Vision For Life

In our concluding discussion on prayer, Dave and Autumn respond to the following questions:
1. Do you experience seasons in prayer?
2. How do you process hard emotions in prayer? When should I do that in prayer and process with another person, too?
3. I keep asking God to help me not to be angry, but he won’t!
4. Does God speak to us in prayer? And if he does, how can we distinguish our own thoughts from the Spirit’s voice?

Autumn and Hunter continue our New Year focus on learning how to pray. Because so much has been written about prayer and so many different prayer practices have been invented throughout history, we often need to simplify this habit. Fortunately, Scripture does make learning to pray simple. It gives us two places to focus, two types of model prayer: The Lord’s Prayer and The Psalms. Today, Autumn and Hunter discuss how to use the Psalms to learn prayer.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

“Answering God” by Eugene Peterson
“Christ in the Psalms” by Patrick Henry Reardon
“The Songs of Jesus” by Kathy and Tim Keller
“Lectures on the Psalms” by Martin Luther
“Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures” by Martyn Lloyd Jones

Prayer, or communing with God, is fundamental to life with God. Scripture itself teaches us to pray. Though countless books, articles, and infographics exist on methods of prayer, the normative prayer practices found in the Bible are The Lord's Prayer and The Psalms.

Autumn and Hunter discuss The Lord's Prayer as a basis for daily time in prayer with God and examine four patterns of prayer that emerge from from Matthew 6:9-13: thanksgiving and praise, lifting of burdens, ongoing petition, and confession.

Autumn and Hunter discuss their favorite reads of 2021. Books mentioned in this show:

"Sodom and Gomorrah" and "Swann's Way" by Marcel Proust
"Crossroads" by Jonathan Franzen
"Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey" by James Rebanks
"Jayber Crow" by Wendell Berry
"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joan Didion
"The Lincoln Highway" by Amor Towles
"Martin Luther, vol 1: His Road to Reformation, 1483-1521" by Martin Brecht
"A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson" by Winn Collier
"Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer" by Kate Clifford Larson
"Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade" by Daniel K. Williams
"Policeman Small" by Lois Lenski
"The Wingfeather Saga" by Andrew Peterson
"The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" by Carl Trueman
"You Are Not Your Own" by Alan Noble
"Urban Apologetics: Restoring Black Dignity with the Gospel" by Eric Mason, ed.
"Prayer in the Night" by Tish Harrison Warren
"Praying Together" by Megan Hill
"The Glory of Christ" by John Owen

Thank you for listening to the Vision for Life Podcast! We are taking a two-week break to reflect on the joys and difficulties of 2021 and the many ways we’ve experienced God’s sustaining presence through both. We hope you take some time to do the same.

Autumn and Hunter will return on January 5th to share their best reads of 2021.

During Advent, we pause. Advent means "coming" or "arrival." In these weeks preceding Christmas we pause to look back to Jesus' inauspicious arrival on earth centuries ago and to look forward to the day when he will come again. We refer to Jesus' birth, the Son of God coming to earth, fully God and fully man, as the "incarnation."

Hunter and Autumn discuss the meaning of the incarnation, God's desire to dwell with us, and the limits of our human attempts at restoration of ourselves and the world. The path to restoration comes to us via a baby born of the Spirit and of Mary, and leads us through–not out of–suffering and weakness.

Twentieth century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth.” A celebration of Advent is an invitation to waiting. We wait, we look forward to Jesus' return, and we anticipate the glorious restoration of all of creation.

Dave and Autumn reflect on how we, during this Advent season, can be people who are sober about our present conflicted reality and yet remain ever-hopeful in the One who once came as a baby and will return as a King.

The season of Advent is upon us! Advent means “coming” or “arrival.” During Advent, we look back to Jesus’ first coming when God quietly sent His baby Son to begin a great rescue. And we look forward to Jesus’ second coming when He will return as a triumphant King to set all things right.

Advent is a time of waiting, longing, and hoping, but our waiting is not a passive patience. Advent invites us into an active hope borne from our faith in the fulfilled promise of Christ's incarnation and his promised future return. Hunter, Dave, and Autumn discuss how to enter into this season of longing by creating rhythms of study and celebration.

At the end of a long and stressful year, the practice of giving thanks is easy to skip but especially important. With this in mind, Autumn and Hunter discuss four themes of thankfulness, where we see God working in the life of our church. Happy Thanksgiving! The podcast will return on December 1.

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