“Do I have to kneel when I pray?”

Steve Brown:
Do I have to kneel when I pray? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus and the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers. Life’s hard for everyone, so grace is for all of us, but there is a lot of confusion about how grace applies to real life. So, here’s seminary professor and author Steve Brown and Pete Alwinson to answer your questions.

Steve Brown:
Hey Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. How you doing?

Steve Brown:
Doing really good.

Pete Alwinson:
Good, it’s Friday, you know, are you preaching this week-end?

Steve Brown:
Yes, as a matter of fact.

Pete Alwinson:
Wow.

Steve Brown:
I’m not sure where, and I haven’t finished the sermon, so I may tell them I’m sick, but

Pete Alwinson:
No, you won’t.

Steve Brown:
No, I won’t. As a matter of fact, I am and I’m looking forward to it.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, good. I’ll pray for you.

Steve Brown:
See, I don’t have to be their pastor. I just have to preach and I can leave.

Pete Alwinson:
Amen. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Isn’t that good?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, it is. It’s a great thing.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. When God released the burden for us, he set us free, and now we’re dangerous. That’s Pete Alwinson. Go to ForgeTruth.com you’ll be glad you did, so much there about teaching, videos, and audio teaching, blogs, and a podcast. It’s a wondrous website. That’s ForgeTruth.com. Pete comes in, as you know, on Fridays and we answer questions and we love doing them, we love each other and we love doing it and it shows, but we love your questions too, so feel free to send any question. We’ll take it seriously.

You can call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7, and record your question, and often we put your voice on the air. Or you can write to

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or you can e-mail us at [email protected] and if you can help us financially, please do. If you can’t, please don’t. And, but if you do, we’ll be faithful with your gift and squeeze every dime for the glory of God. If you can’t, we understand, do pray for this ministry. And at the end, the bills will be paid, they always have. I’ve been scared to death, but the bills have been paid. So, be faithful as you can and thank you. Pete, lead us in prayer and we’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
All right, our Father, we do come to you today on the end of this week, and we’re so grateful that we can call you Father, with all of that implies, we thank you Lord Jesus for being the one to reconnect us to the eternal God who made us in his image, and has called us back and restored us from our sin and our fallen condition. And Lord, we just thank you for your goodness. Pray that you continue to help us to grow. May grace set us free and energize us as we seek to become like you. Lord, we know one day when we see you face to face, it’s going to happen immediately. And we ask this week-end would be a little bit of heaven. We pray for our pastors and teachers and priests that they would continue to bring us into your Holy Word and into your Holy Presence. Bless them, use them, and change us even this week-end. We commit this time of Q&A to you right now as we pray in your Holy Name, Lord Jesus. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Hey Pete, let’s first go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
What is the proper position for prayer?

Steve Brown:
That was short and sweet.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, right at it.

Steve Brown:
You have a joke.

Pete Alwinson:
Oh, you know, you may have told me, I love this one on prayer though, you know, the Methodist, the Baptist and the Catholic pastors were gathered together and they were talking about prayer and there was a guy fixing the phones in the room and they’re all talking about the right attitude of prayer and the right position of prayer and and the repairman, you know, he chimed in. He goes, Hey, listen man, I found the best position for prayer is when I’m hanging upside down from a telephone pole. And I love that because it is, it’s like I pray best when I’m desperate, you know? But

Steve Brown:
yeah, that’s true. You know, at one time I always knelt when I prayed. And I would do that today, probably more than I do, except I’m old. And if I kneel down, it might be a day before I get up.

Pete Alwinson:
Where’s Steve? He’s in the process of getting up.

Steve Brown:
And if you No, you know, and I don’t do prostate on the floor. I used to do that occasionally when I was worshiping, but as you get older, that’s not as easy as it used to be. And I asked the Lord, is this all right if I sit? And he said, I did. When he taught, he sat on the, well, and so I don’t think that position is a mandatory law of something you have to do, but there’s some good things about it, aren’t there?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, there are, in the Screwtape Letters it says this idea that the position of the body affects the condition of the soul. And so, there is some truth to that. And I have found that over the course of my adult life, I pray best when I’m sitting at my desk looking and praying through my cards, prayer cards with Scripture. And when I get on my knees, I often get distracted. And I don’t know why that is, it’s probably just the way I’m wired. But when I, but I do what you have said, I do get down on my knees periodically in worship. And just simply recognizing the transcendence and greatness of God.

