Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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I do not understand the fixation and hangup with the fact that there are superficial Christians whether in the LRC or anywhere else? I find this mockery particularly distasteful since I do not meet with the LRC and in my experience, there are plenty of superficial Christians outside of the LRC. I have heard many prayers that are as fleshly as you can get. But I don't mock them because I realize the real error in the LRC is their pride and arrogance.
As I recall I thought RG's book "Lord...Thou saidst" (thank you Ohio) was beneficial in improving my prayer life. I felt as a result of that book and the Biblical evidence he provided that if I could punctuate my prayer with "Lord...thou saidst" not as a formula, but by Finding God's will in His word, that would have impact. Please do not misunderstand what I am saying, I don't ever use the phrase "Lord thous saidst" in my prayer, but I often do seek to pray God's word back to him.
No doubt your mockery of pray reading is a shoe that fits many in the LRC, but certainly not everybody. I stayed at Dunton House in 1996. There were two older sisters there (in their 70s and 80s) and an elder (also in his 70s I think) in addition there was another brother. These 4 had all been in the LRC far longer than I, and I first met with the LC in '78. Their practice of praying the word for morning watch did not resemble your mockery in any way. We read the word, fellowshipped over it (perhaps, perhaps not), raised some prayer requests / burdens (again maybe yes, maybe no) and then finished by each praying. They refused to use that LSM booklet. The church in NY had a schedule on a weekly basis of verses for morning watch that were based on the messages during the Lord's day morning. No other church that I had met with had that practice, but so what, we used those verses in our morning watch.
For those of us who understood the genealogy of the practice, the point was that the word of God keeps us aligned with God's will and we knew that prayer is, at least in part, praying that God's will would be done.
As for your mockery, I wish many more Christians would have a time in the word every morning along the lines that we did.