prayers aren’t answered because there is an active enemy at work in our world attacking and opposing the work of God—we live in a battle zone.
As P. T. Forsyth says, “We shall come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God’s great refusals were sometimes the true answers to our truest prayer.”
Suddenly, he reached across the table and patted my chest. “You wanna know how God changes you in here, Pete? Silence! Contemplation! That’s how you pray continually. It’s like Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet doing the one thing needed, while her sister is getting all hot and bothered in the kitchen.”
The priest took a sip of his Pepsi. “I’m not against intercession and all those other kinds of prayer,” he said. “In fact, I think they’re essential. It’s just that they’re not enough. The world is so full of need. You watch the news, and there’s so much tragedy. How many things do you have to add to your prayer list after that?
“What if the hour you spend in the prayer room is when you refocus on Jesus so that you can carry his presence with you into the other twenty-three hours of the day with a heightened awareness that he is with you, he is for you, that he likes you, that he hears your thoughts? You start to pray in real time.
If petition is prayer at its simplest, and intercession is prayer at its most powerful, contemplation is prayer at its deepest and most personally transformational.
In fact, I believe that most ordinary Christians already practice contemplation and experience God’s presence way more than they realize.
Or maybe you’ve sometimes been sitting alone quietly in prayer or been walking outside, and God’s peace has gently enveloped you in a way that made words seem unnecessary and even inappropriate.
As I mentioned in chapter 3, Anthony of the Desert described this experience more than 1700 years ago as “Perfect prayer is not to know that you are praying.”
The great poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, says something similar in one of his most famous poems: For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
His last entry is one of the most astonishing things I have ever read: All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no interest in anything but the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. If God wants it to, my life will be useful through my word and witness. If he wants it to, my life will bear fruit through my prayers and sacrifices. But the usefulness of my life is his concern, not mine. It would be indecent of me to worry about that.
But ultimately, this brilliant intellect was not a rationalist but a mystic who argued that “people almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer was listening. SØREN KIERKEGAARD
PRAYER IS A LIVING conversation with a loving God, which means that we must listen as well as talk.
Hearing God in the Bible. Hearing God in dreams and visions. Hearing God in counsel and common sense. Hearing God in personal reflection. Hearing God in action.
The Bible is our primary source of revelation and the ultimate authority by which we weigh all other words.
We shouldn’t just learn from the Bible, therefore; we should also listen to it.
The paradigm shift happens when you realize that the Bible wasn’t meant to be read through; the Bible was meant to be prayed through. And if you pray through it, you’ll never run out of things to talk about.”
First, we discover that there are prayer prompts and conversation starters scattered on almost every page of the Bible
