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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tyler Staton
Read between
September 2 - November 30, 2024
it’s not because they’re suddenly caught up in a moment of euphoria, inspiration, and wonder. “Hallowed be your name” is a longing to see God here and now, to know his presence in the midst of this mess.
But the God who is Immanuel is equally in those moments we would never choose as in those we would always gladly choose.”
“In affliction you bring wisdom that my comforts can displace”
When they sang in a jail cell, they were dragging heaven into a dark corner of earth, and it changed the atmosphere.
it’s our wounds that God often uses to heal others, not our competencies.
Bible scholars have pointed to eight different Hebrew words used in the Bible, all translated with the one English word sin.
This makes me feel better about trying to define it to my kids
it’s about the state of their souls.
They trusted themselves, not the God they believed in. And that is what the Bible calls sin—good desire channeled through the wrong means.
Calls to mind Dante
It’s that sin inhibits us from doing what we were made to do best—love—to receive love and to give it.
Goes back to trust
The way our sin hurts others is the collateral of that first refusal.
The entrance back into the full, free, abundant kind of life God made us for is guarded.
Christ's death our passage back
My real life is a mockery of who I want to be and wish I was.
God deals with sin by forgiving us, and when he forgives us there is more of us, not less.”
One of the biggest mistakes we’ve made in the modern church is to reimagine spiritual maturity as the need to confess less.
Maturity is discovering the depths of my personal brand of fallenness and the depths to which God’s grace has really penetrated, even without me knowing it.
The very parts of our stories we most want to edit, or erase altogether, become the very parts of our stories we’d never take back and never stop telling. That’s the kind of author God is.
Enticing to view sin as a greater opportunity for grace. Makes confession exciting almost. Like yes i have this ugly stain of sin BUT GOD meets me and loves me anyway!
It is not by our gifts, insights, ideas, or qualifications that God is determined to heal the world, but by our scars. By his wounds we are healed,25 and by our wounds the healing is shared.
beneath the surface, the weight I’m lugging around,
Most people go to the grave without ever confronting the false self—the
He has definitely read Till We Have Faces
Monica stayed awake all night in intense prayer that God would prevent his travels.
“History belongs to the intercessors”—what a compelling wonder! That is, until we actually begin to pray, and all that confidence and inspiration are drowned in a tsunami of questions, doubts, confusion, and past disappointment.
prayer that joins God to bring about redemption and push back the darkness?
And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.
The motive behind all true intercessory prayer is love for the other.
This isn’t just a story of God and one guy named Adam; this is the story of God and all of us. It’s every individual’s story.
You and I lost who we are.
Because we were ALREADY rulers, image bearers, like God
The ancient phrase “in my name” means “under my authority.” To pray in Jesus’ name means to pray with recovered authority.
“In Jesus’ name” was never meant to become just a fitting tagline at the end of the prayers of experienced Christians. It’s the exercise of Jesus’ victory. To pray is to experience the very same access to God the Father that Jesus has.
Again puts Chambers in a more logical light. It cost Christ so much because of the authority he was winning back for us
Prayer is the means by which we push back the curse that’s infected the world and infected us.
“Intercession is impossible until we allow the things that break God’s heart to break our hearts as well.”
I love Diego, and his needs exceed my capacity, so what fills the space between love and humility? Prayer.
Where does my will stop and God’s begin? How do I ask in a way that’s in line with God’s eternal perspective?
Everything we can think to ask for finds its source in heaven.
The “daily bread” variety of prayers is also a battle cry, a declaration of war against one of the soul’s fiercest enemies—control.
I can trust him as my answer to the big theological questions, but I’m not sure if I can trust him with my dreams, my hopes, my plans.
Daily, as we ask, he weans us off our addiction to independence, our insistence on living under the illusion that what we most deeply desire we can feed ourselves all on our own.
We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). Prayer takes place in the middle voice.2
The middle voice means I am an active participant but the action began with another.
None of what they were entrusted to steward began with them. Everything that is exists because God spoke the first word. But neither does God ask Adam and Eve to sit back and watch him rule. He invites their participation, even designing creation in such a way that it demands participation.
"creation demands participation"
Rather, the aim of prayer is to get us in on what God is doing, become aware of it, join it, and enjoy the fruit of participation.
No one wins a fight against that kind of current. You can agree with it and cruise along assisted, or you can fight it and be pushed along, exhausted. The one thing you can’t do is pretend the rushing river current is a still-water pond.
I want to cooperate with God’s work in me, inviting his formation of my desires, thoughts, emotions, and actions, all of them hopelessly disordered by the fallen lineage of which I’m a part. I want the Spirit of God to rework me from within, like an expert mechanic to a classic car, getting me running according to design.
By praying in the middle voice, we consent to the deep work of the Spirit within, deeper even than language, forming us into resilient people in a fragile world, with no fear of bad news.
As time passes and your own lack of control becomes more apparent, are you growing in resilience, or in anxiety?
God has a habit of employing us in response to our own prayers.
her life was about being with God and responding accordingly.
Intimacy leads to fruitfulness,
Fruitfulness comes because we love Jesus and want to be with him. When that’s our heart, the expression of that relationship begins to look like justice in the world, compassion for others, and peace in our inner being.
I’m an extra in the background of a single scene in a narrative that is grander, more complex, and more redemptive than I could fathom. This is a story about God.
Wherever you recognize his Spirit inviting you to act, say yes. Commit to go, to give, to forgive, to include, to slow down, to rest, to see, to hope, to believe, to serve, to speak, to listen, to wait, to love.
