prayer coach

image courtesy of Tom Cochrane

This post will be a bit different as it is personal and may be harder to pull out an application for you, but bear with me as I still feel it is important. The other day I was driving through town and came to a stop light that just turned red. I was going to turn right so I was watching for my opportunity to pull out. After about a minute I perceived it was safe to go. However as I started I heard someone shout.

I quickly stopped and there was a man on a bike at the left front of my car. I had completely clipped him and bent his back tire. He came from my right and was riding across the intersection, and somehow I completely did not see him.

Thankfully he was not hurt and I am not sure who was more scared. We talked and worked out the details. When I finally got back in the car, my heart was still pounding. I quickly turned my attention to God asking what did all that mean?

I have not mentioned this in some time, but I believe that God uses everything to get our attention. God has committed Himself to intimacy with His children and will use anything to draw us closer to Him.

When I got to where I was going, I had no answers, but I got my heart rate down enough to call my wife and let her know. I also let some friends know that I was meeting. I had to move past the shame of the event.

image courtesy of Shelton Interactive

Recently I was approached by Shelton Interactive to do a review for Anything: the prayer that unlocked my God and my Soul by Jennie Allen. This is not a paid review, but my opinions on this book.

This book is a journey with Jennie through her life the last couple years. It starts giving her background of a good Christian girl and comfortable pastor’s wife. Her life gets turned around after coming in contact with a blog by Ugandan missionary, Katie Davis. Katie Davis was also the all-American girl, but she ended up dying to all the normal American dreams to serve Jesus in Africa. As Jennie read Katie’s blog, areas of her heart came alive and reawakened desires to give it all to Jesus.

While this book is mainly Jennie’s journey, her husband Zac was also being lead by God to the same abandonment. Together they prayed a simple prayer, “God we will do anything.” This book is primarily about the consequences of that prayer, through the many things that gave up and the extraordinary things they gained.

God is incredibly in love with us, but the things our hearts desire keep us from fully giving ourselves to Him. We say that God loves us, but we believe that we loves ourselves more than He does. We live our lives as if we know what would make us happy. Jennie’s journey shows her giving up things she thought would make her happy and moving toward things that scared her. But in the end what she found was that the things God was calling her to were things that made her come alive.

image of Luke Sankey in prayer

The common thought is it takes 21 days to form a habit. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard this through high school youth groups to parenting training. If you can just stick with something for 21 days you will form a habit, then everything will be easier.

While it is true that repetition creates momentum, habits cannot form if we don’t really want them. I recently read a review of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg that simplified the process down to three steps.

“In order to build a habit you need to create a Cue, a Routine, and a Reward.”
- Charles Duhigg

The cue is the thing to remind you to do something. For instance if you want to start exercising, you may place your running shoes by the bed so it reminds you when you wake up to go for a run. Or, you can set up an appointment with a buddy to meet at the gym. The cue is the thing to be that personal reminder to do the habit you want to create.

The routine is the habit itself. This can be any habit you want to create. To be more precise, the routine is what you do in order to accomplish the habit you want to create.

The reward is what you want to get out of the habit. Using the exercise example, maybe the reward is a new pair of pants or running in a certain event. The reward is the motivation for creating the habit.

God enthrones Himself among the praises of His people (Psalm 22:3). The believers in the video below build a throne for the everlasting God within a mall in Beirut. In doing so they expressed their love of Jesus and His resurrection last Easter that brought beauty in a non-threatening way.

I encourage you to watch the video. Even though the song is sung in Greek and Arabic, their love for Jesus will boast your own worship this Easter. I have found the English translation and added it below.

Rough translation of what is being sung:

Christ is risen from the dead,
and by His death, He has trampled upon death,
and given life to those who are in tomb.

This day is the day that God has made,
let us be happy and rejoice in it.

Truly, He is risen!
Truly, He is risen!
Truly, He is risen!

I am going to take a brief break from normal posting in order to celebrate the inclusion of my alma mater into the NCAA tournament this year. After a Lowe period in Wolfpack basketball lore, we are back in. If you want to spiritualize this post, I would accept prayers for State to win.  I have included an excel version of this year’s brackets for people to download to help you enjoy this year’s tournament.

