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DIR Return to: BIBLE STUDY - From The Late Lori Bolinger
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#Post#: 10678--------------------------------------------------
Why stay awake and pray?
By: guest24 Date: February 27, 2020, 8:54 am
---------------------------------------------------------
It seems in our world today that there are two distinct camps
when it comes to sin. On the one hand we have those that think
that we can never stop sinning and on the other hand we have
those that believe sin is such a small part of our walk that God
will forgive us so don’t worry, do whatever you want. Mark
14:32-42 and Matthew 26:36-46 give account of Jesus just before
He would be betrayed and arrested. Just before He would face
and endure some of the most horrendous torture and death that
man is capable of inventing. Things He knew were to come.
Things that grieved Him deeply as the text says, even to the
point of death. In this distress, Jesus asked His companions to
stay awake and pray with Him. Of course the men fell asleep and
so Jesus said to them, stay awake so you will not fall into
temptation. The men once again fall asleep. The third time
Jesus admonished them to stay awake for the hour had come.
Peter was one of those men and it was shortly after that that
Peter denied Christ three times before the cock crowed. There
are in these texts three specific reasons for one to stay awake
and pray. The first, is that of distress within self or
another. Psalms 102:7 talks about the distress that keeps one
awake all night as does Psalms 77:4. Sometimes we are so
troubled that we cannot sleep and instead we should stay awake
and pray.
The second reason given for staying awake and praying was to
avoid falling into temptation. We may never know if Peter had
stayed awake and prayed if He would not have denied knowing
Christ but we do know that temptations come day and night and
sin is important enough to stay awake and pray if that is what
it takes to avoid falling into that temptation. The spirit is
willing but the flesh is weak, something that Paul knew all too
well. (II Corinthians 12:9; Philippians 4:13)
The last time the disciples were commanded to stay away and
pray was because the time had come for Christ to be betrayed. I
Thessalonians 5 shares with us a similar idea. It is because we
are those that walk in the light not in darkness that we need to
stay awake, be serious, and be in full spiritual armor. In
faith and Love we are to encourage one another as we wait for
the return of the King. (Luke 12:40; Mark 13:33; Luke 21:36;
Ephesians 6:18; Colossians 4:2) It is little wonder that Paul
talks about the many sleepless nights he endured for the sake of
the gospel, for the sake of Love.
#Post#: 10681--------------------------------------------------
Re: Why stay awake and pray?
By: patrick jane Date: February 27, 2020, 1:20 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Excellent.
#Post#: 10700--------------------------------------------------
Re: Why stay awake and pray?
By: guest8 Date: February 28, 2020, 6:32 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=patrick jane link=topic=789.msg10681#msg10681
date=1582831246]
Excellent.
[/quote]
agree with you.
#Post#: 15045--------------------------------------------------
Re: Why stay awake and pray?
By: patrick jane Date: July 11, 2020, 9:54 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/118312.png?w=700[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2020/july/one-on-one-with-john-starke-on-having-deeper-prayer-life.html
One on One with John Starke on Having a Deeper Prayer Life
We need a deep, hidden life for a fruitful, public life.
Ed: Why a book on prayer? Have you noticed deficiencies in how
we are doing in the church in regards to prayer life?
John: We live in a performative age. “Performative
individualism” is how Sophie Gilbert describes our society,
where the performance of the self is more important than the
reality of it. The most obvious place this shows up is in social
media, where we curate our image to give the impression that we
are okay and that we’re successful.
But there are also forms of performative individualism in our
vocations, relationships, and even our families. Jesus warns
against this in “performing your righteousness before others” in
a kind of performative spirituality. The fruit of that is a
culture of hyper-insecurity, a lack of self-awareness, and deep
status anxiety.
We are likely all shaped by this culture in more subconscious
ways than we think.
The answer to this performative life is to have a regular,
hidden life with God. For many people, that’s intimidating.
Oftentimes, when we hear of a “deep prayer life,” they imagine
the one or two people in their church who are mature, or
pastors, or folks made of different spiritual stuff.
