Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that many people treat prayer superficially, seeking attention without a genuine desire for connection.
D. A. Carson's quote reflects on the nature of prayer and its lack of sincerity among many individuals. It draws an analogy between the careless act of ringing a doorbell and fleeing, and the way some people approach prayer—often engaging in it for show or out of obligation rather than seeking a true relationship with the divine. This critique challenges the reader to consider the authenticity of their own spiritual practice.
In practice
During a sermon about the importance of genuine prayer, this quote can emphasize a more authentic relationship with God.
Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.
It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.
The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
Woman’s bodies continue to be dismembered in advertising. Over and over again just one part of the body is used to sell products, which is one of the most dehumanizing thing you can do to someone. Not only is she a thing, but just one part of that thing is focused on.
The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.
War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.
Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.
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