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 topic of lament, specifically looking at the way in which injustice and mistreatment spark anger in us, and how we healthily learn to deal with those feelings by being honest about them, praying through them, and limiting them
Sermon Resources:
1. “If it’s human it’s mentionable, and if it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.” -Fred Rogers
2. “Prayer, we think, means presenting ourselves before God so that he will be pleased with us. We put on our Sunday best in our prayers…It is easy to be honest before God with our hallelujahs; it is nearly impossible to be honest before God in the dark emotions of our anger. So we commonly suppress our negative emotions. Or, when we do express them, we do it far from the presence of God, ashamed or embarrassed to be seen in these curse-stained bib overalls. But when we pray the psalms, these classic prayers of God’s people, we find that will not do. We must pray who we actually are, not who we think we should be. In prayer, all is not sweetness and light. The way of prayer is not to cover our unlovely emotions so that they will appear respectable, but expose them so that they can be enlisted in the work of the Kingdom.” -Eugene Peterson, "Answering God"
3. “It is an act of profound faith to entrust one’s most precious hatreds to God, knowing they will be taken seriously.” -Walter Brueggemann, "The Message of the Psalms"
4. “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.” -Frederick Buechner
Join us below:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/midtownpreschurch
Instagram: www.instagram.com/midtown.pres
Website: www.midtownpres.org
Community Groups: www.midtownpres.org/community-groups
Sunday Services: www.midtownpres.org
