Pray Network Forum

I don't write a great deal about success. I fear our hearts read something glitzy rather than substantial. But I need to show you something about success from the word of God. The characteristic most connected with genuine success in the Bible is humility.

Jesus repeatedly told us we would be exalted if we humble ourselves. James said we would be exalted if we humbled ourselves in the sight of the Lord. Peter told us to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God.

Let me give you three examples of successful humility or humble success. I know of a number of spiritual leaders in history that have exemplified this principle. But none of them shone as brightly in the twentieth century as Billy Graham.

I think you will agree that Billy has been successful in the eyes of God and in the eyes of men. Called to the White House in crucial times by presidents from Harry Truman to George Bush. He preached in sweeping movements of God on five continents. On June 3, 1973 Billy ended a five-day crusade in  Seoul Korea, by preaching to over a million people. No other preacher in history has ever preached to a crowd like that.

And yet people who met and knew Billy Graham were always stunned most by his humility. It is amazing that those who have followed in Billy's wake have thought promotion and strategy were the way to greatness.  

I would like to go far back into Biblical history for our second example. Numbers 12:3 says Moses was more humble than anyone on the face of the earth. And I think it is safe to say that God exalted him. Those words were spoken while Moses was facing jealous opposition during the great trial that God brought upon the Children of Israel to humble them. In Deuteronomy 8:2 the Lord said, "Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in in the desert these forty years, to humble you." What has God done in your life to humble you? Don't chafe under His mighty hand. God's humbling is the key to great blessing.

The third example of humble success towers over all the others. Can you honestly call yourself a disciple of Jesus Christ if your heart does not hunger for humility. He who shared His Father's eternal glory humbled Himself for you. His whole ministry was an expression of ultimate humility.

As a follower of Christ, are you seeking the power of humility? As a child of God, are you praying for the Holy Spirit to produce supernatural humility in you? This is a crucial key to being used by the hand of God.

Now I do need to caution you about thinking of humility as a means of self promotion. Such Pharisaical efforts may impress people, but not God. Our humility needs to be an expression of grateful devotion to God. We cannot be truly humble in order to get what we want from God. True humility wants to see Jesus honored because of the wonderful grace He has lavished upon us.

               What I am about to tell you is one of the reasons most churches don't have much spiritual power. Church today have generally abandoned this practice. You would Catch the intensity and conviction in my tone: The greatest working of God come by corporate prayer, and we will not see the power of God in sufficient measure to transform the world around us until we pray together. As a leader you must make praying together a priority equal to preaching and teaching. if I sound a little melodramatic, good. Then you caught just how monstrously important it is. I want sow this seed of conviction in your heart so that you will conclude that your spiritual fate depends not just on prayer but on praying in community with other Christians. Personal prayer lives alone will not result in the working of God to the degree needed  for spiritual transformation in our lives, our churches, our cities, or our nation. I believe that private and corporate prayer are like two wings of a airplane, which one you would rather do without? the absent of either would be fatal. If we don't pray together, we will continue losing our country. If we do pray together God's way we can expect a revolution of our society.

Do you get tired of praying the same prayers for your grandchildren and their parents? Do you feel like your prayers have become humdrum, repetitive, or pointless?

A number of years ago, I felt that my prayers were general and superficial. I prayed that my grandchildren would be safe and have a good day, but those prayers felt rote--and were probably powerless.   

However, that all changed after I asked God to give me wisdom and insight on how I could intentionally pray with a purpose for my grandchildren and their parents. I discovered that God’s Word is a great resource to help me to pray not only for my grandchildren and their parents, but also for myself. I believe that no prayer is more effective than the one that finds its roots in God’s Word, which is alive, powerful, and will not return void. 

When I pray according to God’s Word, I am in line with His will, enabling me to pray with wisdom and power, according to Hebrews 4:12: “The Word of God is full of living power” (NLT). I have found it helpful to spend time in God’s Word to know His promises and commands because my mind is renewed to think His thoughts. His Word helps me to see my grandchildren’s needs from His eternal perspective instead from my limited perspective.

John 15:7 promises that “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you” (NIV) I believe God’s words can be the foundation of powerful prayers for our grandchildren and their parents.                     

As I started claiming God’s promises and personalizing the Scriptures, I experienced more boldness and confidence in my praying. I believe that nothing threatens the enemy, Satan, more than when we are intentionally praying God’s Word for our grandchildren, their parents, and ourselves. Many Scripture passages in Psalms, Proverbs, the Gospels and Paul’s writings can be used in our prayers.     

In our increasingly complex and turbulent world, we don’t know about the future. However, as grandparents who love the Lord, we know Who holds the future. We must be engaged in prayer for our grandchildren and their parents to keep their hearts and minds from falling captive to the enemy’s deception and lies.

