Praying Life, A: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

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He shares difficult stories and deals with the issue of unanswered prayer in a way that's manages to face the reality of how hard it is while staying true to the Bible and still remaining encouraging. Unfortunately, Miller tends to make bold assertions and then back them with an example, rather than any consideration of Scripture. Miller impresses upon you that the crowning achievement of godliness in your life is to be “authentic. Miller's book is distinguished from others I've read in that it stresses prayer's connection with the gospel, it explains how a lack of prayer betrays a lack of dependence on God, and it illustrates through Paul Miller's own personal family stories, how prayer connects with all of life.

Beginning a Praying Life makes for a practical handout to begin a lifelong change of heart about why and how to pray. He is married to Dani, with whom he is working to sustain a healthy population of redheads in southwestern Ohio. There are numerous practical tips in the latter chapters that are very helpful to anyone seeking to grow in prayer. The narration can at times feel a little monotone but overall it helps in the reflection of the words themselves. But if you belong to Jesus Christ, you can be certain that the Lord of heaven and earth really will listen to your prayers.Within the first few chapters, actually within the first few pages, I could tell that Paul Miller was describing something that I had never experienced before. Reading Paul Miller’s A Praying Church fresh filled my heart with the power of Oswald Chambers’s insight: ‘Prayer does not equip us for greater works—prayer is the greater work.

Finally, some readers may be turned off by the way Miller talks about the intimacy we can cultivate with our heavenly Father in prayer, or by his emphasis on praying for things that some might deem to be trivial. No, Jesus opens his arms to his needy children and says, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NASB).Was encouraging, real, humbling, but also challenging the status quo of what we believe prayer is today. b. Unless Scripture guards and directs our intuitions, we can easily run amok and baptize our selfish desires with religious language (“God told me to marry her…”). If A Praying Life is anything, it is practical, and the fifth section of the book surveys several tools such as prayer-cards and a prayer-journal that help to make prayer a vital part of your everyday life.

The best thing about A Praying Life is that you soon realise that it's really not just about prayer: it's about living as a Christian. If this sounds all too familiar, chances are you could be one of the many who have been living in the midst of a lifelong struggle with prayer. Maybe it was simply the right book for the right time in my life, but Paul Miller's insights into having a praying life are profound. However, after a significant amount of recent reading, I have become convinced that it is a major problem and that if I don't do something, I will be violating my responsibilities to the Lord and to my grandchildren. This may be okay in some instances, but there’s one painful account in chapter 18 of an interaction with his son.Instead of trying to suppress anxiety, manage it, or smother it with pleasure, we can turn our anxiety toward God. Miller shares in these chapters particularly his own personal prayer journey and how his life and the lives of those he loves have been shaped by prayer. Unlike many books that take the reader through the facets of prayer (thanksgiving, intercession, waiting, confession, etc. These chapters are designed to undo some of the bad thinking in our lives which leads to a weak prayer life.