I wrote this book because the Bible imagines prayer to be a very
ordinary thing for very ordinary people. The whole first half of
the book is aimed at showing that a satisfying and vibrant
prayer life is for all who are in Christ.
Ed: What are some of the regular pathways and rhythms of a life
of prayer?
John: After we grasp that prayer is possible for us, we learn
the pathways. That’s the concern of the second half of the book,
where I look at six main disciplines: communion, mediation,
solitude, feasting and fasting, and corporate worship. These
aren’t complex, but ordinary things.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the most transformative
thing you can do is to begin to spend unhurried time with God on
a regular basis for the rest of your life. What I try to show in
the book is that it’s possible.
Ed: Who have you found to be key people in scripture who have
modeled what our prayer life should look like? How can we model
these patterns?
John: Jesus gives us a pattern of prayer in the Lord’s Prayer in
Matthew 6. That’s a good place to begin. But Jesus talks quite a
bit on prayer. He teaches us we ought to come to God like a
father who likes to give good gifts (Matt. 7:7-11); that we
ought to pray with faith (Mark 11:23-26); we ought to pray in
private (Mark 12:38-40); we ought to plead to God like a
persistent widow coming to a reluctant judge for justice or like
a tax collector longing for mercy (Luke 18).
But the prayer book of the church is the book of Psalms. Eugene
Peterson says somewhere that since the church’s beginning,
Christians have learned to pray by praying the Psalms each day.
The Psalms contain every human emotion.
They teach us how to pray when we are angry, desperate, joyful,
depressed, afflicted, and hopeful. They teach us how to feel or
what to say when our lives are falling apart or when we’ve just
been delivered.
The easiest way to allow the Psalms to shape your prayer life is
to read a psalm a day and ask how this psalm teaches me to talk
to God.
Ed: Let’s talk about prayer during these times of Covid-19 and
racial injustice. How do we press into prayer now?
John: Covid-19 has taken away a lot of the public and therefore
performative elements of our lives, leaving much of it hidden,
which can be strategic for our spiritual growth. It might be
helpful to imagine ourselves like a seed, buried in the ground.
So much happens to a seed, when buried. It dies, as Jesus says,
in John 12. But in doing so, it opens itself up to all the
resources of the soil and becomes something greater than it was.
But it had to be hidden to do so. I think there’s a lot to that
imagery that we haven’t been able to see and grasp until now.
With racial injustice, there’s a danger of performative justice.
In other words, right now, Christians are tempted to say the
right things on social media to ensure we are on the “right
side” or we don’t have any work to do on ourselves.
Then, once our culture is done being concerned about it, so are
we. Having right conclusions about racial injustice is one
thing, but to be working against it for only as long as the
culture is paying attention is worldliness. We will need
something deeper than “cultural support” to be people of
justice.
Justice, especially racial justice, is a long road that often
takes many hidden acts of sacrifice and suffering. So much is
needed that is unseen. That means we will need to know how to
work and pray in hidden ways. For many of us, it’s hard to even
imagine what that kind of life and work looks like. We need a
deep, hidden life for a fruitful, public life.
Ed Stetzer is executive director of the Wheaton College Billy
Graham Center, serves as a dean at Wheaton College, and
publishes church leadership resources through Mission Group. The
Exchange Team contributed to this article.
#Post#: 15047--------------------------------------------------
Re: Why stay awake and pray?
By: guest8 Date: July 11, 2020, 11:40 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=patrick jane link=topic=789.msg15045#msg15045
date=1594522479]
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/118312.png?w=700[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2020/july/one-on-one-with-john-starke-on-having-deeper-prayer-life.html
One on One with John Starke on Having a Deeper Prayer Life
We need a deep, hidden life for a fruitful, public life.
Ed: Why a book on prayer? Have you noticed deficiencies in how
we are doing in the church in regards to prayer life?
