Prayer is never an isolated event. When we pray, we convey our entire theological system. Our theology is never so clearly displayed before our own eyes and before the world as in our prayers.

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In Scripture it is unthinkable that a true disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ would not pray.

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The Lord Jesus, because he is fully God and fully man, is the only one truly qualified to teach us how to pray. As the second member of the Trinity, Jesus gives us God’s perspective on prayer. In Jesus Christ, God himself is teaching his people how he wants us to approach him. But as one who is fully man, Jesus is also able to instruct us in how we as humans are to approach prayer. Jesus engaged in and experienced a life of prayer. Because he is fully human without any taint of sin, Jesus led a life of perfect prayer.

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One of the besetting sins of evangelicalism is our obsession with individualism. The first-person singular pronoun reigns in our thinking. We tend to think about nearly everything (including the truths of God’s Word) only as they relate to me.

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The Lord’s Prayer, however, is doctrinally robust, theologically deep, and anything but serene. The Lord’s Prayer is anything but tame. Regrettably, our familiarity often blinds us from seeing just how radical, even subversive, this prayer is. It is for those who hold firmly that Jesus Christ has inaugurated a kingdom, has risen from the dead, reigns at the right hand of God, and is coming again to judge the living and the dead. The Lord’s Prayer is for revolutionaries, for men and women who want to see the kingdoms of this world give way to the kingdom of our Lord.

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As J. I. Packer noted, “Here more clearly than anywhere the purpose of prayer becomes plain: not to make God do my will (which is practicing magic), but to bring my will into line with his (which is what it means to practice true religion).”

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C. S. Lewis observed the same phenomenon in his classic work The Screwtape Letters. As Lewis explained, humanity is prone to two extremes when it comes to thinking about demonic forces. There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.1

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If Christians truly embraced biblical teaching on demonic powers, we would come to church with a tremendous sense of the fact that God has rescued us from the domain of darkness.

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The key to time management at the end of the day is simple: you need to know where you are going, and you need to focus on the things that will get you there.

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John Piper sums up the biblical meaning of freedom in this fullest sense, of being free “indeed,” that Jesus and Paul are speaking of: “You are fully free—completely free, free indeed—when you have the desire, the ability, and the opportunity to do what will make you happy in a thousand years. Or we could say, You are fully free when you have the desire, the ability, and the opportunity to do what will leave you no regrets forever.”

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J. Gresham Machen said about the use of the intellect: “No conversion was ever wrought by argument. A change of heart is also necessary. . . . But because intellectual labor is insufficient it does not follow, as is so often assumed, that it is unnecessary.”4

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Christian philosopher Ronald Nash says a worldview is “a conceptual scheme that contains our fundamental beliefs; it is also the means by which we interpret and judge reality.” He goes on: “Worldviews function much like eyeglasses. The right eyeglasses can put the world into clearer focus, and the correct worldview can do something similar.”4 Nash summarizes well that there are five clusters of beliefs in any worldview: God, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and human nature. Our view of history could be added to this as well.

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Covey says, “I submit that if we focus our attention on techniques, on specific practices, on ‘to do’ lists, on present pressures, we might make some small improvements. But if we want to move ahead in a major way, we need to shift our paradigm and see the situation in a totally new way.”8

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As Dwight Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

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Money is not the scarcest resource. As Drucker pointed out years ago (and it has only increased since then), “Of the other major resources, money is actually quite plentiful. And when it comes to people, while it is hard to find enough good people, you can hire and train more people.” But you cannot get more time. You cannot rent more of it, hire more of it, or in any other way obtain more of it. Time is the scarcest resource—not people and not money. And therefore “nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.”

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King talks not only about how to write well, but also how to make the writing process work well for you. Regarding his own schedule, he writes, “My own schedule is pretty clear-cut. Mornings belong to whatever is new—the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait. Basically, mornings are my prime writing time.”19 That’s creative work first, reactive work second. And note that there is plenty of time left over for the reactive work, which does matter (and can be very energizing).

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Ephesians 5:7–17 teaches us that God does not typically whisper from heaven what decision we should make. He wants us to choose because that requires the growth of wisdom, maturity, and conscience.

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