January 25, 2007

• Prayer

  Please pray traveling mercies on us. Today we are driving to Philadelphia so my oldest can get a look at Wharton School of Economics. We are going to make a one day round trip, so prayers are welcome.

  Last night I gave Julie all the comments you made on her poems and she was blessed to see them. We had one of our members teach a very encouraging Bible study which I will try to write up later today, but that usually takes a few hours to type, proof, and look up the verses.

  So before I go today, I thought I would encourage you with a few more quotes from Philip Yancey’s, Prayer, Does it Make any Difference? Let me tell you, this book is one that will stay on my shelves and be pulled down time and again.

  P. 137 We humans are confined to a space-time universe that began at a moment of time, but God is not. Experiments on relativity have proved that, strange as it seems, time itself is no constant.”

  P. 139 “We tend to place God’s activity in a different category from natural or human activity; the Bible tends to draws them together. Somehow God works in all of creation, all of history, to bring about ultimate goals.”

  P. 141, Jim (in an insert) says, “I treasure the time I spend with God more than the requests I want him to fulfill.”

  P. 142 “In a few other places the New Testament gives hints of God choosing us “before the creation of the world.” God’s grace, claims Paul, “was given to us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,” with Jesus “chosen before the creation of the world but revealed in these last times for your sake.” Our eternal life was promised “before the beginning of time.” Thus the essentials of hope—God’s love, heaven, grace, resurrection–the Bible specifically grounds outside of time and creation. Long before Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time and space, long before any notion of a Big Bang origin of the universe, the New Testament writers established these truths as, quite literally, timeless.”

  P. 144 “By using prayer rather than other, more direct means, God once again chooses the most freedom-enhancing style of acting in the world. God waits to be asked, in some inscrutable way making God’s activity on earth contingent on us. Does the kingdom, or “God’s will,” advance more slowly because of that choice? Yes, in the same way parents slow their pace when the youngest child is learning to walk. Their goal is to equip someone else, not themselves.”

  P. 149 an insert by Susan ”I used to worry about falling asleep during prayer. Now, as a parent, I understand. What parent wouldn’t want her child to fall asleep in her arms?”

  P. 166 “When I pray, it may seem that I am narrowing my world, retreating from the real world into a prayer closet in Jesus’ metaphor. Actually I am entering another world, just as real but invisible, a world that has power to change both me and the world I seem to be retreating from. Regular prayer helps me to protect inner space, to prevent the outer world from taking over. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” Jesus said. When I think of how long a single image crafted by Hollywood lust-masters can live on in my mind, I understand his saying. So often I fill my mind with images that crowd out all room for God. Prayer involves a “renewing of the mind,” a two-stage process of purging out what displeases God and damages me (the same, it turns out) and allowing God to fill my mind with what matters far more.”

  Hope you enjoy,

  Heather

   

  • 7:35 am
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