The Prayer Course Sesssion 2: what I learned and took away...

I am continuing to enjoy and find 'The Prayer Course' useful. It is a good catalyst both for prayer and for small groups in a church setting.

The second session is about petition prayers... coming with our needs and our concerns before God.

Pete Grieg shares a technique he uses to pray for eight important issues and areas in his life. He went on the internet and obtained an eight sided dice and at different times during the day will bring out the dice throw it and pray for that issue in his life. I imagine he keeps it in his pocket and I thought "If that was me, I wonder how many times the dice would go through the wash". He also shared that for each of these eight areas he had gone to scripture to look for a promise in each area... In the video he shares one promise he had for his Children and an answer to that prayer.

I did wonder if it wasn't a bit like the old promise boxes where people pulled out a promise from scripture each day (out of context) and claimed it for themselves... and I did have to admit I find my thinking about claiming promises from scripture being a bit coloured by the whole 'name it and claim it' emphasis of the prosperity movement. But once I had managed to work through my own misgivings and yes prejudices... I actually thought... yes... if we are serious in our prayer lives that God's will be done  then it make sense to let God's word direct and shape our prayers and prayer life.

In a very public way at the end of the worship services here at St Peter's we do this  as  we use a benediction/blessing from scripture to ray over each other... I have enjoyed finding the different and often unused blessings from the New Testament epistles  so that we have new and fresh expressions of that desire that God would be with us and bless us.

Here is the one we are using from Roamns 15:5-6 at the moment... it's a bit long but as we've gone on people have got into it as a blessing on us individually but as a church as well.

Scripture shapes and guides our faith and it was good to have that connection with our prayer life emphasised as well.