We read in Psalm 3:5, “In the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation” (NIV).  Will you join me in laying your requests at the feet of Jesus, waiting in expectation for Him to answer those prayers?

Here are some Scripture passages to begin to pray intentionally for your grandchildren.  If you would like to receive more Scriptures to Pray for your Grandchildren subscribe to this blog and you will receive a free downloadable copy and you will receive more grandparenting tips and resources.

Pray ____________ will be quick to listen, slow to speak. And slow to become angry.  James 1:19

Pray ___________will be kind, compassionate and forgiving toward others Philippians 4:12 

Pray _________ will be generous and willing to share with others. I Timothy 6:18

If you would like to receive “31 Scriptures to Pray for your Grandchildren” sign up on the right to receive grandparenting resources regularly.

By Lillian Penner, Prayer Director, Christian Grandparenting Network, lpenner@christiangrandparenting.net

I want to address Prayer Warriors and those of you who long very much to become prayer Warriors. In the Old Testament book of Esther Mordecai spoke to his niece the queen, saying “Who knows perhaps you have been raised up for such a time as this.”
You have been raised up for this very day. I am not qualified to determine exactly what kind of era we are living in. The beginning of A Tale of Two Cities may well apply to our age. It is the best of times and the worst of times. We are enjoying the rich blessings of God. We may be on the verge of apocalypse. But it really does not matter what unique day we are living in. God has raised you up to be a prayer warrior in these days.
God may have raised you up to be a prayer warrior in days in which we are so blessed that it is difficult to find time to pray, when there are so many distractions entertainments and blessings to enjoy. You may have to sacrifice watching your favorite your favorite television program or going to a game where your favorite team is playing an archrival. These may be days in which God raises up an army of people who love him more than the things He gives us. Instead of taking long relaxing vacations people take could go on mission trips to pray for people in other countries. This may be a day when people pray despite allurements the enemy throws in front of us.
While I certainly believe this is partially true. I am also convinced that you are raised up to pray in times of great moral crises. You and those around you will face heartache and trials. I believe we are going to see terrible judgment in these days. In fact, prayer movements in history have accompanied or preceded judgment. A case in point is the great prayer revival of 1858. It preceded the Civil War that God brought upon our country because of the sin of slavery. People were able to endure those days, many went to heaven, because of that revival.
I believe the return of Christ is imminent. If that is the case, we are about to enter into the greatest tribulation the world has ever seen. And we may have been raised up to pray that the greatest spiritual awakening the world has ever seen will come about simultaneously.
Now, whether the return of Christ is near or not, most of you know that you are going to face severe difficulty and heartache in your life, and your family, in your neighborhood, in your city, in your nation. This is your day! In John 12:27 Jesus admitted that His heart was troubled. And He asked rhetorically if He should pray to be delivered from those days. “But,” He said, “for this purpose I have come to this hour.” You are hear for this very purpose. God has raised you up for such a time as this.
http://daveswatch.com/
http://writingprayerfully.blogspot.com/
http://thinkinginthespirit.blogspot.com/
http://watchinginprayer.blogspot.com/

When I was a teenager, my father was Pastor of a church in Houston, Texas and my mother was President of a city-wide Pastor Wives organization.  On a cold-December night I lay in an Emergency Room with a broken second vertebra of the neck, hearing doctors saying it was a miracle I was alive, and not paralyzed. That’s when my mother sprang into action.  On the social media of the day, my mother placed phone calls to several Pastor wives, who in turn called several others, and the prayer chain continued until a hundred or more wives had been contacted with a request on my behalf, to go “boldly to the throne of grace . . .  and find grace to help in time of need”  (Hebrews 4:16).  I spent the next nine months hearing doctors and surgeons explain why my neck bone would never heal, twice scheduled for surgery and twice cancelled at the last minute, unable to attend school or church services for nine months.  After these nine months, I was pronounced healed.  When my parents tried to thank the atheist orthopedic surgeon, he replied, “Thank someone else.  I had nothing to do with the healing.” So my mother and her pastor wives friends did just that, they thanked Someone else. Six decades later, many of those ladies and most of the doctors who said I would never be totally well again have moved into eternity, and I’m still here. We sang a version of a little song originally written in 1929, and often adapted with different words, “Are there any rivers that seem to be uncrossable? Are there any mountains you cannot tunnel through? God specializes in things that seem impossible.  He knows a thousand ways, to make a way for you. Let go and let God have His wonderful way.  Let go and let God have His way.  Your burdens will vanish, your night turn to day.  Let go and let God have His way.”  We did, and He did!

