Agape Prayer book Ch. 1

I finished the 1st rough draft of Chapter 1 of my book “The 7 steps of Agape Prayer.” Here are a few excerpts.

“This type of prayer comes as a method for waking up to what is deep within you. It came to me as a deep spiritual sensation that was a way for finding, in the way that the ‘Kingdom Parables’ of Jesus are about finding what is at the true heart of Life. And in a similar way, the act of sending (that will be described in later chapters) follows from a deep attitude of finding what is truly best for the ultimate well-being of people.
“Let yourself feel the spiritual joy as you begin finding a vision of your well-being. Let a picture develop in your imagination of what would fulfill your life. Try to sense what that would feel like as your living is effected. Then sense how the spiritual power of agape is part of that. Feel the power of agape flowing into the center of your being. Let the spiritual sensation come to you so you experience being drawn close to and opening up to both the personal Presence and vastness of eternity.”

    Most of the chapter used the methodology of Bible study. I used the approach advanced in this blog of leaving ‘agape’ untranslated so as to see the full impact of what agape means to Christian understanding. Of course, the main NT passage I concentrated an intense study of was 1 Cor. 13, but I also studied parts of Matthew, Luke, Romans, and Galatians.

Agape Prayer Practice -- the beginning of a book

I’ve decided to write a book based on these postings of the last couple of years. I’ll structure it using the form of extended prayer practice that I call Agape Prayer. The last time I reported in this blog on the “Agape Prayer practice” was in the April, 2012 and July 27, 2010 postings.

I developed 7 ‘steps’ with the practice, as I prayed for an expanding list of persons (a few of the ‘steps’ took a long time to develop, so I didn’t move from ‘step to step’ until I was fully ready). The book will give a general summary that makes this prayer practice available for anyone else to follow.

The general outline and extensive notes for the book are quickly falling in line. As the writing is developing, the book structure will be 7 chapters that correspond to the 7 steps of Agape Prayer. So far, I added also an 11-page introduction, mainly explaining my theory that ‘agape’ should not be translated in the Bible as ‘love.’ I plan to add an appendix that gives a selection of the main scripture readings where 'agape' appeared in the original Greek, and I will leave 'agape' untranslated in the listing.