2013 Ridge Blog in Review

Posted on January 3, 2014 by dkoop

Did you ever think our church could reach people in Saudia Arabia?  We are. At The Ridge we are SHOWING Christ to our world. Our vision is being fulfilled in many ways.  One way is through our blog, read on to see how many people.

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. The Ridge Blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

The busiest day of the year was February 15th with 2,940 views.

Where did they come from?

People from 133 countries visited The Ridge Blog!
Here’s a break down:

  • The US – 13,568 people
  • Canada- 452 people
  • United Kingdom – 427 people
  • Australia – 228 people
  • South Africa 211 people
  • India 161 people
  • Germany 62 people
  • Nigeria 60 people
  • France 47 people
  • Kenya 45 people
  • Indonesia 41 people
  • Mexico 24 people
  • Italy 23 people
  • Thailand 22 people
  • Brazil 21 people
  • Saudi Arabia 20 people
  • Egypt 12 people
  • Turkey 6 people
  • For more see complete report below

Thanks for helping SHOW Christ to our World!

Darrell

Click here to see the complete report.

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How do I Pray?

Posted on December 31, 2013 by dkoop

7 Dec Livin on PrayerMaybe you’ve heard prayer is important. But how do you start?

Do you remember learning how to read? Most of us learned by first identifying letters and their sounds, then combining those letters to form words, and later stringing words into phrases and sentences. We moved from picture books to chapter books as our ability grew. But we started simply—with an alphabet and a desire to learn.

Learning to pray is not so different from this.

Prayer, the act of conveying a message to God, can seem intimidating—and the thought of praying publicly can be almost paralyzing!1 It helps to remember that when you pray, you are addressing a God who loves you and wants to hear what you have to say.

Just Begin

Praying, at its most basic, is simply talking to God. So get to talking.

Your prayers won’t be graded or compared to anyone else’s. You don’t have to sound “spiritual” or quote Bible verses back to God. You can just speak to God as if talking to a friend.

If you feel like you have no idea how to “just begin” or that you’re uncomfortable with talking to God, you’re in luck. The Bible is a great resource for learning how to pray. The entire book of Psalms is comprised of all types of prayers—prayers of praise, petition, and lamentation. You can even read the prayers of Jesus himself in the Gospel of John.2

Prepare for Challenges

But know that when you do begin to pray, you will face opposition.

C. S. Lewis’s book The Screwtape Letters is written as a series of letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior devil-in-training, Wormwood. Screwtape’s letters instruct Wormwood in how to thwart a new believer.

He quickly advises Wormwood about the “danger” of prayer: “The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself [God] we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him toward themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills.”3

You will surely find resistance to prayer when you begin. Any number of distractions may hinder your efforts—from phone calls to sleepiness to self-consciousness. But begin anyway.

Author Tim Challies says, “If I want to know how to pray, I just need to pray. No book, no classroom, no course, no instructor can teach me so much about prayer that I can avoid the hard work of learning on my knees. Ultimately prayer itself is the classroom.”4

Don’t Stop

But once you begin to pray, don’t stop. The apostle Paul instructed believers in the church at Thessalonica to “pray continually [and] give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”5

Praying continually doesn’t mean kneeling all day or reciting prayer after prayer after prayer. It is rather a continual turning of the heart toward God; a submission; an eagerness to be near him, to hear him, and to share life with him. It is a continual recognition of God’s presence in your life.

Any ordinary moment can be an opportune time to communicate with God. You might pray on the move as you walk, jog, or commute. Let landmarks that you routinely pass serve as prompts to thank God, praise him, or offer quick prayers for family members or friends.

Check in with God throughout the day as you do routine chores like cooking or cleaning. You might incorporate music into your prayers, too, by singing along to hymns or songs of praise.

You can also pray as you work. For example, you can thank God for providing a job for you. Ask him for wisdom in dealing with colleagues, clients, superiors, and subordinates. You may ask him for creativity in problem solving or for the courage to act ethically and fairly.

And yes, you could even ask him to bless your work and bring you success. Christians who do their work with excellence—whatever their work may be—glorify God in the process.

