For the past few weeks I’ve been reviewing the Morning and Evening Prayerbook. It’s been good for the most part. Let me share with you what I like about it. 🙂
From the Publisher:
A collection of morning and evening prayers, a different one for every day and night of the year, drawn from the treasury of Christian prayer throughout the ages.
A Morning and Evening Prayerbook provides a framework for prayerful devotions with two prayers for each day of the year. The morning prayers are ideal for encouraging your heart for the approaching day’s activities and challenges while the evening prayers will help you close each day with reverence, gratitude, and reflection. Selected to mirror the seasons and the liturgical calendar, the prayers are intended not to replace your personal, spontaneous prayers but to serve as a springboard for them.
What you Get:
I have read a few other reviews because I was curious what others were saying. One of things that kept popping up was “it’s a wonderful devotional”. It isn’t.
I want to be clear about that. This is a prayer book. A book to remind you to talk to God. It isn’t a book that teaches scripture, or explains scripture. It IS a book that helps you to offer devotion to God. Perhaps that is where some confusion lies.
Editors Jeanie and David Gushee have collected inspiring contributions from Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox sources. They have drawn these collections from across the world, over the centuries of Christian history, and from the Bible.
Each day has it’s own prayer with a morning and an evening prayers. The prayers are designed to fit with the liturgical year.
The morning prayer is intended to help you wake up and welcome the new day with God. Say the prayer and then follow up with your own words about what is on your heart.
The evening prayer is to help you close the day as you lose yourself in sleep. A prayer that builds to your words of thankfulness for all God has given you over the day.
Since this prayer book is designed to work with the liturgical year, a helpful list was provided to help with those Holy Days that move. This way you can find the day of prayers you need to fit.
My Thoughts:
My husband noticed this book sitting in my pile of review books and said “Be careful reading this, watch the theology in the prayers.” We talked a bit further about that and I need to the following. This man’s gospel does not seem to be the same gospel that I follow. Do your research.
That said, I’ve gone through about 1/4 of the prayers listed in this book and the preponderance of the prayers are from the church of old. This doesn’t necessarily make them great prayers.. as I told my hubby, most of them are prayers I could teach a child to pray. Short, easy, without a lot of depth to them.
I did note some prayers written by the authors, about 21 all told. So not a huge amount out of the total number in this hardcover prayerbook. With any book of faith, whether it is one of prayers, or biblical interpretation, be alert to the leadings of the Holy Spirit and don’t assume that all is good all the time. 🙂
Do I recommend It?
Yes. Why? For a couple of reasons.
- Daily prayer in the morning and then again at night. I used them as a kick-start. Here’s a prayer, let’s read it and then continue on in a prayer of my own words.
- Excellent habit formation. It’s good to start and end the day with the Lord, but we don’t always remember to do so. This book will help.
- Not all believers are confident in their ability to talk to God. I know there are days that I just don’t know what to say (for a whole variety of reasons), so a book of prayer helps. It reminds me that others pray and therefore, so can I, even when I don’t know what to say.
What I wish I found within, were prayers directly from scripture. It is good to read prayers that others wrote, but it’s great to read, rather… to pray, the prayers that God provided for us. Let me correct myself here, I found 12 prayers from the bible. I still wish there had been more. 🙂
Morning and Evening PrayerBook
Jeanie and David Gushee (editors)
W Publishing Group, Thomas Nelson
400 pages, Hardcover, all ages
Prayerbook, Christianity, Faith, Worship, Devotion
Reviewed for BookLookBloggers.
Leave a Reply