The Gift Of Discernment! Robert Longman Jr.

[Found on my hard drives, posted here for educational purposes – I have not read it all]

I’m guessing that you’re talking about the spiritual gift of discernment (a rare thing) rather than the Spirit-led process of day-to-day discernment.

A lot of people really believe that they or their pastor or a friend have been given a special gift for discerning the Godliness of the spirit of something or someone. Very few have shown this
gift when they try to put it to work. It tends to break down into an internal political thing. Gift-discernment is often sent by the Spirit for situations rather than full-time, and
works like a strong intuition (but more Spiritually focused, like a laser). When it’s there, it’s to be used, like other gifts, to build others up, and it’s always to be used in a
very Christ-like manner (but you have to read the Gospels a lot to catch what that is).

Gifts are a mystery, to be lived rather than understood.

# Corinthians 12 and 14) his earth-shaking chapter on love (1 Corinthians 13).)

“There are, then, two ways to confront or criticize another human being : with instinctive and spontaneous certainty that one is right, or with a belief that one is
probably right arrived at through scrupulous self-doubting and self-examination. The first is the way of arrogance; it is the most common way of parents, spouses,
teachers, and people generally in their day-to-day affairs; it is usually unsuccessful, producing more resentment than growth, and other effects that were not
intended. The second is the way of humility; it is not common, requiring as it does a genuine extension of oneself; it is more likely to be successful, and it is never, in
my experience, destructive.”
—— M. Scott Peck, *The Road Less Traveled* (Touchstone, 1978), p.152

“I believe in the Spirit’s guidance just as surely as I believe in God.”
—— Fredrik Wisloff, *I Believe In the Holy Spirit*.

“God never gives us discernment in order that we may criticize, but that we may intercede.”
—— Oswald Chambers

“I fear that many people seek to hear God solely as a device for securing their own safety, comfort and righteousness. For those who busy themselves to know the
will of God, however, it is still true that “those who want to save their life will lose it.” My extreme preoccupation with knowing God’s will for me may only indicate,
contrary to what is often thought, that I am overconcerned with myself, not a Christlike interest in the well-being of others or in the glory of God.”
—— Dallas Willard, *Hearing God*, p. 28

“It is impossible to frame a doctrine of the Holy Spirit by taking all the data indiscriminately and forcing them into the Procrustean bed of a formal system. We have to
discriminate between what is true and what is false, … between what is primary and what is secondary, between what is central and what is peripheral;… between
testimonies concerning the Spirit which reflect different levels of apprehension, between those which belong to different stages of the divine economy, and between
those which have relation to different moments in the dialectic of spirit.”
—— George Hendry, *The Holy Spirit In Christian Theology*, p.13

“The majority of historic heresy is based on an interpretation of the written not the living word. The ‘living word’ — which is the Word in action through the gifts of the
Spirit — is all application and totally subjected in interpretation to the body of Christian truth, not an elevation of subjective over objective truth.”
—— Ron Zess (online).

More of Jesus let me learn
More of His holy will discern;
Spirit of God, my teacher be
Showing the things of Christ to me.
—— (‘More About Jesus’, EE Hewitt, 1915)

(1) Have you had the experience of thinking that you were being led by God to do something, and it turned out not to be so? (If you’re doing these questions on your own, grab a pad and write down about it.)

(2) What kind of matters have you sought God’s guidance about?
How has the result surprised you, if it did?

(3) Have you ever used “God’s will” as a cover for your own plans or ideas? Are you doing so now? (Please, when discussing this: don’t start talking about when others have done so; that just breaks down into the blame game. Talk about yourself.)

(4) Take a look at 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21. It says ‘Don’t quench the Spirit’ and ‘test all things’.

* How do they fit together?
* How might these be seen as working against each other?
* Have you ever been involved in an activity or a church where one was used to render the other as void? How? Why? Did you take any action?

