A Quote by Philip Yancey
Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.
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If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.
Everybody you work with sees what you're doing from a different point of view, a very specific point of view. So, if someone is lighting, they're seeing it from that point of view. A production designer is seeing it from the placement of furniture that tells you about the character. Everything that goes into the room should tell you about the person who lives in that room.
Prayer may seem at first like disengagement, a reflective time to consider God's point of view. But that vantage presses us back to accomplish God's will, the work of the kingdom. We are God's fellow workers, and as such we turn to prayer to equip us for the partnership.
Bibles read without prayer; sermons heard without prayer; marriages contracted without prayer; journeys undertaken without prayer; residences chosen without prayer; friendships formed without prayer; the daily act of prayer itself hurried over, or gone through without heart: these are the kind of downward steps by which many a Christian descends to a condition of spiritual palsy, or reaches the point where God allows them to have a tremendous fall.
Prayer that craves a particular commodity—anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.
This is the path of prayer-contemplative prayer, that is, as distinct from simple prayers of supplication and thanksgiving-which is a specific discipline of thought, desire, and action, one that frees the mind from habitual prejudices and appetites, and allows it to dwell in the gratuity and glory of all things. As an old monk on Mount Athos once told me, contemplative prayer is the art of seeing reality as it truly is; and, if one has not yet acquired the ability to see God in all things, one should not imagine that one will be able to see God in himself.
Faith is lifeless unless you act on it. T.L. Osbourne says: “When the promises of God are believed and acted upon they become the power of God”. We can do all the things we have previously talked about about: desire, decision, prayer, speaking faith, seeing the answer, but if we don’t act our faith it is all to no avail.
Sometimes the act of walking in the face of the elements helps us come to grips with reality. Or it simply exhausts us to the point of seeing the futility of resisting reality and the futility of denial.
Prayer is not so much an act as it is an attitude of dependency, dependency upon God. Prayer is a confession of creature weakness, yes, of helplessness. Prayer is the acknowledgment of our need and the spreading of it before God.
We're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from. All the ones who don't have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotized by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality tunnel. And every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we're willing to listen.
Reality makes no sense at all, except possibly from God's point of view
Whenever the insistence is on the point that God answers prayer, we are off the track. The meaning of prayer is that we get hold of God, not of the answer.
Four things let us ever keep in mind: God hears prayer, God heeds prayer, God answers prayer, and God delivers by prayer.
The truth is an objective standard by which reality is measured; it's God's point of view on any subject.
Seeing things from a different point of view can help us understand why other people act the way they do. We too often judge people without having all the facts.
As I have come to realize that we all live and move and have our being in God, the names of each person, species, creature, and element are superimposed over God's name. God is reality; God is the source of reality of each of us. Panentheism seeing the world as in God - puts God's "name" first, but each of our names are included and preserved in their distinctiveness within the divine reality.
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