Pray with Others

Praying with others one-on-one, in small groups, and in corporate worship can also strengthen our prayer practice. “For where two or three gather in my name,” Jesus said, “there am I with them.”6

Hearing the prayers of fellow believers (and joining our prayers with theirs) is an encouraging, instructive, and powerful experience. We learn by imitating others. If you are hesitant to pray aloud, just pray along silently. You’ll learn by listening!

As mentioned earlier, the pages of the Bible are full of potential “prayer partners” for us too. Read the prayers of Moses, David, Daniel, and Solomon recorded in the Old Testament and of Jesus, Peter, Timothy, and Paul in the New Testament, just to name a few.

Many books contain the prayers of passionate men and women of faith. Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, George Muller, Amy Carmichael, Charles Spurgeon, Jim Elliot, and others can stretch your understanding of prayer and refresh your mind and heart when your own words feel stale and weak.7

Finally, remember that when words fail you altogether, you have another “partner”—the Holy Spirit. The Bible tells us, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”8 When we can’t even think straight, the Holy Spirit knows what we need and “speaks” to God for us.

Be Authentic

Keep your prayers authentic. Strive to remain honest and transparent before God. Don’t pretend to be someone or something you’re not. God invites us to come as we are when we pray—flaws and all.

C. S. Lewis wrote, “We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect, but how we should pray being as we now are. It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”9

How to Pray

So you want to know how to pray? Just begin where you are. God is waiting. He longs to hear from his own.

Begin, and then keep on praying—through your ordinary days and in every circumstance. Pray not just alone, but in the company of other believers—past and present—whose prayers can strengthen your own. Come to God as you are, not as you think you should be.

Acrostics and formulas for “effective praying” abound, but we learn to pray—and to love spending time in God’s presence—simply by praying. Are you ready?

For more about the series, Livin’ on Prayer, got to www.RidgeFellowship.com

Footnotes
  1. John Piper, “Pray Like This: Hallowed be Thy Name” (sermon on Matthew 6:5–18, December 30, 2007). Available at http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/sermons/pray-like-this-hallowed-be-your-name, accessed February 27, 2013.
  2. See The Holy Bible, New International Version © 2011, John 17.
  3. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (San Francisco, CA: Harper One, 1996), 15–16.
  4. Tim Challies, “The School of Prayer” Challies.com, February 6, 2013, http://www.challies.com/christian-living/the-school-of-prayer.
  5. The Holy Bible, 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18.
  6. Ibid., Matthew 18:20.
  7. See Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer; The Journals of Jim Elliot by Jim Elliot and Elisabeth Elliot; Answers to Prayer from George Muller’s Narratives by A. E. C. Brooks; A Simple Way to Pray by Martin Luther; Spurgeon on Prayer: How to Converse With God, by Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
  8. The Holy Bible, Romans 8:26.
  9. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964), 22.
Written by Leigh McLeroy
For more great articles like this, check out www.ExploreGod.com
Posted in Livin on a Prayer | Leave a comment

When God is Silent

Posted on December 31, 2013 by dkoop

7 Dec Livin on Prayer“I pray, but God is silent. At these times, I wonder if God is even there.”

That is a perfectly logical conclusion. After all, if you told a friend all your troubles and they sat silent as a stone—no advice, no gesture of empathy, no words of encouragement—wouldn’t you wonder if they’d gone deaf, or worse, just didn’t care? What, then, are we to make of the silence of God?

Who’s There?

When someone gives us “the silent treatment,” we run through a mental checklist: Have I offended him? Failed to keep a promise? Behaved badly? We imagine that if we can attribute the silent party’s unresponsiveness to some egregious action of our own, perhaps we can make amends and return to speaking terms. The burden, we believe, is on us.

But “God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind.”1 Perhaps the first error we make in understanding God’s silence is failing to understand his nature. We forget that God is not a man, and we attribute human motives and emotions to him in an attempt to explain his actions. But our ways, he says plainly, are not his ways.2

And while other human beings might predicate their responses to us on our behavior—good or bad—God does not. His behavior is an out flowing of his character, not our own. And his very nature is love.3

Silence and the Saints

“It’s not very loving,” you might say, “for someone who loves you to be silent.” But silence from God has been experienced by many devoted God-followers to whom you might assume God would never stop speaking. Even Mother Teresa wrote privately that she failed to sense God’s presence in her life for more than fifty years—an astounding confession from a woman whose love for God produced so many good works.