PRAYER
the whats and whys

ver.: 25 November 2002

On This Page :
What is Prayer?
praying and thinking
bother the Father

* Asking Amiss : puppeteering
* the laundry list mentality
* labeling and name-calling
* comparing
* using God to your advantage
* getting God to back your plan

A Yes to God
prayer and the Holy Spirit
prayer and the charismatic renewal
the heart-stuff
God hears prayers
some Bible passages on prayer
some good books on prayer
quotes
Some questions (for further study)

Elsewhere :
praying together
praying with the Bible
the ‘Jesus prayer’
body positions and prayer
space set aside for prayer
prayer and church vitality
intercessory prayer
when prayer falls flat
starting a prayer ministry
prayerwalking a neighborhood
prayerwalking your church building
prayer in worship
quiet time
prayer in a family setting
praying under a burden
prayer against demons
‘bathed in prayer’
praying for nature
prayer in decision-making
prayer as a mark of a living church
prayer and the gift of blessing others
prayer in a parish’s healing ministry
small prayer groups and circles

(Please, send your personal prayer requests to ePrayer or Upper Room, not to Spirithome.com.)

Don’t pray to God without listening.
WHAT IS PRAYER?

Prayer is, at its heart, the communications that are the fabric of the human being’s (and human species’) relationship with its Father. Prayer, at least as a Jew, Muslim,
or Christian would see it, presumes several beliefs to be true at the very least :

* that there’s One beyond each and all of us, beyond all that is around us;
* that this One cares enough to bother with you;
* that this One cares enough to want your response;
* that this One cares enough to respond to you;
* that this One is effective enough for that response to make a difference.

A Christian has an even more intimate picture than that. In most of the other faiths, the believer must get prepared to pray. Muslims, for example, have an elaborate ritual of washing themselves before their prayers, symbolic of repentance and thus cleanness/holiness before God. But Christians see it differently. God as Christ came to us as we are, to remake our relationship with the Divine. Knowing that even our best holiness is rags, but Jesus’ holiness in us means everything, when we come in prayer we come as we are. Unwashed. Messy and icky inside. Sometimes scared. Sometimes needy. Sometimes empty. Sometimes bored. Sometimes furious. But we come. We come trusting that through prayer God can change us, and can change the things that happen in life. We come trusting that God is with us and builds us up, that the Holy Spirit prays with us and for us. We trust that the Lord will lead us to lose our anger, lead us to repentance, lead us to being open to the Spirit’s voice, lead us to love of God and of each other.

That is, when we Christians bother to pray at all. A rather large part of the Christian church rarely prays. They are not much different from the typical agnostic. Both doubt that prayer matters, or doubt that God loves them, or doubt that they are clean enough, or doubt that God is able to make good things happen in this world. If that’s the way you think, I challenge you to just do it.

* Don’t worry about your doubts.
* Don’t worry about how much time you spend at it.
* Don’t worry about using the right words.
* Don’t worry that you might think something really bad and God will get mad.
* Don’t worry about whether you’re ‘ready’ to pray.
* Don’t worry about whether you have the right theology of prayer.
* Don’t worry about thinking of something to say.

Just pray, offering whatever you’re thinking and feeling to the Lord. Whatever you bring, it’s a start. As you pray more regularly or more often, the usual experience is that a strange thing starts happening to you. You start being more truthful in prayer, you start turning away from what you did wrong, your attitude becomes more confident, you start taking the time to listen, you start looking for the signs of divine response in your daily life, you start hungering to read the Scriptures, you start wanting to pray with others, you think less and less about yourself. You will find preparations and practices that may help you be more open to God in prayer — they’re
not necessary or required, but they can help. You start letting the Holy Spirit change you. And this is the beating heart of a relationship with Someone you can’t see.
Strange? But it’s true. True love.

“One should offer not what one has, but what one is.”
Paul Evdokimov, *The Sacrament Of Love*

THINKING IS NOT PRAYING

There’s a key difference between just thinking something and praying it to God. Prayer has a direction. You’re not churning it in your brain or sharing it with friends or
talking it over with a psychologist or getting in touch with your inner self. Prayer is directed to God — acknowledging not only God’s existence, but also a relationship
and even a certain degree of trust. Prayer’s not a waste of time because God is hard at work in this confused, ambiguous world, to draw it toward God’s good
purposes. Prayer is your response to that. If there’s noone there, if there’s no way to relate or even communicate, or if a wrathful god would strike you down just for
trying, why would anyone pray? There’s an unspoken hope there, even if it hangs by a thread or is the size of a mustard seed. God’s response also has a direction :
you will not be left adrift or be led nowhere unless, like Israel in the Sinai, you have a lesson to learn from the drifting.

ARE WE BOTHERING GOD?

God wants people to pray. Jesus set the example. Acts and the various epistles call on us to be in “unceasing prayer”. See Romans 12:12, Colossians 4:2; 1
Thessalonians 5:17; Ephesians 6:18; Jude 20; 1 Peter 4:7; Philippians 4:6. Paul was a pray-er, too (2 Corinthians 13:7; Ephesians 1:16-23; Philippians 1:9; 2
Thessalonians 1:11). The early church even prayed for secular rulers (1 Timothy 2:2-4); their concerns were not just for their own.

The more that your heart opens out to God in prayer, the more that your prayers will buoy your daily life. Spiritual disciplines and practices assist us in this opening-
out.

Jesus gives a great lesson on what prayer is like. It’s like the woman who keeps knocking at the door until the judge comes out and addresses her concern, if only
just to get rid of those annoying knocks. (Jesus likely told this with a smile.) But how much more would you be heard by Someone who loves you? Many people
today wonder if we should be pestering God with our concerns. The answer is Scriptural : God says ‘pester me’!
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There’s no one right way to pray, but there are wrong ways.
ASKING AMISS

Prayer is no place for illusions. Yet, each of us clings to illusions, and we will end up somehow bringing them into our prayers. The Spirit is working to tell us the truth,
and the growth of our prayer relationship with God depends on how well we take heed.
PUPPETEERING

One of the growing problems of the church is that it can’t seem to get it through its thick skull that God controls the outcome of prayer. Not the Church, not the
minister, not the person who prays. It’s not at all rare that a pastor does a political sermon where he/she is doing nothing more than playing ventriloquist with a dummy
labeled ‘God’. (Aside from being idolatrous, it’s also not funny.) So it is also with the “health and wealth” pseudo-gospel where the church ‘prays’ with the attitude of a
puppeteer : pull the string, and God’s hand stretches out to send forth a blessing. God is not a genie in a lamp; our wish is not God’s command. If we are asking
anything, we are to be asking, not putting in a 1-800 call to a divine telemarketing service or clicking our mouse to reach a multi-level marketeer in some level of
heaven. Remember that God is bigger than you, so you can’t go bossing God around.
USING GOD

Jesus taught us to pray that God’s will be done. That means seeking God’s purposes instead of seeking a new car or a passing grade or a fast-track promotion or a
miraculous sign. Jesus didn’t promise earthly bliss in 30 days or less. Jesus’ promises are for those who abide in Him, who put themselves at His service and draw
their love from His. There is such a thing as the wrath of God, and one sure way to provoke it is to try to jerk God around for one’s own advantage.

THE LAUNDRY LIST MENTALITY

Prayer is not a laundry list. It is communication with someone you love and trust. Don’t only do it when you want something. Prayer is as much listening (‘meditation’)
as it is talking, as much a sharing as it is a plea for help. Yet, God has asked us (even dared us?) to ask. Nothing’s too small, too big, too hard, or for that matter too
twisted by our selfishness or lack of perception, for God to hear and take account of it.

God’s here, in the world in which we live, involved in what’s going on. A lot of it flies in the face of divine will, but God’s very good at finding ways to make the best of
the bad situations created by our skewed creation. Even our own worst foulups.

Ask, and ye shall receive — but often ye shall receive something else that’s more in keeping with what God needs from you. And it will come in God’s time, not ours.
God promises those who believe in Christ a loving response.
LABELS and NAME-CALLING

In the Bible, Jesus shares the story about a fixture in the religious community who when praying thanked God that he is not like that traitorous tax collecting low-life
some distance away. It’s not only an example of being prideful, it’s an example of reducing a person to a category. Categories can be useful for understanding data,
but they’re dreadful for understanding a person. Categories don’t tell the truth about people; people just don’t fit. You may not be as out front about it as the proud
man of the parable. But do you ever pray about people as if they would have some pre-slotted attitude or worth? It’s not hard to find people who pray about a
“godless liberal” or “heathen” or “hypocrite” or “snob”, and so on. But treating people according to a label can be almost as harmful when we mean good by it,
because we’re not treating that specific person as the person they are. It’s bad enough that the world around us depersonalizes people; it’s sin for followers of Christ
to do so, since we know better. Christ died not just for all of us, but for each of us.

IT’S NOT FAIR TO COMPARE

The religious leader of that same parable was doing something else that has no place before God. He was comparing himself (favorably, of course) to someone else.
God isn’t weighing you against anyone else, noone of today and noone of the past.

Like a good mother does with her children, God may not love us all the same, but God loves each of us completely for who we are. If you’re someone who is prone to being depressed, among the most common of mental traps is to say, “I’m not as worthy as (someone else)”, or “God, why did you make my life so miserable and that jerk’s life so happy”. That can be a real downer. But that is not how God sees you. Your real worth is what God deems you to be, and how good or bad or happy or pathetic others are just doesn’t matter for that. If that’s so, then there’s no reason to let comparison creep into your prayer life. All it does is twist what you ask for and dull your response.

IN THIS TOWN, EVERYONE’S GOT A PLAN

Sometimes what you desire is not material at all. Sometimes you just want the sense of control that comes from having everything go according to plan. You believe that if it follows your plan, it will work out best overall for yourself and those you care about, progressing as it should. Or so you think. So you pray an argument with God, trying to convince God that you have it right, that you know the way to go, trying to talk God into giving your plan a divine blessing. Once again, we forget who is the God here. Our plans are awfully puny when stood next to God’s; they’re all twisted up in curly-queues, driven by motives deeper than we are aware of, not big
enough where big counts, not detailed enough where it matters, not wise enough to prevent us from looking really stupid. God already has a plan under way, called “the Kingdom of God”. It’s the plan that will take effect, with or without you, like it or not. Thank God for that, or we’d really be sunk! Pray instead that God will guide you into the part of that plan that was designed for you.

“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for the day.”
Abraham Lincoln

Don’t pray to God without listening.
A ‘YES’ TO GOD

Real prayer comes not from gritting our teeth, but from falling in love.
Richard Foster

No matter how good the devotional method or prayer strategy is, if it does not rely on God, it will fail. Prayer is meant to be a ‘yes’ to a God who has already said ‘yes’ to us. If you pray with the core of your being and surrender to the Lord, you will get the power to carry out what God wants of you, because you will be doing what God wants you to do and God has promised to help. You yearn for the spiritual because God loves you. The Spirit opens you to that love so you hear the Word’s call for a response of love. The response is that we yield our selves to God. Prayer, spiritual devotions, service and worship are sides or facets of that response.
PRAYING AND THE SPIRIT

Traditionally, when Christians have prayed involving the Holy Spirit, we’ve prayed an epiclesis. That’s fancy God-talk for saying that the prayers are a plea to the
Father to fill us with the Spirit. In liturgical churches, the key epiclesis is found in the thanksgiving prayer before Holy Communion is given out. In some charismatic
churches, an important epiclesis happens right before the sermon. The worshippers will come forward to make a huddle around the preacher, praying that the Spirit
moves through the sermon. Every once in a while, a song will give praise to the Spirit, but most churches only do that once we’ve already said praises to the Father
and to the Son. Almost no other churchly prayers directly speak to the Spirit. This gives many people the impression that the Spirit is somehow third-rate.

Christians don’t pray to the Spirit to confess our sins nor do they plea to the Spirit for forgiveness. As Jesus taught in the Lord’s Prayer, prayers go to the Father, so
that the Son may step in for us now as He did when on earth. The different persons of the Trinity do different things. The Spirit moves you to turn to God in prayer
and repentance, brings to your mind that there is hope in doing so, and makes you aware of the truth and the need. The Spirit prays with you, and when you reach
the point where your prayers get stopped by human limits, the Spirit picks it up and keeps it running, “with sighs too deep for words”. But don’t think rigidly about
these roles. All of the Triune God is at work in your prayers. If you pray to the Spirit, God hears it just as well as if addressed to the Father. The pattern is there not for
God, but for us and our feeble grasp of the mysteries of how God works in prayer.