John: We live in a performative age. “Performative
individualism” is how Sophie Gilbert describes our society,
where the performance of the self is more important than the
reality of it. The most obvious place this shows up is in social
media, where we curate our image to give the impression that we
are okay and that we’re successful.
But there are also forms of performative individualism in our
vocations, relationships, and even our families. Jesus warns
against this in “performing your righteousness before others” in
a kind of performative spirituality. The fruit of that is a
culture of hyper-insecurity, a lack of self-awareness, and deep
status anxiety.
We are likely all shaped by this culture in more subconscious
ways than we think.
The answer to this performative life is to have a regular,
hidden life with God. For many people, that’s intimidating.
Oftentimes, when we hear of a “deep prayer life,” they imagine
the one or two people in their church who are mature, or
pastors, or folks made of different spiritual stuff.
I wrote this book because the Bible imagines prayer to be a very
ordinary thing for very ordinary people. The whole first half of
the book is aimed at showing that a satisfying and vibrant
prayer life is for all who are in Christ.
Ed: What are some of the regular pathways and rhythms of a life
of prayer?
John: After we grasp that prayer is possible for us, we learn
the pathways. That’s the concern of the second half of the book,
where I look at six main disciplines: communion, mediation,
solitude, feasting and fasting, and corporate worship. These
aren’t complex, but ordinary things.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the most transformative
thing you can do is to begin to spend unhurried time with God on
a regular basis for the rest of your life. What I try to show in
the book is that it’s possible.
Ed: Who have you found to be key people in scripture who have
modeled what our prayer life should look like? How can we model
these patterns?
John: Jesus gives us a pattern of prayer in the Lord’s Prayer in
Matthew 6. That’s a good place to begin. But Jesus talks quite a
bit on prayer. He teaches us we ought to come to God like a
father who likes to give good gifts (Matt. 7:7-11); that we
ought to pray with faith (Mark 11:23-26); we ought to pray in
private (Mark 12:38-40); we ought to plead to God like a
persistent widow coming to a reluctant judge for justice or like
a tax collector longing for mercy (Luke 18).
But the prayer book of the church is the book of Psalms. Eugene
Peterson says somewhere that since the church’s beginning,
Christians have learned to pray by praying the Psalms each day.
The Psalms contain every human emotion.
They teach us how to pray when we are angry, desperate, joyful,
depressed, afflicted, and hopeful. They teach us how to feel or
what to say when our lives are falling apart or when we’ve just
been delivered.
The easiest way to allow the Psalms to shape your prayer life is
to read a psalm a day and ask how this psalm teaches me to talk
to God.
Ed: Let’s talk about prayer during these times of Covid-19 and
racial injustice. How do we press into prayer now?
John: Covid-19 has taken away a lot of the public and therefore
performative elements of our lives, leaving much of it hidden,
which can be strategic for our spiritual growth. It might be
helpful to imagine ourselves like a seed, buried in the ground.
So much happens to a seed, when buried. It dies, as Jesus says,
in John 12. But in doing so, it opens itself up to all the
resources of the soil and becomes something greater than it was.
But it had to be hidden to do so. I think there’s a lot to that
imagery that we haven’t been able to see and grasp until now.
With racial injustice, there’s a danger of performative justice.
In other words, right now, Christians are tempted to say the
right things on social media to ensure we are on the “right
side” or we don’t have any work to do on ourselves.
Then, once our culture is done being concerned about it, so are
we. Having right conclusions about racial injustice is one
thing, but to be working against it for only as long as the
culture is paying attention is worldliness. We will need
something deeper than “cultural support” to be people of
justice.
Justice, especially racial justice, is a long road that often
takes many hidden acts of sacrifice and suffering. So much is
needed that is unseen. That means we will need to know how to
work and pray in hidden ways. For many of us, it’s hard to even
imagine what that kind of life and work looks like. We need a
deep, hidden life for a fruitful, public life.
Ed Stetzer is executive director of the Wheaton College Billy
Graham Center, serves as a dean at Wheaton College, and
publishes church leadership resources through Mission Group. The
Exchange Team contributed to this article.
