Prayer

The denomination that I am part of is not known for its prayer life.  It is known mostly for its emphases on the Bible and on evangelism and missions.  It's not bad to major on the Word and the work, but both of those activities tend to be ineffectual apart from prayer.  That last statement would receive hearty amens from all my fellow Baptists because they know what the Scriptures teach about the necessity of prayer.  However, knowing the theory well has not translated into following the practice well.  More than one pastor has found attendance at the church's mid-week meeting dwindling when he tried to eliminate the Bible study in favor of a true prayer meeting.

Why do so many of us find prayer so difficult?  And finding it difficult, do so little of it?

One reason of course is that the devil does all he can to keep us from praying.  He has nothing to fear from what we do in our own strength and cleverness.  He knows far too well the real damage to his realm that the King of kings can inflict.  He will use his bag of tricks to distract us, discourage us, and divide us so that either we won't pray or that our prayers will be disqualified (Matthew 5:23-24).

Another reason is that our "flesh" resists praying.  Our natural self is "anti-matter" to matters of the Spirit (Romans 8:7).  Prayer is decidedly un-natural.  One way of understanding Adam and Eve's eating of the fruit is that they were looking for a way that they could gain knowledge without having to depend on God.  We have inherited this drive for independence.  I wonder if God sees us as we often see babies crying, "I can do it myself!" and then making a mess of things.  Humbling ourselves to depending on God goes against our grain.  No wonder we find prayer difficult.

Finally, there is a practical reason for a tendency to prayerlessness.  Not seeing answers to prayer leads one to question its value.  We might think, "What good does it do to pray?  I tried praying and nothing happened."  Such a thought reveals faulty understanding of prayer.  If we see God as being like the genie in Aladdin's lamp, we are sure to be disappointed.  But now we have a real problem because the best way, perhaps the only way, to learn to pray is by praying.  What a "catch 22"!

We must become a praying people.  We are either praying or sinning (1 Samuel 12:23).  Pray today that Jesus would teach us to to pray (Luke 11:1).  Pray that the Spirit would help us to pray (Romans 8:26-27).  The Nike corporation might say, "Just do it" but the Father tells us, "Just pray!"  We cannot extend His glory to the nations without prayer.

Missions Roles: Going

"We are already commanded to go.  It takes a call from God to stay."  Some missions spokesmen have used that logic in reply to those who say they don't "feel" called to go as a missionary.  There is truth to it.  The Great Commission does tell us to go.  Jesus told all the disciples present on the night of His resurrection that they were sent just as the Father had sent Him (John 20:21).  If the Bible says, "Go," then we should move in that direction unless the Spirit prevents us.

In my formative years, as my classmates and I were seeking the Lord and His will for our lives, I often heard someone say, "I'm afraid to surrender completely to the Lord -- He might send me to Africa!"  What most of us discovered was that the decision to surrender our wills to His, even if it meant going to Africa, brought a breakthrough to spiritual freedom and to greater clarity about what God really wanted us to do.  There had to be a willingness to do whatever the Lord asked before we could clearly hear His call.  Jesus said, "If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God" (John 7:17 NKJV).  Once we get our will out of the way, His will becomes clear.  The greater includes the lesser.  When we can truly say with the hymn, "Wherever He leads, I'll go," our hearts will finally be in harmony with His.

The fear of surrender is rooted in the flesh's resistance to His will:  "The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.  So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God" (Romans 8:7-8).  Our old nature, the sinful nature we all have without Christ, wants its own way as surely as Adam chose his own way over God's.  The tactics the flesh uses to avoid God's will can be subtle and ingenious.  I have heard Avery Willis use the illustration of how as a child he would figure out how far his mother's voice would carry and then go just a block or two further to play with his friends; that way he would not hear her when she called him to come in and he could honestly say to her, "But I didn't hear you when you called me!"  In my previous posts about Jonah, I told about my own resistance to missions by avoiding the seminary chapel services that were dedicated to missions. I wonder how many Christians allow the fear of missions to rob them of the joy of complete surrender.

It is clear that many who should go are not going.  No general would arrange his forces the way Christian workers are currently serving.  In general terms, the American church keeps more than 95% of its resources at home to reach what is less than 5% of the world's population.  Our churches are stocked with multiple staff members while 3,800 people groups around the world have no one to tell them about Jesus.  Someone is not doing what God wants them to do.  Let's make sure that that someone is not us.

Let's pray until our will is completely surrendered to His will.  Let's pray to go until He says to stay.