The Problem with Prayer
We can be honest. Prayer is hard sometimes. And yet, prayer is perhaps the most precious and most under- utilized gift we have. For a multitude of reasons, people who follow Jesus often struggle with it. And the more capable you think you are, sometimes the more significant the struggle becomes. Perhaps this is because we fail to see the profound practicality of prayer, the deeply connected way it can reorder our lives. Perhaps we need to look at life, and ourselves, in a new way.
In this series, we want to imagine the Lord’s Prayer as a series questions we can ask daily. We want to take the practice of talking to and being with God, and see this way as something solid and tangible, something daily, something that matters to our experience of life.
If you have grown a little stale in your personal prayers, this series promises to re-energize what is most basic. Prayer is more practical than you ever dreamed.
Part 1 - Jeremy Duncan
This past Sunday we acknowledged the problem with prayer, talked about learning the language of payer, the role of liturgy and imitation of the “masters” in our prayer life, and the call to align our prayer with God’s vision of us and of the world.
Part 2 - Jeremy Duncan
This week we looked at the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer - “Our Father…” as pointing us both towards God and towards one another. We were reminded that our prayer is an expression of intimacy with God to the extent it engenders the expression of God-like care extended out of us to those around us.
Part 3 - Jeremy Duncan
In this last session on the Lord’s Prayer, we’re looking at a series of questions, sometimes called petitions, that Jesus gives as a framework for prayer. And, hopefully, they can become tools for your own creativity in prayer or will help you to say and to hear the Lord’s Prayer differently.
