thought exercise on Praying with Expectance

“The Prince of Preachers”, Charles Haddon Spurgeon once shared a thoughtful analogy for the life of prayer in most people’s lives: Prayer pulls the rope down below and the great bell rings above i...

“Hey, Craig, do you believe God still does miracles?” “Of course,” I said. “Good—because your prayers are so lame.” I tried to laugh with him, but my friend’s joke stung—mostly because he was right. W...

Have you ever thought to yourself, "I'm glad I'm not God!" Too much responsibility! In the 2003 movie "Bruce Almighty," Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) gains God’s divine powers b...

Have you heard the old spiritual “Down to the River to Pray” or “The Good Old Way”? It is most famous in popular culture because of Alison Kraus’s version of the song recorded for the movie O Broth...

Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to w...

Anticipation lifts the heart. Desire is created to be fulfilled – perhaps not all at once, more likely in slow stages. Isaiah uttered his prophetic words about the renewal of the natural Creation into...

We Christians must be armed and expect every day to be under continuous attack. . . . At such times our only help and comfort is to run here and seize hold of the Lord’s Prayer and speak to God from o...

During my work, I would always continue to speak to the Lord as though He were right with me, offering Him my services and thanking Him for His assistance. And at the end of my work, I used to examine...

Because the results of God’s sovereignty are delayed, waiting remains an act of faith. We believe results will occur one day. By waiting on God, we affirm our belief in his providence. We trust his ti...

This prayer, written by the great British pastor and poet John Donne, anticipates the new heaven and new earth that we will one day experience with our Lord: Bring us, O Lord, at our last awakening ...

Now assurance goes far to set a child of God free. . . .It enables him to feel that the great business of life is a settled business, the great debt a paid debt, the great disease a healed disease, an...

I remember a story that R. A. Torrey told, growing out of a series of meetings he had held in Melbourne, Australia. He had been speaking on prayer. One day just before a noon meeting a note was placed...

Nine-year-old Leo Tolstoy , convinced God would help him fly, dove headfirst out a third-floor window and had his first major crisis of disappointment with God. Fortunately, Tolstoy survived the cr...

There are a great number among the Christian people, who, in the Lord’s prayer, when they pray, “Thy kingdom come,” pray that this day may come; but yet, nonetheless, they are drowned in the world: th...

With the global coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, life stopped. Overwhelmed by the threat of a disease we couldn’t stop and for which we didn’t have the hospital capacity, everyone moved work and s...

Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death. That is natural and normal, a proper reaction to the Last Enemy. Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the ...

When one prays the hours, one is using the exact words, phrases, and petitions that informed our faith for centuries. . . . We are using the exact words, phrases, and petitions that were offered just ...

Intimacy happens as we bring more and more of ourselves into God’s presence. To pray with soul and body means, says Jane Vennard, “praying with all of who we are: our physicality, our emotions, our in...

One of the biggest challenges in the Christian journey is grasping the heart of grace. Oftentimes there is an internal battle between our theology and our lived experience. In this short excerpt, Fred...

The prayers in the Psalms use words of waiting, watching, listening, tasting and seeing, meditating, and resting. It’s remarkable how inefficient these actions are. They aren’t accomplishing anything....

Right before my freshman year of high school, I was hospitalized for a severe asthma attack that landed me in the intensive care unit. It was one of a dozen such hospitalizations during my younger yea...

Agnes Sanford relates how, as the young wife of an Episcopal minister, her child came down with a serious ear infection. It lasted for six weeks while she prayed fearfully and fruitlessly. Then a neig...

Patience is more than endurance. A saint's life is in the hands of God like a bow and arrow in the hands of an archer. God is aiming at something the saint cannot see, and He stretches and strains...

I say my prayers, I read a book of devotion, I prepare for, or receive, the Sacrament. But while I do these things there is, so to speak, a voice inside me that urges caution. It tells me to be carefu...

On a walking pilgrimage to Assisi in Italy, the writer Patricia Hampl began to make a list in answer to the question, What is prayer? She wrote down a few words. Praise. Gratitude. Begging/pleading/cu...

In his book Surprise Endings, Ron Mehl recounted a story about a seventy-eight-year-old minister who was hired by a church in California. Not long after his arrival, the church members began to compla...

The Lord’s Prayer is designed to help us make this change: a change of priority, not a change of content. This prayer doesn’t pretend that pain and hunger aren’t real. Some religions say that; Jesus d...

To pray, I think, does not mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things, or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people. Rather, it means to think and live ...

Here is the first step of prayer in a universe where God has put on flesh to be with us: we must put ourselves in the way of his friendship to sick and needy sinners. The heart naturally resists this ...

A father is delighted when his little one, leaving off her toys and friends, runs to him and climbs into his arms. As he holds his little one close to him, he cares little whether the child is looking...