It’s interesting to note that a good deal of biblical commands to pray come with a promise of the amazing results that prayer can have. This means that these commands to pray are not to burden us, but rather to inspire us. Don’t let a legalistic mindset make you focus on your own actions or efforts in prayer. Set your eyes on our gracious Father, and pray in confidence.

I once heard another believer give a stirring talk on prayer. Everything was profoundly encouraging until he said the following:
If you don’t spend at least two hours in prayer each day, how can you expect to live a godly life?
That sentence startled me because we just don’t see that in the Bible. Yes, it’s good to spend time in prayer. Two hours even. And prayer IS essential for sanctification. I know his statement was meant to encourage, but it may have wound up having the opposite effect in the long run, because it was legalistic.
Legalism is trying to earn God’s approval by our works, in this case our prayers or prayer life. Legalism often adds rules to our faith that God never gave us.
There are two main ways we can be legalistic about prayer: thinking too much about the quality and quantity of our prayers.
Overemphasizing quality might subtly believe that we can cajole God with the right mix of external factors like eloquence, passion, intonation, or fist pumps and hand raises. (This might be especially evident in group prayer.) Overemphasizing the quantity of our prayers acts as if God is keeping a quota for the number of times we pray or a stopwatch to track the length of our prayers.
Thankfully, a glance at biblical teaching on prayer shows that God cares about our heart posture in prayer and the content of our prayers instead of more arbitrary measures like quantity or quality.
I’d like to give recovering legalists some encouragement as we think about what God wants and doesn’t want in terms of the quality and quantity of our prayers.
The Quality of Our Prayers
There is nothing wrong with prayers that sound good or are emotional, assuming they’re prayed with the right heart. In fact, I want to help you improve the quality of our prayers by making their content as biblical as they can be. But we must not think we can bribe God to answer our prayers based on their quality.
We can’t forget that God is our Father. Think how ridiculous it would be for an earthly father to only pay attention to his children if they worded their requests JUUUUST right or with the right intonation.
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Woke Christianity is an attempt to reconcile Christianity with Black Lives Matter. It is a theology developed from Calvinism with an awareness for social justice. It makes liberation from perceived racial injustice a central message of the gospel. It suggests that a gospel that doesn’t address racial injustice is an unbalanced gospel. Woke Christianity is essentially a Calvinistic social gospel.

You probably don’t know its name, but you’re familiar with it. Barack Obama’s pastor preached about it. Chance The Rapper raps about it. Cornel West writes about it. And evangelicals are becoming sympathetic about it. You are familiar with Black Liberation Theology, and you didn’t know it.
Black Liberation Theology was developed by James Cone in the 1960s during the Black Power movement as a reaction to evangelical apathy on racial injustice. In his book, Black Theology and Black Power, James Cone explains how he formed his theology:
“For me, the burning theological question was, how can I reconcile Christianity and Black Power, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea of nonviolence and Malcom X’s by any means necessary philosophy? The writing of Black Theology and Black Power was the beginning of my search for a resolution of that dilemma.”
Anyone who makes a prophet out of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is sure to teach another gospel, and that is what James Cone’s Black Liberation Theology is: another gospel. Black Liberation Theology is Martin Luther King Jr,’s social gospel and Malcolm X’s Black Nationalism in one. Black Liberation Theology exchanges the power of God for Black power. It exchanges the supremacy of Christ for Black supremacy. Black Liberation Theology is built on a foundation of bitterness and victimhood, with social justice as its chief cornerstone.
In James Cone’s theology, Black liberation from White oppression is the gospel. In his book, Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology, James Cone said:
“What else can the crucifixion mean except that God, the Holy One of Israel, became identified with the victims of oppression?  What else can the resurrection mean except that God’s victory in Christ is the poor person’s victory over poverty? If theology does not take this seriously, how can it be worthy of the name Christian?  If the church, the community out of which theology arises, does not make God’s liberation of the oppressed central in its mission and proclamation, how can it rest easy with a condemned criminal as the dominant symbol of its message?”
James Cone died last week, but his Black Liberation Theology is more alive than ever, more woke than ever in the reformed community.
You only need to read some reformed leaders’ words on James Cone’s death last week to recognize that many reformed Christians are adopting a form of Black Liberation Theology, a theology that borrows from James Cone and John Calvin, Martin Luther King Jr. and Martin Luther, a theology called woke Christianity.
Woke Christianity is an attempt to reconcile Christianity with Black Lives Matter. It is a theology developed from Calvinism with an awareness for social justice. It makes liberation from perceived racial injustice a central message of the gospel. It suggests that a gospel that doesn’t address racial injustice is an unbalanced gospel. Woke Christianity is essentially a Calvinistic social gospel.
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So, what does deconstruction even mean? It means different things in different contexts. It is a postmodern philosophical label that has been adopted by current and former evangelicals to sometimes mean navigating a faith crisis, to sometimes mean identifying harmful cultural influences that distort the true gospel, to sometimes mean questioning and rejecting traditional evangelical doctrines and authority figures, or to sometimes mean departing the Christian faith altogether.

