Pray Network Forum

 Do you think God's timetable is too slow for you in answering your prayers? We read in John chapter 11, where Mary and Martha sent word to their dear beloved friend Jesus to let him know their brother Lazarus was sick. Mary and Martha became impatient when Jesus didn’t come when they thought He should come to heal Lazarus. However, Jesus had different plans, He told the disciples, and “This sickness will not end in death, No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it”.  Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus very much but stayed in Galilee teaching and healing the sick until the time was right to go for God to be glorified.   

Two days later Jesus told his disciples that it was time to go to Judea to see Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. However, when they arrived, they learned that Lazarus had been dead for four days. Martha told Jesus, “If You had come sooner my brother would not have died.” Jesus was deeply moved as he went to the grave, asking to have the stone removed from the tomb but Martha said, “But Lord, he’s been dead four days and stinketh.” Jesus told her “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God”. Then Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out” and Lazarus came out of the tomb.   

 We can learn several lessons from this story. When we pray asking God for something, we get discouraged as Mary and Martha did because our prayer isn’t answered on our timetable. However, think of all the people Jesus had the opportunity to heal and teach during those two days. Jesus, God’s Son knew the Father’s plan was to glorify his Son by raising Lazarus from the dead, not to heal Lazarus. Isn't it great that when we think God is four days late by our timetable He is still on time?    

Our finite minds simply cannot grasp God’s infinite ways for answering our prayers. We have no idea how many times we have prayed and He is waiting for the proper time to answer. God often needs to work in our hearts, our character or the person we are praying for before he can answer our prayers. God’s way and timing is always perfect, he knows best, even when we think he is too late, He is still on time.    

• Is God's timetable too slow for you at times?
• Are you getting tired of waiting on God to answer your prayers?
• Are you disappointed and frustrated because God is not answering on your timetable?
• Does God want to develop character in your life or in the lives of your loved ones before He is ready to answer?
• How do you respond when God does not answer your prayers according to your plans? 

Prayer:

Dear Father, I want to thank you for the privilege to bring my concerns to you.

Give me patience as I wait for you to work out your plan and your timing

to answer my prayers.

Help me to trust you and your Word as I wait for your answers to my prayers.

In Jesus Name, Amen

Lillian Penner

_________________________________________________________

Life is full of demands. It's hard meeting these high demands causing one to become frustrated and overwhelmed. There is a demand that will be help one meet all other demands. That demand is prayer. Life demands prayer everyday all day long. When one depends on God for directions, answers, guidance and solutions, life becomes more balanced and beautiful. Prayer, the rose garden for the soul. Yes, the calmness of the soul depends on a quiet spirit. Don't become ruffled or dismayed with life.  Dispense faith on everything.

"But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price" 1 Peter 3:4 (KJV)

A life well lived is one that is quiet in the presence of God. Decrease the pressure of the demands of this world by taking them to the Lord in Prayer. Yes, It's time for prayer. Prayer will get us there.

PrayOn!

Mary J. Crosby

The first guy who got away with decision making without the impact of a woman was Adam, when he still had a full set of ribs (Genesis 1:18-23). Why does God so often communicate with women first? On our first date, my then future wife told me what God had called her to be, and what that meant in terms of the husband she needed to fulfill that revelation. Prior to that my mother had been a bit more subtle, in telling me what she and God had determined would be my future. In both cases, the women were correct in their interpretation of my future. I have talked with countless men who share similar versions of my story. If there is an answer to my question, as to why God so often communicates with women first, it may be the same answer as to why God’s first communication following the resurrection of Jesus, was through an angel, but to women (Matthew 28:5-7; Mark 16:5-7; Luke 24:4-8; John 11-14), and the first appearance of Jesus following His resurrection was to Mary Magdalene (John 20:15-17), and therefore, the first verbal witness of God’s resurrection power was shared by Mary to the male disciples (20:18). My intent is not to make more of this than is necessary, although I’m sure some who respond will be prone to do so, but my desire is to share that God reveals His will to whomever He chooses, and we had best listen when the communication comes from God, whomever might be the messenger.

Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth (Psa. 46:10).

Solitude is the creation of holy space and time for God, but it is not stillness; that is an inner condition. In Psalm 46:10, the word for still in Hebrew is raphah (raw-faw’). It means to sink, to relax by necessity as it were, to fall or hang limp. The short definition is to fail. To sag. It is the idea of coming to the end of oneself. In one passage it is translated to become helpless.

As O. Hallesby reminds us, “Prayer and helplessness are inseparable.”^[1] Other meanings are: to cease, to collapse, to be discouraged, even to drop, emotionally and physically. It can also mean to let one be alone, to leave one alone. Overall, it is the idea of stillness and solitude, of waiting out of necessity, at times, lifelessly.

