Prayer Postures in the Bible
With such a variety of prayer postures in the Bible, I think we should assume that taking one particular posture for prayer is not the main issue in prayer. The primary issue is that you actually talk to the Lord when you pray. Do be aware, though, that certain postures lend themselves more readily to certain types of praying; for example, lying prostrate on your face seems more appropriate for repentance than lying on your bed. But try to find a mix of prayer postures that best allow you to pray.
When I first started to learn how to pray on my own, I thought that I had to kneel when I prayed. Most of the people I had read about who were pray-ers were also kneel-ers. For example, a second-century Christian named Hegesippus records that James, the half-brother of Jesus, “was frequently found situated upon his knees asking forgiveness for the people, so that his knees became hard after the manner of a camel, on account of always bending down upon a knee while worshipping God and asking forgiveness for the people.”[1] As a young man, I so wanted to have camel knees!
But when I tried it, I kept falling asleep while kneeling next to my bed. (I had no idea it was possible to fall asleep on my knees! My grandson might say that that was my superpower.)
I tried standing, pacing around my room, and sitting on a comfortable chair with my hands turned upward. It took two years from the time I committed myself to develop a personal prayer life to find a prayer posture that really worked for me. The breakthrough came when I learned that my beloved teacher, David Needham, took daily prayer walks. “What? You can walk and pray at the same time?” I decided to try it and, as a result of his example, have been prayer-walking for the past four decades.
But walking and trying to pray is not going to work well for many people, especially for people who get easily distracted by things they see.
So let me list out other prayer postures you might try that I’ve found in the Bible, since there is such a variety in the Bible itself, with the goal of helping you grow in your times of prayer.
- Standing. Hannah stood while she prayed for God to give her a child (1 Sam 1:26). Jesus prayed while standing before the tomb of Lazarus just before raising him from the dead (John 11:41). Psalm 4:4 says that we should, “Stand in awe.” In one parable of Jesus, both characters are standing for prayer in the temple (Luke 18:10-14). In 2 Chronicles 20:13 it says that the whole congregation of Israel stood before the Lord.
- Lifting or stretching out one’s hands. 1 Timothy 2:8 encourages, “I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands.” Psalm 141:2 reads, “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice!” (Cf. Exod 9:29)
- Lifting eyes upward. Now, in certain situations it’s a good idea to close your eyes in prayer to keep from being distracted by the things around you. But frequently in the Bible, people lift their open eyes upward. Psalm 121:1 says, “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?
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Why the Frankfurt Declaration Is Necessary
The Frankfurt Declaration ends with an expression of gratitude to those civil authorities who respect these Christian beliefs and the rights and liberties of each individual, and with a call to repentance to those civil authorities who have disregarded these freedoms, lest in the abuse of their God-given authority they become liable to God’s wrath.
In the spring of 2021, pastors from different countries came together to draw up a joint declaration in response to the COVID measures enacted by many governments. The result is the Frankfurt Declaration of Christian and Civil Liberties, which was presented to the public on August 28, 2022, near Frankfurt, Germany. The document was initially signed by fifty pastors and theologians from America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and Africa, including men such as Grace Community Church pastor John MacArthur, African Christian University dean Voddie Baucham, and Apologia Church elder James White. In the meantime, more than 5,000 signatories from all over the world have joined the Frankfurt Declaration.
Even though the concrete reason for drafting the Frankfurt Declaration was the totalitarian response to COVID, it is not primarily about these measures, but about the underlying spiritual reasons that led states to infringe so massively on the guaranteed rights of their citizens. The signatories of the Frankfurt Declaration see this unprecedented disregard for liberty as just one symptom of an emerging totalitarianism of the state over all spheres of society, including the church, that has developed for decades.
The Frankfurt Declaration seeks to address these threats with the timeless truths of God’s Word through affirmations and denials derived from biblical principles.
Article 1: God the Creator as Sovereign Lawgiver and Judge
For centuries, the countries of the Western world have been moving further away from the biblical truth that God created the cosmos and everything in it, including man. Most people’s thinking is now strongly influenced by a radical materialism assuming that all processes and phenomena in the world come from impersonal matter and motion rather than a personal and transcendent Creator.
