29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Book Addressing the Realities of Listening Prayer, July 24, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Listening Prayer: Learning to Hear God's Voice and Keep a Prayer Journal (Paperback)
This book was one of the most nurturing I have found on the subject of prayer. Leanne Payne, unlike many other authors coming coming from a Charismatic background, emphasizes the fact that prayer and a relationship with Christ is simple persistence, and work. While other authors say this with their words, I saw this "persistence and work" theme emphasized over, and over. Her book erased any thought of a "quick and easy" relationship; her emphasis centers on Christ, and Christ alone.
My only criticism is my desire, even need, to have more examples. I appreciated her narrative, and her use of Scriptural authority. However, real life examples, woven into the text, would have been helpful. She gave some examples (especially in her chapter in Chapter 12 on "How God Speaks to His Children"), but more would have been helpful to place her discussion into a context. Also, she was extremely circumspect in detailing one of her own experiences; after reading it, I did not know what she was trying to express, or what, precisely, occurred.
This criticism is the only reason for my four-star rating. If I could, I would give a "4.5" or a "4.6." This book is one to be read several times, and I highly recommend it.
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Balanced and helpful, August 12, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Listening Prayer: Learning to Hear God's Voice and Keep a Prayer Journal (Paperback)
I have been using a prayer journal based on Payne's model for nearly a year and have seen her ideas move me towards greater intimacy with Christ. Other volumes she's written are more complex, but this is quite readable. Her emphasis is always to look straight to Christ, not to a method.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Full of sound and fury signifying nothing., November 7, 2010
This review is from: Listening Prayer: Learning to Hear God's Voice and Keep a Prayer Journal (Paperback)
Leanne Payne could easily have saved me about 200 pages of usless information and turned this book into a two page pamphlet explaining that how it works is that you get a three ring binder some paper with holes punched in it, seven dividers, and some pens. I reccomend you follow that advice, and grab a good study bible. A bible has a lot more usefull and practical instruction on the subject of prayer than this book has. Once you have a bible, read a bit, pray about it, and then write down your prayers, how they were answered, words, the spirit leads you to write etc. DO that and you aved yourself some money, and 200 some odd pages of junk.
The book tells you what you should title each section, but beyond that the book is silent. The rest of the book is full of phillosophy, psychology, and a pinch of theology discussing the benefits and dangers of listening prayer without actually describing any methods to help one focus on God. It uses the Lord's prayer as a vague outline of how to arrange the sections of the journal (not a bad idea) but the headings only barely connect to the parts of that famous prayer she claims inspired each section title.
She quotes a good many people, C.S. Lewis being one of them. Of course, whereas Payne clearly belives in the idea that everyone has repressed memories, and that pschology can be used to understand prayer, Lewis does not. Much of what she discuses seems to share some of the ideas found in theophostic prayer which is more psychologically than biblically based. The originator of theophostic prayer, Ed Smith based it firmly upon the notion that pain is caused by some lie burried deep within our subconscious. This lie must be searched out and exposed to the light in order to be healed. These concepts are not biblically based and are instead rooted in Recovered Memory Therapy. While this may be used effectively to help victems of tremendously traumatic expiriences, it is unwise to assume that everyone has repressed memories. According to wikipedia RMT, "does not refer to a specific, recognized treatment method, but rather a combination of several controversial and/or unproven interviewing techniques, such as hypnosis and the use of sedative-hypnotic drugs. The term is not listed in DSM-IV or used by any mainstream formal psychotherapy ."
Payne warns time and again that certain attitudes twoard prayer are gnostic or neognostic, yet at one point as she heads off on a tangent about how God can communicate with us in dreams and visions, she insists that people need some sort of formal training in Judeo-Christian symbology in order to understand them. Thats right, she insists that to understand God's message to you, you need some kind of special gnosis to understand it. Apparently, God is not powerful enough to send you the message contextuallized into your own particular language and use images familliar to you. Lets just forget about the part of the bible where Pontious Pilot's wife has a preminition warning her that Jesus (a man pilot had condemned to death) was innocent.
In short I found the book as pretentious as it was impractical. If she had approached the bible unencumbered by modern psychobable and strived toward appealing to more than the fairer sex in her annecdotes and examples, I might have been a bit more generous. A committment to objectivity would help a great deal. Instead, she injects her own biases into the book at every turn, quotes authors that disagree with her methods, and beyond the first few pages does nothing to tell you about how you are to pray.
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