Eugene Peterson often speaks of prayer as a verbal response to God’s verbal revelation in Scripture. In Eat This Book, Peterson at one point launches into a discussion of the manner of our prayer response.
“Sometime we suppose that the proper posture of response to God as we read the Bible is to be curled up in a wingback chair before a cozy fire, docile and well-mannered. Some of us are taught to think that reading the Bible means sitting in God’s classroom and that prayer politely raising our hand when we have a question about what he is teaching us in his Deuteronomy lecture. The Psalms, our prayer text within the biblical text, show us something quite different: prayer is engaging God, an engaging that is seldom accomplished by a murmured greeting and conventional handshake. The engagement, at least in its initial stages, is more like a quarrel than a greeting, more like a wrestling match than a warm embrace.” (104-05)
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