PRAYER AND THE CHARISMATIC RENEWAL

The early years of the charismatic renewal were especially prayer-packed. An outsider could easily have seen the charismatic movement as a prayer movement. The
prayer meeting was the charismatic renewal’s beehive. It was the main activity for their gathering, their nurture, and for their spreading around. Several people would
gather, often at someone’s home, strictly on their own accord, just to pray. Eventually, the groups got larger as more people came, and the scene shifted to
churches. In the movement’s heyday, there was a prayer group praying somewhere in many major cities, at any time, every day. Even on the overnight shift! (Shades
of the prayer vigils of the Herrnhut of Zinzendorf’s followers!)

The charismatic movement is prayerful before it is anything else. However, they’re finding it harder to keep it up nowadays, because there’s so much more to do :
conferences and books and videos and web sites and programs and classes and church activities and stadium meetings and visiting preachers and warfare
strategizing. Let’s not forget WWJD bracelets and angel-on-my-shoulder jewelry. Oh yes — all sorts of other stuff about prayer and about someone else’s powerful
prayer ministry.

The Devil will do anything to get our mind off of our really praying or really serving.
There’s No Star Syndrome

Throughout Christian history, there have been stories of people whose prayers are astoundingly effective, lead to amazing insight, and bring about the smaller turning
points that make up the meat of history. In the Book of Kings, Elijah prays and God makes incredible things happen. Revivals were started by prayer leaders,
whether it be the renewal ministry of Francis of Assisi or the start of Luther’s Reformation, or the first Great Awakening of Jonathan Edwards, or at the birth of
Pentecostalism or of the Charismatic movement. Today, there are some leaders whom many people look up to as powerful “prayer warriors”. Yet, the star syndrome
is not what any true pray-er is about. In his letter, James (5:16-17) writes in praise of Elijah’s powerful prayers, but then says that Elijah had “a nature like us”. Nothing
was essentially different about him, save that Elijah was a righteous man living his calling, who passionately prayed to the God he served and loved. When I think of
modern-day prayer heroes, I sometimes think of the grandmothers of Russia who, since their youth, had kept their nation in prayer and quietly tended to the fires of
the church while the Communists oppressed and tried to kill the church’s public life. These women had little else but faithful prayer, but they kept it up. And won.
Anyone can be a mighty prayer person. You can be one. But you can’t hear that and just say, ‘That’s what I want to be right now’. It takes hard work at being God’s.
You don’t name it and claim it, you grow and mature into it.

The ‘Heart Stuff’

A lot of people have in their mind the stuff of faith. But how can you move from that ‘head stuff’ to a living faith? Prayer, before anything else. In prayer we go from
thinking about or talking about God or even talking to God, to talking with God and listening when God calls. It’s a trust commitment in one whom we cannot see and
will not hear, who we cannot by normal earthly means even know is there. We pray trusting, or maybe just hoping, that God will act on what we pray about. We
respond to God’s proven love by depending on God to respond within our daily lives. The life of faith is a life of trusting that God is at work on your concerns, or is at
least working on you.

When you rediscover that the world around you is both natural and supernatural, then it makes sense that prayer has great value as spiritual communication. You
begin to want to pray, and look forward to private or group time in prayer.
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Prayer methods aren’t crucial, but they can be helpful.

Some Bible passages on prayer :

Matthew 7:7, 21-22; Mark 11:22-26; Luke 18:1-6; Luke 11:1-13; John 15:7,16; Ephesians 6:18-19; Colossians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 5:17-18; James 5:16;
Revelations 8:3-4.

SOME QUOTES TO THINK ABOUT

“You may pray for an hour and still not pray. You may meet God for a moment and then be in touch with Him all day.”
Fredrik Wisloff, *I Believe In the Holy Spirit* (Augsburg)

“The pursuit of a prayerful life of simple love and discipline sets us in isolation from and opposition to the mainstream, mammon-directed culture in which we live. We
become deserters from technocracy, disaffiliating ourselves from its power, rejecting its false values. To pray is to drop out in the most profound and positive sense.”
Kenneth Leech, *True Prayer* (Harper, 1980), p.81

“You will never learn how to pray until you are moved enough to weep.”
Jerry Kaufman, as found in *The Power Of A City At Prayer*, Mac Pier and Katie Sweeting (IVP, 2002), p.107

