Christian prayer

This was published by Crossroads.

It's called The Resurrection as the Foundation of Christian Liturgy or the Meaning of Sunday for Christian Prayer.

It says it was in the year 304 during the Diocletian persecution in North Africa when Roman officials surprised a group of about 50 Christians who were attending the Sunday Eucharist to take them into custody because they couldn't do that.

Just like today, some people can't gather like we just did and we're upstairs.

But let's, let's not get too far ahead.

I hope that you'll see in this teaching that the Glory Be is a prayer that in itself kind of encapsulates like the heart of what prayer, Christian prayer is.

But at first, again, the attraction to Jesus' own prayer is what moves the disciples to ask him, "Lord, teach us to pray," because they notice something about Jesus' prayer.

It's not a meditation technique designed to manufacture a kind of calm in his life.

But I try to remember that.

And then going out to meet him, I wanna know where I can encounter this God, and I remember his presence in the scriptures, animated by the Holy Spirit, the sacraments conceived by the Holy Spirit, the saints moving and speaking and acting in that Holy Spirit.

So again, you saw Father, Son, and Holy Spirit when we talk about Christian prayer in particular.

You can see then the Church is like Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, that Trinitarian life of God, that we're being taken up into it as we pray.

We're starting at entry 2558, if you want to pause and pull that up on your computer.

This is part four, Christian Prayer.

"...great is the mystery of the faith.

The church professes this mystery in the Apostles' Creed and celebrates it in the sacramental liturgy, so that the life of the faithful may be conformed to Christ in the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Father." This mystery then requires that the faithful believe in it, that they celebrate it, and that they live from it in a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God.

So it's coming from the most sincere, real us in ourselves, the part that only God knows fully and knows us better than we know ourselves.

Anybody that's lived long enough will realize they don't know themselves terribly well.

Paragraph 2564 Christian prayer is a covenant relationship between God and man in Christ.

It is the action of God and of man springing forth from both the Holy Spirit and ourselves, wholly directed to the Father in union with the human will of the Son of God made man.