Up to now I have only written in this blog about my own experiences and disciplines. But I have to admit I don’t think I have ever prayed at all about what I should be reading. I recognize reading voraciously is essential to being a writer. And it is beneficial to my character and the enjoyment of life. A number of books have greatly impacted my thinking and writing. And I have prayed about the content of those that struck my spirit and drew me closer to God. But it has somehow never occurred to me to pray about everything I was reading or about what I would like to read, say this month, this year or before I die.

So, I admit that these ideas are not tested truths. I am beginning to tiptoe into them and I hope to test them out in the coming weeks and months. I would really like to hear what some of you think or how you may have prayed regarding your reading.

I intend to begin each year by spending time praying about what I would like to read in the year. We are two months into 2017, but I intend to try to carve out time to pray about what God wants me to read this year. I also would like to do this at the beginning of the summer and before a trip.

I think I should also pray about the kind of books I want to be reading. I usually read more than one book at once. Don’t be impressed. I am such a slow reader that it takes me forever to get through one. But I try to always be reading a fiction book and a nonfiction. I know a few people who never read one or the other of these. I don’t think that is a good plan, especially for a writer. Both will broaden your perspective.

I also want to pray to learn technique from things I read. I remember hearing Charles Shedd say he had fifty rules by which he measured and edited his writing. I certainly need to see things I should and should not do in my writing. This needs to be a work of God. I need Him to teach me as I read.

I could pose several other principles or elements of praying for my reading. But as I admitted I have never done it at all. And when I know so little about a subject I am in danger of writing on and on. So, I will end here. But I may take up this subject again after I have read some of your comments and after I have tried to do it for a while.

http://writingprayerfully.blogspot.com/

http://watchinginprayer.blogspot.com/

http://thinkinginthespirit.blogspot.com/

http://daveswatch.com/

One of the most wonderful truths of the Christian life is the fellowship of the Spirit. Paul puts it forth so vividly in his salutation in the final verse of 2 Corinthians.

“May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

In the discussion on friendship love in his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis talked about three close friends, Jack, Charles and Ronald, who met together every week. They were so close until Charles died. And Jack said, he thought he might be closer to Ronald now that he was not sharing him with Charles. But it did not work that way. Instead he discovered that he no longer had as much of Ronald because he did not have characteristics in Ronald’s personality that were brought out by Charles. He would never again join in Ronald’s reaction to a typically “Charles joke.”

Most of us have experienced that to some extent in the church. I worked together with Jim Gantenbein for 22 years. We got along wonderfully even though we have radically different personalities. In fact a great part of the joy of our friendship came from our differences. Again and again I delighted as the Spirit of God worked in Jim so differently than He works in me. But more than that. I drew closer to God through my friendship with Jim. Our bond in Jesus Christ grows as He binds us together with other believers.

http://watchinginprayer.blogspot.com/

http://thinkinginthespirit.blogspot.com/

http://daveswatch.com/index.html

http://writingprayerfully.blogspot.com/

The simplest way to do this is to ask God to give You ideas, and lead you to what you should write. But most of us will see this as more complex.
LISTENING TO GOD
One of the most common Scriptural principles is that God speaks. He seldom speaks twice in the same way. God can even speak to us in His silence. 1 Corinthians 9:24 says the things of God are spiritually discerned. If you understand something in Scripture the Holy Spirit is speaking to you. There are Many times I did not realize God was speaking to me until what He was saying had come about. I am reminded of Moses asking God to confirm His calling. In Exodus 33:12 the Lord told him the sign that His presence was with Moses was that when they returned the people would worship Him on that mountain.
There are two principles to hearing the voice of God. The first is surrendering to his will. You do not ask God to show you His will about writing or anything else so you can decide if you want to follow through with it. If you want to hear the voice of God you must decide you are going to obey whatever He says. Another principle is to spend time in fellowship with God so that you will learn to understand when he is speaking to you.

WALKING IN THE SPIRIT
For most Writing the clear and direct voice of God does not apply. It is much more important to develop character by spending time with God and coming to see from God's perspective, especially through the difficulties of life. This may manifest itself in things like being humble enough to know that God gives me the capacity to come up with ideas. God gives me the capacity for all communication.
This will help me determine the purpose of my writing in general. And it will help me ask if a particular piece of writing is consistent with my purpose. Do you want to bring honor to yourself? Is publication your primary goal? Do you consider success your highest good? Do you want to impress people with your knowledge or writing talent?
I am embarrassed to admit that I spent a large part of the past several years writing something with a wrong motivation. Somewhere in the back of my mind I wanted to impress people that I was a scholar, that I too am smart. I poured a huge amount of energy into it before God finally got my attention. And as painful as this is to admit, it was quite as difficult to put it aside.
I don't really regret the experience. In fact, I would not have understood this principle to the same degree, had I never fallen into this mistake. And yes, this was more than a mistake. It was sin. It included a whole series of sins. But having returned to some extent to sanity, I want God to use this to help my sisters and brothers who write. You need to determine the right purpose for your writing.
It is interesting to me how closely listening and walking in the Spirit fit together. Do you remember Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kings 3. The Lord told him to ask for whatever he wished. And he pleased God by asking for a discerning heart. But the Hebrew word for discerning is “shimah.” Shimah means to listen or hear. It is the same word that is used in Deuteronomy 6:4 that begins, “Hear O Israel.” Literally, Solomon prayed for a listening heart. Spiritual wisdom is personal. It is a listening heart.
In John 15:7,8 Jesus told us,
“If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”
Fruit is produced in our writing and lives as we walk with Him.
http://watchinginprayer.blogspot.com/
http://thinkinginthespirit.blogspot.com/
http://daveswatch.com/index.html
http://writingprayerfully.blogspot.com/

