prayer on Ignorance

The following story is told about the Chicago Bears’ coach, Mike Ditka and one of his most famous players: One day Ditka was about to deliver a locker room pep talk and he looked up and saw defensiv...

To pray means to be willing to be naive.

Pride is a by-product of insecurity. And the more insecure a person is, the more monuments they need to build. There is a fine line between 'Thy kingdom come' and 'my kingdom come.' If...

The truth is simpler… and more alarming. [This] is the end of religious experience, the very opposite of mysticism…. We have been going round the paths, and suddenly we see our path goes round a hole,...

Prayer without study would be empty. Study without prayer would be blind.

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...

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?… On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of condi...

Writing about ministering to postmodern skeptics, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp share a helpful insight into the mystery of God's movement: The first lesson they have taught us about the path to f...

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for ...

Medieval Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), in his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, specifically the fourth petition (“give us this day our daily bread”), points out several ways that our own...

People: Oh Lord God, You have been gracious to us to give us Your holy Scripture which tells us of Your names, titles, qualities, regulations, word, and works. We should always treat these gifts with ...

True prayer is an awareness of our helpless need and an acknowledgment of divine adequacy.

I don’t pray because I don’t want God to know where I am.

God of grace, you ask us to pray without ceasing, yet we admit to you that we are easily distracted. Days and weeks can pass where we don’t acknowledge you. Neglecting our relationship with you, we de...

Merciful God, you have given us the gift of life. We confess the uncaring ways we have treated others. We have been impatient with those growing old. We have been inattentive to the curiosities of the...

My Sunday school class of youngsters had some problems repeating the Lord’s Prayer. One child prayed, “Our Father, who art in heaven, how’d you know my name.”

Courage is Fear That has said its prayers.

People: Oh God, whose name is great in all the earth, You have been good and gracious to give us Your name and for making Yourself known through your titles, qualities, regulations, word, and works. Y...

God of grace who knows us intimately and wholly; Who listens intently and persistently: We praise You. You hear the prayers of our lips and our hearts. You know our innermost thoughts and intentions. ...

To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule—it is a failure to treat God as God.

The prevailing idea seems to be, that I come to God and ask Him for something that I want, and that I expect Him to give me that which I have asked. But this is a most dishonouring and degading concep...

Praying to an invisible God does not bring forth the same feedback you would get from a counselor or from friends who at least nod their heads in sympathy. Is anyone really listening? As Ernestine, th...

What this means is that prayer can be learned only in the vocabulary and grammar of personal relationship: Father! Friend! It can never be a matter of getting the right words in the right order. It ca...

If your prayers were always answered, you’d have reason to doubt the Wisdom of God.

Introduction Sometimes verses 1-4 are separated from 5-10 in preaching. N. T. Wright points out, however, that in both sections, the need for humility binds the passages together. A teacher must prac...

Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.

Every prayerless day is a statement by a helpless individual, ‘I do not need God today.’ Failing to pray reflects idolatry – a trust in substitutes for God. We rely on our money instead of God’s provi...

One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and powe...

All-powerful God, overwhelmed by the sorrows and pains of the day, we are prone to doubting. We search for your goodness yet we cannot perceive it.  We long for your greatness but we disbelieve it.  H...

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 ne...