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 an inevitable experience in our spiritual journeys, but one we often don't give enough space to explore: it's the experience of doubt. Psalm 73 teaches us not only what this experience looks like, but how we can healthily navigate through it - doubting words to God become God's words to doubting people.
Sermon Resources:
1. Skeptics Study - join here: https://www.midtownpres.org/skeptics-welcome
2. “I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.” -Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3. “We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.” -Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing A Conversational Relationship With God
4. Feelings of hopelessness in America: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/10/51percent-of-young-americans-say-they-feel-down-depressed-or-hopeless.html
5. Antidepressant usage: https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/news/antidepressant-prescribing-increases-by-35-in-six-years#:~:text=Prescriptions%20of%20antidepressants%20rose%20by,the%20sixth%20consecutive%20annual%20increase.
6. “The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.” -Peter Abelard
7. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue…Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” -Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters To A Young Poet”
8. “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” -Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
9. “Yes, doubt will come, even to the one who follows Christ. But the only person who has a right to leap forward even with a doubt is someone whose life bears the marks of imitation, someone who by a decisive action at least tries to go so far out that becoming a Christian can still be a possibility. Everyone else must hold his tongue; he has no right to put in a word about Christianity; least of all against.” -Soren Kierkegaard
10. Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph
