Words for reflection

Prayer is language used in personal relation to God.  It gives us utterance to what we sense or want or respond to before God.  God speaks to us; our answers are our prayers.  The answers are not always articulate: silence, sighs, groanings - these all constitute responses   The answers are not always positive: anger, skepticism,  curses - these are also responses   But always God is involved, whether in darkness or light, whether in faith or despair.  This is hard to get used to.  Our habit is to talk about God, not to Him.  We love discussing God.  The Psalms resist these discussions.  They are not provided to teach us about God but to train us in responding to Him.  We don't learn the Psalms until we are praying them.

Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer

Order of Worship, January 27 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

(Re: Revelations, see especially Revelations 12)  It is St. John's Spirit-appointed task to supplement the work of St. Matthew and St. Luke so that the nativity can not be sentimentalized into coziness, nor domesticated into drabness, nor commercialized into worldliness.... The splendors of creation and the agony of redemption combine in this event, this center where God in Christ invades existence with redeeming life and decisively defeats evil.  It is St. John's genius to take Jesus in a manger attended by shepherds and wise-men and put him in a cosmos attacked by a dragon... Our response to the Nativity cannot be reduced to shutting the door against a wintery world, drinking hot chocolate, and singing carols.  Rather we are ready to walk out the door with.... Highest praises of God in our throated and two-edged swords [Word of God] in our hands.

Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder (pp. 121-122)

Order of Worship, January 2 2011

Grace Presbyterian Church

In worship God gathers his people to himself as the center: 'The LORD Reigns.' Worship is meeting God at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically.  We worship so that we live in response to and from this center, the living God.  Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every siren.  Without worship we live manipulated and manipulating lives.  We move either in frightened panic or deluded lethargy, as we are, in turn, alarmed by specters and soothed by placebos.  If there is no center, there is no circumference.  People who do not worship are swept into a vast restlessness, epidemic in the world, with no steady direction and no sustaining purpose.

Eugene H. Peterson,  Reversed Thunder

Order of Worship, February 25 2007

Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New Orleans

God gives us various means to grow: prayer and Scripture, silence and solitude, suffering and service.  But the huge foundational means is public worship.  Spiritual growth cannot take place in isolation.  It is not a private thing between the Christian and God.  In worship, we come before God who loves us in the presence of the others whom he also loves.  In worship, more than at any other time, we set ourselves in deliberate openness to the action of God and the need of the neighbor, both of which require us to grow up to the fullness of the stature of Christ, who is both God and man for us.  Regular, faithful worship is as essential to the growing Christian as food and shelter to the growing child.  Worship is the light and air in which spiritual growth takes place.

Eugene H. Peterson, Living the Message

Order of Worship, February 7 2007

Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New Orleans

When we find ourselves deficient in wisdom, it is not because the Word of God has pages missing, but because we have not seen all there is on the pages we already have.  It is not another book we need, but better attention to the book we have; it is not more knowledge we require, but better vision to see what has already been revealed in Jesus Christ.

Eugene Peterson, Praying with the Psalms

Order of Worship, November 5 2006
Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New Orleans