It’s hard to
believe it’s only been a little over a year since War Room came out (the picture above is
when we rented out a movie theater on Aug. 30, 2015) and then the DVD was released on Dec. 22, 2015. So much has happened in the
past year. Since then, we’ve taught “The Battle Plan of Prayer Bible Study”
several times with nearly one hundred who have gone through the course. I have sensed a growth in our church in
regards to prayer: our Wednesday night prayer attendance is up, as is our men’s
prayer time on Thursday. There is a sense of spiritual strength in our church
and I believe it is because of prayer.
But we can always grow in our prayers, not as
a duty, not to get what we want, not to even seek God’s blessings...We need to
pray because prayer is a personal communication with our God who loves us. This Sunday we will study Prayer and in the Spring, I plan to have five different Discipleship tracks for us to study what I believe are the five essentials to Christian ministry. Those five areas are:
Prayer & Worship
OutReach & Evangelism
InReach & Fellowship
Need-meeting & Missions
Teaching & Discipleship
Please pray for these five key essentials in our church. This is week 12 in
our BELIEVE series. Prayer is a vital action in our foundation of beliefs. If you wrote down your prayer requests when this blog was first published on Aug. 25, 2016, review your prayer list and see how God has
answered your prayers.
The following devotional is from Zondervan.
KEY
QUESTION: How do I grow by communicating with
God?
Our God is a personal
God who desires a real relationship with us. He is not a distant, cosmic being,
but a good father who longs to interact with his children. Prayer is a
conversation between God and his people. We serve a God who is not threatened
by our questions and doubts. We don’t have to put on a false persona to please
him. He permits us to be honest about our fears, our feelings of isolation and
our disappointments. When we rehearse our story before him, we see his good
involvement in our lives.
Because we are God’s most prized creation, he wants to know
the desires of our hearts. Scripture encourages us to, without hesitation, lay
our requests before him. For example, see Gen. 18:20-31 for a conversation
between Abraham and God that displays the freedom we have to talk honestly with
him.
KEY
VERSE
If I had cherished
sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened; but God has surely listened
and has heard my prayer. Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or
withheld his love from me! (Psalm 66:18–20)
KEY
IDEA
I pray to God to know
him, to find direction for my life and to lay my requests before him.
KEY
APPLICATION: What difference does this make in the
way I live?
We pray to align our lives with God’s will and story. We
pray to lay our burdens before God to find peace. We pray to avoid making any
major decision without seeking God. We pray for others.
Let me share a story with you. Our son David was born
without a left hand. Prayer was a key spiritual practice to not only help me
process this difficult event in our lives but also to move the reality of my
identity, and my son’s identity, in Christ from my head to my heart.
During this time, I began by praying psalms of lament to the
Lord: Why, Lord, did you let this happen to me? I serve you as a pastor of a
church — not perfectly, but wholeheartedly. Why could you not pass this burden
on to someone who doesn’t even believe in you? Have I done something wrong to
deserve this?
I never sensed God was angry with me for speaking to him
with such honesty. Actually, I felt as though he were whispering to me, Go
ahead, I can handle this. I love you. Keep talking honestly to me, and we will
get to the bottom of this. I will show you something I have wanted you to see
for a long time.
In many extended moments of silence, when I didn’t know what
else to say or how to pray, God began speaking back to me — not in an audible
voice, but directly to my spirit. “Randy, my son, I have nothing in my being
that seeks to harm you. The darkness and pain of the world are caused by sin,
not by me. I have come to redeem the pain caused by sin. Randy, my son, I will
use this situation to show you — and your son — who I really am. If you capture
this, it will be more valuable than having three hands. Randy, my son, I have
given your son everything he needs to be and do everything I am calling him to
be and do. Randy, my son, it is time to shift your sense of worth from your
performance to your position. You are my son. You do not have to perform to be
a somebody; you already are a somebody in my eyes.
“Randy, my son, you need to teach this to your son. He will
learn this from how you live, not by your words alone. You have four years
before he realizes he is missing a hand. This gives you four years to learn to
place your identity in your position as my son. Randy, my son, if you get this
truth embedded into your heart, you will be free — free from the exhausting
life of trying to gain and sustain status in the world. This is a great gift to
give to all your children.”
Prayer is a conversation with God. We lay our honest
requests before God, our need for daily bread. Yet, we clarify, as Jesus did,
that we want God’s will to be done over our will, trusting his way to be good
and right. As we rest in the presence of God, he will speak and show us his
will in his perfect timing.
YOUR
TURN
What do you learn about prayer from David’s psalms? (You’ll
find some ideas in Psalm 77:1-20.)
