Prayer will always have an element of mystery to it. We can’t completely figure out how it works or how we interact with God’s will through prayer. But we do know that God tells us to pray, and that He reveals a picture of what prayer should look like in the Bible. This is a resource to get you started in exploring what the Bible says about prayer.
Category Archives: Christian Life
Articles and resources to help you grow in maturity and your ability to apply God’s truth to every area of your life.
Dear College Student…From Your Local Church Pastor
Dear college student,
I want you to know how much our church loves you and wants to support you in following Jesus. We are so glad you are at High Point Church. We want to make sure that you grow as a disciple, a disciple maker, and in learning to obey everything Jesus commanded.
Let me explain how I have tried to lead High Point Church to love you, because it might be somewhat counter-intuitive: We don’t offer ministries for your demographic. We don’t have a college student ministry — and we aren’t going to start one. Probably ever.
Why not?
Continue reading Dear College Student…From Your Local Church Pastor
Working for Unity: Prudential Wisdom
In my sermon this morning, I spent some time talking about how unity produces buoyancy for faith in the church community. Unity provides the structural integrity to the vessel of the church that carries people and supports them in their faith in Christ. The Bible absolutely claims that we should seek purity in the faith, both doctrinally and in terms of morality. But it also claims that we should seek unity as passionately as we seek purity.
Why Morally Laying Down Your Life Matters
It used to be the expectation of good men and women that there were things they would die before doing. A noble man might be expected to die before they would be willing to lie, or a woman before “losing her virtue”. We might expect a soldier to die before being made a spy for the enemy, or before a hostage taker could use him as a human shield. Or maybe before informing on a friend without being tortured, and so on. It was thought that because ethical truths were true, they were even more substantial and important than maintaining your human life — especially when we believed in an everlasting life to come determined by the God of the morals and virtues we would die for.
All virtues can be humiliated by wrong use. Continue reading Why Morally Laying Down Your Life Matters
Parent’s Corner: What Three Months with My Daughter Has Taught Me About God
They say that having a child colors your understanding of God and life. That bringing new life into the world changes how you see the world. Until three months ago I didn’t realize how incredibly true this was. I feel like the charcoal sketch that I was looking at has been transformed into the most vibrant of Monet’s. Possibly the most profound instances of this is in regards to how God has painted my understanding of prayer and His emotional nature.
Feeling Prayer
I’ve always prided myself on being a man who was confidently in touch with his emotional side and when it comes to prayer I’ve always prided myself on being the guy who says “it doesn’t matter what you say — just speak and let the Holy Spirit translate it for you!” But if I can be honest, having Maisey has opened my eyes to just how theological I’ve been about all of it. It’s been a standard case of the “head but not heart syndrome”. I’ve known in my mind how God desires us to talk to him in prayer, I’ve known theologically how the Holy Spirit intercedes and translates for us when we talk to God but I haven’t felt God’s heart for us regarding prayer. It took the birth of my daughter for it to finally click.
Continue reading Parent’s Corner: What Three Months with My Daughter Has Taught Me About God
The Lost Art of Attention: Making Time and Space for Prayer
We live in a noisy world in which busyness is often treated as a badge. Even as we complain about our busyness, many of us would be lost without it. Conscious of it or not, it becomes a defining piece of our identity and worth — in our eyes and in others’.
In our world of constant movement, it can be frustratingly difficult to find consistency and intimacy in prayer. I’m definitely speaking from personal experience. In recent weeks, God has been teaching me about the lost art of attention and how to recover it in the midst of a world that competes for our focus with excessive volume and motion.
To sit in the presence of God in prayer is an act of love and obedience to be sure. It also has a lot in common with the ancient practice of Sabbath. Both are acts of trust. When we choose to step out of our busyness for a moment, we trust that the world will spin without our maintenance. We trust that our work was never really in our hands to begin with.
Speaking for myself, even when I finally sit down to pray, it’s not long before my mind drifts off. I fear that I have destroyed my ability to focus. Faced with the choice between a long exertion and a quick reward, I will consistently chose the latter. But just as I’ve trained my brain to be distracted, I can re-train myself to foster attentiveness. I can’t cure my distraction, but I can give God space to do it.
Continue reading The Lost Art of Attention: Making Time and Space for Prayer
Engage & Equip 