54 Thoughts About Prayer

(Our front yard - snow in April!)

These are from my book Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God. (Kindle version HERE.)

1.  You will learn more about prayer by actually praying than you can get from a book.

2.  Prayer is talking with God about what God and I are thinking and doing together.

3.  Praying is revolutionary activity whereby I revolt against the kingdom of this world as I meet with the true Lord of heaven and earth.

4.  If you believe God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then you believe God is powerful enough and knows enough to address your struggles.

5.  If you believe that God is all-loving, then you believe that God desires to address your struggles.

6.  What we think about God affects how we worship and pray.

7.  Prayer is not a religious duty, something I “have” to do, but a relationship with God.

8.  In praying I must let go of control and trust God.

9.  The focus of praying is not prayer itself, but God.

10.             I can meet God at a conference. I can also meet the same God wherever I am.

11.             Assume God is doing something in you, now.

12.             Praying is the act of interfacing this world with the kingdom of God.

13.             I can hear the voice of God, speaking to me.

14.             Hearing God’s voice is a function of intimacy with God.

15.             Humility is needed to hear the voice of God.

16.             Discernment is the capacity to recognize and respond to the presence and activity of God, both in the ordinary moments of life and in the larger decisions of life.

17.             As intimacy with God increases, discernment increases.

18.             Discerning should always come before deciding.

19.             In praying, God changes me.

20.             I pray to be able to see God’s Bigger Picture of my life and reality.

21.             I pray for my heart to be shaped into a heart of God’s love.

22.             Praying for people is a God-given, holy burden.

23.             In praying I bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.

24.             I pray for others because I believe that where prayer focuses, power falls.

25.             Blessed are the mono-taskers, for they shall see God.

26.             Praying is a slow-cooker, not a microwave.

27.             Teaching people to pray in solitude is one of the greatest needs and challenges of the church today.

28.             Solitary times with God prepare us for fellowship with people.

29.             If you commit to praying God will lead you deeper into community.

30.             One’s personal prayer life can never be understood if it is separated from community life.

31.             In praying we cry for the in-breaking of the kingdom into the brokenness of the present.

32.             In praying God aligns our heart with his kingdom heart.

33.             To pray is to explore and venture into the vast, limitless regions of God’s beautiful kingdom.

34.             Authentic praying is an act of self-denial.

35.             To pray is to let go of control.

36.             When God reveals personal faults it is never to condemn us, but only to rescue us.

37.             There is a “spiritual Alzheimer’s disease” which results in forgetting the many times God has rescued and delivered us.

38.             A main antidote to fear is remembering.

39.             In praying I enumerate things I am thankful for and give thanks to God.

40.             I pray because Jesus prayed.

41.             I pray for protection and guidance.

42.             In praying I am detoxified and released from burdens.

43.             Renewal can begin with one follower of Jesus, praying.

44.             The more Westernized a person is, the less they pray.

45.             Prayvailing – Travailing prayer brings prevailing in a person’s life.

46.             I need to set aside some time very day for active talking and listening to God. Just ten minutes each day can bring about a radical change in my life.

47.             Nothing can stop me from praying today.

48.             If I humble myself and pray, turning from any wicked ways, God will hear from heaven and heal the land.

49.             The antidote to spiritual burnout is time alone with God, praying.

50.             Pray even when, especially when, it seems or feels like God is absent.

51.             God isn’t in a panic room when you or I have doubts.

52.             Life is best lived when death is acknowledged.

53.             Kick the “bucket list” and live for a greater purpose.

54.             How a life begins and ends is important. Don’t forget the ending part. 

A Disciple Grows in Discernment

 

 

I began taking guitar lessons at age five. I have taught and played guitar for sixty-nine years. (How old am I?)

How familiar am I with guitars? Very! I am able to discern whether a guitar is in tune, or out of tune. I can hear chords played, and without looking at the guitar being played, tell you what chord it is. (Mostly, not entirely…) I can listen to a song for the first time, and (mostly) immediately play it. (Really accomplished guitarists do this better than I can.)  

I became a disciple of Jesus just before my twenty-first birthday. I have talked and walked and lived with Jesus for fifty-three years. (How old am I?) Jesus became to me, as one scholar calls him, a “familiar stranger.”

From the beginning, Jesus felt familiar to me. I felt safe, at home, with him. Coming to Jesus was a great homecoming!   

And, just as the first disciples found the ways and words of Jesus strange, like his use of parables, so did I. Yet I, like those disciples, was, and remain, attracted to him.  

I am familiar with Jesus, with more understanding coming daily. I am able to discern what is of Jesus, and what is not of Jesus. The discipleship principle I have learned is:  

Discernment is a function of familiarity.

Discernment is in direct proportion to intimacy.  

I want you to be familiar with our Lord Jesus. I want your spiritual discernment to increase.  

Apprentices become familiar with their teachers. My Teacher has taught me this: The more I know him, the more I see and understand him.  

This is what happens to disciples of Christ. May it be so, in you.

DECLARATIONS  

I am becoming more familiar with Jesus every day.  

I am able to discern spiritual realities.  

I can separate the good from the evil.  

