The Blog
1.7 - Pray First
How’s your prayer life? That can be a painful question to answer—few of us think our prayer life is where it needs to be. Yet most of us would acknowledge how powerful and important prayer is. So today, we’re going to tackle it head-on and discuss two prayer issues I’ve noticed in my own life. First is perspective and second is order.
When Dorothy and I were church planting in Japan, I vividly remember working hard on an outreach event and then finalizing it with prayer. “God please bless this effort, please come and be mighty in this place. Please bring people and open their hearts.” Sincere? Yes. Effective? Not as much as it could have been.
For years I had the perspective that God was a divine cheerleader, trying to psyche us up. We’d ask God to guide our planning and then bless what we had generated. We would do the work and ask God to add the power.
But that’s not what He meant when He said, “I will be with you.” In reality, God is way out front, preparing the way for us. We are to join His activity, what He is already doing. It’s not our work but His and we needed to discover His presence in it and try to help others see Him as well.
Now to the issue of order. The other day I received a concerning email, one of many about that particular situation. After considering it for awhile, I pounded out a response and then just before clicking “send,” I stopped to pray. That has been a fairly consistent pattern in my life—act and then pray. It’s a hard pattern to break.
I can quickly get caught up trying to influence a situation first through my character, my words, my actions, or my money. I often then add prayer to empower the action. But that is exactly opposite of what needs to take place. Prayer must go first. Prayer must pave the way. Prayer must shape my thoughts and actions to that of my LORD. Prayer must lead, and be followed by character, actions, words, money.
I need to stop adding prayer to my activity and instead add activity to my prayer. Only in this way can we hope to penetrate the unreached for the sake of the Kingdom.
RememberThePoor
I need to stop adding prayer to my activity and instead add activity to my prayer. Wow!
About This Blog
Welcome to the official SEND blog. Here you will find updates from contributers serving in a variety of fields around the world.
LisaJene
We were talking about this very thing in the media department today. Too often we bring everything we are to a situation and we can't hear God's voice through our clutter. If we allow God to speak first, we are then more able to apply all He is to our lives.