I am going to write this review in reverse order :
Praying the Bible is a book I have had in my Amazon cart for a looooong time. I finally bit the bullet and bought it last week. Prayer has been over the years THE weakest link in my walk with God. Some seasons, especially the most brutal, usher in a new resolve, a stronger effort...but it normally falls to the wayside once the intensity of the crisis abates.
Earlier this year, I stumbled across an account on Inst*gr*m that put the prayer closet idea from the movie, "The War Room" into practice. The visual explanation and encouragement of the posts encouraged my entire family to pray, quickly becoming a faith building exercise, especially as we posted notes on top of the notes as God answered prayers.
But, my private prayer life still stumbled along and that frustrated me. I find myself not really knowing what to say and how to pray without employing the same phrases over and over and over again.
I also could not, for the life of me, figure out how people spend hours in prayer.
I run through the entire list in minutes.
Earlier in the spring I excitedly pre-ordered a book on prayer, but it fell through and so I decided to go ahead and get the book by Donald S. Whitney instead.
This quote sums up the entire book, what I hoped it would accomplish for me:
"Some people wonder how you can pray longer than five minutes," says John Piper, "because they would lose things to pray for. But I say that if you open the Bible, start reading it, and pause at every verse and turn it into a prayer, then you can pray all day that way." (Donald S. Whitney including a quote from John Piper pg. 68)
This book is a quick, concise, practical explanation on exactly how to do this. I know it may be self-explanatory to some, but for me, it wasn't until I read this that something fundamental clicked into place.
I have also wanted to read E.M. Bounds for a loooong time. Last year I bought the Complete Collection on Kindle and then got busy and kept putting it off. This week, I decided to read the first book and now I cannot wait to read the other seven!!
Favorite points:
"Prayer—secret fervent believing prayer—lies at the root of all personal godliness."
"Speak for eternity. Above all things, cultivate your own spirit. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear and your heart full of God’s Spirit is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin. Remember that God, and not man, must have the glory. If the veil of the world’s machinery were lifted off, how much we would find is done in answer to the prayers of God’s children.—Robert Murray McCheyne"
It was a fantastic week of reading! 💖
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