Friday, March 16, 2007

Random rant on prayer and pronunciation

I was reading Dan Phillips' post here on people mumbling and mangling Jesus' name.

It brought to mind a few thoughts of my own - one backed up by the mighty Pyro leader himself in the comments section of Dan's post.

minor rant
As Phil put it "The possessive of Jesus' name is spelled and pronounced the way I just wrote it." Ministers and pew sitters alike pay attention - it's Jesus' and when you say "Jesus' disciples" it sounds just like "Jesus disciples" not "Jesusiz disciples".

Anyhow...

Slightly more important Rant
When you pray consider these three things:
  • Leave out the word "just" as in "Lord we just want to just ask you to just help us"
  • Think about the Trinity when you pray - I don't know how many times I've heard, "Dear father, we just want to thank you for loving us enough to come and die for us". God the Father did not come an ddie for us, that was God the Son.
  • Also - please don't try to be so calvinistic or whatever it is that you don't actually ask God for whatever it is you want - "Lord pray for so and so who's sick and we ask you to do your will for him, and we know that you will do your will, so we ask you to do your will." It's almost as if we are afraid to ask incase we dont get it and people, us or others, will say "God didn't answer your prayer". Or perhaps it's because we know that God has a secret will and we don't want people to think we dont know it. I don't know
What I do know is this - Jesus tells us to ask whatever we want in his name - over and over again 8 times plus another 3 from the apostles. It's ok to be specific and to ask for specific things. Of course we understand that God will do what is best, but shouldn't let it handicap and mangle our prayers because we are so conscious of sounding right to other theologically astute folks.
Anyhow...

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