Praise and Thanksgiving as a Key to Prayer-I

Praise and Thanksgiving as a Key to Prayer-I
Psalm 9: 1-18

Yesterday a pastor in Florida invited me to look at his blog, where he had written about God’s renewing the church. When God renewed the church (as happened with the emergence of Pentecostalism a century ago, for instance), he emphasized, there were always people praying and repenting. God’s act of renewal was a response to their repentance and prayer. I commented that we need to be wary of formulating rules about how God acts and of giving the final word to our reaching out to God rather than to God’s reaching out to us, but I also told him about how encouraging his piece was. When you live in a context where the church is in a diminishing or diminished state as we do in the West, you need reminders about what God has done in the past (as well as reminders about what God is doing in the present in other parts of the world, but that’s another story). Our knowledge of God’s acts in the past stokes our conviction about what God might do again. It thus encourages us to pray along the lines that his blog was encouraging...