Prayer
Hello and welcome,
What you will find here are a few resources that I trust will be helpful in growing your prayer life. I hope you will come back sometime. At this point I do not expect to be writing regular content for this blog, but rather to use it to post supplements to the Sunday morning sermon.
On Sunday, I endeavored, with Paul, to call us to devote ourselves increasingly to prayer in 2017. I believe you will find the resources below to be useful in gaining a deeper understanding of what exactly prayer is as well as how to grow in it. But before I recommend resources, I will remind you of the warning I gave in Sunday’s sermon: you will not learn to pray until you pray. If you have little to no prayer life do not think that reading a book with make you a praying person. Begin. There is hope for you in the gospel. Rest your hope in Christ. Then pick a quiet place, a quiet time, quiet your heart afresh in the good news of Jesus Christ, and simply begin. You will not learn to pray until you pray.
Some of you have been praying for longer than I have been alive and I praise the Lord for this! All of us, however long we have been praying, need to have our prayer lives continually reformed by Scripture. To this end, I encourage you to begin by reflecting on the prayers of the New Testament. Do your prayers reflect the theology and priorities of these prayers? Pray these prayers, and let them reshape both how you pray and what you pray for. Here is a short list of references to some prayers in the NT: Matthew 6:6-15; 1Thessalonians 3:9-13; 2 Thessalonians 1:3-4, 11-12; Colossians 1:9-14; 4:12; Philippians 1:9-11; Ephesians 1:15-23; 3:14-21. Read, and then pray.
I commend to you this article by Edmund Clowney titled, A Biblical Theology of Prayer. It is short at around 39 pages, but has a lot packed into those pages, and will richly reward the effort of carefully reading through it.
Here are two books that I commend to you along the lines of praying scripture:
Whitney, Don. Praying the Bible. Crossway, 2015
Carson, D. A. Praying with Paul: A Call to Spiritual Reformation. 2nd Ed. Baker, 2015
Here are two additional books I commend to you on cultivating private prayer in general:
McIntyre, David. The Hidden Life of Prayer: The life-blood of the Christian. Christian Heritage, 2010
Miller, Paul. A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World. NavPress, 2009.
I would love to speak with you about any of these resources or hear how the Lord uses them in strengthening and deepening your prayer life. Just grab me on a Sunday morning or find my contact information here. You will not learn to pray until you pray, so begin, and press in.
For His glory and your joy,
Pastor Eric