"Calloused knees. Prayer closet. Answered prayers. Prayer warrior. These four phrases don’t exactly trigger me with spiritual PTSD, but they do represent markers in my journey of moving from prayer-guilt into the grace of praying." - Desiring God
"They asked him, 'Lord, shall we strike with the sword?' [Luke 22:39-53] Is it time to fight, Lord? ... This is, in essence, a prayer." - SBC Voices
"Christ didn’t tell these two stories [Luke 11:5-8, 18:2] to imply that we need to approach God with the same request repeatedly before he complies." - Word by Word
"Bills chaplain Len Vanden Bos said he has witnessed a unifying desire for prayer among both players and fans since Hamlin fell to the turf in Cincinnati." - RNS
"'Pray for Damar Hamlin' became a national exhortation. It was everywhere. The universal urge and call to prayer keenly revealed how embedded man’s spiritual nature is within him, despite what our culture says and does to try to remove the divine from our horizon." - World
Related: What Dan Orvlosky Did When He Didn’t Know What Else to Do - Breakpoint
A review of Joseph C. Harrod, 40 Questions About Prayer. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2022, 292 pages, pbk.
Over the many years that I have been a Christian I have read many books about prayer. I have also written about it on several occasions. Prayer is at one and the same time one of the easiest and one of the most difficult subjects in Christian Theology. Most of the books on prayer that I have read are either too simplistic, or else they veer too far from the Scriptures and the view of reality that they present.
With that in mind I picked up Joseph Harrod’s book with some skepticism, although I was hopeful, since he had written his dissertation on Samuel Davies. Still, I play the cynic well. Was it going to be a wafer-thin book on how much God wants to answer every felt need? Was it going to be written like a long motivational speech, egging us on to pray because prayer is so great? Would the author keep his feet on the ground?
The first thing to do is to see how the author defines prayer. Straight away I was won over. Harrod went to John Bunyan. Since I think Bunyan’s definition (which I will not reproduce here) is one of the best breakdowns of the essence of prayer I was very pleased to find that Harrod agreed. (As an aside, Bunyan’s work on Prayer is available from Banner of Truth).
"As the Lord deepens my burden for evangelizing non-believers, fasting has become a critical component of those efforts." - Chuck Lawless
"...some reasons pastors don’t pray. We’re “fixers” by nature....We’ve had no role model prayer warriors....We’re afraid to tell anyone when we struggle with prayer....We have so much to do" - Chuck Lawless
