Dr Paul Allen

We have all heard evangelists quote from Revelation:  "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come into him and dine with him, and he with Me" (Rev. 3:20).  Usually the evangelist applies this text as an appeal to the unconverted, saying: "Jesus is knocking at the door of your heart. If you open the door, then He will come in."   In the original saying, however, Jesus directed His remarks to the church. It was not an evangelistic appeal. So what? The point is that seeking is something that unbelievers do not do on their own. The unbeliever will not seek. The unbeliever will not knock. Seeking is the business of believers.  Jonathan Edwards said, "The seeking of the Kingdom of God is the chief business of the Christian life." Seeking is the result of faith, not the cause of it. When we are converted to Christ, we use language of discovery to express our conversion. We speak of finding Christ .  We may hav...

Is there a simple way to deepen your prayer life? Yes. It requires discipline, time to pray (of course), and a desire to grow in godliness. Suffering from cheesy prayers?   Do your prayers need challenging - to think through what it is exactly you're doing in prayer? How am I supposed to pray for an hour a day?  What do I do? It was An Hour that Changes the World: A Practical Plan for Personal Prayer , by Dick Eastman. In it, he suggests that Christians should make it their aim to pray for an hour a day. He derives this suggestion from Matthew 26:40, where Jesus asks, “Could you not watch with me for one hour?” Eastman says the best way to pray for an hour is to split up the hour into 12 blocks of five minutes, then pray with a timer, and pray through the different blocks, five minutes at a time. Now Eastman gives his 12 blocks of time (praise, waiting, confession, Scripture, watching, intercession, petition, thanksgiving, singing, meditation, listening, a...

“Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” ( Jeremiah 29:12-13 ) There are many promises and instances of answered prayer in the Bible. Unfortunately, many of us really don’t seem to believe them and therefore don’t experience the answers to our prayers. Halfhearted praying may sometimes secure partial answers, but God exhorts us to pray wholeheartedly. “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” ( James 5:16 ). The principle is timeless and is stressed often in the Word. “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not” ( Jeremiah 33:3 ). God’s resources are unlimited, but our motives must be pure, and our prayers must be from the heart. “Let him ask in faith, nothing wavering” ( James 1:6 ). “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts”...

Chances are you are among the massive majority of Christians who rarely or never fast. It’s not because we haven’t read our Bibles or sat under faithful preaching or heard about the power of fasting, or even that we don’t genuinely want to do it. We just never actually get around to putting down the fork. Part of it may be that we live in a society in which food is so ubiquitous that we eat not only when we don’t need to, but sometimes even when we don’t want to. We eat to share a meal with others, to build or grow relationships (good reasons), or just as a distraction from responsibility. And of course, there are our own cravings and ache for comfort that keep us from the discomfort of fasting. Not So Fast Fasting is voluntarily going without food — or any other regularly enjoyed good gift from God — for the sake of some spiritual purpose. It is markedly counter-cultural in our consumerist society, like abstaining from sex until marriage. If we are to learn the lost art of fasti...