Dr Paul Allen

Prayer is not simply a soliloquy, a mere exercise in therapeutic self-analysis, or a religious recitation.   Prayer is discourse with the personal God Himself. There, in the act and dynamic of praying, I bring my whole life under His gaze. Yes, He knows what is in my mind, but I still have the privilege of articulating to Him what is there. He says: “Come. Speak to me. Make your requests known to me.” So we come in order to know Him and to be known by Him. There is something erroneous in the question, “If God knows everything, why pray?” The question assumes that prayer is one-dimensional and is defined simply as supplication or intercession.  On the contrary, prayer is multidimensional. God’s sovereignty casts no shadow over the prayer of adoration. God’s foreknowledge or determinate counsel does not negate the prayer of praise. The only thing it should do is give us greater reason for expressing our adoration for who God is.  If God knows what I’m going to say before I ...

“Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” ( Psalm 139:16 ) This is an amazing verse, testifying as it does to the omniscient fore-planning of our Creator for each human being. Each person has been separately planned by God before he or she was ever conceived; His eyes oversaw our “unperfect [not imperfect, but unfinished] substance”—that is, literally, our embryo—throughout its entire development. Not only all its “members” but also all its “days” (the literal implication of “in continuance”) had been “written” in God’s book long ago. While modern evolutionists argue that a “fetus” is not yet a real person and so may be casually aborted if the mother so chooses, both the Bible and science show that a growing child in the womb is a true human being. Instruments called fetoscopes have been able to trace every stage of embryonic development, showing that ...