Reflections on the interplay of the Bible and Culture
I wonder if the money spent on the large venue is the best use of the resources provided to the church. Not only do you have the expense of building the large venue, there is also a large increase of the maintenance and operating budgets to support the building.
In his book on prayer, Tim Keller writes this about the importance of having Scripture as the foundation of our prayer life: “Without immersion in God’s words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality. We may be responding not to the real God but to what we wish … Read more
God is telling us that he wants us to bring our concerns to him. He wants us to pray for, long for, a day of ultimate peace. He wants us to beg for the ultimate establishment of his kingdom.
This verse in Isaiah encourages me that at some point justice will be established. We will no longer experience terrorism, disease, or government corruption. We have a hope that rises higher than any flood of bad news that comes our way.
The question is, why should we pray if God already knows what we need? It is not like I am going to provide God with a missing piece of data without which he could not make a good choice.
We can learn a lesson from Daniel’s prayer. Daniel earnestly interceded on behalf of his people and asked God to intervene and do something about it. God has responded in a most amazing way by sending Jesus.
I can read about miracles in the Bible and not be amazed. The flannel graph presentations of my youth have made the stories so familiar that too often I do not connect with how radical the events actually were. This healing should amaze me but its familiarity masks how marvelous it really is.
It is precisely because Jesus died and rose again that I can have hope to be other than I am. For what could I pray if there was no hope that my sin has been conquered? For what could I pray if Jesus did not rise and demonstrate that sin and death are vanquished? What hope have I without the Cross and the empty tomb?