“Prayer puts us on the potter’s wheel, reshaping us to be God’s vessels. As we beg that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we present ourselves to God
to do it.”
from *Churches That Make A Difference*, Olson / Unruh / Sider (Baker, 2002), p. 142

God has instituted prayer so as to confer upon his creatures the dignity of being causes.
Blaise Pascal

“Prayer is the breath of your life which gives you the freedom to go and stay where you wish and to find the many signs which point out the way to a new land.”
Henri Nouwen, *With Open Hands*

“Prayers do shape the future in ways different from what would have been the case had no prayers been uttered. And this is because of the kind of God to whom
the prayers are spoken. …. God is open to taking new directions and changing courses in view of the interaction between God and people. Yet always in view will
be God’s salvific will for all.”
Terence Fretheim, ‘Creating Space In the World For God’, in *A Primer On Prayer*, ed. Paul Sponheim (Fortress, 1988) p. 61. Emphasis is in the original.

“Learning to pray is the way Christians discover how to speak. The primary language of the church is the way of prayer — because in prayer the practice and the
language are inseparable.”
William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, *Where Resident Aliens Live*, p. 42

Some books on prayer :
Ole Hallesby, *Prayer* (Augsburg; orig. 1931, repr. 1994)

Anthony Bloom, *Beginning To Pray* (Paulist, 1979)
E.M. Bounds, *Power Through Prayer* (Zondervan, 1979)
George Buttrick, *Prayer* (Abingdon, 1942)
Judson Cornwall, *Praying the Scriptures* (Creation House, 1990)
Richard Foster, *Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home* (Harper, 1992)
Romano Guardini, *Prayer In Practice* (Pantheon, 1957)
Jeanne Guyon, *Experiencing God Through Prayer* (Whitaker, 1984)
Timothy Jones, *The Art of Prayer* (Ballantine, 1997)
Kenneth Leech, *True Prayer* (Harper, 1980)
C.S. Lewis, *Letters To Malcolm* (Harcourt Brace, 1964)
Peter Lord, *Hearing God* (Baker, 1988)
Joseph Schmidt, *Praying Our Experiences* (St. Mary’s Press, 1989)
Kenneth Swanson, *Uncommon Prayer: Approaching Intimacy With God* (Ballantine, 1987)
Theresa of Avila, *The Interior Castle* (Paulist, 1979)
R.A. Torrey, *The Power Of Prayer* (Zondervan, 1955)
C. Peter Wagner, *Churches That Pray* (Regal, 1993)
Timothy Ware, ed., *The Art of Prayer: A Orthodox Anthology* (Faber & Faber, 1966)
Walter Wink, *Engaging the Powers* (Fortress, 1992)

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Prayer is the most essential act of the spiritual life.

SOME QUESTIONS to ask yourselves

If you pray :

1. How do you pray?
2. In what settings do you pray?
3. What do you pray for? Do you receive it? Do you receive something else? What do you do when you do not receive it?
4. What is the one thing which most puzzles you about prayer? What do you find hardest to accept about prayer?

Check out one or two of the first 17 Psalms.

* What do you notice about what they are praying about, and how they are praying about it?
* Do you find any of it disturbing? Why?
* Which of these Psalms do you connect most with? Why?

 

WHO DOES GOD HEAR?

God hears our prayers, whomever we are. I myself would even say (as an opinion) that God hears the true prayers of the non-Christian — certainly a faithful Jew or
Muslim. God heard the pleas of Cain, and Cain didn’t care about God. A God who is totally deaf to the cries of a animist mother whose son is dying is a very different
sort of god than the Father who sent His own son to die to save the human race. The One we pray to sends rain and sunshine to the evil as well as the good, and
calls on us to love our enemies because that’s how God loves. The Lord will at least communicate, though the conversation would go quite differently with those
who don’t believe. I get the feeling that when God hears some major Christian leader say who is and isn’t heard in prayer, God thinks, ‘Oh, yeah? Who are you to tell
Me who to listen to?’. God’s reply is different, the non-Christian’s response is different, but the Lord cares about all of us sinners, whether we accept God’s
forgiveness and new life or not. Prayer’s power comes from God’s love and God’s promises, not ours. The difference with the believing Christian is that God promised
us full attention and a loving reply, and we can live in that promise. The believing Christian doesn’t pray to a Remote Unknown God-Machine that receives our pleas.
When the Christian prays, it’s to a Father who hears His Son’s voice speaking for and with us.
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Some statistical info on prayer

