Sabbatical begins

I have been reading a book newly written and published by a colleague at IBTS, Rollin Grams. It is a tribute and a biography of his parents’ ministry in South Africa, as independent Pentecostal missionaries. Their story is interesting, but what I especially value are the reflective comments of their godly and scholarly son, himself a New Testament theologian and missionary teacher.

As I enter further into my sabbatical in prayer, reading and reflection, I am especially arrested by his reflective ‘capsules’, and especially one on ‘prayer and healing’, where he notes, relating to serious and answered prayer in their mission activity,

‘The prayers were spoken in a pleading voice, perhaps different from the prayers one sometimes hears in certain Pentecostal and Charismatic circles today, where the vold voice of prayer has a certain air about it, as though one can demand healing because some Scripture or other is thought to hold a divine promise to heal in every instance. But the prayers of former times often meant wet faces: they were an emotional seeking and beseeching of our miracle-working and all compassionate God’.
(Rollin Grams, Stewards of Grace, Wipf & Stock, 2010, pp 89-90)

I’m not sure why, but I find this really helpful. Maybe I’ve become too mechanical in prayer, or unwittingly ‘name it and claim it’ orientated. But this reminder, to cast myself before God in His sovereign compassion, I find really helpful. It reminds me and calls me back to the excitement of meeting God in prayer.