[/quote]
I have found the best way to pray to Jesus is like the ole'
farmer.....through the heart.
Blade
#Post#: 16064--------------------------------------------------
Re: Why stay awake and pray?
By: patrick jane Date: August 11, 2020, 1:14 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dPnDxzjAy8
#Post#: 18305--------------------------------------------------
Re: Why stay awake and pray?
By: patrick jane Date: October 2, 2020, 12:04 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Pray
#Post#: 19088--------------------------------------------------
Re: Why stay awake and pray?
By: patrick jane Date: October 19, 2020, 8:38 am
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esxpEOH7zJQ
#Post#: 30358--------------------------------------------------
Re: Why stay awake and pray?
By: patrick jane Date: May 27, 2021, 5:21 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=patrick jane link=topic=789.msg19088#msg19088
date=1603114709]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esxpEOH7zJQ
[/quote] >:(
#Post#: 35695--------------------------------------------------
Re: Why stay awake and pray?
By: patrick jane Date: November 13, 2021, 6:44 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/126327.jpg?h=528&w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/november-web-only/stokes-romantic-poets-prayer.html
She Walks in Beauty Like a Prayer
Christopher Stokes on how the Romantic poets propelled a new
view of personal devotion.
The language of prayer and the language of poetry share strong
similarities. Prayer, like poetry, allows for, and even invites,
the interplay between truth and beauty. A new book explores this
connection between rational thought and aesthetic expression.
Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion,
1773–1832(Oxford University Press, 2021), by Christopher Stokes,
senior lecturer in Romantic literature with the University of
Exeter, is a scholarly examination of several key poets of the
British Romantic period, from pre-Romantic William Cowper to
second-generation Romantics Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and a
range of poets in between.
The poets examined in this book reflect shifts in forms of
religious devotion. Stokes argues that the theology of prayer
reflected in this age and its poets parallels the growing
importance of individual practices in religious life, when
devotion became as much about doing as believing. Poetry,
likewise, was increasingly becoming a personal practice, not
merely an objective art.
Living in a time of ongoing and culminating secularization,
these poets illustrate the ways Christianity helped birth
secularity, as debates about the modes of Christianity evolved
into debates about Christianity itself. Even so, as Stokes
shows, poetry can be a way to preserve and practice religious
faith amid growing skepticism.
You call prayer “an organ of faith” because of the way it
“imprints” an understanding of God in the one who prays. Poetry,
too, is a language that forms or imprints itself on us. The
foundation of your analysis is that the language of prayer and
the language of poetry are deeply connected. How are they
connected?
There’s certainly a deep historical connection between poetry
and prayer. As I note in the book, the very earliest surviving
poem in English, Caedmon’s “Hymn,” is a kind of prayer. And
across the centuries, poetry has been energized by its
relationship with private prayers, with hymnody, with liturgies,
and with great scriptural texts like the Psalms or the Song of
Songs. There are certain eras—I’m thinking of the 17th century
and the Victorian period, for instance—when devotional poetry
really is as good as anything else being written in English
literature, and you see poetry drawing this tremendous beauty
and complexity from the great religious and theological shifts
of its times.
So, it’s impossible to think about the development of English
verse—and literature never sheds its histories—without thinking
about prayer as well. The evangelical tradition often slighted
set or memorized prayers and saw prayer as a much more visceral
cry from the heart. Poetry also took inspiration from that
notion.
More abstractly, there is also something interlinking the
experience of prayer and the experience of lyric poetry (poetry
spoken by an “I”), which has always captured the imagination of
writers. Perhaps it has to do with the intimacy of voice, or the
overtones of confession, or the idea of speaking in this
strikingly unusual way (that prayer and poetry share) whereby
there isn’t necessarily an addressee present in the conventional
way but there is still a fundamental sense that this language
will be heard. I’ve always been fascinated by those links.
