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I am utterly confident that prayer works, but am far less certain about how prayer works. God invites and commands us to come to him with our petitions, our requests. He promises that he hears them, that through the intercession of the Spirit he perfects them, and that it is his joy to answer them. He gives us the things we long for, though not always in the way we ask and often not in the time we ask. Still, …
For the past several months, I have been searching through the long and storied history of the church to find examples of Christian men who had godly moms. More specifically, I have been searching for notable Christian men whose most important spiritual influence was their mother. I have discovered many of them and have been deeply encouraged by their stories. In the first article, we examined the life of John Newton, whose mother proved that spiritual strength can exist even …
It has been a few weeks since I last shared a collection of letters to the editor. But I’m making up for lost time today by posting quite a few. I hope you enjoy them! Comments on Seems So Long Ago, Nancy I read your recent flashback article, “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” with keen interest. Not because I know this song; in fact, I am not very familiar with much of Cohen’s music. I read with interest though because …
A friend asked the question: How do I pray for unbelievers? How do I pray effectively? I trust that every Christian regularly prays for family or friends or colleagues or neighbors who do not yet know the Lord. And while we can and must pray for matters related to their lives and circumstances, the emphasis of our prayers must always be for their salvation. Here are some ways the Bible can guide our prayers. Prayers for Salvation We begin with …
You know you ought to pray. You know that God invites and even commands you to pray. He loves to hear from you, loves to know you. Yet there are times when your soul feels bone dry, when even opening your mouth to pray seems an impossibility. What do you do? Just Pray Perhaps the hardest thing to do in those times is to even make the effort to pray. Just pray. It is always the right thing to do. …
It’s one of those little quotes that is well worth pondering, well worth chewing on for a while: “The things you pray about are the things you trust God to handle. The things you neglect to pray about are the things you trust you can handle on your own.” Those words come from H.B. Charles Jr. and they’ve caused me to pause and to consider—exactly what a good quote ought to do. If this quote reflects reality, and I think …
Not too long ago I was speaking to a friend who was lamenting the way he had spent his time the day before. He had become convicted that his prayer life was languishing and that it would benefit from a measure of organization. A couple of hours later he had to move on to other activities and realized that he had put a lot of time into thinking about prayer and organizing prayer, but little time into the actual act …
Maybe we are growing too accustomed to these Reformed mega-conferences. If that’s the case, we should think back to the time—it was only a few years ago–when there appeared to be an inverse relationship between a conference’s attendance and its doctrinal soundness. For many years it was true that the conferences that held to Reformed theology were sparsely attended. But then something happened and today we can choose from any number of great conferences centered around proclaiming the deepest truth. …
It seems that every Christian author eventually tries his hand at a book on prayer. And when our favorite author takes his turn, we, the readers, tend to pick it up. After all, prayer is difficult and few of us are confident that we are praying right and praying well. John Eldredge qualifies as a favorite author to thousands of Christians and he has now tried his hand at a book on prayer in Moving Mountains: Praying with Passion, Confidence, …
I am especially excited about this blog post. Why? Because it is in response to a Patreon supporter. What does that mean? It means that I have committed to interact at varying levels with those who choose to support me (you can see more details towards the bottom of this page). So, here is a question from one supporter: It’s good to teach our children to pray, we all know that. But what about having them pray aloud in public …