EMQ » Oct – Dec 2024 » Volume 60 Issue 4
How to Resurrect a Dead Prayer Life: Transforming Your Prayers into a Spirit-Empowered, Life-Giving Adventure
By Bill Thrasher
Moody Publishers, 2023
152 pages
US$12.99
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Reviewed by Richard Cook, PhD, professor of church history and missions at Logos Evangelical Seminary in El Monte, California, and a former missionary in Taiwan.
Bill Thrasher offers a fresh primer on cultivating prayer. Many Christians, even missionary-minded ones, need a volume like this every ten or twenty years. Readers who have been aided by Andrew Murray (1950s), John White (1970s), or John Piper (1990s), will be delighted to find How to Resurrect a Dead Prayer Life (2020s). Bill Thrasher, faculty at Moody Bible Institute, exhorts readers in the Preface, “Please do not look at your prayer life as merely a human activity. This book is about how God offers His powerful and gracious hand in motivating, guiding, and empowering you to pray (13).”
This slim prayer guide includes a modest number of notes at the end (149–152), illustrative anecdotes scattered throughout, and, most notably, it is saturated with Scripture. To receive the full value of the thoughtful presentation, readers should move slowly through this book.
The material is divided into four parts, starting with “From Death to Life,” and concluding with “Experiencing the Power of the Holy Spirit.” There are 14 chapters, and each chapter concludes with a section, “For Personal or Group Reflection.”
Chapter 1 starts with an eye-opener: “How do you know if your prayer life has died? It is when you are praying and yet are not expecting anything to happen (29).” The author admits to having had that experience. The sections are well organized and stimulate prayer. Chapter 6, for example, “Turning Our Temptations into Conversations with God,” concludes with the evocative reflection question, “What temptation in your life is drawing you to the Lord (77)?” The companion piece, Chapter 7, develops the ideas further, “Turning Our Temptations into Intercession for Others.”
Chapter 10 connects prayer and worship, asking “Have you ever lost the joy of corporate worship? Have you ever looked at your time in your Sunday services as only an obligation (103)?” Those questions open part 3 “Experiencing the Guidance of the Holy Spirit.”
Bill Thrasher urges us to allow the Holy Spirit to infuse our life and prayers. The anecdotes are simple and the Scripture references familiar, but a thoughtful and meditative reading could resurrect your prayer life.
For Further Reading
With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray (Fleming H. Revell Company, 1953)
People in Prayer: Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Daniel, Hannah, Job, Paul, Jesus by John White (InterVarsity Press, 1978)
A Hunger for God: Desiring God through Fasting and Prayer by John Piper (Crossway Books, 1997)
EMQ, Volume 60, Issue 4. Copyright © 2024 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