Here is the link to the 2012 Tournament Basketball Brackets (xlsx). I am asking that you donate $5 if you chose to use this version I created. It is completely on the honor system, but it will help offset some expenses on the Prayer Coach Blog.

If you are not familiar with Prayer Coach, here are a few posts that have been popular over the years:

• 7 Tips to a Better Prayer Life
• What is the Importance of Confession?
• How to Pray for Love
• 10 Things to Pray for Your Husband
• 10 Things to Pray for Your Wife

Thank you for stopping by. Blessings to you and your loved ones.

image courtesy of Leonard Ravenhill interview

After I posted the prayer quotes by Leonard Ravenhill earlier this week, I got interested in more about this man. I found a two-hour interview of him where he shared about past revivals and his view of Church today.Here are some takeaways I had from the interview.

1. Prayer was important to these revivals.

This may sound obvious, but when I listened to the interview I was overwhelmed at the intensity he held for prayer. He prayed with his elders for 45 minutes to an hour before any service. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, prayed with his team from the end of one day’s service for four hours for the next day’s service. Evan Roberts of the Welsh revival started meetings with 3 hours of prayer, spoke for 15 minutes, then prayed all night for the next day’s service. Their commitment to prayer was not idle words, but backed with a depth of experience. One statement of Ravenhill stood out to me, there were often more people packing the altar before a meeting than there was afterwards.

2. Holy living was an overflow of these revivals.

When William Booth or W.P. Nicholson preached, people will get so convicted of the Holy Spirit that pages of hymnals would be commonly shredded in the pews from people fidgeting as light came into their souls. When they converted, they gave all to God. Missionaries going to the far reaches of the world – not for a few years of sight-seeing, but giving their lives away. C.T. Studd immediately gave up his professional athletic career to follow Hudson Taylor to China. Studd’s words summarize the heart of many during that time:

This video may well be old for many people, but this a celebration event that Oprah Winfrey put on for African-American women in 2005. She desired to honor the lives of those who have paved a way for others to come behind. Honor was given, love was displayed, and then in the words of Oprah herself, “Jesus showed up.”

Bebe Winans took the stage pulled in legendary singers from the crowd to piece together a wonderful menagerie of praise. “Not one note was planned or rehearsed,” but the effect was felt by all that was there. Diane Sawyer said, “For the rest of my life I think that may be the most transcendently spiritual moment I’ve ever been part of.”

Sometimes as believers we are so caught up in trying to convince people of the Gospel that we forget to give people a chance to experience Jesus for themselves. It is possible that not one person there placed their faith in Jesus that day, but all of them there had an opportunity to experience Jesus that will contradict any negative feelings they have ever encountered with Christians.

I love this video, and I hope you are encouraged by it.

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Dear Readers of the Prayer Coach Blog,

I decided to do a Top 10 List this year to satisfy my interest and help those new to Prayer Coach find articles they may not have known existed. This list has been compiled by looking at pageviews on posts for this year. I also took into account Facebook likes and Twitter shares (please share any post you like on your social network).

1. 10 Things to Pray for Soldiers

This post had immediate success. It was shared on the Christian Prayer Center and shared by its fans to 1,700 Facebook accounts. This holiday season is good time to pray more for these wonderful men and women in the service; many of whom are away from their families at this time.

2. Prayer Quotes

It was really hard to pull this part together because if I took them all separately, they would have most of the top ten. These great resources are continually being found on search engines and used by many. To see a complete list of prayer quotes, go to our prayer resource page.

Here are the list of authors that filled out the top quote pages: A.W. Tozer, Bill Bright, Francis Chan, and E.M. Bounds. It was interesting that Dr. Bright’s quotes were shared heavily on the Stumble Upon network. Each share through any of the social networks is helpful for this site.

Two other quote pages that made the top list are 70 Quotes on what “Prayer Is” and If God is For Us…

3. 6 Steps to Deal with Grief

I personally love this post as it speaks to things that are important to me. Glad to see others seem to be liking it too. This post is not to insinuate that it is grief is quick and easy to process through, but there are some steps to help give direction through the process.