Tag Archives: Prayer for Beginners

Sin

What Should Be Our Response When We Fail God?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Failing to obey God is something that every Christian does, and repeatedly.  Every one of us sins, but how should we react when we sin, when we fail God?

Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft, in his book Prayer For Beginners, takes some lessons from Brother Lawrence’s little classic The Practice of the Presence of God.  Brother Lawrence says, “When I fail in my duty, I readily acknowledge it, saying ‘I am used to doing so; I shall never do otherwise if I am left to myself.’ If I fail not, then I give God thanks, acknowledging that the strength comes from Him” (Conversation 2).

When he considers Brother Lawrence’s advice, Kreeft says:

You may think this sounds too easy, too cavalier, almost indifferent. But why?  To be “sensible” of our faults but not “discouraged” by them is not indifference, it is patience.  Not to be sensible of them, or not to confess them, is the road to pride.  But to be discouraged by them is the road to despair. . . . How can we attain this state, of being sensible of our faults but not discouraged by them?  By seeing our faults but also seeing farther than our faults; by framing our faults by our faith, which is not faith in ourselves but faith in God.  No fault, no sin, no failure can exhaust God’s power to forgive.

Kreeft then compares the way Satan wants us to think about our sins versus the way God wants us to think about our sins.

God wants us to worry about our sins before we sin; the devil wants us to worry after we sin. God wants us to feel free after we repent (for we really are free then); the devil wants us to feel free before we sin, as we are choosing to sin (for we really are not free then; the devil is a deceiver). The devil tempts us to cavalier pride before we sin and worrisome despair afterward, since pride and despair both separate us from God, and anything that separates us from God is the devil’s friend and our enemy, while anything that brings us closer to God is the devil’s enemy and our friend. But what is our friend at one time can be our enemy at another.

Kreeft concludes with these thoughts:

What our Heavenly Father wants us to do about our spiritual failures is like what our earthly father wants us to do about our earthly failures.  When we fall off the horse, or the bike, or the high road to Heaven, we must simply climb on again as soon as we are aware of the fact that we have fallen off, rather than sitting there stewing in self-pity or self-hatred.

And remember to thank God for the awareness of the fact that you have fallen off the “horse” of awareness of his presence, for that, too, is his gift, not your achievement.  If he did not give you the grace to notice that you have forgotten his grace, you would not only forget his grace, but you would also forget that you had forgotten his grace. And then your state would be without hope.

Prayer

How Do We Listen to God?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Oftentimes you’ll hear pastors or priests tell us to listen to what God has to say to us, but how exactly are we supposed to do this?  Should we expect God to communicate in a booming voice, much like he spoke to Moses on the mountain?  If not like this, then how are we to understand this command to listen to God?

Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft introduces the concept of listening to God in his book Prayer For Beginners.  An important step in learning how to pray is learning how to listen to God.  So, how do we go about listening to God?

In a conversation, if you are the wisest, it makes sense for you to do most of the talking. If the other person is wiser, it makes sense for you to do most of the listening. The wiser the other is, the more listening you want to do. Well, prayer is conversation with God, and it makes no sense for us to do most of the talking. We ought to be listening most of the time.

But, you may object, we cannot hear God’s voice as we can hear the voice of another human being. True, but we can hear God’s voice in other ways. We hear him in nature, which is his art. We hear him in his providential directing of our lives, and in the lessons in human history, and in the “still, small voice” of our conscience, God’s interior prophet. We hear him loud and clear in Scripture, his inspired Word deliberately given to us.  One way of praying is listening to God’s voice in Scripture, reading Scripture as God’s Word—which is exactly what it is!

And the best listening, the listening that gets the closest to God’s heart, the listening that hears the most total revelation of God, is listening to Christ, God incarnate, God in the flesh, “very God of very God”. “The Word of God” means the Bible only secondarily; primarily it means Christ. In the words of the Catechism, Christ is “the Father’s one, perfect, and unsurpassable Word. In him he has said everything; there will be no other word than this one” (CCC 65). Praying by reading the Gospels prayerfully and “listeningly” is one of the very best ways to pray.

Let’s review the ways we listen to God.  Kreeft introduces 6 ways of listening to God in order of their effectiveness and importance:

  1. nature
  2. providential directing of our lives
  3. lessons in human history
  4. conscience
  5. Scripture
  6. Christ in the Gospels

The implication of this ordering is that those who listen primarily in ways 1-4 are missing out on the 2 best ways to listen to God.  They are starving themselves of his fuller revelation.  There is nothing wrong with ways 1-4, but we mustn’t stop there.  If we are going to hear the most from God, if we are going to get the “closest to God’s heart,” we must take seriously the reading of Scripture, and especially the reading of the Gospels.

Meaning of Life, Prayer

What Is the Meaning of Life?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

This is the one of the most basic and fundamental questions that every human being must come to grips with, or waste their lives away.  If you don’t know what the end goal of your earthly existence is, you will drift like a boat without a rudder on the high seas of life.  You will chase one thing after another, never making any progress, because progress implies that there is something to progress to.

The Christian answer to this question is powerful and compelling.  Recently, as I was reading philosopher Peter Kreeft’s little book, Prayer For Beginners, I came upon Kreeft’s wording of the Christian answer to the meaning of life.  Prayer, Kreeft explains, is a necessary activity for attaining the meaning of life.  In this context, he explains what the meaning of life is:

Becoming saints is the meaning of life.  It is why we exist.  It is why God created us.  It is the reason he banged out the Big Bang, . . . and why he providentially provided this one perfect planet, and why he breathed his Spirit into the Adam he formed out of its dust, and why he does the same to every baby conceived, and why he prepared a chosen people, and sent prophets among them, and finally came down from Heaven into a mother and a manger and a Cross, and was forsaken by God so that we need never be forsaken, and rose again, and sent his Spirit to haunt our hearts—all this stupendous effort was for one end: to make saints, to make little Christs, to give his Son brothers and sisters.

The whole universe is a saint-making machine.  And prayer is the fuel that powers it.  He was not called “Jesus” (Savior) merely because he was to save us from the punishment for our sins; he was called “Jesus” “for he will save his people from their sins” (Mt 1:21).  His purpose was not just to make us safe but to make us saints.  Prayer is our first step in becoming saints.

The meaning of life is to become like Christ, to become a saint.  It is not to become wealthy, it is not to gain honor before other men, it is not to become famous, it is not to gain power over other humans, it is not to seek bodily health so that we can live longer, it is not to revel in fleshly pleasures.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.  Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Heb 12:1-2