Years ago one of our prayer team leaders was talking about how she discovered the power of praying the scriptures.
By which she simply meant she quoted a lot of bible as she prayed. This was nothing new to me; I grew up among people who did this all the time. They liked to pray
Our prayer leader wanted to emphasize praying the scriptures because there was, she insisted, power in praying the scriptures. If we wanna tap that power, we need to pray the scriptures too.
Um… what power’s she talking about?
Well, whenever Christians talk about powerful prayers, we nearly always mean one thing: We get we ask for. Every time. Every request. God always, always answers our prayers with yes.
Yeah, sometimes we also mean powerful-sounding prayers, which is why we’ll use the
So Christians are always sharing techniques which guarantee God’ll never ever grant us our three wishes answer our prayer requests.
When I phrase it that way, Christians balk: “That is not what I mean.”
Yeah it is. Bad enough you’re fooling yourself; don’t try to fool the rest of us.
Not that they don’t try. “I’m fully aware God has free will; he can say no whenever he wants; he can say no to unworthy, self-centered prayer requests. But what I’m doing is righteous…” and then they try to explain why they’re fully justified in reducing the holy scriptures to a magic incantation which bends God to our will.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t quote bible in our prayers. It’s actually a good idea—provided
But the attitude behind trying to make God do as we want, instead of praying as Jesus did, “Thy will be done,”