"We can’t do battle with evil without letting God destroy the evil in us as well. The world is far too intertwined." Paul Miller
--
i was re-listening to tim keller's sermon titled "how to pray" this weekend.
i'm fascinated by prayer b/c everyone, no matter what his/her religious beliefs, does it at some point. particularly in times of panic. is it just an utterance into the void, hoping that desperate words will catch some stronger power's ear? do animals pray?
tk described it as communing with the infinite God. we pray not to get things, but to interact, to build intimacy with something so transformative and spiritually beyond us we've only felt intimations of it.
probably a hard thing to swallow if one is not spiritual to begin with. but i'm beginning to believe that everyone is spiritual in the sense that everyone yearns to escape the pedestrian and predictable. we laud those who take risks and live radically. we want to be caught up in a force that takes us out of the lather, rinse and repeat of daily life. spoken or not, we want a spiritual, transformative encounter.
it's just when the spiritual is defined as a specific God who orchestrated specific events in history and in our own lives that we suddenly balk. much easier to believe the God of our imaginations. but i have yet to meet anyone who has had a truly "spiritual" encounter with the God of their own understanding. when i pray w/o first settling in my mind who exactly it is i'm praying to, i feel like i'm just tossing coins into the air, hoping that some invisible hand in the sky will reach out and grab it. not very promising or confidence-building.
so true prayer, prayer that builds intimacy and that permanently changes our lives, is only possible when it is directed towards a real and specific God. to be resolved: how do we know the real and specific God?
Post a Comment