“Deconstruction” is a term that has increasingly been used in evangelical circles, especially over the past decade. But it is a confusing term, because there’s no single or simple definition for “deconstruction.” It has different meanings in different contexts. It has technical meanings in certain academic contexts and various informal meanings when current and former evangelicals use it to describe their (or others’) faith experiences.
It’s not surprising that many are asking some form of, “What does ‘deconstruction’ even mean?” It’s an important question and needs clarifying answers — certainly more answers than I can adequately cover here. But I hope to provide something of an introductory overview.
First, we’ll examine briefly where the term, “deconstruction,” came from, so we can, second, understand the primary ways evangelicals are using the term today.
Where Did ‘Deconstruction’ Come From?
In the 1960s, a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) began to advocate for a postmodern philosophy of language and its relationship to our conceptions of meaning that he called “deconstruction.” It is an abstruse philosophy and notoriously difficult (some say impossible) to summarize. In fact, Derrida himself refused to summarize deconstruction, claiming that his whole life’s work was a summary of his philosophy.
Nevertheless, I’ll take a shot at summarizing it as I currently understand it — and stick with me, because knowing something of where “deconstruction” comes from will hopefully give us insight into why some Christians have adopted and adapted it to describe their experiences — and why many find it confusing.

A fundamental assumption undergirding Derrida’s philosophy is that humans, through biological evolution, developed the capacity to impose psychological constructs of meaning upon their world as a survival mechanism. In other words, meaning — as in the ultimate meaning of things — is a human psychological creation, not a discovery or divine revelation of absolute truth.
Therefore, deconstruction asserts that human language at best communicates, not absolute truth, but how a certain individual conceives of truth at a certain moment in time, in the contexts of his cultural, political, religious, environmental, and experiential influences.
Therefore, deconstruction asserts that philosophers (or theologians) consult written works of the past in vain to discover absolute truth or meaning, since all they’re encountering are other authors’ constructs of truth or meaning. And not only that, but the more distant a reader is culturally, linguistically, and historically from an author, the less the reader will understand what the author actually had in mind when he used terms like truth, justice, good, evil, etc.
And therefore, the philosophy of deconstruction asserts that in an effort to understand as much as possible what an author actually meant by the language he used, sophisticated methods of textual criticism must be employed to deconstruct the author’s words in order to decipher the conceptual constructs that shaped that author’s understanding of truth and meaning.

Let me try to simplify it even more. If I understand Derrida correctly, deconstruction is

A literary philosophy arguing that we’re wrong to assume that by merely reading an author’s words we can understand something about absolute truth, since our conception of truth — our constructs of what everything means — will be significantly different from the author’s; and
Deconstruction is a method of literary criticism that takes apart and analyzes an author’s use of language in effort to discern his construct of meaning.

For Derrida, there is no meaning outside the text of a philosopher’s written work — no absolute truth that the writer is shedding light on for the reader. There’s only the writer’s construct of meaning, of truth, represented in the text he wrote.
Which means that there is no absolute truth inside the philosopher’s text either. Just a reflection of how the author interpreted what the world means. Which, according to Derrida, is what meaning is for all of us: a human psychological construct shaped by multiple influences.
Why Have Christians Adopted ‘Deconstruction’?
So, why have Christians adopted the term “deconstruction” from a philosophy based on principles of philosophical naturalism? I think we can make a connection from something theologian Kevin Vanhoozer has written about Derrida:
The motive behind Derrida’s strategy of undoing [deconstruction] stems from his alarm over illegitimate appeals to authority and exercises of power. The belief that one has reached the single correct Meaning (or God, or “Truth”) provides a wonderful excuse for damning those with whom one disagrees as either “fools” or “heretics.” . . . Neither Priests, who supposedly speak for God, nor Philosophers, who supposedly speak for Reason, should be trusted; this “logocentric” claim to speak from a privileged perspective (e.g., Reason, the Word of God) is a bluff that must be called, or better, “deconstructed.” (Is There a Meaning in this Text?, 21–22)
Over the decades since Derrida introduced his philosophy of deconstruction, the term has worked its way into the common vernacular where it now has come to generally mean “a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought.”
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