Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Places to Pray
Where are your favorite places to pray? I hope there are places where you feel drawn to prayer when you are there. Actually, i hope you feel drawn to prayer wherever you are, but because of my forgetfulness, i love having places to pray. I don't recommend this normally, but the bed has been a consistent place for a long time. It is the greatest way to start my day. I roll over and see my Bible and Spurgeon's Morning and Evening sitting right there on the nightstand. It's also nice to just close my eyes again and pray right away instead of sleep. I realize this would not work for everyone. I also love going on walks. Lately, the trail along the river next to my apartment has been amazing. Quiet places out in nature are my absolute favorites. I also feel a need to pray in the truck on long drives. Those are my consistent places. But i guess the Lord is everywhere, and we don't need places to pray. The main point is that we are praying to our God, who is able to do abundantly more than we could ask or imagine, and who holds everything in His sovereign hands. I am preparing some stuff for my vision team with InterVarsity about the book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire by Jim Cymbala. I would recommend other books on prayer, such as John Bunyan's Prayer , but Cymbala's book makes me want to keep praying more and more. I want to be in earnest prayer for my students and Joanna, for my family and for circumstances. The sweetest times, however, are spent in worship of God for who He is and meditation of Christ. God does good things all the time!
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3 comments:
Q:"Where are your favorite places to pray?"
A: In the Spirit
Okay, needless joke. Here's a question I have to pose for anyone that would like to respond.
In America are we gnostic about the way we pray? Remember the Gnosticisim that Paul fought in the Scripture upheld the idea that matter=evil, spirit=good. And what I mean when I ask this about America is that we often focus on whether our hearts in the right place, that our spirits are still and quite before the Lord, but we never enunciate a physical position. We say you can stand, sit, bow, lie down, walk, drive, etc, we don't emphasize the physical. Anyway, just wondering what some thoughts on this are. And don't respond simply by saying God doesn't care about the physical, I want to hear some Scripture :-)
Interesting. I've thought about this a bit. The most obvious positions that scripture points out are raised hands (1 Tim 2:8), and prostrate (Deut. 9:18, Mt. 26:39...), and kneeling (Acts 21:5). I also think laying on of hand is talked about more than we would like to admit, and i wish many elders would take that charge more seriously. We are also not to pray in public for the purpose of being seen by others(Mt. 6:5).
When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he mentioned nothing about physical position, however, and we are to pray continuously day and night. Paul prayed when he wrote letters, when he knelt, when he raised his hands, when he layed hands on people, and i think we should be in prayer when we are walking, driving, sitting, standing, kneeling, writing, raising our hands, laying on our faces, and all the time.
We need to pray whether our hearts are in the right place or not, whether our spirits are quieted, whether we are resting or working. But you are a philosophy student, Mr. Borg, and you know that often we cannot separate the physical from the spiritual as neatly as we would like. It seems physical position and spiritual position may go hand-in-hand a little more than we tend to want to believe in America, unless of course you are into yoga (there is no such thing as Christian yoga, but that's another topic). I know you've thought about this, so let some more people respond and then i want to hear more of your thoughts, since i don't have much for you.
Well, here's another question for anyone to mull over. I've been wondering, is it okay to pray to Jesus and the Holy Spirit even though Scripture never says we should, and even Jesus prayed only to the Father?
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