Spirit of the Disciplines


I don't know exactly how you pray, but I have been meditating on prayer for a couple weeks, reading about it, exploring it on my blog and in discussions with friends, and now reading Dallas Willard's take on it as a discipline.


Willard talks about the experience part...one reason that a person will pray more is because they will see answers.


Andrew Murray (isn't that the dude that wrote "With Christ in the School of Prayer"?) wrote that we need to ask for things confidently, knowing they will happen, because we ask for them from within God's will therefore we are asking for God's will to be done.


I don't pray for things because I do not presume to be within God's will (which I really perceive as prideful since one must know God's will to be within it) and I don't feel like I really know what that [His will] is since I know that God knows way more than I do and has the ability to see and know things about situations that I wouldn't even think to consider. Murray seemed to consider it a copout that one might ask for what they need and then end the prayer with "if it is Your will," because we should know His will.


I feel like a coward. I am afraid to pray like this because, at the core, I do not trust. I don't trust my intentions to be God's and I am not too sure that I am important enough for God to personally care for. That's pretty lousy, huh? It just doesn't seem like it is ok to ask for something because, some would say, it is proof of God to the world and for His glory when if what I need or desire is not God's will and it doesn't happen? Wouldn't it be for His glory then that He protected me from whatever I asked for? But of course, that isn't how we see it because we don't have His vision.

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