“Jesus has a very special love for you,” she wrote to one of her mentors, [but] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”4 Mother Teresa could not explain God’s silence, but she did not question his love—perhaps because she knew that God’s ways were not her ways.

Scottish theologian Oswald Chambers argued that “God’s silences are His answers.”5Silence from God, therefore, may be an overture of intimacy, not a retreat from it: “Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? You will find that God has trusted you in the most intimate way possible, with an absolute silence, not of despair, but of pleasure, because He saw that you could stand a bigger revelation. If God has given you a silence, praise Him, He is bringing you into the great run of His purposes.”6

From this view, God’s silence is not punishment or abandonment but an intimate gift of trust.

When All Is Quiet

So when God seems silent, what should we do?  To begin with, we could use the silence as an occasion to remember the ways he has spoken in the past. When you are separated from a loved one and cannot converse, it’s common to remember conversations or moments of intimacy from your previous times together.

Instead of wondering “where God went,” consider using the perceived “lull” in communication to remember those times. Remind yourself of the moments when you keenly felt his presence, the times you believe you heard his instruction, encouragement, or affirmation.  Let those memories fill the void and strengthen your faith.

As you remember, thank God for those times. Praise him, too, for his attributes, his character, his mighty acts of the past, and the ways he has been faithful to you. Let gratitude—not fear or doubt—begin to fill the emptiness you may be feeling. His character is not dependent upon your perception of him—something else for which to be thankful!

Understand that your faith is being exercised when God seems absent. During the silent times, you must trust something beyond your own feelings and emotions. “Anyone who comes to [God],” said the writer of Hebrews, “must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”7

Belief in times of silence is hard. When God is silent, we’re tempted to stop believing that he exists or that he cares. “What makes [unbelief] in many was more appealing [than belief] is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn’t require much of anything at all.”8Take the hard road. Let your faith be strengthened as you believe without seeing or hearing.

It is also important to continue to obey God—especially during those times when his presence is not felt. Don’t fall into the trap of saying, “If you’re not going to talk to me, I’m not going to try to listen to you!” So much of God’s will and instruction is given to us not individually, but corporately. Within the pages of His Word, he has said much about how he wants his people to live.

He speaks through the Bible, through other people, through his created world, and through the “still, small voice” of his Spirit. Often what we imagine as silence from God is far from it. Obey what he has already said, and you will be poised to hear even more from him.

Remember. Praise. Obey. Repeat.

“I’ve done all these things,” you might say. “Doesn’t God owe me proof of his presence now? Doesn’t he have something just for me?” No. And yes.

No, he does not owe us proof that he is. (He gives us this in many ways, but it is not owed.) What we are due on the basis of our performance is, thankfully, not what he gives those of us who put our trust in Christ.

He offers grace to the person who confesses their shortcomings and asks for mercy. He gives himself to those who ask. Yes, he does have something just for you. If his voice is not clear, if his plan is not plain—keep doing the things you know. Keep remembering his goodness and love. Keep praising him. Keep obeying as much of his will as you know.

And as you focus on these things, keep the ear of your heart tuned God-ward.  You will hear his voice again. Until then, receive the silence. It teaches, too.

For more about the series, Livin’ on Prayer, got to www.RidgeFellowship.com

Footnotes
  1. The Holy Bible, New International Version © 2011, Numbers 23:19.
  2. Ibid., Isaiah 55:8.
  3. Ibid., 1 John 4:8.
  4. David Van Biema, “Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith” Time, August 23, 2007.
  5. Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (Deluxe Christian Classics)(Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour Publishing, 2000), 207.
  6. Ibid.
  7. The Holy Bible, Hebrews 11:6.
  8. Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, (San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1992), 218.
Written by Leigh McLeroy
For more great articles like this, check out www.ExploreGod.com
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Does Prayer Work?

Posted on December 20, 2013 by dkoop

7 Dec Livin on PrayerPrayer can be an ongoing conversation with God, but does it make any difference?

When we talk to God, we’re praying. When God talks to us, we’re schizophrenic. Lily Tomlin

The idea of talking to God—praying—is kind of weird, isn’t it?