We have interpreted the passage optimistically, “Be still, and know…” But the mood of the word, still, is not one of optimism, but desperation. In such stillness, God promises that we can know that He is God. Know is that familiar word, yada (yaw-dah’), which means to know – as in “Adam knew Eve.” It is beyond head awareness. It is the idea of experiential knowing. Know that I will be exalted among the nations, in the whole of the earth. Know it. Know who ‘I am’. Know me. ‘I am God,’ inviting you to know!

Pascal argued that we are afraid to slow down, lest our fears assail us and confront us with inner misery. The only other option is to continue the frantic, breakneck speed, to live in the numbing noise, to keep the adrenaline rush on so that we avoid the pain.^[2] In the world, we are offered a buffet of narcotics for the soul. Baptized in television and movies, games and events of this kind or the other, we engage in what Gary Thomas calls “a quiet, sleepless death in which we kill our souls by letting time race by.”^[3]

Thomas continues that being “…drugged by diversions [we] cannot expect to enter the quiet without a struggle.” Addictions are only broken with withdrawal.

For the ancients, there were four markers toward inner quiet.

1. First, the heart had to be captivated. This is a matter of love, but not merely superficial emotion. Rather, profound love that tethers, that leads to singularity of heart and will.
2. Second, a bridled tongue, thus, not only stillness, but the capacity for silence.
3. Third, a limited curiosity, a narrowed focus that is capable of filtering out the peripheral, the things that distract.
4. Fourth, they learned after losing themselves in God in the early hours of a day to reemerge slowly, to carry the air of the encounter with God into the day.^[4]

In stillness, we notice. At the end of ourselves, we find God. Depleted of options, God becomes our only hope.

• Learn more about Creating Your Own Personal Prayer Closet with Doug’s new book The Prayer Closet>

• This blog is part of The Praying Church Handbook – Volume III – Pastor and the Congregation which can be purchased at alivepublications.org>

^[1]       O. Hallesby, Prayer (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press, 1931), 17.

^[2]       Gary Thomas, Seeking the Face of God (Harvest House: Eugene, OR; 1999), 105.

^[3]       Ibid, 107.

^[4]       Ibid, 109.

How do we look at radical Muslims? Shortly after 9/11 a child in our church said, "We need to pray for the terrorists!"

Without thinking, I answered, "Pray that they will be caught and killed." Because of that 4 or 5 year-old boy, I had to examine my heart and my thinking in this matter. I have come to some thoughts that I would like to share with you.

Is it wrong to pray for judgment to come on our enemies? God is a God of judgment. He could not be good, holy or even loving, if He did not judge the wickedness of men.

Many skeptics point at the command of God for the people to destroy the city of Jericho killing men, women, children and livestock, saying the Bible endorses genocide. However, this incident did not take place in a vacuum. First, God had told Abraham in Genesis 15 that He was going to bring judgment on the Amorites. But he said they had not filled up their iniquity. Who knows how long God had already shown His patience toward this wicked people, calling them again and again to repent. And yet, another four hundred years passed before the Children of Israel came through the wilderness to encircle the city of Jericho. Many have argued that the Atomic Bomb that killed all living creatures in the Japanese cities, ended World War II and prevented many more deaths for many years. So the destruction of Jericho caused many of the Amorites to flee rather than being killed in the ensuing war.

But you may ask why the Lord employed Israel in this judgment. I certainly don't know all of God’s reasons. I do know the people of Israel knew not to do such a thing without God's direct command. This is a crucial point that I want get back to.

Interestingly enough, this is not the only time God put His judgment into the hands of men. King Saul wickedly brought the judgment that had been foretold upon the house of Eli. God used the ungodly Assyrians to carry His people into captivity for rejecting Him. And most strikingly, God used the imperfect judgment of a Roman tribunal to sentence and crucify Jesus. That judgment of God was upon my sins and yours. God took my sin upon Himself as Jesus died for us. Nothing shows the measure of God's love for us as powerfully as Jesus taking our judgment on Himself at the cross.

I have prayed for God to bring judgment on wickedness in our world. But the Bible, Old and New Testament, clearly teaches that God prefers repentance and forgiveness to judgment and destruction. One of the most apropos stories of this is the book of Jonah. Jonah was sent to preach to Nineveh. Nineveh was the enemy of Israel. Jonah tried to flee from God's call. But he only proved you can't run from God. When he finally went to preach to the city he made no reference to repentance as he proclaimed judgment would come in forty days. However, the people did repent in sackcloth and ashes. The point of that book is God's compassion for people and our New Testament mission to love even our enemies with the gospel. The final day of judgment is coming. But until God tells us it is time to pray for judgment temporary or ultimate, we need to pray for it not to be too late for His grace even for our enemies.

