The best counsel on prayer I ever received was from a pastor who spoke about prayer at a spiritual retreat. It is wrong to think that we have to get in a "holy" mood before we can pray to God, he said. God wants honest conversation from us.

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I am encouraged that many evangelical leaders have been stepping forward in recent months to express a concern about global warming in particular and environmental stewardship in general. But this is long overdue. It is a sad thing that for us "creationism" has come to mean an obsession with how long ago God created the earth and whether that happened in six literal days

We have been willing to go to court over what schools teach about the age of the earth, but we have taken almost no interest in the well being of that earth. There can be some good arguments about how much of the first few chapters of Genesis we should interpret literally. But there is at least one thing in that account that cannot be given anything other than a literal interpretation: that God took delight in the world--plants, animals, rivers and hills--that he had made. When we fail to take good care of that creation we sin against our Maker.

I have often been critical of specific policies of the Israeli government, but I am not an anti-Semite. So yes, there is no necessary connection between the two.

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