Desiring Prayer

Several people in my class wrote how they struggled with even having the desire to pray. I read those cards this morning, and then asked my class how they would respond with grace and in humility. The image here shows most of their responses, and I thought they had a real beauty to them. As the discussion continued, one man summarized the discussion well with the thoughts in the square in the image. He was hearing how God constantly allows us to lose control in life, which then causes us to surrender in the futility, and then we pray. All we have to do to realize our desire to pray is to simply pay attention to the brokenness in life. 

Messy Prayer

I really do love teaching Sunday School, especially at a grace-centered church at Oak Mountain. Imagine a place where people talk about their struggles and questions as they wrestle to find the truth. Only in a place like that would I admit to having the kind of prayer life shown in this diagram. Yep! That's pretty much my typical prayer time during my devotions. (Click on the image, and I bet it will pop up bigger for you.) Do they make a special ADD medicine for people who only get ADD when they pray? I'm usually a really focused person until I start praying.

This morning, I started the lesson with a brainstorm about how the gospel of grace makes us free. I really enjoyed hearing what people had to say. That's on the left side of the white board picture below. Then we brainstormed the right hand column, taking what we know about how the grace makes us free in general and applying it to how grace frees us up in our prayer lives. I wanted people to be able to see prayer, which Paul Miller calls the last bastion of legalism, in light of gospel freedoms that they were beginning to really know in other parts of their lives.