prayer

A teenager who was shot and killed while protecting a friend died just hours after making a commitment to Christ and being baptized at a Fort Myers church.

A couple in Sudan could be punished with 100 lashes after being charged with “adultery” because a sharia (Islamic law) court annulled their marriage due to the husband’s conversion to Christianity, their attorney said.

Terrorism by the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) stretched into Taraba state, Nigeria for the first time on April 19, killing six Christians, sources said.

I was waiting for my knife to be sharpened at a gun shop. I couldn’t help eavesdropping on a conversation between the shop clerk and a customer who was enquiring on how to apply for a gun license. In South Africa we have some of the most intimidating gun control laws in the free world. The process can take over a year. One of the requisite steps is that you must provide a substantiated motivation as to why you want the firearm. The gun shop clerk was coaching the customer on how to craft his motivation using the exact wording that would improve his chances of a positive outcome.

As I was listening to all of this it occurred to me that people are willing to put a lot of effort and thought into making requests that are important to them. But often when people want something from God, they put no thought into how to frame their petitions. They assume God will accept any request, from anyone, in any format.

Well, they would be wrong.

God has very specific ways in which he wants us to communicate with him and make requests. And Jesus coached his disciples on this very topic. In Matthew 6 Jesus provides a template for prayer that has become the most famous and repeated prayer of all time, known as the Disciples’ prayer, the Lord’s prayer, or simply as the “Our Father.” Jesus taught how to pray on two different occasions, in Matthew 6:5-13 and Luke 11:1. And although the two prayers are as similar as fraternal twins, they are not identical twins. The dissimilarities prove that Christ never intended this as a formula or rote prayer. It was a model or pattern for prayer. Of course, it is not wrong to pray it word-for-word, but that was not the intended purpose of the prayer.

Let’s examine some of the wrong ways to pray. Six insights from wrong ways to pray:

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I plan to say much more on our subject tomorrow, but for today I want to make this emphatic point: mental illness is illness. It is like cancer, heart disease, or any other disease. However, it is unlike other diseases in that its causes and symptoms are often less obvious to the rest of us.

Our leaders need prayer. Whether we agree with them or not, all leaders are in need of prayer, and the Bible commands us to pray for them: "I urge you, first of all, to pray for all people. Ask God to help them; intercede on their behalf, and give thanks for them. Pray this way for kings and all who are in authority so that we can live peaceful and quiet lives marked by godliness and dignity" (I Timothy 2:1-2). Sometimes, however, it's difficult to know what to pray for. We don't often know the details of our leaders' lives like we know the details of our friends' and family members' lives. Below is a list of five different things that you can be praying for our leaders to have. They are things that all leaders -- and really all people -- should strive after and pray for.

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Whether your children are preschool or college-aged, it's important that they know how to express their faith in a school environment. Although we hear a lot about Bibles being banned from public schools or Christian prayer or after-school groups being targeted, it is important for Christian students to know that America is still a country with laws protecting religious freedom rights. We are blessed as Christians to be granted these freedoms, and we can encourage our children to use them while at school. Here are five ways students can express their faith during the school year.

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We can never undo the horrific past from which we suffered, and from which many still do. But we have built up our lives and our country. In our very existence, we shout, “Never Again.” This is the cornerstone of the victory that we celebrate every day, even on days like today, Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we must remember and mourn the past.

Israeli officials have increased security around Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his family after he received a letter containing a death threat and a live bullet.

Is there hope for Hong Kong? That’s the question the city’s citizens, including nearly 1 million Protestant and Catholic Christians, are being forced to ask daily.