I am praying and rejoicing to see Muslim people turning to Christ by the thousands all across the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere. Some of them had indeed been radical Muslims. I pray for their sin and threat against us to be condemned and come under the terrible wrath of God as Jesus died in their place and mine.

 http://thinkinginthespirit.blogspot.com/

http://watchinginprayer.blogspot.com/

http://daveswatch.com/

Many years ago I heard this illustration: Imagine a set of scales with a one-pound weight on one side and a pile of sugar cubes to be added to the other. The first few cubes added seem to make no difference in shifting the weight. Neither do the next ten cubes…or the next ten. However, by the time one hundred cubes have been added, a point is reached where the addition of one or two more sugar cube starts to tip the scales.

So the question is which sugar cubes played the most important part in shifting the weight? Was it the first ones placed on the scales or the ones that finally tipped the weight? The answer of course is that all were equally important. The ones that tipped the scales wouldn’t have done so had the first ones not played their part.

When we pray, doesn’t it seem sometimes as if our prayers make no difference at all while at other times we see immediate answers? Assuming we are praying in line with God’s will, the prayers that seem to make no difference are just as essential as those that bring immediate answers. There seems to be a certain “weight” of intercession that God requires to answer each prayer, whether we are praying for a need or a friend’s salvation.

This illustration can also be applied to leading someone to Christ. Was it our witness that made the difference—or did reading a Bible or hearing a preacher lead to their decision? If our words didn’t seem to make much impact we should not be discouraged. We are sowing where someone else will reap. And those who reap and see results can be grateful for those who sowed without which there would be no reaping.

So let us ask God to make us faithful sugar cubes—willing to pray and witness even without seeing visible results.

And there is one more thing we can learn from the sugar cubes. It wouldn’t harm for us to be a little sweet either!

Colin Stott

Colin Stott is Global Prayer Coordinator for Global Recordings Network, a mission that provides audio Bible stories in over six thousand languages and dialects. For more information about reprinting this article and others in this series on prayer, contact Colin at colinstott@globalrecordings.net

Praying Grandparents are in a battle for the next generation, however the battle isn't ours, it is the Lords. We read in II Chronicles 20:15, "Do not be afraid or discouraged . . . . For the battle is not yours but Gods." The way to walk through this battle is to grip the hand of Jesus tightly and stay in close communication with him.   

It is only as we release our concerns for our grandchildren and their parents we are free to cling to the hand of Jesus. It is hard to cling to His hand when our hands are full of our concerns and worries, we need empty hands to hold His hand.  

Imagine the impact in our world if Million Plus grandparents who are Prayer Warriors clinging to the hand of Jesus committing their grandchildren and their parents to Him.

In an attempt by secular humanists to develop a secular society, they have very strategically and very intentionally whittled away at our Godly heritage. Today it is urgent for grandparents to unite in mass numbers in prayer for the next generation.  

If you are a grandparent and grasp the urgency for prayer and believe in the power of prayer I urge you to join the many who are signing up for the Million Praying Grandparents. When grandparents sign up they are declaring their commitment to pray intentionally for their grandchildren, their parents and outside influences.

 As a way of saying thanks for that commitment, you will receive a free printable PDF download of a prayer resource of Scriptures to Pray to help you pray for their grandchildren using God’s Word.

To sign up go to www.millionprayinggrandparents.com

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

Where are you going? You are going somewhere. In recent Thinking in The Spirit blog entries I wrote on repentance. And I keyed off of Psalm 139:23-24. It reads,

"Search me O God and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

In the previous entries I focused on the dependence and devotion of your heart. But notice the wording of this passage. David does not ask God to search his heart for wicked thoughts, although that has to be included. He does not ask the Lord to search his life for any wicked deed. He says, "See if there is any grievous way in me." This is the primary emphasis of repentance. A line in my poem Continuing In My Word[1] reads,

"Then you will come to know and understand all that you longed for but you couldn't be."

We who belong to Christ are being transformed into the likeness of Jesus. Repentance needs to be seen as our participation in that process. Suppose my temper gets out of control and I curse or harm someone. The devil accuses me. "Look what a terrible person You are." We sometimes think of those thoughts as repentance. They are not. God wants me to see where I am headed. I need God to help me change something in my heart so I will respond better the next time I am tested. Have you ever realized that you missed an opportunity to tell someone about Jesus. The devil will tell you that you have blown it and God will never trust you again. That is a lie. God is telling you to be ready for the next opportunity just around the corner.

Psalm 139 concludes with the words, "Lead me in the way everlasting." God longs to get us off our dead end roads and get us moving in His eternal direction.

