Category Archives: Prayer

When it feels like God doesn’t listen to prayer

Grace and Judgment Posted on by

Do you ever feel like you pray and pray and God doesn’t listen? It may or may not be true.

Once when I was feeling really down and rudderless, I opened my Bible at random and found Isaiah 1. It contains this passage:

 

11The multitude of your sacrifices—
what are they to me?” says the Lord.
I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure
in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.
12 When you come to appear before me,
who has asked this of you,
this trampling of my courts?

… Read the rest

Lessons on prayer from Paul’s Epistle to Philemon

Grace and Judgment Posted on by

Among their many treasures, Paul’s epistles contain a lot of prayers, which we can use as models and lessons on prayer. His shortest epistle, the one to Philemon, has a gem.

While in a Roman prison, Paul met a man named Onesimus, grew quite fond of him, and came to rely on him. Onesimus had come to Rome from Paul’s old missionary territory back in modern Turkey.

When Paul wrote letters, he couldn’t just put a stamp on them and expect the post office to deliver them. He had to enlist the help of trusted couriers. Who better than Onesimus to carry Ephesians and Colossians back to his home?… Read the rest

Be still: in spite of your monkey mind!

Grace and Judgment Posted on by

In Psalm 46:10, God says, “Be still and know that I am God.”

How?

For a lot of people, it would start by turning off their cell phones and anything else that provides background chatter.

I am not a cell phone addict. My television and radio are off most of the time. No one else lives at my house. Right now, I can hear the air conditioner fan and the ticking of a clock. My dogs don’t even have anything to bark at. So I regularly experience a level of quietness that many people today would find alien and threatening.

That’s outside of me.… Read the rest

Beans, ping-pong balls, and Jesus

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Perhaps you have seen this object lesson: Before starting his sermon, a preacher asked for a volunteer from the congregation. He had a jar of beans and three ping-pong balls, and asked the volunteer to put the ping-pong balls into the jar. He couldn’t do it.

The preacher emptied the beans into a pitcher. The balls easily fit into the jar. Then the preacher asked the volunteer to see how many of the beans he could get into the jar. They all fit with some room to spare.

The ping-pong balls represented time with God. The beans represented all of the day’s activities.… Read the rest

Jesus’ humility, Satan’s pride: whom do we follow?

Grace and Judgment Posted on by

God is all-powerful, but when he chose to use his power to become a man, he also chose not to use power like other men. It is Satan who turns power into something coercive and egocentric.

It would be nice if we could say that Christians understand the situation and exercise power as Jesus did. Unfortunately, we can truthfully say no more than that some do, and they successfully imitate Christ maybe only some of the time.

… Read the rest

The consequences of sin and repentance

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“Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and the walls come a-tumblin’ down.” Then he and his people sinned. The next part of the story didn’t go as well for them. Joshua decided to attack the small town of Ai next. They chased his warriors out of town and killed some of them. What happened?

Most obviously, someone named Achan took some of the spoils and hid them in his tent. God didn’t appear to Joshua and tell him what had happened and what he thought about it. He hardly ever does.

I have written previously about Achan’s sin, how God revealed it to the people, and how they had to carry out his gracious judgment.… Read the rest

False religion and the God-shaped vacuum

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God shaped vacuum“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”

That familiar quotation is falsely attributed to Blaise Pascal, but it’s a reasonable paraphrase of what he actually wrote.

It’s true, no matter who put it in those words.  Trouble is, sinful man has tried to fill it with something else—anything else—besides God since time immemorial.

What “spiritual” atheists think about God

I recently came across an article that talks about a remarkably high percentage of atheists who nonetheless consider themselves somehow “religious” or “spiritual.”… Read the rest

Joshua and the secret of answered prayer

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Jesus said, “Ask and it will be given to you.” He did not say, “Ask and it will be given to you immediately.” He also did not say, “Ask and it will be given you exactly as you envision it.” When we ask and seem not to receive, it’s easy to fall into some kind of crisis of faith.

Ordinarily, Bible teachers deal with the questions of unanswered prayer by looking at the text in detail in order to point out conditions or the various ways we sabotage our own faith. Instead, let’s look at Joshua.

The 11th chapter of Joshua might not make the most fascinating reading, but it does summarize the accomplishments and answered prayers of one of the Old Testament’s most successful leaders.… Read the rest

Praying the Lord’s Prayer with Daniel

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Wait a minute! Daniel was in the Old Testament and Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament? What does Daniel have to do with that?

In many churches, maybe most churches, the congregation recites every Sunday. Everyone has it memorized from the familiar King James translation. It is one of the few parts of today’s services where the language hasn’t been updated. It takes less than a minute. How many people actually pray it? Daniel did, as recorded in Daniel 9.

Praying the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew

Jesus gave the church a model prayer, not merely to be words to memorize.… Read the rest

Lent and the spiritual wilderness experience

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The season of Lent recalls Jesus’ 40-day temptation in the wilderness. All Christians sooner or later go through their own spiritual wilderness. And so, in the Old Testament, did one of the Sons of Korah, who left behind Psalms 42 and 43 to instruct and comfort us in our own struggles with wilderness experience.

These two psalms appear to have been originally one song of three verses with refrain: “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” (I use “verse” in the sense of familiar songs or hymns, not in the sense of a verse of scripture.)… Read the rest