Revelation from Jesus is increasing in me.  

It excites me to think there is so much more to Jesus waiting for me to comprehend.  

There is no greater privilege than knowing Jesus my Lord!

(From my book 31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship)

Logic and Truth

I'm re-posting this video, in my ongoing attempts to combat postmodern thinking, especially as it infects certain areas of "progressive Christianity." (For example, the idea that orthopraxy is more important than orthodoxy. Or, e.g., the idea that reality is mostly (if not entirely) socially constructed.)

Some Quotes from My Conference Message

 

                                                             (Green Lake, Wisconsin)

At our annual conference's fifty-year anniversary I gave a retrospective on things I have learned at the conference.

Here are some quotes, from some of our past speakers.

Jack Hayford - 1992

“Doors don’t open for the interfacing of the body of Christ until there comes love for the body of Christ.

“The essence of renewal is not the power of the HS. It is the voice of the HS, and responding to it.”

“Teach your people how to respond to the culture non-cynically as healers of that culture.”

“Fears are always liars. They are always prompted by some spirit.”

"You would worry less about what people think of you if you realized how little they do."

Dean Sherman - 1999

“If you want to work with Jesus, build church. If you want to work against Jesus, tear the church down.”

 John Dawson - 1998

“In the absence of the glory, there is an inrush of the demonic.”

Donna Hailson - 2005

“Church is not measured by its attendance but by its deployment.”

Dan Fountsin

"Christianity is the only caring culture in the world.

          Hinduism is not caring.

          Buddhism is not caring.

          Islam is not caring."

Grant Mullen

“Comparison is the rocket fuel of shame.”

         

J. P. Moreland

“The American people are intoxicated with wanting ‘happiness’. 

The emphasis on happiness is not working. 

The paradox of hedonism is: You won’t be happy by trying to be happy.

Happiness is a wonderful byproduct but a terrible goal of life."

Jo McIntyre

"Pray with apostolic authority."

Randy Clark - 2010

“Most of the time when I pray for people to be healed I feel nothing.”

“My faith isn’t in my performance. It’s in God’s Word and what God has told me, not in my performance.”

Rachel Hickson. 

“It’s not about how you feel. It’s about how you are connected.” 

Bill Johnson 

"Prophetic ministry is not to be focused on the sins of the world. It takes very little discernment to find the dirt in people’s lives. The prophetic in its purest form is designed to find the gold in people’s lives and call it to the surface."

Greg Boyd - 2005

“The Kingdom of God always looks like Jesus. Everything hangs on this.”

Leif Hetland - 2013

“The coming move of God is going to be nameless and faceless.”

Leif’s life verse is John 17:26 - I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

Francis McNutt - 2001

“I can’t measure my success as a minister of the gospel by what people think of me.”

J.P. Moreland  – "McNutt’s book on healing is the best book on the subject ever written."

The great theologian John Wayne - 

"Courage is being afraid but saddling up anyway."

Overcoming Fear - Resources

 

 

Here are some blog posts I have made, on overcoming fear.

https://www.johnpiippo.com/2018/08/fear.html

https://www.johnpiippo.com/2022/06/31-declarations-that-defeat-fear.html

https://www.johnpiippo.com/2010/03/trust-as-cure-for-anxiety-fear.html

https://www.johnpiippo.com/2020/03/overcoming-fear-two-sermons.html

https://www.johnpiippo.com/2021/01/overcoming-fearfulness.html?m=0

https://www.johnpiippo.com/2018/05/remembering-as-cure-for-fear.html

https://www.johnpiippo.com/2020/03/fear-cannot-survive-in-atmosphere-of.html

https://www.johnpiippo.com/2020/07/to-defeat-fear-grow.html

https://www.johnpiippo.com/2020/08/overcoming-fear-of-unknown.html

God Is Wrathful Because God Is Love

                                                                   (Monroe County)

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf personally witnessed the horrors of the Bosnian war. Out of this context he wrote,

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, mypeople shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days!

​How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.

 Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, (Zondervan 2005) pp. 138-139

As I read this, I thought of H. Richard Niebuhr's famous quote, as he critiqued a soft and shallow theological liberalism.

"A God without wrath

brought men without sin

into a kingdom without judgment

through the ministrations of

a Christ without a cross."

(For more on the love and wrath of God, see Kevin Kinghorn and Stephen Travis, But What About God's Wrath? The Compelling Love Story of Divine Anger.)

Teaching and Preaching in New York City July 4 -10

 

I'll be teaching and preaching July 4-5-6 at Faith Bible Church and Seminary (Chinese), in Queens, NYC.

Friday night, July 4 - "The Presence of God Motif in the Bible"

Saturday morning, July 5 - "Abiding in Christ"

Saturday afternoon, July 5 - "Experiencing God's Presence"

Sunday morning, July 6, 9:30 AM - "The Marks of a Disciple"

Sunday morning, July 6, 11 AM - "Ten Things I Have Learned About Praying"

Sunday afternoon, July 6, 2 PM - "Ten Things I Have Learned About Praying"

T-W-Th, July 8-9-10, 9 AM - 4 PM - I'll teach my Spiritual Transformation class in Faith Bible Seminary. (How God Changes the Human Heart)

This course is taught in English with full Chinese translation.

