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#Post#: 15048--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: guest8 Date: July 11, 2020, 11:49 pm
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[quote author=patrick jane link=topic=926.msg15044#msg15044
date=1594522437]
[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]
Powerful ; Yes....in the sense that you as a true Christian can
communicate with a true Extraterrestrial. Someone beyond the
boundaries of TIME, someone so grand, so loving that he gave His
only begotten son the sins of the world. Talk to Him, speak to
Him often and always make it from your heart.
Blade
#Post#: 16063--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: August 11, 2020, 1:13 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dPnDxzjAy8
#Post#: 18304--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: October 2, 2020, 12:03 pm
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Yes
#Post#: 19087--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: October 19, 2020, 8:38 am
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esxpEOH7zJQ
#Post#: 19812--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: October 30, 2020, 11:06 am
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REClYm9WBjM
#Post#: 23838--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: January 17, 2021, 9:44 am
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ65lMvJJ0Q
#Post#: 24466--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: February 1, 2021, 8:51 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ZUwBr8GOg
#Post#: 28870--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: May 6, 2021, 12:57 pm
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[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/123420.jpg?w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/may-web-only/prayer-science-psychology-research-methodology.html
How Much Does Prayer Weigh?
Why scientists struggle to put this spiritual practice under the
microscope.
Praying can be easy. A prayer can be a thought, a word, a
heavenward plea from someone in need, a few lines said
spontaneously or recited from a book, or even just a groan.
Understanding what a prayer does after it leaves your lips is a
little more difficult. Christian theologians have long debated
how prayer works, and what it means to say it “works.” So have
scientists.
Psychologist Kevin L. Ladd, a professor at Indiana University
South Bend, recently examined some of the extensive recent
research on prayer for the John Templeton Foundation. Looking at
more than 40 psychological studies finished in the past few
years on the impact of prayer on intimate relationships, Ladd
found there is some evidence of positive correlations between
prayer and improved relationships. “It may,” he writes, “be
useful to encourage people to engage some forms of prayer as
coping tools.”
But in study after study, Ladd, author of The Psychology of
Prayer: A Scientific Approach, also found that researches hadn’t
thought very carefully about what prayer is. In a sense, they
kept pointing their telescopes in the wrong direction.
Ladd spoke to CT about the limits of prayer research.
Why is it hard to study prayer scientifically?
If you’re not familiar with the practice of prayer and why
people pray, it’s very easy to look at it as though somebody is
making a definitive statement or doing something over which they
would claim to have full control. The twist with prayer is that
you can be saying things that sound very active and assertive
about what you want to happen in the world and also at the same
moment you are relinquishing control. You’re saying, “I am
surrendering this concern.”
The metaphysical core of prayer—what God does—is not accessible
to science. That’s out of the ballpark. But what we can study
effectively as scientists is how people act as a result of
prayer. What drives them to prayer? What do they do when they
pray? And after, how do they behave?
If I pray for my neighbor, are you saying you could study the
effects of that prayer on me but not on my neighbor?
Yes. This goes right into the idea of “thoughts and prayers,”
which has been attacked so much. If I direct thoughts and
prayers to my neighbor, I can’t see what the prayer itself is
doing, but I can see what I do.
If I’m praying for my neighbor, does that change my behavior
toward that neighbor? Maybe, as the old saying goes, “My heart
is to God and my hand is to work.” We can see if those two
things go together. One person prays for the neighbor. Another
doesn’t. Who actually goes and does something for the neighbor?
Who’s contributing their time, their talents, their resources?
Yeah, we can study that, and we find it does have an effect.
Not everyone prays in the same way. Not everyone means the same
thing by prayer. So how do researchers define prayer?
The standard approach is to leave it open to the participant and
say, “You do what you do when you say that you’re praying, and
then we’ll talk about it.” You leave it wide open.
There’s so much individual variation. Having talked to thousands
of people in religious communities, in churches, people who are
dedicated to prayer, I’ve found there are so many—almost
half—who say they’ve never been asked about prayer and what they
do and why.
This line of research opens up so many conversations about the
nature of spirituality. One of their biggest fears is that
they’re not doing in right.
How did you get into studying prayer?
It has always been a part of my own life as a Christian. My
father is a pastor in the United Methodist Church. I went to
seminary and as part of my seminary training, I spent time
working at an education testing service, which is a sort of
atypical path in seminary. My friends were studying Greek and
Hebrew and I’m talking about statistics and research design.
My first study during my PhD work was a group of breast cancer
survivors, and it was focused on exercise and the things they do
to take of themselves after surviving cancer, and many of them
spontaneously talked about how important prayer was to them. And
we thought, well, we should look at that. At the time—30 years
ago now—that was pretty novel.
How long have people been studying prayer scientifically? When
did that project start?
I don’t know if you remember the story of Gideon and the fleece,
how he put out the fleece and said to God, “Make it wet!” and
“Make it dry!” That has the hallmarks of a study.
If we look for a more modern scientific approach, we come up to
the 1800s and Francis Galton. He’s in Victorian Britain
thinking, if prayer is doing something, then you do a lot of it,
it must be doing more things. Well, who gets the most prayer?
The Church of England is praying for the health of the monarch
all the time. So the king ought to be in really good health! It
turns out it doesn’t really work like that, but that idea
launches t he prayer-gauge debate, which rages for a long time.
The way they’re thinking about it at the time, people are
praying, prayer goes from their lips or their hearts, and then a
metaphysical thing happens, and it influences the monarch.
People get stumped with that middle section, though. With the
metaphysical question.
Eventually that approach falls out of favor. I think when it
falls out it’s because you’re trying to measure a metaphysical
thing, and you can’t get at that. Eventually you hit a wall.
There’s a missing component.
Is part of the problem also a problem with measuring? It seems
like prayer can’t be measured in the way science approaches
measurement.
Yes. It’s interesting if you think about it, one of the things
Galton was assuming was that more prayer is better. But if you
go into any religious tradition, you dig into the text, there’s
never a guarantee that more is better. It’s not like a dose of
aspirin. The Bible says lots of things about excessive prayer
having no effect, whether it’s the prophets of Baal trying to
call down fire in a competition with Elijah, or Jonah, who wants
to see Nineveh destroyed and God doesn’t do it. More prayer
doesn’t necessarily have greater effect.
There’s also so many people sitting in every congregation who
worry about not praying right that we should be careful. If we
say that “Scientifically, prayer does these things,” and then it
doesn’t work, we’re saying you didn’t do it right. That’s the
insidious underbelly of a lot of science research on prayer.
We’re blaming the victim.
You go back to the religious texts, and that’s not what they say
about prayer. They’re much more nuanced and complicated in
articulating what makes a prayer good, and that may or may not
connect in any direct way to an effect that we can see.
Does studying prayer have the side effect of helping people see
prayer differently?
I hope that part of what the research shows is there’s not one
way that people pray. Not one way in terms of language. Not one
way in how it is you use your body. Not one time that people
pray. There is a plethora of ways that people pray. I hope
that’s one thing that people take away.
What if your prayer is just a single fleeting thought reaching
out to God? Does that count? Well, I think some theologians
would say yes.
#Post#: 29463--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: May 15, 2021, 11:37 pm
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Franklin Graham reacts to Biden omitting 'God' from National Day
of Prayer
Biden is the first president to omit the word God from
proclamation; Reverend and Samaritan's Purse President weighs in
5 minutes
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz0NBaA0lk
#Post#: 30709--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: June 1, 2021, 6:37 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD8pP---l-Y
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