If most of us are being honest, we likely consider prayer to be a weak point in our spiritual lives. We find it hard to make time to pray; we find it unproductive in a world obsessed with hurry and productivity; we feel guilty for not praying often enough, and yet when we finally set aside the time to do so, we find ourselves distracted or confused, not sure how to proceed. Rather than serving as a life-giving connection to a redemptive, loving, and restorative God in the midst of a broken world, prayer becomes a chore or a bore or a guilt-riddled religious game. We often find ourselves, as Jesus’ earliest disciples did, wondering how we can begin to pray. Join us as Midtown as we wade into the challenging waters of prayer, exploring the way that the Psalms teach us authentic, genuine prayer, and how their model can provide us structures for how we begin to relate to and know God more fully in our own lives today.
Listen as Pastor Clint explores the conception of confession and how it leads us to profound freedom and joy in our spiritual lives.
Sermon Resources:
1. "Man is the cruelest animal.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
2. “Truth and untruth often co-exist; good and evil often are found together." -Mahatma Gandhi
3. "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
4. “The state we find ourselves in is sinful, quite independent of guilt.” -Franz Kafka
5. “When a person is getting better they understand more and more clearly the evil that is still left in them. When a person is getting worse they understand their own badness less and less.” -C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"
6. “Anyone God uses significantly is always deeply wounded…On the last day, Jesus will look us over not for medals, diplomas, or honors, but for scars.” -Brennan Manning, "Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin’s Path To God"
7. “True confession is neither self-condemnation–to be merciless with anyone, even ourselves, is no virtue–nor casual evasion. Overconscientiousness becomes morbid; underconscientiousness becomes indifference and decay.” -George Buttrick, "A Simple Regimen of Private Prayer"
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