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 prayerβoften 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.
My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
By whomsoever no evil is done in deed, or word, or thought, him I call a Brahmin (holy man) who is guarded in these three.
Man cannot live by bread alone. Man after all is composed of intellect and soul.
All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. [ . . . ] Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.
There's a notion I'd like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person.
If we hold tightly to anything given to us unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used we stunt the growth of the soul. What God gives us is not necessarily "ours" but only ours to offer back to him, ours to relinguish, ours to lose, ours to let go of, if we want to be our true selves. Many deaths must go into reaching our maturity in Christ, many letting goes.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.