As we move through life, we flow with predictable patterns of interaction with others. Sadly, so often the emotions, the cognitive content exchanged, the decisions and the delights of the world with which we interact are not in unity with God. On the contrary, they are adverse to Him. Consciously, sometimes unconsciously, we are pressured to compromise ideals, exposed to language and lines of thought contradictory to God’s principles. The drive, the things that delight those around us, is diametrically opposed to heaven’s will for healthy and godly people, not to mention our families. Yet, we are forced to swim in this stream called the world! A world at enmity with God. We cannot escape it. We cannot leave it and flee to the desert. We must be in it, but not of it.

The way we differentiate ourselves, break from its mad rhythms and noises, recalibrate our values, is solitude. Prayer is a protest against the world as it is. It is a declaration to God that we do not want to be a part of this world, that we want the power to live above its grip, and yet to influence it in some profound way. The inability to pray, to tolerate the stillness and silence, is an indication of the degree to which we have become addicted to the world.

“Nothing but solitude can allow the development of a freedom from the ingrained behaviors that hinder our integration into God’s order.”^[1] Jesus urged, “When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father” (Mt. 6:6). The word for room in Greek is tameion, referring to a small inner closet. It was probably a storeroom, a kind of pantry, typically the only room in a first century home with a door.^[2]

John Paton (1824-1907) was a legendary Scottish missionary to the New Hebrides in the 1800s, that great missionary century. Paton’s father was common laborer. The small cottage in which John grew as a boy was ordinary. Nonetheless, in it was an extraordinary place – a small private space consecrated by his father for private prayer. Paton remembered it well.

The closet was a very small apartment…having room only for a bed, a little table, and a chair, with a diminutive window shedding diminutive light on the scene. This was the sanctuary of that cottage home. There daily, and many times a day, generally after each meal, we saw our father retire, and shut the door; and we children got to understand, by a sort of spiritual instinct (for the thing too sacred to be talked about), the prayers that were being poured out there for us, as of old by the High Priest within the veil in the Most Holy Place. We occasionally heard the pathetic echoes of a trembling voice, pleading as for life, and we learned to slip out and in past that door on tip-toe, not to disturb the holy charge. The outside world might not know, but we knew, whence came that happy light, as of a new-born smile, that always was dawning on my father’s face: it was a reflection from the Divine Presence, in the consciousness of which he lived.^[3]

Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage in the third century noted,

In his teaching the Lord has bidden us to pray in secret – in hidden and remote places, in our very bedchambers – which is best suited to faith, that we may know that God is everywhere present, and hears and sees all, and in the plentitude of His majesty penetrates even into hidden and secret places.^[4]

Andrew Murray reminds us,

The Father is in secret…He is waiting for us, where He is always to be found. Christians often complain that private prayer is not what it should be. They feel weak and sinful, the heart is cold and dark; it is as if they have so little to pray, and in that little no faith or joy. They are discouraged and kept from prayer by the thought that they cannot come to the Father as they ought or as they wish. Child of God!…when you go to private prayer your first thought must be: The father is in secret, the Father waits for me there…^[5]

Quiet. Solitude. Time alone with God – it is irreplaceable.

• Learn more about Creating Your Own Personal Prayer Closet with Doug’s new book The Prayer Closet>

• This blog is part of The Praying Church Handbook – Volume III – Pastor and the Congregation which can be purchased at alivepublications.org>

^[1]       Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ; quoted by Calvin Miller, The Vanishing Evangelical, 160.

^[2]       Philip Graham Ryken, When You Pray: Making the Lord’s Prayer Your Own (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, a division of Good News Publishers, 2000), 17.

^[3]       John Paton, ed. John G. Paton, DD, Missionary to the New Hebrides: An Autobiography, 2 volumes (London, 1889), 1:10-11.

^[4]       Cyprian, “Treatise on the Lord’s Prayer,” Hippolytus, Cyprian, Caius, Novatian, Appendix, Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, ed., Ante-Nicene Fathers, 10 Volumes (Christian Literature, 1886; Reprinted: Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 5:447-457, 448.

^[5]       Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer (Westwood, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1953), 30.

Have you seen the Facebook post that reads, “I wouldn’t change my grandkids for the world, but I would like to change the world for my grandkids?” As I was thinking about the quote, I was reminded there is something we as grandparents, can do to change the world for our precious grandchildren by link arms with other grandparents to intercede for our grandchildren. We can pray they will develop a soft heart for Jesus and learn to know and follow Him wholeheartedly. 

In today’s broken world, Satan’s purpose is to destroy the family. It is important that we pray God will give the parents of our grandchildren wisdom and time management in their monumental task of guiding our grandchildren in the ways of the Lord. They live in the midst of a busy and evil environment filled with many spiritual battles.   

For that reason, Christian Grandparenting Network has a passion to encourage and equip grandparents to pray for their grandchildren. Our mission is to challenge grandparents around the world to intentionally and regularly come together to pray, interceding for their grandchildren, children and communities world. 

