Dr Paul Allen

REMEMBER TO PRAY USING A.C.T.S Adoration Holy God, You are patient. You persevere. You are kind. You are holy. Your compassionate love covers me. And yet You are also just. You are also righteous. And so You become weary of evildoing. You become tired when my words are empty and when my heart is far away. You are not just a stoic being with no emotion. Rather, you care so deeply that it offends. You, when I keep on sinning in light of Your overarching grace. Lord, I worship You as I fear You, in honour of who You truly are. I’m grateful that You allow me to see this side of You, not only the side that’s giving, kind, and forgiving. I need to know all of You in order to give You the authentic praise due Your name and to rightly reflect Your character with the spirit of my worship of You. Confession Holy God, I confess that I don’t consider how I’ve wearied You as often as I should. I confess that I depend on the kindness of Your character to such a large degree that it borders on a spir...

Give us this day our daily bread. (Matt. 6:11) These words draw our focus to a particular time—this day. It is recurring, a petition to be made again with each sunrise. These words would have reminded Jesus’ hearers of the Exodus, a period in Israel’s history when God provided just enough manna daily for the people to survive (see Ex. 16). They were wandering in a wilderness on their way to a promised land where God would be their king. They would have loved a grand stockpile of food. But God taught them to trust him afresh each morning as they awakened to find new manna on the ground. Trusting God for basic necessities would form the foundation for trust in greater matters. Similarly, Jesus prepares his followers to trust God for what they need as they await the new kingdom that God is establishing through him. What was difficult for a first-century peasant may also be difficult for us, albeit for different reasons. Reliance requires that we see our position in the world clearly. We a...

"Isn't it a load of rubbish? This speaking in tongues?"  Some say that speaking in tongues is just gibberish resulting from over-emotionalism. Isn’t there danger in getting mixed up in something like that? No, not unless you deliberately seek out a place where such goings-on are encouraged. Certain individuals and churches indeed show more emotion in their worship than others. Some shout and some cry. But these displays we find disturbing mainly because of their contrast to the quiet way we worship.  This doesn’t mean that noise is wrong and silence is right; it merely means their ways are different from ours. We may think their worship noisy and unseemly while they consider our worship dead and lifeless. Church history shows that all great revivals have been marked by the presence of physical phenomena such as trembling, weeping, shouting, fainting, and even dancing.  They are not necessarily the work of the Holy Spirit as much as they are human reactions to the working ...

  By John Starke THE CRAB NEBULA is an exploding star about forty-two hundred light years away. I first learned about it in Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk . Light from this exploding star first became visible to earth in 1054. It was a supernova then, so bright it could be seen during the daytime. A thousand years later, the star is still exploding. What explodes for a thousand years? What has the density and size to keep up this pace? If you look at the Crab Nebula today through binoculars, it looks like a little ring. If you stare at it, even with earnest stillness, you will see no movement. The naked eye clothed with binoculars looks at this exploding star, and it seems more like a statue. “Photographs of the Crab Nebula taken fifteen years ago seem identical to photographs of it taken yesterday,” and yet the Crab Nebula is expanding at the rate of seventy million miles a day, and it’s been doing that for millennia. 1 We are in a universe where something that has incr...

A vibrant prayer life is possible for you. I know it may not seem this way, but the whole thing is rigged for triumph. That doesn’t mean that prayer will be easy or comfortable. It won’t. In fact, we should prepare for the long, slow haul of discomfort, confusion, and frustration, laced with joy, love, stability, and wholeness.  There aren’t a few techniques merely to pick up so that next week the struggle for prayer will be over. Instead, there are realities that we need to grasp that lead to pathways (rather than techniques) toward intimacy with God.  These realities—like the incarnation of Christ, our participation in Christ’s exalted status, and his participation in our troubled and lowly place—rearrange how we think about ourselves, God, and the world around us. This often means unlearning lies about ourselves, God, and the world that have shaped how we’ve lived and made decisions so far. That will take time because it’s not merely changing our minds or our perspectives b...