But if there is no Creator God, then there is no divine lawgiver who has revealed His universal, immutable law to man, and there is no divine judge who at the end of time will judge all men according to this law. And if there is no heavenly lawgiver above the earthly state, then the state is the highest lawgiver, and its laws need not measure up to any higher standard. With no divine judge, human legislators need not consider answering to Him for their actions. The state and those who govern it thus assume for themselves the role of God, freely determining what is good and evil conduct without the bounds of a divine moral standard. The result is devastating: unconverted people, corrupt by nature, turn the commandments of God into their opposite, rebelliously calling good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:20).
Examples of this tendency during the COVID crisis abound. For example, the state decreed (even for healthy people) that visiting the elderly, the sick, and the dying was evil, although Christ says that such actions are signs by which one knows who is blessed of the Father and inherits the kingdom, and who is cursed and must depart from Christ into everlasting fire (Matthew 25:31-46). But the phenomenon of the state calling things good that have been considered sin for millennia is one we have been observing for years: the state enables divorce and sexual immorality, promotes homosexuality and transgenderism, and allows the killing of children in the womb.
The state both approves of such evils and demands that its citizens do likewise. Even kindergarteners are indoctrinated accordingly. Anyone who disagrees is considered backward, bigoted, hateful, and a threat to society.
The Frankfurt Declaration affirms that God, as supreme lawgiver and judge, is the ultimate source of ethics, and that He has revealed an unchanging morality which is rooted in His own character and which determines for all people at all times what is good and evil conduct. It therefore denies that the state has the right to define morality and to demand unconditional obedience from its citizens when their beliefs contradicts God’s law, invoking the clausula Petri, that one ought to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).
Article 2: God as the Source of Truth and the Role of Science
With the turning away from the truth of the Creator God, other truths also increasingly falter. As Christians, we know that God has ordered creation by objective truths, which man can discover through scientific observation. This knowledge made scientific endeavors possible in the first place, since men once recognized that all scientific investigation is an inquiry into the works of God and hence cannot feign neutrality.
When science no longer serves to glorify God, then science itself becomes a god. Many today are convinced that science can provide answers to all questions and instructions for the right action in all situations. This scientism overlooks the fact that empirical inquiry may not only lead to erroneous results due to the lack of data and the human propensity for error, but that it can in no way provide answers to moral questions. Science can only say what is, but not what should be. Virology and epidemiology can say which measures might be promising to contain a virus, but they cannot answer whether a lockdown or other infringements on rights and liberties are ethically justified to achieve that goal.
However, this is exactly what happened during COVID: individual experts were considered to represent “science,” and their predictions and recommendations guided the policies of entire governments. As C.S. Lewis once explained: “Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”
Since man has fallen into sin, all his thoughts, deductions and institutions contain degrees of corruption which tend to distort, manipulate, or suppress the truth. In the hands of ideologically driven people, truth becomes subject to change by reinterpretations, while science is quickly perverted into an instrument of indoctrination through fearmongering, propaganda, and the wielding of political power. Dissident voices are ignored, suppressed, or canceled. During COVID, dissenting doctors and scientists, some of whom had been considered luminaries in their field for decades, were silenced, discredited and sometimes dismissed from their jobs. But we see this trend in other areas as well. For example, the state and the “scientific consensus” have been propagating for decades that scientifically untenable theories, such as Darwinism, were settled truth. We are being told science has discovered that it is no longer possible to determine what a man or a woman is.
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Thinking Biblically and Theologically about Justice
The standard of justice is God himself, and we know what is just due to his revelation of himself in creation and specifically Scripture. In all of God’s external works, he acts justly and righteously, consistent with his own will and nature. As the just one, God requires moral conformity of his creatures to his moral demand. God is the Lord, indeed the “Judge of the whole earth” who always does what is right (Gen. 18:25).
Our world is consumed with talk about “justice” and specifically “social justice.” Yet similar to how our world has redefined the word “love,” most discussions of “justice” lack definition and any sense of a standard of what justice actually is. In fact, just as we are told it’s “loving” for a mother to take the life of her unborn child for her own psychological health, or it’s “loving” to end a marriage so that couples can pursue their own self-actualization (which is another word for selfishness), we are also told that it is “just” to do many unjust and lawless acts.