CGN have organized “Grandparents@Prayer” (G@P) intercessory prayer groups. Our goal is to encourage grandparents to be prayer warriors through the personal discipline of intercessory prayer in the battle against the enemy. We encourage grandparents to meet together in small or large groups on a regular basis to unite in prayer at a designated location for 1 hour or longer of guided prayer and fellowship.  

In Isaiah 58:6 we read that we can “loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke” in our world. One of the ways we can break these chains is by “standing in the gap” with prayer for our dear grandchildren.  Just as Esther stood in the gap for her people, the Jews, when they were physically threatened. Today grandparents can stand in the gap with prayer for their grandchildren as the enemy threatens their spiritual lives. 

I have found uniting in prayer with other grandparents for my grandchildren is a special blessing for me. We now have a number of G@P intercessory groups meeting in about 20 states, Canada and South Africa, in retirement Centers, schools, churches and homes. Some of the groups meet weekly, some twice a month or once a month, whatever the group desires.  

I want to challenge you to ask God whom He would like you to ask to pray with you for each other’s grandchildren. Ask your friends, church senior group, neighbors, family members or whomever. Check out this website to learn more about the G@P prayer groups and complete the form and I will send you additional information.

http://www.christiangrandparenting.net/prayer/grandparents-prayer/participate-in-gap

You may also email me at lpenner@christiangrandparenting.net

God told the Israelites, “I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring

and my blessing on your descendants.” Isaiah 44:3,

 By Lillian Penner

National Prayer Coordinator for Christian Grandparenting Network

Much is being written here and elsewhere these days about praying for our country.  Good thoughts, wisdom shared, encouragement and hope given.  Hopefully, we're praying even more than we're writing about prayer.

I wanted to take a minute to contrast two approaches that I've personally experienced to praying for our country. 

• Pride brings God the answers and asks him to act on them; humility brings God questions and asks for his wisdom.
• Pride tells God who needs to be elected or which party should be in or out of power; humility seeks God's intervention to raise up righteous leaders of his choosing.
• Pride calls down God's judgment on people who believe or act in ways we consider immoral (and that even ARE immoral); humility seeks God's grace, forgiveness and cleansing for those who live far from his will, recognizing that we also once lived outside his will and saving grace.
• Pride makes the assumption of the Pharisee - that we are in the right and that God should recognize that; humility recognizes with the tax collector that we are wrong and in need of God's grace.
• Pride shouts; humility pleads.
• Pride calls us to tell God the way things are going in our nation and in our world; humility causes us to seek his wisdom and strength to change them.
• Pride focuses our thoughts on the changes other people need to make; humility confesses the changes we need to make.

I have prayed both ways.  By God's grace - and in his infinite patience - I'm slowly learning to pray less from pride and more from humility. 

In this season pregnant with revival, you readers have some pretty amazing “God-sized” dreams! Last week I asked you to send me your prayer requests for the bigger things God has called you to do. And you did. Lots of them, from various corners of the earth. And they are amazing.

Click here to continue reading

Blaise Pascal observed, “All of man’s troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly alone in a room.”^[1] Prayer demands solitude times, and perhaps seasons, in which we shut out the world and seek only God. At such times, God is our exclusive concern; we are closed to everything else. This may demand, from time to time, getting away, breaking from our world and its rhythm and demands. It certainly demands private space, uninterrupted time, the absence of distractions, and the developed capacity for stillness. Ravenhill charged that the antidote to burnout, the missing ingredient that insured against an inner collapse of spiritual vigor and vitality was “spending time alone with God consistently.”^[2] He said, “…men won’t get alone because we are afraid of loneliness. We can’t take it. But if you don’t know how to get alone with God, you won’t know God deeper.”^[3]

The partner to solitude is silence. These two – solitude and silence – are sadly foreign to Western culture. Monastic life seems bizarre to us. Even extended retreats for prayer are outside the range of our appetites. We pray on the run, in the car, with the radio blasting away, and the noises of rush hour in our ears. We pray jogging, as we listen to our favorite music. Praying and multi-tasking. We have no idea the cost, the toll, of such a low commitment to space and time for God on our lives. In addition, we fail to see that the noise and rat race pace are, in fact, characteristics of our worldly age. These are not godly values; they are worldly values.

Moreover, a part of our addiction to the world, our condition of worldliness, is manifest in our inability to be free of the world’s pace and noise. Our failure to pull away is the measure of the degree of our addiction. Just the exercise of struggling to pray, struggling to focus in prayer, is a kind of wrestling free of the cobwebs of worldly entanglement. That itself is a form of prayer, a plea to God, to make the world on top of this world as real, no, more real, than the world in which we live.

