Liars and Heretics

So, following from my last few posts, what do we do with prayer and the movement of the Holy Spirit?   Prayer and the movement of the Holy Spirit as individual subjects, both share a lot of similarities. They both concern how we meet with, understand and experience God, not theoretically, but in our real, everyday lives. We believe that prayer is the way we are meant to communicate with God, that in prayer we come before God with our thoughts, petitions, fears, and whatever else we have on our hearts, and by praying we hope that God will speak into our lives, into our failings, and into our uncertainties, and that things will change through God’s power and grace. At the same time, we also believe that the Spirit of God is the agent that helps to bring about change in our lives. We call upon the Holy Spirit to meet with us, and we believe that our encounters with the Spirit, however they look, can change who we are, spiritually, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Our u...

I still believe in prayer and despite my weird story, I believe I have experienced the power of prayer in my life. Those answers may have been coincidences, and the outcomes may have happened without prayer or divine involvement, but I choose to believe in prayer, because I want to believe that God intervenes in our lives for the better. Despite never having experienced dramatically immediate and miraculous answers to prayer, I still pray for those things, because I hope that God can answer prayer in that way, and does, and I need that hope, maybe more than I really need the thing I am praying for.   I suppose this leads me to what I ultimately believe about prayer, at this moment in time. I think that we have all become a bit lost, when it comes to prayer, and despite asking for prayer, I think that the answers we seek, are not what we absolutely need.   Jesus told us how to pray by teaching us the following words:   Our Father in heaven, may your name be kep...

I’d like to share a strange testimony with you, which relates to this, to prayer and my beliefs, and my doubts around it. I’ve never been able to share this story with anyone, maybe by the end of it you’ll see why, this is a genuinely true story though, and I promise that I’m not making anything up.   I’ve struggled with anxiety throughout my whole life. I was an anxious child and this was probably compounded by my mum’s illness, trauma from bad church experiences, my parent’s divorce, and hundreds of other factors that have impacted me since then. Over the years I received prayer for my anxiety to be healed, but nothing ever really happened. Over time things got better or they just worked out, and whilst I was thankful to God that my anxiety improved slowly over time, and that I was kept from any serious mental health problems, I never saw this as an answer to prayer, because I knew this to be true for lots of people who have never prayed, and who didn’t believe in God. There ...

Prayer is something I have struggled with throughout my life. I do believe in the power of prayer, but at the same time, it is something I don’t really get, and I have felt cynical about it in the past. I’ve found prayer to have been amazing and life affirming, but I have also found it stressful and anxiety inducing. I’ve seen prayers that have apparently been answered, but I have also seen the disappointment and sorrow caused by unanswered prayers.   Prayer is really complicated to me.   The times I have felt closest to God have often been when alone in prayer, and I regret that I don’t make the time for private prayer time as much as I should, but life does get in the way, and I don’t always feel like I’ve got a spare half an hour to sit in prayerful contemplation or meditation, or in other words, I haven’t been disciplined and made time for significant time for prayer in my life. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, and that I’m among hordes of Christian’s who are busied...

I believe God is powerful and engages with us, exactly as we need, and in precisely the right way, but we don’t always get to say how that happens, because God is God, and we are not. I believe that God has given us mechanisms and systems that help us draw near to him, such as meditation and prayer, but I also think that God enables us to draw near through human creativity, and that people have been able to capture something of God, and in doing so have been able to lead others towards God, through their creativity, through music, art, poetry, literature, and even through the way we have built our churches, the architectural choices, and the way we run our services, through the liturgies we use, the songs we sing and the sermons we hear. They are all meant to point towards God, however, none of these define or dictate God, and we don’t get to control or put God in a box. God is God, and we are not. We are flawed humans who are weak and make mistakes, and with that in mind I think it is...

  As I have already alluded to when talking about the Trinity, there is nothing more mysterious to Christians, than the Holy Spirit. We obviously believe in the Holy Spirit, because we are all good, Bible believing Christians, but we seem to have wildly different ideas and understandings of what, or who the Holy Spirit is. This isn’t surprising, by now it’s apparent that we have wildly different ideas about most faith related things, yet I feel that our beliefs about the Holy Spirit are different, because when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we aren’t talking about our theoretical and intellectual notions of God, we are talking about our real world, personal interactions with God. These individual experiences of the Spirit can be diverse, ranging from a vague sense of God’s presence being with people in some way, through to powerful movements of God, which affect people physically.   I have witnessed both extremes. I have been in churches where the leader has invited the Ho...

  Satan is one thing, but if we are talking about the satanic, then what about dark powers and demonic forces that exist in the world? This is something that I think Christians need to be careful around, but not in the way that you might instinctively think.   My personal belief is that science and medicine can account for much of what the church sees as satanic or demonic. There are people who I respect, who do see dark powers as being something spiritual, and so I hesitate to rubbish it all, but I also know that those people would say that many presumed cases of the demonic, are psychological in nature, and should be dealt with medically, and not through exorcism or deliverance ministries. Perhaps this is a healthy balance to have, and something that the church should be looking to move towards.   I think many churches believe so strongly in the satanic and demonic, that they jump to supernatural conclusions before entertaining any other possibilities. I get tha...