It's letters like this one that twist my brain! Reading through the letter quickly, I get the impression that informal prayer with God is just what the enemy wants.
But wait, that's what I do. I'm pretty good at casual conversational prayer with God. I thought that's what we should be doing according to the verse that incites us to pray ceaselessly. I thought prayer was intended to build a relationship with God, so the more comfortable it is the better.
So what exactly is this letter supposed to tell me? Maybe that God deserves a position of reverence in our prayers. Maybe there should be more awe and fear in mine. In practice, prayer should be concentrated and focused. A formal position helps to keep us focused, not lazy. We should wait for God to answer our prayers instead of trying to force an answer or feeling on ourselves.
As for the class, the discussion director's role is to write a list of questions for the group to discuss. I hope they will address some of the following:
How does the enemy want us to pray?
How should we pray to God, in what attitude?
The connector's job is to make connections between the book and ordinary life:
How can we apply what we've learned to our prayer life?
Do we have a habit of prayer?
How should we approach God?
The literary luminary's role is to choose a paragraph or sentence from the book to discuss with the group. There are many possible passages they could choose for this. One migh be, "In reaction to "parrot-like prayers of his childhood" he may be pursuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be ab effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part."
Stay tuned for letter 5......
No comments:
Post a Comment