[OBW]

ZNP,

For all of your examples, I see exactly what I said. There are numerous places where as part of a prayer, passages were, in effect, recited back to God. This is the kind of praying of the word that I have seen with significant impact. Even simply repeating the "Lord's Prayer" is profound as part of a larger prayer. It fills in our poor prayers with at least generalities concerning the broad categories we were taught to pray. To pray for more than just kingdom stuff. To also pray for those "poor, pathetic" things about ourselves and our lives that Lee so despised.

But that is not the practice that was being defended by anything written by the LRC and published by the LSM. The practice being defended by Graver's little book was the one described in the earlier book in which neither true reading of the word, nor prayer that looks anything like what Jesus taught when he said, among other things "Thy will be done." Nor any of the other passages you quote in which clear, coherent sentences of profound meaning were turned into something like:

"Our Father. Oh, Lord, Amen, Our Father! Yes, Lord, our Father! Hallelujah, our Father! . . . Thy kingdom! Oh, Lord, Your kingdom! It's all about your kingdom! Save us prom prayers about anything but your kingdom! Come. Oh, Lord, Come! Come! Come! . . . "

And so on. And it can be argued that simply because the actual words from scripture are in there, it is a "sound" praying of the word. But while I did manage to leave the content vaguely recognizable, the process of dealing with scripture are more than sanctified syllables that contain power in their utterance — sort of like the effects of speaking the words from the Book of the Dead in the Mummy series of semi-modern swashbuckling adventure movies. The words contained in The Word have far less meaning as dictionary entries as they do in sentences, paragraphs, and whole passages.

And while there is power in the Word of God, it is not from merely saying the words contained in it. It is from reading for wisdom and understanding — something that the deconstruction of sentences into snippets divorced from their companions cannot do. There is no mystical power in mashing a bunch of words together in a meaningless way. That is not "letting the Word wash over you." It is no better than sitting in a circle and chanting "om." You feel better. You have been engaged in an exercise of emotional exhilaration but with no spiritual significance.

And the problem is not that there is no such thing through history as what might be called "pray reading," but that there is no record of the kind of thing that the LRC pushed as "pray reading." As you point out, there are numerous examples of praying by using passages of scripture as major portions of your own prayer. Or mixing parts of passages into your coherent sentences that, joined together, pray currently in a manner consistent with the passage mixed into your prayer.

So, a little book like Lord Thou Saidst correctly points to prayer in conjunction with what we know to be written in scripture. But that book is not being used to defend the practices mentioned in it, but something different. Something that only shares the words "pray" and "reading" with the examples brought out in the book.

In effect, the whole premise of that book is a kind of equivocation. They make note of practices that they call pray reading (and even others have called pray reading), then assert that their practice is also called pray reading and is therefore covered. But it ain't necessarily so.

So save your dissertation on examples of praying words from prior scripture contained within the scripture. I already agreed with that kind of practice.

And for anyone who still practices that stew-of-a-prayer the LRC calls pray reading, are you empowered to go out and care for the needy after pray reading those passages? Or is pray reading them not on the agenda?

Oh, and finding places where scripture contains the recording of a prayer that we can also pray does not support the general statement that scripture in general "was designed to be prayed." A prayer was designed to be prayed. That is not a general statement about the rest of scripture. So you can correctly assert that "there is scripture that was designed to be prayed" and that would be because it was a prayer when it was recorded.

And just because the word accomplishes God's will, and the words "Thy will be done" are found in a prayer does not support a general statement that the words of scripture are "designed to be prayed." That is just nonsense.

Yes. Pray the Word. Use it all in prayer. We can pray anything (although there clearly is no purpose in praying the American Heritage Dictionary). But that does not make any of it broadly "designed to be prayed." The purpose of scripture in general was not to be prayer. It was to be God's speaking. We can pray it. It is possible to do so. In some cases it is profitable to do so. But I do not see any evidence that, as a whole, it was "designed" as such.