The monastics were champions of solitude, and despite the extremes of the movement, there are valuable take-aways. The monastics sought humility in the full acceptance of God’s hidden action in weakness and the ordinariness, even the unsatisfactory elements, of their everyday lives. This was not a passive acceptance of incompleteness, but a resignation from the world’s methods in order that in quiet, God might complete us in His own way. It was the joy of emptiness, simplicity, the rest of not striving in the strength of the flesh, the recognition that what was longed for could only be filled by God.^[4] It is exactly the opposite of the flash and pizzazz of Western Christianity.

Solitude, it is observed, actually frees us. It is liberating – because it leaves us alone, with no one, dependent on no one but God. Human interactions take place along a continuum of anticipated action-reaction patterns that include the emotional, cognitive and volitional. We live in a social sea, connected to good and bad, positive and negative influences. Sadly, in our society, these interactive patterns are not typically informed by or reflective of Christian values. This is the reality of being in the world, and attempting not to be of the world. Solitude is our break with these patterns. It is an act of gracious defiance.

In solitude, alone with God, over an open Bible, in prayer, we perceive God’s design for behavior, for Christ-like thinking and feeling. Here we have a chance to receive the strength necessary to develop the character needed to make our break from the world, to bring our lives, by grace, under the liberating lordship of Jesus Christ.^[5] Jonathan Edwards would say of Sarah, his wife, and her longing for solitude with God, “She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her.”^[6]

You have not prayed well until you have prayed your way to silence; and you cannot pray well until you have silence in the center of your soul. Much of our praying is only making noise at the noises in our inner heart. It is in vain. You cannot scream your fears and anxieties away. Only the Presence of God, with a clear definitive sense of His love, brings the peace of God. Initially, words are critical to prayer. By them, we empty the cargo of our soul. They are the vessels upon which we load our emotions, our toxic waste, the residue of our temptations and trials, and lay them at the foot of the cross. But then, the best praying is on the other side of words when, if we had more words, they would not matter. This is the moment that something deep in us touches something deep in God, and we know that we know – there is a God, and we are His. He loves us, and all is well, even when nothing seems well.

• This blog is part of The Praying Church Handbook – Volume III – Pastor and the Congregation which can be found at alivepublications.org>

^[1]       Blaise Pascal, Pensees (New York: Penguin Classics, 1995).

^[2]       Mack Tomlinson, In Light of Eternity: The Life of Leonard Ravenhill (Conway, AR; Free Grace Press, 2010), 344.

^[3]       Ibid.

^[4]       Thomas Merton, (2010-05-21). The Silent Life (6). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

^[5]       Willard, 160.

^[6]       Iain Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Edinburgh, Scotland: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), 92.

1 Timothy 2:1,2 reads,

“First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”

Are you submitted to this injunction? Have you been praying for your president?  Are you praying daily for your governor, your senator and congressmen?

This command includes those you do not agree with. It even includes those you believe are destroying our country. Paul was not only calling for prayer for pagan local potentates. He wanted the churches to pray for Tiberius Caesar!

Praying my politics also includes praying my ignorance. When we come to politics, we often assume knowledge that is beyond our purview. I am not saying we should vote anything but our convictions. But when we come to prayer we need to recognize that we do not understand all that God may be doing. He is capable of using the foolish to bring about His wisdom and the wicked to accomplish His purposes.

This may mean no more than admitting to God that I trust His sovereignty to allow, or even bring about, things I do not understand. It surely means asking God to show me what to pray for, and being open for Him to change my mind. 

In the Northwest, where we have four seasons the beautiful tulips are in full bloom reminding us of the new life that spring brings, the cherry trees are loaded with blossoms. It is a beautiful time of the year with the trees and plants that have lied dormant during the cold winter months are getting new life almost over night.   

During the winter months, many of our areas experience harsh cold snowy weather. However, as spring approaches it gives us the hope of warmth, beautiful gardens, and landscapes. As it warms our spirit, we become alive and more energetic.    

We often go through seasons in our prayer lives where we do not take the time to read and meditate on God’s Word or pray intentionally for our families or ourselves. We pray but our prayers may become humdrum, repetitive, or seem pointless.   

That was my experience a number of years ago, I felt the prayers for my children, and grandchildren were very general, superficial, and powerless. I prayed they would be safe, have a good day and I would be go on through my day since I didn’t live near them, and didn’t know their immediate need.    

However, that all changed after I asked God to give me wisdom and insight about how I could pray for them intentionally. Praying intentionally means a determination to pray in a certain way, done by intention or design. Asking God for direction and reading several books about prayer, I was encouraged. I gained some tools to help me to pray intentionally and regularly for my children and grandchildren.    

The Bible, God’s Word was the greatest resource I discovered to help me with my praying, not only for my family but also for myself. We read in Hebrews 4:12 (in the Amplified version), “The Word of God is alive and full of power, making it active, operative, energizing, and effective.” it was alive and full of power, bringing energy into my prayers. Personalizing God’s Word in our prayers releases His supernatural power and His presence in my life.    

