It’s been a while since I’ve updated you on my special Bible class material project: “Plugged In: High Voltage Prayer-The Bible Class.” I am excited to announce that within the next few weeks the story of Steve and Sarah and their victory in Christ through prayer will be released for personal and congregational use. I’ve received great feedback about this class material and I’m truly excited to be able to offer it to you.
I want your help and input. I’ve had what I think is a cool idea for a Bible class to go along with my book: “Plugged In: High Voltage Prayer.” Instead of just giving you 13 lessons about prayer with questions in a vacuum, I want to get the lessons to fit into real life. Therefore, I’ve decided to tell a story about “Steve and Sarah.” As the students learn Steve and Sarah’s story, they learn about how High Voltage Prayer fits in real life. Check out my introduction in this post and let me know if this kind of class or small group study would interest you.
I know this may shock you, but my family and I have a terrible struggle with keeping a scheduled family Bible study and prayer time. We’ve learned all kinds of great ways to study and pray together. I’ve written about one of my favorites on this blog. But despite how inspiring some of these methods are, we get them started, do well for a while, and then it falls off. The struggle is often with making the schedules work. I don’t have a set schedule. I’ll have meetings come up or studies come up or I’ll have to go out of town. Or maybe something comes up for Marita or the kids. It gets in the way of our Bible study and prayer schedule and then, after a few misses, the habit is broken. A few weeks or months later, we are convicted about our lack of devotion and we get back on the family Bible study bandwagon feeling all kinds of shame and guilt.
Ephesians 5:15-16 says, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” Making the most of our time is essential for us these days. We are so busy, flitting from here to there, church, work, school, PTA, clubs, sports, and on the list goes.
Through all of this, we spend a lot of time alone in our cars. That time can be wasted or it can be invested. Here are 6 ways to invest and redeem your commute time. Continue Reading…
If there is one thing consistent among almost every Christian I have ever talked to, preached to, studied with, no matter what level of maturity, no matter how long we’ve been a Christian, most of us think we need to do better at prayer. Either by praying more, praying longer, praying deeper. I say “almost every Christian” because I did poll one congregation during a sermon and one brother raised his hand to say his prayer life was good enough. But I think my polling now ranks in the thousands. One in thousands is not too inspiring.* So, what can we do to improve our prayers lives? I’d like to share 5 things that have improved my prayer life. I hope they may help you as well.
Don’t just intend to pray. Schedule it. Mark it in your day-planner. Put it on the calendar. If you wanted to meet with your boss, you’d schedule it. If you wanted to go on a date, you’d schedule it. When you want to meet with God, schedule it. When someone asks you to have coffee during that time, politely explain you already have an appointment with someone far more important.
Obviously you can pray anywhere at anytime. I encourage you to pray everywhere. But I have also found that having a place dedicated to my specific and purposeful prayer time has been very powerful. Why? When I have a place dedicated to praying, every time I even pass by it, I start thinking about prayer. Sometimes it prompts prayer even when I wasn’t planning it.
(As an aside, don’t make your place of prayer your bed or easy chair. One complaint I’ve often heard among those who pray is, “I want to pray more, better, longer, but every time I start praying, I fall asleep.” I ask, “Where are you praying?” The response, “Oh, in bed.” I agree with many who say, “What better way to fall asleep.” However, I also agree with those who say, “If you feel asleep every time you talked to me, I’d start to get offended.” I have a place dedicated for sleep. I try not to confuse the issue by also making that my place dedicated to prayer.)
This may sound odd, but it has helped me tremendously. Obviously, there are times praying out loud isn’t appropriate. When you are in that staff meeting and your boss is getting on your last nerve, you probably shouldn’t pray out loud, “Dear God, help me deal with this man.” But, pray out loud sometimes and see if it doesn’t help. It helps me because when I’m praying my mind can tend to wander. When I’m praying in my head, it is often hard to tell when I’m praying and when I’m just thinking. When I pray out loud, I can always tell. I’m praying when I’m making noise, I’m just thinking when I’m not. By the way, it is great to spend some time thinking while we pray. So even when you pray out loud, don’t be worried about times of silence. Take some time to think about what you are praying, but then pray it out loud.
One of the most helpful tools I’ve developed is my “prayer Moleskine.” In it, I have lists of prayers from the Bible and other sources that I love to repeat. I have lists of praise prayers from the psalms that help me praise God. I have lists for thanksgiving, special requests, evangelists I know, churches I’ve been to, family, friends, granted requests. With these lists all in one place, I don’t have any trouble praying more and longer. In fact, the big trouble is now I have so much to pray for that I struggle finding the time.
Now that I have so much to pray for, I’ve learned to plan my praying. This is different from scheduling. Scheduling was setting a time to pray. Planning means figuring out what to pray when. You don’t have to pray for everything on your lists every day. Rather, plan to pray for certain things on each day. For instance, Sunday is my praise and thanksgiving day. While I do some of that every day, Sunday is specifically for that purpose. Monday is my day to pray for evangelism and evangelists. Tuesday is my day to pray for my family and friends. And so on. Obviously, this is not hard and fast. I have some issues going on in my extended family that I pray for every day right now. These are just general guidelines that help me.