Usually when you talk to someone, you can hear his or her response to you. But prayer is different. Prayer looks like you’re basically just talking to yourself.

How do you talk with someone who doesn’t necessarily talk back—audibly, at least? And if you believe that God not only listens to prayers but answers them too, how do you distinguish your own thoughts and feelings from God’s answers?

Then there’s the really big question: Does prayer even work?

What’s the point of praying if God already knows the future, orchestrates what’s going to happen, and knows what we need? And yet, billions of people all over the world practice some form of prayer. Why bother if it doesn’t make a difference?

Why Bother?

Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and adherents to many other religions share a common thread of prayer.

For instance, Buddhists believe not so much in praying to an external god but in praying to awaken their own abilities buried deep within. Muslims believe that their prayers, which are required five times a day, are a reminder of God and a calling to a greater purpose beyond themselves.

Christians, too, believe that prayer can powerfully change lives, that it should be practiced regularly, and that it can help us refocus our priorities. Christianity further teaches that prayer also has the ability to dramatically affect the world and influence how God chooses to interact with humanity.2

But how does that work? If God is a supreme, omnipotent being, won’t he work out his purposes however he wants? It seems unlikely that our measly little prayers would affect his plans.

Many Christians would describe it like this: In mysterious but sovereign ways, God has decided to allow prayer to influence and accomplish his will. He chose prayer as the means through which to involve his followers in his plan. Prayer is one way God accomplishes his purposes in, through, and surrounding the one who prays.

A Changed Heart

Many of us pray to God as if he were a genie in a bottle. We hope that, if we’re lucky, he’ll hear us and act according to our wishes.

However, many faiths, including Christianity, paint a deeper and more intimate portrait of prayer. Rather than using God as a means to an end, within prayer God is the end. The believer prays, trusting in the character and power of God.

One of the chief purposes of prayer, then, is to transform the heart of the person praying to more closely resemble the heart of God. It’s not so much about getting tangible “results” from God. It is rather an opportunity to know God more fully, to better understand what he wants of each of us, and to establish a lifelong relationship.

Prayer is a lifestyle of humble dependence, of living in community and harmony with God, the source of life.

Ask and It Will Be Given

This is not to say that there’s no place for making specific, personal requests for God’s direction and provision. In speaking to his disciples about prayer, Jesus said:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!3

According to these verses, prayer is an opportunity to approach the greatest father of all time and openly express our needs and desires and directly ask for help.

But how could God, an entity massive enough to create the universe, really care about the little details of my tiny life?

This is the heart of the Christian message—God cares so deeply about each one of us that he has provided a way for us to have an authentic, intimate relationship with him. Prayer is one of the incredible blessings of the Christian faith, for the more we believe, the more God reveals himself.

Building Trust

Like anything worthwhile, prayer is a process. It takes time, commitment, and discipline.4 Prayer is not meant to happen only in times of desperation. It is meant to be an ongoing conversation.

And that’s where it gets fascinating. As someone invests in and becomes more comfortable with prayer, one of the ways in which it “works” is in the growing trust that person gains.

Praying people have reported miracles and answers to prayers that they never would have imagined and certainly couldn’t have created on their own. They believe that prayer made the difference.

Imagine a miracle that you would like to see—maybe the healing of sick relative, the repairing of a broken relationship, or the redeeming of a seemingly hopeless situation. Could prayer be your answer? Could miracles become your experience?

For more about the series, Livin’ on Prayer, got to www.RidgeFellowship.com

Footnotes
  1. Jane Wagner, In Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, directed by John Bailey, (Showtime Networks, 1985), performed by Lily Tomlin.
  2. There are numerous examples of this throughout the Bible. For just a few, see The Holy Bible, New International Version © 2011, Genesis 25:21, 2 Samuel 24–25, 2 Kings 20:5, 1 Chronicles 5:20, Isaiah 38:5, Luke 1:13, and Acts 28:8.
  3. Ibid., Matthew 7:7–11.
  4. If you find yourself struggling, it may help to find another person or group of people with whom you can pray regularly. This can help you stay motivated and focused. Ask a friend or family member, or join a prayer group at a local church. You can also contact us at info@ExploreGod.com to pray with you and help you get started.
Written By:  Joel Lindsey
For more great articles like this, check out www.ExploreGod.com
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