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Recap of 7/3/11 (Daniel 9:3,4)
1. Prayer energizes our work, our worship, and our walk (for example, prayer is an essential part of the abiding life of fruitfulness spoken of by Jesus in John 15).
2. Biblical prayer is relationship-oriented, not results-oriented. God is our Father and wants us to come to Him with our needs, joys, weaknesses, hurts, etc.
3. Eugene Peterson describes prayer as “the means by which we get everything out in the open before God.” He teaches about prayer that we should:
-pray our tears (prayer for that which makes us cry, keeps the balance between self-pity and suppressing our emotions)
-pray our doubt (Doubt is not sin. It is an essential element in belief. No mature faith avoids or denies doubt. Doubt forces faith to bedrock.)
-pray our death (Psalm 90:10,12 – death is inevitable, we must seek God’s help to live wisely and live well)
-pray our praise
-pray our sin (we must confess not just individual sins, but the tendency to want our own way, the demand to our right to ourselves, the tendency to go away from God)
-pray our fear (“The world is a dangerous place. Prayer brings fear into focus and faces it and affirms God’s presence in it.”)
-pray our hate (“Prayer, we think, means presenting ourselves before God so that he will be pleased with us. We put on our ‘Sunday best’ in our prayers. But when we pray the prayers of God’s people, the Psalms, we find that will not do. We must pray who we actually are, not who we think we should be.”)
-pray the Scriptures (turn God’s Word into prayer)
-pray for our enemies