In the United States (based on a combination of sources) :

* Four out of five adults and three out of four teens pray each week.
* 19 out of 20 African-American female adults pray each week, and over two-thirds do it every day. That makes prayer one of their most characteristic sociological
behaviors.
* Teens in the Midwest who pray, pray 3 to 4 times a day when they feel their lives are falling apart, though the rates fall to average once the crisis is over.
* Most of those who say they are ‘not religious’ also say they sometimes pray, usually to ask for something good in their lives or to ask forgiveness. (But to who or
what?) Many of them also believe that prayer can make things change for a loved one or for themselves. ‘Non-religious’ people often say they prayed for an aunt,
mother or grandmother who was seriously ill or dying. And on 9-11, it was common to find professed atheists and agnostics crossing themselves or going into other
prayer positions.
* On average, prayer time lasts for about five minutes, and just over a third of those who pray say they include silent time for listening back or stilling the soul.

I’d love to hear from you. Please write me at rlongman1@aol.com.
Or, to the introduction to Spirithome.
Or, to the Spirithome front page.
Or, to the subject index.
If you like this site, please link to it on yours, and tell others about it.
Copyright © 1996, 2002 Robert Longman Jr. You can use any Spirithome.com material freely anytime for non-profit, non-commercial personal, church or educational
use only, if credited. Otherwise, ask permission and pay up.

 

Spirithome.com on spiritual disciplines and practices
SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES
and practices

ver : 05 September 2002

On This Page :
Spiritual Disciplines and Practices
What Makes Disciplines So Special?
Quotes
key spiritual web links
seasonal devotionals

Other Spiritual Stuff :
about prayer
about praying
Quiet Time
Retreats
Sabbath
Devotional Bible Reading
Devotional Singing
Bracketing
Journals
Movement and Dance (for now, try the Sacred Dance Guild’s web site)
Labyrinths
Availability
Fasting
Intercessory Prayer
Travel and Pilgrimage
Doing Good ‘Little Things’ and Acts of Kindness
Denial Detection
The Church Year and Holy Days
some self-checks on spiritual attitudes (NEW)

Disciplines help us keep focused on God
SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES AND PRACTICES

Christians over the years have learned that certain disciplines and practices help them keep the spiritual channels open and help keep the heart turned toward God.
These disciplines can’t save; they can’t even by themselves make you a holy person. But they can heighten your desire and awareness and love of God by stripping
down the barriers you yourself put up and some that others put up for you. What makes something a ‘spiritual discipline’ is that it takes a specific part of your way of
life and turns it toward God. A spiritual discipline is, when practiced faithfully and regularly, a habit or regular pattern in your life that repeatedly brings you back to God
and opens you up to what God is saying to you.
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WHAT’S SO SPECIAL ABOUT DISCIPLINES?

Spiritual disciplines help to keep our relationship with God in good working order, and even help develop intimacy. But no discipline is able to create or start one’s
relationship with God. Nothing we do can do that; Christ did it already. No discipline can earn us heavenly brownie points, because there are no such brownie points
to earn. No discipline gives us even the briefest moment of escape from our broken nature. No discipline can rescue us, make us more valuable as persons, or make
us inherently more of a leader. Your life may go smoother because of it, but it may get much rougher, and neither is really the point of it.

Disciplines and practices are tools that are a part of cooperating with the Spirit on the task of remaking us into what God wants us to be. Tools, not magic, not
willpower. Tools of surrender and remanufacture. Tools that are used with Scripture, not in its stead. Powerful tools, but only because of the powerful One we’re
working with. And you are not the foreman.

