Monument

I've always like the idea of a prayer journal, especially for keeping track of answered prayers. But I'm a terrible journaler, so it's never happened. I'm going to try to do it here.

First, to mark where I'm at, I have been a Christian since August 1997, and I'd conservatively estimate that I've had thousands of prayers answered.

This past week, God answered my cry very directly with Galatians 6:9 Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary. It spoke directly to my struggle, and God renewed my heart and strength.

The Gospel and Prayer

Speaking loosely, I've begun to find that prayer is the most important means of living the Gospel.

This is because my understanding of the Gospel is that the human experience is the quest for deliverance from Evil, and the good news is that God, in his perfect capacity, acts to deliver us from evil. Our role is almost a passive one, except that we are to simply believe that God is, in fact, acting to save us.

And prayer is the perfect way to experience this. By making a petition to God, we acknowledge our need (or, in other words, it's an act of repenting from the sin of self-sufficiency, aka, believing we can save ourselves, aka, believing that we are God). In that act, we also are expresssing our faith that God can and will save us. And then we wait on God, in His infinite wisdom and capacity, to answer, knowing that either He will do as we've prayed, or else it wouldn't have been good for us if He had.

Tim Keller resources

So, here's my 2-cents (and really, this is just my personal speculation). The postmodern person is in crisis, no less the postmodern Christian. In response, there's a New Church Movement (home churches, emergent churches, traditional denominational churches that feel like emergent churches). But I think the church iteration that is going to best meet the exigencies of day is the young Reform church.

In that vein, I came across a cool blog that stockpiles Tim Keller resources. Keller is probably the brightest light in the Reform church right now, and his stuff is really the good stuff. Of course, to my mind, the good stuff is just the book of Romans, restated.

Dear Christians,

I know many of you suffer.

But know that your brothers and sisters everywhere undergo the same thing, and that your suffering isn't for nothing. It is for a purpose, and as you faithfully endure it, you resist the devil and have fellowship with your Christ and Lord.

1 Peter 5:9, Phil. 3:10-11.