Two key words for prayer

Our Father...

I'm convinced that most of our problems with prayer originate from a failure to comprehend these two words.

Our Father,  Richard Coekin, p30

Welch: do my concerns drive God crazy?

We have absolutely no evidence that God ever throws up his hands and says “You are driving me crazy! What more can I say?” If he says “Do not be afraid” hundreds of times, there is no reason to think that he will be silent during your struggles.  How strange it would be for God to say, “Okay, you persuaded me. You aren’t my child.”  How backwards!  He is the One who persuades us. 

Running Scared, p225

Welch: defeating fear of opinion 2

My world must be very small for me to be preoccupied with the opinions of others.  What a relief to be offered something bigger, something more important than the anxieties that keep me awake at night. 

Running Scared, p199

Welch: defeating fear of opinion 1

The only appropriate and healthy response is to treat others the way God has treated us.  The result?  People’s (perceived) opinions don’t have the same power to crush us any more.  Instead, we are less concerned about how we are treated and more concerned with how we treat others.  Rejection may still hurt, but it won’t control us. 

Running Scared, p188-9

Go far enough to be able to hear the Word

In all of his learnings from his pastorate in rural Switzerland and his own reading of Scripture, Karl Barth made a type of conclusion in The Word of God and the Word of Man, saying, "We must take the trouble to go off far enough to hear the Word again." Both Barth and Bonhoeffer had to go away to re-hear the good news they had awoken to first years ago, to be reminded of what to Paul was "of first importance." As a young preacher and pastor in America, I am reminded of what Andrew Walls would call, "a certain vulnerability, a fragility, at the heart of Christianity" (that is, the cross of Christ). In the midst of the evangelical industrial complex that has been built here in the West, we must not modify this "good news for the poor," or try and rephrase it so that it might "work" for the satisfied, popular, and wealthy.

Chris Nye in Leadership

Welch: rust

What does it mean to store up treasures on earth? ...It means that anything labelled “mine” is already rusting. 

Running Scared, p163

Augustine on preaching prep

He should be in no doubt that any ability he has and however much he has derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory; and so, by praying for himself and for those he is about to address, he must become a man of prayer before becoming a man of words. As the hour of his address approaches, before he opens his thrusting lips he should lift his thirsting soul to God so that he may utter what he has drunk in and pour out what has filled him

Quoted in Leadership 

Welch: mechanism of a worry

If we know Christ and have affirmed our allegiance to Him, worry is a sign that we are trying to have it both ways.  We certainly don’t want to renounce our allegiance to Jesus, but we want to protect what we feel is our own.  We are not sure that the Lord can be trusted with some of these things, so we look for help elsewhere.  And if there is no obvious alternate source of help, we worry.  

Running Scared, p161