Prayer

Pastor Ron Merrell · Sep 29, 2025

Pastor Ron Merrell teaches that the private practices God has given us — reading the Bible, prayer, fasting, Sabbath, solitude — are not mere disciplines to make us better Christians but the very means by which we develop and deepen an actual friendship with Jesus. Drawing on John 15, Psalm 1, Proverbs 4, and Luke 10, he calls believers to still themselves in God's Word, communicate with God without ceasing or censoring, and continually align their hearts with His, so that their walk with Christ moves from sporadic religious duty to an intimate, life-shaping friendship.

Pastor Daniel Goulding · May 20, 2024

In Matthew 6, Jesus corrects people who pray a lot but have missed the heart of it. Using the Lord's Prayer as a model — not a script — He shows that effective prayer begins with a clear picture of who God is: a holy, all-knowing Father who invites us into relationship. True prayer moves us from treating God as a heavenly genie into a posture of familiarity, expectation, humility, and dependency — where the goal is not extracting things from God but drawing closer to Him and being transformed by His presence.