The Romantic poets were, in many ways, reacting to seismic
shifts in the 18th century, shifts brought about by the
Enlightenment, by the factions within and outside the
established church, and by the increased subjectivity that both
enacted and reflected these changes. You call this “a time in
which prayer was a language under pressure.” What do you mean by
this?
Maybe prayer is always a language under pressure! The
Enlightenment gets mischaracterized, I think, as a relentless
critique of religion. Actually, the radical atheist or
anti-Christian polemic we associate with, say, French thinkers,
was a pretty extreme wing of a much broader sensibility across
Europe, and most parts of it had no real desire to exit
Christianity at all.
However, it is true that many Christian thinkers in the era were
obsessed about the reasonableness of religion as a belief
system—and prayer fit quite awkwardly into that rationalizing
project. For example, the idea that God would intervene
supernaturally in the carefully constructed natural universe he
had elegantly and intelligently created just because someone
prays—well, that just didn’t sit well.
As the century went on, I would summarize two opposite reactions
to this “reasonableness.” On the one hand, some Christians
wanted to rationalize further, and their versions of prayer
became closer to contemplation or meditation. On the other, the
Methodists and the evangelicals offered something much more
unapologetically spiritual and otherworldly, addressing a
devotional need but provoking a lot of suspicion and even
mockery from the mainstream. So, it’s a fascinating time when
multiple ideas of prayer are circulating.
You describe the “secular” as “a space opened up between theism
and atheism.” Can you elaborate on this idea?
It’s a way of looking at history in a more complex way. It seems
broadly clear that over a few hundred years in the West, we
moved from a state of affairs where Christianity was this
universally shared backdrop to a present moment where this isn’t
the case. Traditionally, the secularization hypothesis has
described this change as a one-way street whereby religion
inexorably gives more and more ground to reason, humanism,
science, or whatever. It’s a narrative of inevitable binary
conflict between religion and modernity. The problem is that we
generally find that black-and-white ways of looking at history
nearly always fail the fine detail. Things such as science
weren’t always the opposites of religion, and religion continued
to generate profound ways of inhabiting the world across the
18th and 19th centuries and beyond.
I’m trying to note that what the secular involves is not atheism
triumphing over theism and hence bringing in “the modern world”
as an atheist world, but rather a range of theists, a range of
skeptics, and a range of agnostics all developing their ideas in
a culture which no longer has that common background of shared
Christianity. Basically, it’s just an acknowledgment that
Christianity (or any religion) doesn’t stop having intellectual
vibrancy just because other forms of belief or nonbelief
suddenly share its cultural space; there are modern expressions
of the Christian tradition. Put that way, you have to question
why scholars ever thought that wasn’t the case!
Within the Evangelical Revival, prayer becomes not just an act
of reasonable devotion or duty but, as you write, “a struggle, a
wrestling, a matter of life or death.” You further explain that
“Evangelical prayer involves a transformation and transposition
of self,” and that this is because evangelicalism’s sense of
self involves “an experience of alterity and decentering.” How
does prayer itself contribute to this kind of “intensified
spiritual existence”?
I think all traditions recognized different forms and
experiences of prayer, but they also privileged certain kinds as
more prototypical. For the 18th-century mainstream, prayer
tended to be something that composed and oriented the self. It’s
all prayer as an action which places your thoughts and feelings
into a structure that referred to God. For the evangelical
tradition, prayer was not so much a “doing” as a state of
“being”—and importantly, a state of new being.
So, prayer was a couple of things to the 18th-century
evangelical. It was an invitation for a divine influx to make
the self anew. It was also the language of authentic life
breaking through from the depths of the soul, “an embryo of God,
a spark of fire divine,” as Anna Letitia Barbauld puts it. And
it’s also the record of the struggle of the sinner undergoing
that transformation. It’s all much more dramatic than the
mainstream account, because it’s about change in your whole
existence.
In your chapter on the poetry of the evangelical William Cowper
(most famous for his collaboration with John Newton on the Olney
Hymns), you address the connection between the practice of
prayer within the Evangelical Revival and “radical interiority,”
or a sense of an authentic self. And you describe the decline of
Cowper’s lifelong fragile mental health as, in part, “the
failing of prayer.” Can you explain this connection? Do any of
Cowper’s most popular hymns illustrate this connection?