Doing and Resting

When people first encounter spiritual disciplines, they think it’s something important to do. As they go along, they come to understand that resting can be a discipline,
too. But, they still have the frame of mind which makes ‘being at rest’ something to do. I’ll do x amount of rest, y amount of quiet, in z place at t time. Okay, so
scheduling is important. But so is ignoring the schedule, because the schedule – even on spiritual stuff — is not God. The time can be spent just being, just letting God
do something for you instead of you always straining to do something (even a devotional something) for God. There is a time for work, and a time for rest. A time to
lead or take action; a time to not be in control and to let the Spirit lead, to sit there and watch the wheels go round.
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QUOTES

“Self-respect is the fruit of discipline : the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.”
——- Abraham J. Heschel

“Resolved : that all men should live for the glory of God.
Resolved second : that whether others do or not, I will.”
——- Jonathan Edwards

“The detachment from the confusion all around us is in order to have a richer attachment to God. Christian meditation leads us to the inner wholeness necessary to
give ourselves to God freely.”
——- Richard Foster, *Celebration Of Discipline* 2nd ed. (Harper, 1988), p.21

“Meditation has no point and no reality unless it is firmly rooted in life .”
——- Thomas Merton, *Contemplative Prayer* (Doubleday, 1969), p.39

“By means of the imagination, we confine our mind within the mystery on which we meditate, that it may not ramble to and fro…”
——- Francis deSales, *Introduction To the Devout Life*

“I never had a close relationship with God through prayer and the usual disciplines. That worried me. At the end of life, I find He’s been a part of my life, very clear;
and it’s OK. He reached out; I didn’t.”
——- Reuel Howe, by way of Loren Mead

“If you get the idea to do something good, just do it. It might be the Holy Spirit.”
——- Mary Stearns Sgarioto, in *Lutheran Woman Today*, May 1995.

“First, let [fasting] be done unto the Lord with our eye singly fixed on Him. Let our intention herein be this, and this alone, to glorify our Father which is in heaven.”
——- John Wesley, as found in the collection *Sermons On Several Occasions* (Epworth, 1971), p.301

“To know the mechanics does not mean that we are practicing the Disciplines. The Spiritual Disciplines are an inward and spiritual reality, and the inner attitude of
the heart is far more crucial than the mechanics for coming into the reality of the spiritual life.”
——- Richard Foster, *Celebration Of Discipline* 2nd ed. (Harper, 1988), p.3
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Some good links on other sites :

* Center for Spiritual Formation.
* Centering Prayer, the methods taught by Fr. Thomas Keating.
* Credenda
* Mount Carmel’s Daily Texts.
* ePrayerNet (they take prayer requests and get real pray-ers to pray on them)
* A resource site on ‘sacred reading’ and the Lectio Divina practices.
* Wayne Tow and Lutheran Prayer Ministries’ prayer resources.
* the Oremus prayer and devotional resources
* John Veltri’s Orientations for Spiritual Growth
* Richard Foster and Renovare, a group fostering spiritual disciplines and spiritual life.
* Sacred Space, a prayer guidance site by Jesuits in Ireland.
* Spiritual Growth Ministries of New Zealand; Presbyterian-related.
* Upper Room, with a Methodist-rooted spirituality.
* home site of Dallas Willard, a popular author on spirituality.
* World Wide Web Source on Prayer, mostly from the Catholic tradition; with lots of useful stuff.

Spirithome.com Lenten devotionals

Ash Wednesday.
First Sunday of Lent.
Second Week of Lent.
Second Sunday of Lent.
Third Week of Lent.
Third Sunday of Lent.
Fourth Sunday of Lent.
Fourth Week of Lent.
Fifth Sunday of Lent.
Fifth Week of Lent.
Palm Sunday.
Maundy Thursday.
Good Friday.
Easter.
Pentecost Sunday.

Spirithome.com Advent devotionals
First Sunday of Advent.
Second Sunday of Advent.
Third Sunday of Advent.
Fourth Sunday of Advent.
Christmas.
St. Stephen’s Day.
Epiphany.

And, there’s pages on the Easter season and Pentecost. Check it out !

Spiritual practices are only good for helping strengthen your relationship with God.

I’d love to hear from you. Please write me at rlongman1@aol.com.
subject reference index.
Spirithome front page.
introduction to Spirithome.
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Copyright © 1998, 2002 Robert Longman Jr. All rights reserved.