 In praying scripture, I not only find myself in intimate communication with God, but my mind is being renewed to think His thoughts, about the situation I am praying for, instead of mine. Ultimately, God shrinks what I thought as impossible to a possibility and gives me peace as I wait for His answer.   

As we start claiming God’s promises and personalizing the scriptures, we will experience more confidence and boldness in our praying. Nothing threatens the ENEMY more than when we are intentionally praying God’s Word for children, grandchildren, and ourselves. 

 As you experience the spring, season approaching in your area I hope your thoughts will turn to accessing your prayer life for your children, grandchildren, and yourself. If you are in a WINTER season in your prayer life and you have not been spending time with the Lord regularly or in prayer, allow the spring season to bring new life to your prayers.    

Prayer:

Dear Father, as I am reading your Word, show me the scriptures I can pray for my family and myself. Help me to set an appointment with you each day and show me how you would like me to be an intentional prayer warrior for my family. In Jesus’ name.

I have developed thirty-one “Scriptures to Pray for Grandchildren” that I have found very helpful to pray for my grandchildren. Join our mailing list for updated blogs and grandparenting suggestions and I will send you a free downloadable copy of “Thirty-one Scriptures to Pray for your Grandchildren”.   

By Lillian Penner

National Prayer Coordinator

Christian Grandparenting Network

lpenner@christiangrandparetning.net

Samuel Lee, the great Puritan writer, argued,

Prayer is the soul’s colloquy with God, and secret prayer is a conference with God upon admission into the private chamber of heaven. When you have shut your own closet, when God and your soul are alone, with this key you open the chambers of paradise and enter the closet of divine love.^[1]

As the medieval philosophers noted, every choice is a renunciation – a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to abandon another. You cannot, as the age-old saying goes, have your cake and eat it too. As in Genesis, choose the one tree and lose privileges at the other. To choose God is to differentiate yourself from the world. To want intimacy with Him is to abandon all other gods.

John Guest offered a balanced perspective:

Prayer is first and foremost an expression of an intimate relationship with God.

Prayer includes discipline, but it is not merely a discipline. It involves setting aside a regular time and place, but it is not merely an item on our schedule. It includes asking for things we need, but it is not merely a shopping list of requests and rejoicings. It involves speaking to God and God speaking to us, but it is not merely an exchange of memoranda.

More than anything else, prayer is a relationship. When we reduce it to a regimen, we deprive ourselves of what all who knew God throughout the Scriptures expressed in their prayers: that God is alive, and the He knows us and lets Himself be known by us, that we can enjoy a deep and intimate personal relationship with Him in prayer.^[2]

Prayer itself, the act, is an expression of your need to live out of God’s life, and not merely invite Him into yours. It is more than a fleeting feeling. If you attempt to sustain your prayer life merely out of emotional highs, positive moods, even good intentions, you will fail. A healthy prayer life is found in the balance of both a private and corporate ritual, one as simple as the commitment to pray daily and attend church weekly; to be a part of a small prayer group and also to pray with one’s spouse on a regular basis. Commitment. Ritual – and by that we mean the rigor of a predictable routine. Despite one’s feelings, one’s sense of whether the experience is profitable or not, we should pray. The daily meeting with God is habitual. The ancient John of the Cross noted that in prayer we fight:

…boredom, tiredness, lack of energy. It’s hard, very hard, existentially impossible, to crank up the energy, day in and day out, to pray with real affectivity, real feeling, and real heart. We simply cannot sustain that kind of energy and enthusiasm. We’re human beings, limited in our energies, and chronically too tired, too dissipated, and torn in various directions to sustain prayer on the basis of feelings. We need something else to help us. What?^[3]

The answer is ‘ritual – a rhythm, a routine.’ Ritual in a noble sense. Once you embrace a daily/weekly rhythm, the personal and the corporate, you begin to live by that cadence. It is no longer about the immediate euphoria of any given morning of prayer or weekly worship service. It is about obedience and consistency of life. The discipline itself does not change us: God changes us, but the ritual and routine that galvanizes discipline becomes the context into which God’s transforming power is infused.

We sometimes have romantic ideas about prayer and encounters in our attempts to develop a life of prayer that actually distort our perception of prayer and serve to discourage regular daily times of prayer with God. In truth, bright lights and a booming voice is rare. On some mornings, there may be no new, life-changing insight. Good relationships are long-term, and at the same time daily. As Rolheiser reminds us,

Nobody can…sustain high energy all the time, or fully invest himself or herself all the time…Real life doesn’t work that way. Neither does prayer. What sustains a relationship over the long term is ritual, routine, a regular rhythm that incarnates the commitment.^[4]

Those who have aging parents visit them, not for the take-way – particularly those with afflictions such as Alzheimer’s – they visit not for the joy, but out of dutiful love! They go despite the feelings with which they wrestle, the disappointments that may exist about how the life of their parent has ended. This is the greater love – not self-serving love, not love looking for a pay-off, but genuine agape. Those who are raising teens ask them the hard questions even if it means processing through a grand hassle, and they do so out of love! You pray because you love God, and He loves you! Your daily time is a declaration of that love, and it opens the cosmic door on your side and intentionally invites Him into your life.

