Pray Network Forum

A group of near culture believers who have moved to the Arabian Peninsula for work have a passion to share and are meeting regularly to encourage each other as they ask the Father for opportunities to share and disciple. Please pray that the Lord will move mightily in and through them.

A country with very few indigenous believers is slowly beginning to see some fruit, as those who have begun to follow Jesus are giving testimony to their friends and family. Give praise for these bold ones and pray that they will continue to share with great joy, continued boldness, and great wisdom. Pray that many will be added to the Kingdom.

Even after seeing the truth in the Word and realizing that Jesus is so much more than just a prophet, it is difficult for someone from the Muslim faith to embrace the Gospel as the way to God.  A young woman exclaimed, "How could I ever believe that the Quran is not from Allah?" Pray that the beloved people of the Arabian Peninsula will be freed from the chains that bind them to falsehood. Pray that they will be given faith by the Holy Spirit to repent and confess that Jesus is the only way, the truth and the life.

A woman with stage 4 cancer is reading the Word with her mother. May they receive the faith to embrace the truth of the Good News and surrender their lives to Jesus. Pray also for divine healing in accordance with His will and for His glory.

All prayer is not a struggle, but some of the best prayer is like Jacob wrestling with the Lord.

There are several reasons we must struggle in prayer. They are diverse enough that they could not be covered thoroughly in a single blog entry. I will pray about writing a series of blogs on this important subject. But for now I want to overview the issue.

We need to struggle in prayer because of the condition of the fallen world where God has assigned us to minister. In Joel's powerful call to prayer we read,

"Gird yourselves and lament, you priests;

Wail, you who minister before the altar;

Come, lie all night in sackcloth,

You who minister to my God;

For the grain offering and the drink offering

Are withheld from the house of your God.

We need to struggle in prayer over the condition of our country, our city, sometimes our churches. Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Have you wept in prayer over someone you love who is rejecting Christ. Have you fasted before God because of things were terribly out of His will?

We sometimes need to struggle to discern God’s will. Have you prayerfully poured yourself out over scripture and circumstances to clearly hear God’s voice?

I also have to struggle over my will. In a sense this is struggling over the will of God. Only saying it that way sounds like God is the enemy. But as a child of God, He is no longer the enemy. He is on my side against the selfishness and foolishness of my sinful nature.

It is almost blasphemous to compare my struggles with that of Jesus in the garden before the cross. But He showed us the right attitude of prayer. Even as Jesus was asking if there were any way "the cup" could pass from Him, He surrendered to His Father’s will. And after He had spent time in the presence of God, Jesus made peace with God's will even though it would cost Him everything. The struggles God leads you through are never so difficult or so crucial. But they are important. And they are a necessary part of spiritual growth.

http://daveswatch.com

http://Watchinginprayer.blogspot.com/

If you’re like me, there’s hardly anything in life more frustrating than when you lose something that’s important to you. The day is off to a bad start if you can’t remember where you put your car keys, your cell phone, or the computer file you’d worked on all day yesterday.

Everything else is put on hold until you find what you lost.

On the other hand, nothing is more exhilarating than to find something you thought might be gone forever. Jesus tells three stories about this kind of experience in Luke 15, where a lost sheep, lost coin, and lost son all were regained with great joy.

Have you ever had this kind of experience?

Recently I uncovered a “lost” secret to having an adventurous, discovered-filled life. I feel like the man in Matthew 13:44 (MSG) who unexpectedly found “a treasure hidden in a field for years.” How could I have missed or neglected this “treasure” for so long?

The secret is amazingly simple, found in a single word. It’s a word that probably sounds wimpy or even defeatist at first—yet it’s anything but that. The word is filled with explosive power and potential, but this is a lot like nuclear energy—hidden away for millennia inside of tiny atoms.

Even though this word is never used in the Bible, the concept is found throughout. However, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard a sermon by this name.

So here it is, the forgotten key to a happy, fruitful, and prosperous life of discovery:

RELINQUISHMENT

Dictionaries define relinquishment as surrendering, releasing, letting go, or yielding. The closest Bible “proof text” I could find was an obscure marginal reference in Psalm 46:10 (nasb):  “LET GO and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” The secret to having God exalted in our lives is in simply letting go—relinquishing something we treasure to Him. Or, as Jesus told us, we must lose our life in order to find it (Luke 17:33).

Relinquishment takes a person’s life from ordinary to extraordinary…from bland to blessed…from victim to victor…and from boring to bold. In contrast, nothing is duller or more depressing than trying hold on to what we already have.

Abraham’s son Isaac was just an ordinary young man until Abraham relinquished him to the Lord and put him on the altar of sacrifice (Genesis 22).

Once Moses relinquished his ordinary shepherd’s staff (Exodus 4:1-5), it was transformed into “the rod of God,” able to perform mighty miracles.

There was nothing extraordinary about the five loaves and two fish the disciples had on hand—until they relinquished their supply to Jesus (Matthew 14).

The stone waterpots in John 2 contained only ordinary, colorless, tasteless water, until Jesus took the bland water and did a miracle—turning it into sparkling, tasty, intoxicating wine.

You see, whenever RELINQUISMENT takes place, life gets exciting and God does miracles. So why is it so easy to miss this? The answer is simple: Because of fear and unbelief, we tend to hang on to our meager resources rather than entrust them into the hands of God.

The life of faith is never ordinary, bland, or unexciting. But the “religious” life is a completely different story. Religion always turns the wine back into water and removes the fizz from the adventurous life God planned for us.

Jesus relinquished the rights of His heavenly life in order to embark on the great adventure of redeeming humankind and giving us a right to enter heaven. Still today, He beckons us to a life of relinquishment, where it is “more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

Instead of being a life of boredom or defeat, a life of relinquishment is a life of anticipation, success, and victory. What can God do with that “thing” you are holding in your hand? You’ll never know until you relinquish it to Him. That’s when the fun starts and the fizz returns.

Join me if you would like in praying this prayer during Lent: 

Covenant    Prayer

From   John   Wesley's   Covenant   Service ,  1780 

I  am  no  longer  my  own,  but  thine. 

Put  me  to  what  thou  wilt,  rank  me  with  whom  thou  wilt. 

Put  me  to  doing,  put  me  to  suffering. 

Let  me  be  employed  by  thee  or  laid  aside  for  thee, 

exalted  for  thee  or  brought  low  for  thee. 

Let  me  be  full,  let  me  be  empty. 

Let  me  have  all  things,  let  me  have  nothing. 

I  freely  and  heartily  yield  all  things to  thy  pleasure  and  disposal. 

And  now,  O  glorious  and  blessed  God, 

Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Spirit, 

thou  art  mine,  and  I  am  thine.  So  be  it. 

And  the  covenant  which  I  have  made  on  earth, 

let  it  be  ratified  in  heaven.  Amen.

Instead of surrendering our ability to pray because our expectations aren't fully met in the moment (or in the way(s) we expect them to be fulfilled), shouldn't we surrender ourselves, and continually do so, to God?

*  Revival (when Christians, and the Church, become saturated with God).