Faith Bible Theological Seminary 

Foucault's Non-Progressivism ("The endlessly repeated play of dominations")

 

Green Lake, Wisconsin

James K. A. Smith writes of Foucault's non-progressivism as essential to Foucault's theory.

"As Nietzsche earlier claimed in his Genealogy of Morals, good and evil are just names that we give to the power interests of the strong versus those of the weak. Thus “in a sense,” Foucault concludes, “only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘non-place,’ the endlessly repeated play of dominations.” The story of humanity is not the Enlightenment fiction of perpetual progress or the constant progression of the race, as Kant (and Richard Rorty) suggest, but rather simply the shift from one combat to another, from one form of domination to another."

(Smith, James, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? p. 87)

Identity - Who You Are, and Who You Are Not

(Green Lake, Wisconsin)

(Since 1977 I have taught spiritual formation and transformation at several seminaries, retreats, and conferences.) 

In my spiritual formation classes for pastors and Christian leaders I begin class by sending the students out to pray for an hour, using Psalm 23 as their meditative focus. My instruction is simply: when God speaks to you, write it down.

Upon returning from their hour with God, many of them will have heard God tell them, "I love you." Some have not heard those words in a long time. This is a powerful time of sharing.

This gets at the heart of who we are. Henri Nouwen wrote that he was "firmly convinced that the decisive moment of Jesus's public life was his baptism, when he heard the divine affirmation, "You are my Beloved on whom my favor rests." (Spiritual Direction, 28) 

When God tells someone "You are my beloved," or "I love you," the most intimate truth about that person is revealed. God loves you: this is the ultimate truth about you. Nouwen says "the ultimate spiritual temptation is to doubt this fundamental truth about ourselves and trust in alternative identities." (28)

Who are you? Nouwen counsels us not to define ourselves by the following alternative identities.

1. Do not define yourself as: "I am what I do." He writes: "When I do good things and have a little success in life, I feel good about myself. But when I fail, I start getting depressed." (Ib.) To define yourself by what you do is to live on a spiritual and emotional roller coaster that is a function of your accomplishments.

2. Do not define yourself as: "I am what other people say about me." "What people say about you has great power. When people speak well of you, you can walk around quite freely. But when somebody starts saying negative things about you, you might start feeling sad. When someone talks against you, it can cut deep into your heart. Why let what others say about you - good or ill - determine what you are?" (Ib., 29)

3. Do not define yourself as: "I am what I have." Don't let your things and your stuff determine your identity. Nouwen writes: "As soon as I lose any of it, if a family member dies, if my health goes, or if I lose my property, then I can slip into inner darkness." (Ib.)

Too much energy goes into defining ourselves by deciding "I am what I do," "I am what others say about me," or "I am what I have." Nouwen writes: "This whole zig-zag approach is wrong." You are not, fundamentally, what you do, what other people say about you, or what you have. You are someone who is greatly loved by God.

Today, God speaks to the deep waters of your heart and says, "You are my beloved son or daughter, and on you my favor rests." To hear that voice and trust in it is to reject the three alternative ways of self-definition and enter into freedom and joy.

**
Three of my books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Encounters with the Holy Spirit (co-edited with Janice Trigg)

Wanted: The Perfect Pastor

 

(Me and Linda, enjoying life more than we should.)

I once knew a pastor who was so concerned about what his church family thought of him, that he always wore a suit, even while mowing the lawn on a hot summer day.

Many years ago, on a Wednesday afternoon, I was food shopping in the local Meijer store. Someone from our church family saw me. When I got home I found they had called one of our church leaders and "reported" me. "I saw John shopping today, on a Wednesday afternoon. He should have been in his office working!"

Sadly, this is not atypical.

I thought of this sad story today while reading some Michael Brown (devotionally - so please don't report me!). 

After three inspiring days with Michael this summer, I am now feasting on revivalist literature, some of which is written by Brown.

Here's a Brown quote, from Revolution in the Church: Challenging the Religious System with a Call for radical Change. (This is not my situation. I thank God all the time for my church family! But I talk with a lot of pastors who, sadly, can relate to this.)

"Most pastors are grossly underpaid for the hours they put in, often facing retirement, weary and worn out, with very little in the way of benefits, housing or pension. This satirical want ad by one church says it all:" 

Wanted: the perfect pastor. 

Approximately 28 years old, 

with 30 years’ preaching experience. 

Must have a heart for the youth, 

work well with the elderly, 

participate in church sports, 

visit every hospitalized member. 

Need top-flight negotiating skills, 

good singing voice, 

and expertise in repair of office equipment, 

church van, 

and fellowship hall plumbing. 

Office hours 7 a.m. till 10 p.m. 

Salary $100 per week. 

Will preferably tithe $50 per week, 

wear fashionable suits, 

have a large library. 

Must participate in evangelism outreaches, 

make 30 calls per day on church members, 

always be in the office when parishioners phone. 

Walking on water a plus.

(Brown, Kindle Locations 1894-1897)