Indeed, whatever God ordains is right because, not only will He not leave or forsake His people (Deut. 31:6, Heb. 13:5), He will also continually care for us as a Shepherd tends His flock (Ps. 23), and He will work all things for His greatest glory and our greatest good (Rom. 8:28). Therefore, we pray for the will of God to be accomplished, even as we bring our cares, needs, and concerns before Him.

Two of some of the biggest questions that many Christians ask relate to prayer. On one hand, Christians want to know how they should pray. On the other hand, they want to know what they should be praying for. According to the Westminster Larger Catechism, “Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, in the name of Christ, by the help of his Spirit; with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies” (WLC 178). So, the how of prayer, then, is to confess desires (and needs) to God the Father, in the name of the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Simple enough, right? We even recognize that prayer will include confession of sins and thankfulness for God’s many benefits that He graciously bestows upon us. The question remains, however: What should the Christian be praying for? When the world falls into deeper sin, or that loved one still has not repented and trusted in Jesus Christ, or that child is sick, or that family has lost nearly everything, and words seem to fail, and thoughts do not come, what are we to pray for? Though the Holy Spirit does indeed offer groanings and utterings in these moments (Rom. 8:26), we still want something solid to express and pray.
The answer may come as a surprise due to its simplicity, but Jesus answered this question in the opening of the Lord’s Prayer, directing us to pray: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”[1]
First, our words should be directed toward the Father, and we should pray for His name to be hallowed (consecrated, blessed, honored). Above all else, we should desire for the Lord to direct our prayers in such a way to glorify Himself (1 Cor. 10:31).
Secondly, we are to pray for His Kingdom to come.
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Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress sees the benefits, counts the costs, tells us how we got here, and gives some advice on muddling through the bitters. No institution—including the Church—is immune from feminism’s influence, so no one can ignore its deeply personal wounds.

Human mastery over nature, exercised technologically, is how human beings experience “progress.” Better medical care to extend life. Cars that prevent crashes and protect us from their effects. More market opportunity for all. We rarely think of how the sweetness of progress comes with corresponding bitter costs—and what that fact teaches about the human condition.
Modern feminism expresses this dilemma of progress. On one hand, women have more schooling and degrees today than ever before; more political and economic rights; and more liberation from unchosen roles. On the other, we no longer really know what a woman is and how other beings (call them men) should relate to women. Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress sees the benefits, counts the costs, tells us how we got here, and gives some advice on muddling through the bitters. No institution—including the Church—is immune from feminism’s influence, so no one can ignore its deeply personal wounds.
For Harrington, feminism rides the wave of deeper movements like industrialization and technological thinking. In the beginning, families were communities, truly the basic units of society. They were economic units where husbands and wives produced what families needed together. These conditions coincided with patriarchal legal and cultural arrangements, but all was softened by the fact that teamwork was essential. Then came “the transition to industrial society,” which took men from the home and created “separate spheres” for men and women. The social and economic conditions for communal marriage vanished, so social mystiques like the “cult of domesticity” were needed to prop up marriage. “Big Romance,” as Harrington calls it, emerged, all the better to encourage women to love their chains. Soon the contradiction was unsustainable.
The first feminism—the good one, as Harrington sees it—defined a woman’s maternal value amidst this mismatch between the mode of production and family form. Such early feminists “valued maternity, care and interdependence alongside just measures of economic and political agency and individual freedom.”
That first feminism did not last, by Harrington’s account, mostly because the market continued to liquify, commodify and alienate and to reduce all human understanding to variations on the pricing mechanism. The result was second-wave feminism, an extreme version of the market mentality, where the male model of market success became the model for everyone. Women could only find their meaning outside the home in paid work, while housework was pawned off on domestics. Sex became transactional. The promise of liberation—indeed, the promise of progress itself— colonized human life through the market mentality.
As a result, as Harrington catalogs, we live in a time when relationships are more difficult to form, when motherhood is neither honored nor aspired to, and female bodies are thought to be the playthings of transgendered technological innovation. Upper-class women can buy some immunity from liquid modernity, but working-class women cannot.
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As we look at these Old and New Testament accounts, we see that Jesus’s ministry was greater than that of Elijah and Elisha. Neither Elijah nor Elisha claimed to be the source of such power and life. They were prophets whom the Lord used in miraculous ways. What makes Jesus’s ministry different is a claim like John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life.” Never spoke a man like this before.

There are three stories in the Old Testament in which people rise bodily from the dead. To be clear, these bodies are not raised to a glorified and immortal state, but these individuals nevertheless return to earthly life.
These three stories occur in the ministries of Elijah and Elisha. The relevant passages are 1 Kings 17, 2 Kings 4, and 2 Kings 13. Let’s think about each one.
First, in 1 Kings 17, Elijah raised a widow’s son. Elijah “stretched himself upon the child three times and cried to the LORD, ‘O LORD my God, let this child’s life come into him again’” (1 Kings 17:21). The child’s life returned (17:22). Then Elijah brought the child down to the mother and delivered him to her (17:23).
Second, in 2 Kings 4, Elisha raised the son of a Shunammite woman. Elisha, like Elijah, stretched himself upon the child (2 Kings 4:34). The child’s life returned (4:34–35).
Third, in 2 Kings 13, Elisha’s bones resulted in the resurrection of a body. Elisha himself had died, but when a dead body landed on the area where Elisha had been buried, the thrown body “revived and stood on his feet” (2 Kings 13:21).
These three stories (in 1 Kings 17, 2 Kings 4, and 2 Kings 13) are the only Old Testament accounts of the dead coming back to life. One resurrection is associated with Elijah and two with Elisha.
How many resurrection accounts do the Gospels associate with Jesus before the cross? Not one, not two, but three.
First, in Mark 5, Jesus raised a young girl. He went to her home, took her by the hand, and said, “Little girl, I say to you, arise,” and the girl sat up (Mark 5:41).
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