Archives for July 2016

Forgive Us Our Debts As We Forgive Our Debtors

The fifth petition is “forgive us our debts.”  A consideration of God and his holiness, will, and kingdom will necessarily make us cognizant of our own sin and need of forgiveness.  We can’t draw near to God without simultaneously recognizing how far we are from him.   Repentance is always the appropriate response to a holy […]

Rt. 18 Closure

Please share with everyone concerned: Rt 18 will have a full road closure starting August 1 at 6:30 AM and remain closed til August 8th at 6:30 AM. The full closure will begin at PGT and continue to the traffic signal at Toys-R-Us. All access and exit ramps will also be closed. You will need to […]

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Sometimes prayer becomes a laundry list.  “God, please help me get this job.  Please heal John’s gout.  Please help Marie with her sciatic pain.  I’d love to have good weather for Sunday’s picnic.  Also…peace on the earth.”  And so on. We all have stuff we’d like to have from God.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with […]

The Lord’s Prayer: Parallel Petitions

I’ve never considered myself to be especially strong as a poet.  I love to write, but I’m far more prosy than otherwise.  But I can appreciate poetry, and the Bible is certainly full of loads of it.  The Psalms take a poetic form, obviously, but so too do the wisdom books, huge swaths of the […]

Thy Will Be Done

One of the biggest problems we have in prayer is that we have horrifically bad practical theology.  We pray as though we understand God to be a genie and ourselves to be his master.  We present God a laundry list of stuff we want from him, then get annoyed if we don’t get what we […]