DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
---------------------------------------------------------
<
form action=&amp
;amp;amp;quot;https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; method=&am
p;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;p
ost&
quot; target=&am
p;amp;amp;quot;_top&
amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&am
p;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &a
mp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;input type=&am
p;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;hidden&am
p;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; name=&am
p;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;cmd&a
mp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; value=&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot
;_s-xclick&a
mp;amp;quot;&amp
;amp;amp;gt; &am
p;amp;amp;lt;input type=&amp
;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;hidden&amp
;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; name=&amp
;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;hosted_button_id&a
mp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; val
ue=&
quot;DKL7ADEKRVUBL&a
mp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp
;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &am
p;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;input type=&amp
;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;image&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; src=&a
mp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;https://www.payp
alobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donateCC_LG.gif&am
p;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; border=&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;0&a
mp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; nam
e=&q
uot;submit&a
mp;amp;quot; alt=&am
p;amp;amp;amp;quot;PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!
&quo
t;&g
t; &
lt;img alt=&
amp;amp;quot;&am
p;amp;amp;quot; border=&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;0&a
mp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; src=&am
p;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;https://www.paypalobjects.com
/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif&a
mp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; width=&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;1&a
mp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; height=&amp
;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;1&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&am
p;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &a
mp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/form&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;
HTML https://3169.createaforum.com
---------------------------------------------------------
*****************************************************
DIR Return to: BIBLE STUDY - From The Late Lori Bolinger
*****************************************************
#Post#: 30712--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: guest125 Date: June 1, 2021, 7:05 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
I often hear people talk about the power of prayer and such and
I suppose there is some truth to all of that, but that's not how
I look at it. The way I see it is that my prayers are weak, as
I myself am weak and unable to do much of anything on my own,
but the one I'm praying to? That Father?
HE, can do anything. So in this way- when I am weak, then I am
strong because in my weakness is when I am most willing and most
inclined to reach out to Him who is strong. The prayers of a
righteous man availeth much.... but alas, I am not a righteous
man. I am a weak man, but HE is able. And HE is righteous and
anything I ask that aligns with His good and perfect will, shall
be done. With all this in mind, I knock and I seek and I keep
knocking and keep seeking and even when circumstances don't
change, He changes me. So yes-- that's powerful.
#Post#: 30780--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: guest8 Date: June 1, 2021, 8:17 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=Mr E link=topic=926.msg30712#msg30712
date=1622592345]
I often hear people talk about the power of prayer and such and
I suppose there is some truth to all of that, but that's not how
I look at it. The way I see it is that my prayers are weak, as
I myself am weak and unable to do much of anything on my own,
but the one I'm praying to? That Father?
HE, can do anything. So in this way- when I am weak, then I am
strong because in my weakness is when I am most willing and most
inclined to reach out to Him who is strong. The prayers of a
righteous man availeth much.... but alas, I am not a righteous
man. I am a weak man, but HE is able. And HE is righteous and
anything I ask that aligns with His good and perfect will, shall
be done. With all this in mind, I knock and I seek and I keep
knocking and keep seeking and even when circumstances don't
change, He changes me. So yes-- that's powerful.
[/quote]
My prayers are two fold. For those that need help and comfort
and giving thanks for all the blessings he has bestowed upon my
family, etc.. It should be as simple as thanking Jesus first
thing in the morning for another day to see, feel, hear and
smell His beautiful creation that is all around me. Prayer is
the only way we have of acknowledging that He is our LORD and
Savior.
Blade
#Post#: 30799--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: guest24 Date: June 2, 2021, 7:26 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=Bladerunner link=topic=926.msg30780#msg30780
date=1622596638]
[quote author=Mr E link=topic=926.msg30712#msg30712
date=1622592345]
I often hear people talk about the power of prayer and such and
I suppose there is some truth to all of that, but that's not how
I look at it. The way I see it is that my prayers are weak, as
I myself am weak and unable to do much of anything on my own,
but the one I'm praying to? That Father?
HE, can do anything. So in this way- when I am weak, then I am
strong because in my weakness is when I am most willing and most
inclined to reach out to Him who is strong. The prayers of a
righteous man availeth much.... but alas, I am not a righteous
man. I am a weak man, but HE is able. And HE is righteous and
anything I ask that aligns with His good and perfect will, shall
be done. With all this in mind, I knock and I seek and I keep
knocking and keep seeking and even when circumstances don't
change, He changes me. So yes-- that's powerful.
[/quote]
My prayers are two fold. For those that need help and comfort
and giving thanks for all the blessings he has bestowed upon my
family, etc.. It should be as simple as thanking Jesus first
thing in the morning for another day to see, feel, hear and
smell His beautiful creation that is all around me. Prayer is
the only way we have of acknowledging that He is our LORD and
Savior.
Blade
[/quote]You said....prayer is the only way we have of
acknowledging that He is our LORD and Savior
What about how we live? What about Love? I would think there
are other ways to acknowledge He is Lord and Savior.
#Post#: 35693--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: November 13, 2021, 6:43 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.
#Post#: 35761--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: November 18, 2021, 4:02 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1nPHlz1iQQ
#Post#: 35915--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: November 29, 2021, 3:43 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-P23DaUPj8
#Post#: 35977--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: December 2, 2021, 5:01 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUWvnqBt8w8
#Post#: 36413--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: December 31, 2021, 11:56 am
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAxt1R0pni0
#Post#: 36425--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: January 1, 2022, 8:24 am
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrUP21D7IRw
#Post#: 36487--------------------------------------------------
Re: Are our prayers powerful?
By: patrick jane Date: January 4, 2022, 11:24 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxF0hL2XAAA
*****************************************************
DIR Previous Page
DIR Next Page