{"id":340,"date":"2010-08-26T08:18:27","date_gmt":"2010-08-26T13:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2010\/08\/26\/100826_prayerandchristianity\/"},"modified":"2010-08-26T08:18:27","modified_gmt":"2010-08-26T13:18:27","slug":"100826_prayerandchristianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2010\/08\/26\/100826_prayerandchristianity\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Praying Make You a Christian?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, in response to a poll wherein almost 20% of respondents said they believed that President Obama is a Muslim, a White House spokesman stated<\/a> that “the President is obviously a – is Christian.” The spokesman went on to support this assertion by saying “he prays every day,” as if that settled the question once and for all.<\/p>\n

I don’t pretend to know whether Obama is Christian, Muslim, or anything else. I do find it odd that he would cancel the White House’s National Day of Prayer breakfast<\/a> but hold a dinner to celebrate Ramadan<\/a>, but neither of those things are germane to what I really want to discuss, and that is whether prayer is a sign that someone is a Christian. And, of course, the short – and Biblical – answer is “no.”<\/p>\n

It’s probably helpful for purposes of this discussion to define prayer, and I take a very simplistic view: prayer is speaking with God. We can make it complicated or ritualistic, but conversing with the Deity is the essence of prayer.<\/p>\n

Prayer is<\/i> an important characteristic of the Christian faith. Jesus Christ taught His disciples how to pray<\/a>, and He spent considerable time in prayer. The Christian who doesn’t pray is missing a cornerstone of his faith.<\/p>\n

But, guess what? Using my broad definition of prayer, the practice is not limited to Christians. In fact, Satan and his demons pray. A passage in the book of Revelation describes Satan’s habit of coming before God to accuse us of sin<\/a>, continually (as if God didn’t already know these things!). And one of Jesus’ earliest recorded miracles was the exorcism of an evil spirit from a man; Scripture records a short, desperate prayer by said spirit<\/a> before it was evicted.<\/p>\n

These simple examples help demonstrate that it’s not what we do<\/i> that makes us Christians; it’s what we believe<\/i>. In this regard, the President’s spokesman did him no favors in attempting to describe his boss’s faith.<\/p>\n

Two additional thoughts. First, while one might argue that the faith, or lack thereof, of an American president is nobody’s business, it’s a fact of life that such things are still of interest to an apparent majority of Americans. I fear for our nation when that ceases to be.<\/p>\n

Second, while we’re in the neighborhood, just as praying isn’t necessarily an indication that one is a Christian, neither is knowing who Jesus Christ is. Knowing Christ is not the same as accepting Him as Lord and Savior. Check out this passage in Acts<\/a> where more evil spirits make this point.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, in response to a poll wherein almost 20% of respondents said they believed that President Obama is a Muslim, a White House spokesman stated that “the President is obviously a – is Christian.” The spokesman went on to support this assertion by saying “he prays every day,” as if that settled the question… Continue reading Does Praying Make You a Christian?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}