William Cowper’s Calvinism has always been seen as a problem.
The great emotional power of Wesley and the Methodists came from
the controversial doctrines of sanctification, but what if
sublime confidence in salvation was replaced with a potent
assurance of your failure to be saved? Prayer comes in because a
prayerful state was seen as one of the likely signs of election,
and in finding prayer a tormenting struggle, Cowper feared he
was encountering his own spiritual nullity. Yet the advice given
to an evangelical struggling to pray was, in effect, to pray
more—to pray for the power to pray. This became something of a
tragic circle for Cowper.
It’s probably true, and perhaps understandable, that the most
popular of Cowper’s hymns take more optimistic positions, but
motifs of estrangement and inadequacy are still very much
present: the melancholic nostalgia of “O for a closer walk with
God,” or the “poor lisping / stamm’ring tongue” envisaged in the
grave in “There is a fountain filled with blood.” The circular
logic is also apparent in the rhetoric of love in “Hark, my
soul, it is the Lord,” a poem whose beautifully tender images of
care anticipate some of the quieter recesses of prayer in
Cowper’s later long poem The Task.
For Anna Letitia Barbauld, a Dissenter whom you identify as
“probably the most theologically literate writer” in your study,
prayer is less interior, more social and physical (involving the
act of kneeling, an act done in a physical and often communal
space). How does that different understanding of prayer play out
in her theology, practice, and poetry?
Barbauld is a fascinating figure, not least because she
illustrates how poetry can not only express theology but contest
it. This wing of 18th-century Dissent was increasingly embracing
an ideal of prayer as solitary reflection: minimizing petition,
suspicious of collective prayer, often privileging the wordless,
and in some versions cautious about even addressing God. This
trajectory just doesn’t make sense for Barbauld, and in her
religious poetry she repeatedly evokes scenes of solo
philosophical contemplation only to interrupt them with
something much more intimate and direct. As her career
progresses, I think she finds the most authentic religious
passions are found not in a single mind reflecting on the
infinite, but those generated through shared experiences within
family or chapel. Elegantly, she writes in 1792: “We neither
laugh alone, nor weep alone, why then should we pray alone?”
One of the most beautiful and memorable moments of prayer in all
of Romantic poetry is the moment in Samuel T. Coleridge’s
haunting Rime of the Ancient Mariner when a curse placed on the
seafarer after wantonly killing an albatross is broken when he
bursts forth in spontaneous prayer in response to seeing the
beauty of sea creatures at play upon the water. What does this
moment in the poem illuminate about the deep connections between
prayer, poetry, beauty, and the limits and the power of
language?
This is perhaps the most famous prayer in Romantic poetry. The
first thing I would say is that in at least one sense I can’t
tell you what this moment means. What Coleridge evokes is
something uncanny and wondrous: It’s a narrative pivot around
which the whole mysterious poem turns, but it is strangely
depthless. Of course, critics have tried to interpret it: The
mariner is having an ecological epiphany or facing up to the
guilt of the slave trade or philosophically converted to the
pantheistic doctrine of the “one life.” But, in effect, the
point is its uninterpretability. It just falls, like grace.
As a young philosophical radical, Coleridge had been a
full-blown rationalist Unitarian, but by the late 1790s he was
beginning to feel the truth (his own words) of religious
doctrines like original sin and the Trinity, although he
couldn’t explain them and didn’t have a theology to account for
their consequences. These poems attempted to fill the gap
between what he could explain and what he was beginning to feel.
In his late career, he would go on to attempt a “philosophy of
prayer,” which tried to explain how prayer could be both
absolutely valid but lie partly beyond the forms of human
reason. The fact that some extraordinary lines in a poem of the
1790s could do what his theological labors of the 1820s couldn’t
tells you a lot, I think, about the relation between prayer,
poetry, theology, and language.
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