Steve Brown:
Just adoration.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
But it’s not a law. Don’t get neurotic on it. You know, you can get really neurotic if you aren’t careful.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And I generally, and I do too for that reason, occasionally I’ll kneel, but mostly when I’m focused and sitting at my desk, that is a comfortable way for me to pray, especially for extended prayer. And you and I both don’t just do a quick prayer before we head out the door. I mean, we, it takes us at least an hour to finish confessing, before we start anything else.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, about 20 minutes for confessing your sins, for you. And then you spend about an hour and a half on confessing my sins. You know, one thing that’s true is that the Pharisees in Jesus day stood up to pray.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
They also bowed down to pray.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
And they were also, like you said, prorate on the ground. So, it was all different ways

Steve Brown:
And it’s okay with God.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
It really is. This is an e-mail and we get this a lot and I get this a lot from people. I’m struggling with assurance of my salvation. what do I do?

Pete Alwinson:
Hmm. What do you normally tell them? What do you think is a good starting point on that?

Steve Brown:
Well, you know, you do some shock things like, are you calling God a liar? And how could you do that? I mean, God says you’re his own. You’ve done what he said for, and you’re saying that he lied to you? And then you laugh because it’s not a serious thing, but it’s a shock thing. It’s important to remember that you don’t get to decide that, God gets to decide it. And if you do what God said about salvation, believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. If you do that, that means lean on him, then you’re saved.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. We do get this a lot though, and

Steve Brown:
Oh, I know.

Pete Alwinson:
assurance of salvation in all of the recent discipleship material and really in the last 30, 35 years, really has a section on assurance of salvation

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it really does.

Pete Alwinson:
because it is something, because our sin, and back to what you were saying earlier on another subject, we often think of God and more in the negative that he’s angry about everything. And so,

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
we see our sin and we’re really, we see what we do and what we think and what we don’t even say. And we think he’s got to be angry at me. And so, it’s hard to really trust the full orbed forgiveness of the gospel.

Steve Brown:
That is so true. You know, reform people generally, talk about the Perseverance of the saints, that in your persevering, you will have assurance of salvation. In other words, as I walk it the assurance comes. And there’s some truth to that. I get that. Then you get dispensational by and large people who say, remember the day when you received Christ. Nail it in. And every time Satan talks to you, bring up that date and tell him where to go, that you were saved then. But you know what I think really assurance of salvation, if you want to be better than you are, you didn’t make that up. That came from somewhere.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
That means you’re his because if you weren’t, you wouldn’t care. And then use Scripture over and over again.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. That’s so good. The enemy wants you and and me to be insecure in all of our relationship with the Lord. He wants us to feel like we’ve got ot keep doing more than Jesus did.

Steve Brown:
Oh man. I know. And I’ve been there, but I’m not there anymore. I’ve got some sins, but the assurance one is not one of them.

Pete Alwinson:
You know, we get to a point, I think, if you keep following Jesus, you do see the growth, you see the stability that he provides in you.

Steve Brown:
And you know where it came from.

Pete Alwinson:
And you know where it came from. You know, I didn’t do this alone.

Steve Brown:
What is the, this is an e-mail. What is the origin of sin?

Pete Alwinson:
The origin of sin, well, the first sinner, as far as we know, was Satan and his rebellious angels. Right?

Steve Brown:
That’s true. And then, you know, it’s not outside of, the Scripture says that he’s not the creator of evil. And I agree with that, but it doesn’t mean that God isn’t sovereign and aware and using that as a tool in his box.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Satan is a tool of God. He’s God’s lackey. And there’s certain things that God has accomplished because of Satan. Satan’s not going to win anything.

He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And that’s true with sin too. So, there is a sense in which God allowed the natural course, started by Satan himself, in order to send his Son and glorify himself in the salvation of his people.

Pete Alwinson:
Absolutely. That’s so good. And we pass it on quite easily, down through the human race. And Jesus has come to stop that cycle, to reverse that process and to undo the curse. He became that curse for us.

Steve Brown:
That’s really true. And then what other thing, people say, I sinned because Adam sinned. Which is true, but I sin for the same reason Adam sinned. And that’s true too. And it’s all covered by the blood of Christ.

Pete Alwinson:
Amen. Amen. What a blessing that is. That, and that’s, that’s really the central message of Key Life.

Steve Brown:
It really is. Hey, that’s Pete Alwinson, he comes in every Friday. Don’t forget about ForgeTruth.com and we’ve got to go. But before we go, let me say, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.