There are two billion people who call themselves Christians. Of those, only 680 million (11.5 percent) are Evangelicals or Bible reading Christians. Our task is to wake up 1.3 billion sleeping Christians and simultaneously reach the other 4.5 billion people on the earth. Those billions live in 200 nations, but more importantly, in 16,597 Major People Groups. According to data from the Joshua Project, 6,916 of those People Groups, some 1.8 billion, are still virtually unreached.^[1]

Of the 430,000 missionaries from all branches of Christendom, less than 3 percent work among unreached peoples.^[2] Seventy-four percent of all missionaries work among Nominal Christians. Only three percent work among Buddhists, eight percent among Tribal Peoples, two percent among Hindus, six percent among Muslims, two percent among Chinese Folk Religions, four percent among non-religious/atheists and one percent among Jewish Peoples. Fifty-thousand unreached people die daily without having heard the Gospel – that is about twenty-six million a year, more than 2000 every hour. Oswald J. Smith would lament, “We talk of the second coming, half the world has never heard of the first.”^[3]

Take a world tour with me.^[4] If the whole world were a village of 100: 61 would be Asians, 13 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 from Central and South America, Mexico and the Caribbean, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 person would be from Australia or New Zealand. If the whole world were a village of 100 people, 14 people would speak Mandarin, 8 people would speak Hindi/Urdu, 8 English, 7 Spanish, 4 Russian, and 4 Arabic. If the whole world were a village of 100 people, 33 would be Christians, 22 Moslems, 15 Hindus, 14 non-religious, agnostics or atheists, 6 Buddhists, and 10 from all the other religions.

If the whole world were a village of 100, 80 would live in substandard housing or on the streets of the village, half of them illiterate, 50 would suffer from malnutrition, 33 would not have access to clean, safe drinking water, 24 people would not have any electricity (Of those with electricity, the vast majority would use it only for light at night). If the whole world were a village of 100, there would be 42 radios, 24 televisions, 14 telephones, and 7 computers, but they would not be equally distributed. Only 7 would own an automobile. Five people would possess 32 percent of the entire village’s wealth, all from North America. The poorest one-third would receive only 3 percent of the total income of the village.

If you woke up this morning healthy, be grateful. One million will not survive the week due to some disease for which they have no funds for medical care. If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the gnawing pain of starvation, you are better off than 500 million people who are living in a war zone, under a dictatorship, in oppression, or in deprivation. If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead, a place to sleep tonight, you are among the top 75 percent of people on the planet in terms of comfort. If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in your pocket, you are among the top 8 percent of the worlds’ wealthy. If you can read this, consider yourself blessed. Two billion people in the world have never been taught to read at all.^[5]

This is the task at hand. Let us pray with a missional focus – click to learn some ways to do this. Adopt an Unreached People Group. Pray for National Prayer Leader and Career Missionaries. We can do our part.

• This blog is an excerpt for the newly released The Praying Church Handbook – Volume IV – Intercessory Prayer and Mission.
• PRODUCT SPECIAL: Purchase The Praying Church Handbook – Volume IV for $29.99 and receive your choice of Volume I, II or III for FREE. Purchase today>
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P. Douglas Small is founder and president of Alive Ministries: PROJECT PRAY and he serves in conjunction with a number of other organizations. He is also the creator of the Praying Church Movement and the Prayer Trainer’s Network. However, all views expressed are his own and not the official position of any organization.

^[1]       www.joshuaproject.net.

^[2]       www.aboutmissions.org/statistics.html.

^[3]       www.lausanneworldpulse.com/research.php/856.

^[4]       David Julian Smith, If The World Were A Village: A Book About The World’s People (Kids Can Press, 2002).

^[5]       The are adapted from data by David B. Barrett and Todd M Johnson of the Global Evangelization Movement website. Other portions come from Patrick Johnstone’s The Church is Bigger Than You Think, Bill and Amy Stearns’ Catch the Vision 2000, and the course materials for Vision for the Nations published by the U.S. Center for World Mission.