Dawson Trotman, founder of the Navigators, observed that discipline without must be matched by the desire within. We sometimes intensify activity, crank up the will, and see prayer as a kind of power plant, the boiler room of the church. In the distance, God is calling, “Come away!” He is wooing us back to the place we once were when He asks us, “Do you love me? Feed my sheep!” In the flurry of a growing flock, in the feeding of the sheep, it is possible to lose the relationship with Him. Like a couple, busy raising their children, the fruit of their love, running from the supermarket to soccer games, somehow they lose one another in the middle of what the relationship itself created.

A study of mice revealed the deadly impact of amphetamine, both in groups and alone. Researchers determined that it takes twenty times as much amphetamine to kill an individual mouse than to kill a mouse in a group. In a group of mice given a deadly dose, a mouse not administered the drug will still be overcome by the mere impact of the deadly effect of the drug on his peers. Within ten minutes of being in a group of dying mice on the drug, the drug-free mouse will succumb. Dallas Willard charges, “Western men and women, especially, talk a great deal about being individuals. But our conformity to social pattern is hardly less remarkable than that of mice – and just as deadly.”^[5] Prayer is the great differentiator. It sets us apart from the group. It takes us out of the rat race. It is the moment when we make our daily declaration, “God is enough!” In solitude, we find what Dallas Willard calls ‘the psychic distance’ necessary to be free from the crowd.^[6]

Stop for a minute and evaluate your own prayer life. Is it duty or delight? Is it regular or fleeting? Are you cultivating a relationship or loosing sight of our ultimate purpose here on earth? Declare your love for God. Stay the course. Each day is a new day to commit to Him.

• This blog is part of The Praying Church Handbook – Volume III – Pastor and the Congregation which can be purchased at alivepublications.org>

^[1]       Samuel Lee, “Secret Prayer Successfully Managed,” The Puritans on Prayer. Ed: Don Kistler (Morgan, PA; Soli Deo Gloria, 1995), 239-293, 245.

^[2]       John Guest, Only a Prayer Away: Finding Deeper Intimacy with God (Ann Arbor, MI: Vine, 1985), 75.

^[3]       Ronald Rolheiser, Our One Great Act of Fidelity (New York: Doubleday Religion, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, 2011), 78.

^[4]       Ibid 80.

^[5]       Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 160-161.

^[6]       Ibid, 161.

Most of you are aware by now that I have begun writing two blogs, one every other week. Next week I will continue an entry begun last week on Praying Your Politics. http://watchinginprayer.blogspot.com/

This entry continues last week's post on examining yourself for the Relief of Repentance.

Look again at the powerful prayer of David In Psalm 139.

"Search me O God and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

Searching you heart must key on Searching the Devotion of Your Heart.

I made a serious commitment to Christ the summer before my freshman year in high school. I went back to school a different boy. Sometime in that year a boy confided in me, cautious lest his friends

overhear. "I started going to church once. I was real serious about it. I went every Sunday and even on Wednesday nights. But after a while I just said, 'What's the use?"

I did not know what to say to him. And I'm not certain what he was saying. But most of us are aware of people who say something like, "I used to be a Christian. I was really devoted to God, but it didn't get me anything." Maybe they said something like, "I was devoted to God, but when I really needed something, He didn't come through."

Some of you may have thought something like that. But examine those statements with me. Was that person devoted to God or devoted to what they thought serving God would get them?

We need God's help to examine the devotion of our hearts. Do I love You, God? Or do I love myself. Do I love You, or do I love what I want you to give me?

There are a number of great things about God's searching in us. First, I can never see my devotions as clearly as God. I tend to see the specs in my brothers' eyes but I'm blind to logs in my own.

It is also good to go to God to ferret out my devotion because God loves and forgives me. Satan accused Job of loving God's protection and provision rather than God Himself. But even though it was partly true, God did not believe it. God always sees Jesus in me.

God also comes to us with the power to change our devotion. He speaks to us and draws our hearts to Him. O God, inspire the devotion of my heart. When I enter into worship alone or in church, when I take time to thank God for what He does for me, when I ponder my position in Christ, God’s Spirit draws me to love Him more and more.

“The longer I serve Him the sweeter He grows.”

http://thinkinginthespirit.blogspot.com/

http://watchinginprayer.blogspot.com/

http://daveswatch.com/