I’m always looking for other things to help me pray better, deeper, to connect more meaningfully with God. What practical tools or concepts have helped improve your prayer life? You can add your input by clicking here.
*By the way, I’m not too worried that almost all Christians think they need to improve in prayer. I’m far more concerned about the spiritual status of the one brother who said his prayer life was good enough than I am about the thousands who claim they wanted to do better. We all need to grow always.
Last week we looked at a plan for spending some in depth time with God and making it last. However, the reality is, as you grow in your prayer life, those lists you develop are going to start taking more than 5 minutes a piece. You’re going to start wondering how to get it all in. Or perhaps your schedule just doesn’t allow for an hour. Maybe you’re shooting for 30 minutes or 15 minutes per day (no matter what anyone says, that’s okay). In any event, you’re going to wonder how to get it all in.
You need to set yourself free from the idea that you have to pray for everything in every prayer. You don’t have to cover it all every time you pray. Instead, plan out your prayers for the week and assign different topics to each day.
Obviously, there will be aspects of prayer you keep up with every day. I’m sure you’ll offer some praise and thanksgiving along with confession every day. However, as you consider your intercessions and petitions, you can schedule them out each day.
Consider the following schedule as just a suggestion:
Sunday: Praise and thanksgiving
Monday: Personal requests and family issues
Tuesday: The local congregation, members, elders, deacons, evangelists, the work, special events
Wednesday: Other congregations, their elders, deacons and evangelists
Thursday: Special needs, the lost, the sick
Friday: Our nation, the world, war and peace
Saturday: Clean-up (anything that has come up over the week that you need to pray about)
Obviously, you can make up your own schedule, but you get the idea.
I know some people will say, “But, Edwin, that means I’m not praying for it all every day.” That’s true. However, to be quite honest, before I started this plan, I kept saying, “I don’t have time to pray right now.” Then I wasn’t praying for anything. With this plan, at least I’m getting it all prayed for in a timely fashion.
This is just a suggestion. Just make sure you are praying. You need the connection to God to survive.
We sing the song “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” but then we start praying and wonder how on earth we can even make it through sweet 10 minutes of prayer. I want to thank my friend and fellow preacher Jeff May for showing me a great tool to organize our prayers and help us spend some real meaningful time with God.
Of course, let me first point out that you don’t have to pray for an hour for it to be legitimate. Prayer isn’t real because of the length. At the same time, many of us know there is so much more to be done in our prayer lives but when we finally hit our knees we get that deer-in-the-headlights feeling, we stammer something out and then spend the rest of the day thinking of other things we should have prayed for.
In those cases, don’t worry. When you think of them you can offer up a prayer right then. However, if you want to work on having some serious, in-depth, on your knees time try the PRAYER CLOCK approach.
An hour divides into 12 sections of 5 minutes. Think of 12 areas for which you want to pray and devote 5 minutes for each area. When you are done, you spent an hour in prayer. You don’t have to follow my list this is just for example purposes.
5 minutes of…
You just spent an hour in prayer.
Granted, to make even 5 minutes in prayer for each topic, you probably want to start developing some lists. Make a list of special needs, elders, deacons, preachers, churches, things for which you are thankful, folks who are lost, etc. As you work on this, you’ll be surprised to find out that 5 minutes won’t be enough for some areas. You’ll have to come up with a plan for getting all these prayers in over the week.
In fact, come back next Monday to learn a plan for getting in all your prayers when you just have so much to pray for you can’t get it in all in one prayer session–even if you’re going for an hour.
(If you are stumbling across this for the first time, you may want to start at the beginning of the series and work your way through the links at the end of each post. Or check out the index for this entire series of posts. We’ve learned so much about the psalmists and their relationship with God. I hope today’s is no exception.)
A popular modern approach to God as revealed in the Bible is to change God between the testaments. Folks look at the God of the Old Testament as a harsh, legalistic, sometimes mean, sometimes brutal, judging God. Then they come to the New Testament and say all that has changed. Now, God is a God of love. He doesn’t judge, He is never harsh. He just wants us to know how much He loves us.
However, that doesn’t mesh with the Psalmists view of God at all. Despite the brutal judgment God sometimes administered, the Psalmists were completely sure that God was a God of love. The psalmists mention God’s love 123 times. Consider just a few of the statements.
This story of God’s love crescendoes in Psalm 136. Here the Psalmist repeats “For his steadfast love endures forever” 26 times. In fact, this was most certainly a liturgical psalm used in public assemblies and worship for the Jews. The priest or officiate would say the first line of each couplet and the congregation would shout the refrain–”For his steadfast love endures forever.” What an amazing experience that must have been, hearing the entire congregation praise God for his love as the stories of God’s love were repeated to them.
No doubt, the psalmists were sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes hurt, sometimes angry, sometimes lonely, sometimes joyful, sometimes bitter. But they always knew God loved them.
How can we not pray to a God whose steadfast love for us endures forever, no matter who we are, where we come from, or what we’ve done?
Whatever you do today, don’t forget–God Loves You!
(I think we’re going to take a little break from this study of the Psalms. But keep your eyes open, in a few weeks we’ll get back to them and start learning to look at ourselves the way the Psalmists did.)
