Pastor Sandlin – do you have a trove of quotes on prayer? You for quite a while were posting on prayer and it really affected me. A lot of great Bounds quotes.

I sometimes feel like we Purtianical Reformed in certain parts pray without expectation to justify a theological position. Where is there faith without expectation?

The questions are hard when one prays fervently for an outcome that does not happen. But i now believe prayer to be more powerful than I ever thought it was.

Dear –––––,

I’m so sorry this has taken so long to answer. Sharon and I have been out of town a lot lately.

The best quotes that I can give you on prayer are simply found in E. M. Bounds’ complete works on prayer. That book is inexpensive, and I hope you can buy it and consume it. I have read it three times straight through. I just this morning started on my fourth time. I hope before I die to have have read it completely 30 to 35 times. I find it inconceivable that any true Christian can read that book faithfully without his life — not just his prayer life — being transformed.

You’re 100% right that the Puritan Calvinists today often have unenthusiastic and paltry prayer lives. This is odd, because Calvin certainly didn’t. For some reason, they let their truncated views of God’s sovereignty and predestination get in the way of powerful, persevering prayer. You would think the opposite would be the case: if God is truly sovereign, why not ask him to do the greatest things possible and thus provide for his children and display his glory in the earth? Now that’s sovereignty!

On this point, these often loud proponents of sola scriptura scamper away from the Bible’s plain teaching: God answers prayer if his children cry out to him in simple faith. He answers when they persevere in prayer. He is often willing to change his stated course of action if they cry out to him. He wants to do good things for them and not hurt them “for his greater sovereignty.” These facts are so plain and so frequent in the Bible that one would have to be committed to an alternative theological proposition to bracket them out and pretend they don’t say what they obviously do.

I am praying right now that God continues to give you a mighty spirit of prayer and demonstrates his greatness in the earth as a result of prayers he answers for you.

God-glorifying Christianity sustains a collision course with contemporary pluralism. This pluralism says that you can believe what you want in your private life, but the public realm, including politics, is a lovely, rainbow-hued cornucopia of competing beliefs, none of which is especially important. The public realm is religiously neutral. Pluralism defined in this way is not only entirely false. It is also disingenuous. There are no neutral realms of life.[1] There are either covenant keepers or covenant breakers. There is either covenant-keeping private life and/or public life or covenant-breaking private life and/or public life. No individual, no family, no culture, no politics can be religiously neutral.[2]

Contemporary pluralism, child of secularism, is not religiously neutral. It is actively hostile to Biblical Christianity. It is hostile to Jesus Christ and his law. Modern pluralism is not open to the biblical definition of marriage ( covenant of one man and one woman). It is not tolerant when it comes to God’s law about free markets. It would never accept civil law that forbids abortion. Its claims to be religiously neutral are spurious. Pluralism pretends to be tolerant of all viewpoints unless those viewpoints contradict its own cherished presuppositions. At the root of those cherished presuppositions is radical autonomy, particularly sexual autonomy. Modern pluralism essentially offers this Rousseauian bargain: “If you give me a state powerful enough to crush all other authorities, including God’s word, I’ll give you the freedom from all authority except state authority. I’ll especially deliver you from God’s authority.” Have you even wondered why modern pluralists are so timid before Islam, a non-neutral religion if there ever was one? In some cases, they’re very open to it. Listen to this analysis:

The treatment of women might be expected to make Islam questionable from the liberal elite’s point of view. This has not happened, for a good reason: Muslim teaching on women, marriage and the family undermines the traditional European concept of matrimony. Islam thus becomes an “objective ally” of the postmodern Cultural-Marxist ideology that relativizes gender, sexuality, marriage and family.[3]

In other words, modern pluralists can make common cause with Islam because they both subvert the Christian family, which created “the traditional European concept of matrimony.” It’s Christianity that modern pluralism has in its crosshairs. It’s anything but neutral. It wants to bring all of society under its heavy yoke of religious secularism.

[1] On the false pretensions to neutrality in modern liberalism, see Stanley Fish, “Why Liberalism Doesn’t Exist,” There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech … And It’s a Good Thing, Too (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 134–138.

[2] Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1976), 26.

[3] Srdja Trifkovic, “Horror in Europe,” https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/horror-in-europe/, accessed May 17, 2016, emphasis in original.