For example, it’s “just” to steal from hard-working people to redistribute their wealth to those who do not work (although they are fully capable of doing so). Or, it’s “just” to allow men who identify as women to compete in women’s sports even though it’s completely unjust for the actual women who compete against them. Or, as we were lectured in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots held throughout the country, it was “just” to allow rioters to destroy private and public property and even to harm people because they were “righteously” opposing perceived racial injustices. Such actions were deemed “just” although they were lawless acts. Indeed, as with the word love, “justice” has now become a meaningless concept in much of our current discourse.
The consequences of such a situation, however, are significant. Although for many today the concept of “justice” and “social justice” has lost its meaning, the truth is that these concepts have simply been redefined. The crucial question is: According to whose definition and by what standard is “justice” redefined? That is the question this essay will answer.
A Few Preliminaries: History, Epistemology, and Method
In Western society, due to the influence of Christianity, there has been a fairly clear sense of what “justice” is because it was basically defined by biblical standards. But as the West has thrown off the Bible’s influence and moved steadily away from a Christian view of the world, one of the defining marks of our secularized, pluralistic society is a rejection of the God of the Bible as the source and standard of truth and morality. In the place of God and his word-revelation, we have substituted the idol of self and along with it a “constructivist” view of truth and morality, which at its core is naturalistic, relative, and incoherent.
What has been the result of such a substitution? Certainly not human flourishing, freedom, love, and true justice; rather, the opposite has occurred.
By rejecting the influence of Christianity on our concepts of truth and morality, we have undermined the warrant for an objective standard of truth and morality. In its place, we are left with only the finite, subjective, and fallen human “identity” constructions of various groups vying for raw political power. In fact, this “new” view of truth and morality is more indebted to naturalistic, postmodern, and Marxist categories, so that reality is now viewed solely through the lens of race, gender, and intersectionality, and people are simplistically categorized as either an “oppressor” or the “oppressed.”
In this thoroughly non-Christian view of the true, good, and the beautiful, the goal is to destroy the “traditional structures and systems deemed to be oppressive, and [redistribute] power and resources from oppressors to victims in pursuit of equality of outcome.”[1] Today, this is what our society means by “social justice.” But what is disturbing about this redefined view of justice is that the epistemological ground on which the system stands is quicksand. Even the determination of who the “oppressor” and “oppressed” is, is relative, and without an objective basis to discern truth from error and good from evil, such a view ends in totalitarianism, statism, and the destruction of human life—as history reminds us.
All of this has brought our nation and Western society to the crossroads where the future of the West is now in jeopardy. Why? For this simple reason: if nations are not grounded in an objective, universal standard of justice—which is ultimately grounded in God himself—then our future is bleak indeed. No society can flourish built upon a relative standard of truth and morality. History has taught us that either anarchy will result, or more commonly, totalitarianism will rear its ugly head. But note: this is a totalitarianism that is completely arbitrary and capricious, since it too is grounded in a philosophical and moral relativism.
For this reason, Christians must think carefully about what “justice” is, and to do so requires sound biblical and theological thinking. Unfortunately even some within our evangelical churches have confused our culture’s desire for “social” justice (which is more informed by secular-postmodern categories) with true biblical justice. But if Christians are to make headway in this discussion, we must first ask what justice is in relation to God before we speak about what justice is in the world. If we do not ground “justice” in an objective, universal standard—namely God himself—then the concept of “justice” becomes only relative, which inevitably results in a disastrous application of so-called “justice” in the world.
In this article, I want to discuss the warrant for a universal, objective basis for justice by establishing it in God himself. Any talk of “justice” must first be grounded in God and his revealed word. I will do so in three steps. First, to speak of justice in relation to God, I must say something about God’s attributes and how justice is essential to him. Second, I will describe a biblical view of justice by first unpacking what God’s justice is within himself, then in relation to his exercise of justice in the world, and I will note that we can know what justice is due to God’s word-revelation. Third, I will conclude with a final reflection.
God is Just: Thinking Rightly about God’s Attributes
God is just means that justice is one of God’s moral attributes and that it is essential to him. Let us unpack this statement by making three points.
First, an attribute is not something we “attribute” to God as if it is a “part” of God. Why? Because God is not divisible into parts; his divine nature is singular and simple meaning that his attributes are coexistent with who he is. In other words, God’s attributes are what God is, in his entire being and perfection as the one true God. Attributes are not abstract qualities that exist independently of him; God is not dependent on anything outside of himself. God is his attributes, and each attribute is identical to God’s nature. For this reason, God does not merely possess love, holiness, and justice; he is love, holy, and just. This does not mean that we cannot make distinctions between God’s attributes, but in doing so we must never think that God’s attributes are distinct parts of his nature. God is his attributes, totally self-sufficient and perfect.
