Why Does Prayer Hurt?

When asked, “what is your prayer life like” do you often answer with a non-committal “it’s ok”? When a sermon is delivered that emphasizes personal and family prayer do you feel cut in the spirit? After those heartfelt admonitions and stirring reasons to keep the prayer lines open with God, why is it so hard to actually PRAY?

While driving home from work, a radio pastor was outlining all the benefits of prayer. I myself have often described the Thursday Night Prayer Service at Bible Baptist Temple as a time of refreshment, but many times I almost dread the short drive to the church. Not because of the people or the fellowship or the service. It is being in the presence of God and His Holiness that disturbs me the most. Approaching the Throne of the Creator of the Universe via the Blood of Christ and knowing, deep down, my life is nearly as far from God’s plan for me as it was when I was a godless pagan. After the service I do feel refreshment, but the anticipation of prayer can be unnerving. Even maintaining the discipline for personal prayer and meditation on a daily basis seems nigh impossible at times.

Of course the short answer to this dilemma is the further away from God’s plan for our lives we are the more uncomfortable the Holy Spirit makes our souls during prayer. Prayer indeed does hurt; when we are far from the Light of Truth. It hurts our spirit, it pinches our guilt, it hurts our sense of the Holiness of God. But what we must understand is this pain is not punishment. God sent His Son to die on the cross so that we could AVOID the eternal punishment of the Lake of Fire. Even the mere fact that God sends the rain on the wicked as well as the good demonstrates that He is longsuffering and does not “willy-nilly” throw punishment around the firmament.

I want to pray more, I see the physical manifestations of the benefits of prayer in my life all the time. But we are taught, either by an immature church or pagan society in general, to treat our prayers as “sniper shots” at God. The misguided thinking being if we send up too many prayers God will begin to ignore us or dodge our requests. That thinking has a kernel of truth to it, but it is far from the ideal God has established for us. Read more

Young Earth vs Old Earth Debate; There is No Middle Ground

In the time that I have publicly discussed with friend and foe the debate of Young Earth vs. Old Earth dogma I have become more and more convinced of one incontrovertible fact; the evidence doesn’t matter.

Taken all by itself, a rock is a rock is a rock. It tells no story in and of itself. Through rigorous investigation we can determine its composition. We can weight it, measure it, and drop it in water to determine its specific gravity. Electrocute it, smash it, grind it, smell it, magnify it, burn it, and boil it in acid. All that can be done to it (and more) yet it will reveal no secret. It will divulge no clue of its origin, age, or what it has seen over the course of the centuries. All of our tortures yield no revelations of life, the universe or anything.

We can magnify it to the subatomic particle level or we can map it across continental divides. The rock can be studied in situ or in the lab, with relation to strata above and below. All the information we gather will lead us to no conclusions whatsoever until we apply a worldview to that evidence.

And that is the hidden fact of the debate between YE and OE; it is a debate of WORLDVIEWS, not of the evidence. We can take any particular aspect of the debate, say Cyclothems, and view the evidence through the lens of YE and that of OE and find that the conclusions agree wonderfully within each system of thought. We need not discard observations to make cyclothems fit into a Young Earth model, nor do we need to add spurious suppositions to the data to make the cyclothem harmonize in an Old Earth framework.

Let’s looks a bit closer at our example, the cyclothem. The following is part of a discussion I had online recently and presented the idea that the debate is not of evidence for or against YE or OE but a debate for or against the worlodview. Read more

« Previous Page