Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.
D. A. CarsonThe broader problem is that a great deal of popular preaching and teaching uses the bible as a pegboard on which to hang a fair bit of Christianized pop psychology or moralizing encouragement, with very little effort to teach the faithful, from the Bible, the massive doctrines of historic confessional Christianity.
D. A. CarsonA billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.
D. A. CarsonFor example, the Bible does say this is a proposition, "There is no God." But of course the context of Psalm 14:1 enriches it a bit: "the fool has said in his heart, there is no God." So there are contextual constraints and when you finish putting in all the contextual constraints and sophisticated discussions of what inerrancy is and isn't.
D. A. Carson