Second, all of God’s attributes are essential to him, meaning that they are all necessary for God to be God, unlike creatures who are composed of essential and accidental attributes. The latter term refers to attributes that can be lost while a thing still remains what it is. For example, we could lose a leg in a car crash, or our mental abilities due to a debilitating disease, but we would still remain essentially human. But this is not true of God. God cannot “lose” or “gain” any attributes and still be God; God is who he is in the fullness of his being and life. God’s attributes are essential to him, and thus necessary to his being. This is why we must also distinguish between what God is in himself apart from the world and the exercise of his attributes in relation to the world. This is especially important as we think about God’s relation to a fallen world that he judges and to a people that he redeems by grace. God is love, holy, and just apart from the world. But in relation to the world, especially a fallen world, God displays his wrath and judgment against human sin, but wrath is not an essential attribute of God; it is the expression of God’s holiness and justice towards a fallen world. In other words, God within himself is essentially holy, love, and just; he is not wrath.
Third, divine justice is best understood as a moral attribute of God, along with holiness and goodness. These attributes remind us that God is not only the absolute standard of objective moral norms but also the one who upholds his own glory in the redemption of his people and in his judgment of all sin and evil. We may distinguish God’s moral attributes, but given divine simplicity these attributes are all aspects of one another.
For example, think of the relation between God’s holiness and justice. Holiness speaks of “consecration” or “devotion to,” which then carries over to the moral realm. To be holy unto God is to honor and love what he loves, which demands specific moral entailments. Within God himself, holiness is a way of describing God’s holy love.
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Why Won’t the Librarians Blush?
If we don’t oppose events like the tranny story hour, we cede the war by handing over the next generation. These story hours are not an innocent opportunity for nice fairy people to give back to their community. These are confused, sinful people who are after generational acceptance. They want to confuse our children into thinking what they are doing is normal.
Bring Back the Boomer Upbringing
Our modern-day culture has many of us longing for the olden days. When our grandparents grew up, if a dude in a dress attempted to read books to some minors he sought out in the library, he would be flung out by his frills before he could crack the cover. There would be all manner of men that would assume this as their duty and eagerly put themselves to the task.
And there would be no complaints about this discriminatory behavior – only cheers – because the “common sense” of that time was well-trained by the light of nature and their God-given consciences. “Have you no shame?” they would say. They knew where to aim their shame, and the utility of dishing it out. They knew that a weirdo being weird should not feel comfortable in public. A man who liked to wear fishnets was forced into closeting his behavior or, at the very least, pulling the curtains.Shame did a lot of good back then.
Today, we see people heaping shame on those who point out obvious perversions. “Bigots,” we are called. They are using shame to curb society toward evil, not good. And this is the main way that they push their “progressive,” ideas. No logical argument will advance the normalization of clown world.
How far have we regressed.The Shame of Rotorua
Remember when librarians were considered the frigid do-gooders of society? Today, they no longer know how to blush. They invite those with the kinkiest of bents into their peaceful place of books to twist the minds of innocents. They’re on a mission to kill that natural impulse of a child to shudder at a he-she trying to suppress the inescapable. Shame on them!
“Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,” says Yahweh. (Jeremiah 6:15)Bring Back the Blush
So, how do we make cheeks respond to kink with pink again? It will not happen with more gentle permissiveness – that is what got us here. We need to cut deep with plain truths said plainly, and Lord willing, we will recover some sensitivity from the buried consciences of our city and nation.What are these truths, and how are they so plain?
Well, we all know that a man cannot be a woman, and this is seen plainly in the drag queen’s make-up dilemma. Too much, and they look like a clownish version of a woman, but any less than over-the-top, they hide nothing. Everyone knows intuitively that this is black-face for the gender confused. In the same way that black-face degrades non-whites, woman-face degrades all women. How dare they mimic feminine glory in such a debasing way. Their cheeks should be red hot when they walk amongst the real thing. It is obvious to all that they are rebelling against reality, and it is a losing struggle.
But the very young know far less how futile an attempt at transitioning is. Without any artificial influences, this will become plain to them, so they must be lied to – the earlier the better. Older trans men often keep their man parts because they know they gain nothing from cutting them off.Read More
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