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.
I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life. Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe.
Oh, am I a feminist? I usually say that I was an accidental feminist. Really, I was just being me.
I think that cancer is a life form that exists out there, and it exists in us. I think even the concept of healing is a spiritual principle that we have to really look at. I think the word itself is something we ought to get rid of, because it implies that there is illness - that there is something wrong.
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
[T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy" must grow, must flow, with him. . . . the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.
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