prayer coach

image courtesy of adidas

This past weekend I got to play soccer. Unlike most Americans I love the sport and have had moments of being good. I can even claim scoring goals on three continents. However most of those “glory days” have been in the past. This weekend it all came flooding back.

While playing men 10 to 15 years younger than me, I was weaving in and out of them with surprising ease. While several on the field were international and exponentially exceeded my passion for the sport, I outscored all of them combined.

I probably should add that I was the only one wearing cleats and that the grass was damp. Even knowing that I had an unfair advantage, the feeling of triumph made me feel like a star.

The truth is I feel that the Christian life should be the same way. I feel that I should have some special advantage over the rest of mankind to be able to run circles around them. Why not? We have the living God living within us. We have the mind of Christ. Why are we not ruling the world?

Do you ever wonder that God has something more planned for us that we are not tapping into? With all of the resources on our side, why can’t we be incredibly successful. Jonathan climbs the enemy’s encampment with just his armor bearer and turned the war for Israel (1 Samuel 14:13). Gideon blows a few horns and the enemy runs away scared (Judges 7:22). Moses throws some wood in bitter water to make it drinkable (Exodus 15:25). Jacob has his livestock drink water with strips of bark in it to make them have spotted babies (Genesis 30:37-39). Elijah lays on a dead boy and he comes back to life (2 Kings 4:32-35).

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.

Joseph has a dream that he would have a position of authority. His dream is followed by 13 years of slavery and prison, in which he rises to the positions of authority. Each place has parts of his dream, but it never realizes until the day he is brought before Pharaoh.

David has an extraordinary experience of the chief religious leader of his time declaring him king of Israel after each of his brothers were overlooked for the position. He has some immediate successes with Goliath and advancement in Saul’s army, but it is 15 years before that word comes to pass.

Abraham gets a word from God, a promise that he would be made a great nation. He believes the word but has to wait 25 years before he even gets one son.

The thing that stands out to me is not necessarily the wait but the acceptance that the promise would come to pass. What assurances did any of these men have that what they were told would happen? How many dreams have you had at night were from God? How do you know what someone says to you is from God?

Even the story of Abraham doesn’t explain how God spoke to him. Did he hear an audible voice, or was it just God’s voice spoken into his thoughts?

I do not doubt any of these men’s experiences, but it makes me wonder how can I be so sure. Several months ago I started my newest walk of faith which I mentioned in my post, Does Your Life Make Zero Sense to UnBelievers. Now I face what Blackaby calls the crisis of belief.

• Abiding faith attracts the promises of God.
• Any area that doesn’t have an expectation of good is under the influence of a lie.
• Any revelation that does not bring us into greater encounter only trains us to be more religious.
• Anything you think you know about about God, that you can’t find in the person of Jesus, you have reason to question.
• Arrogance isn’t thinking too much of ourselves but thinking too little of others.
• Don’t grade yourself differently than God does.
• Don’t let the “how to’s” of worship distract you from the “Who to.”
• Don’t let what you didn’t get in your childhood keep you from what God provides for His children – a perfectly faithful Father.
• Evangelism is the overflow of worship.
• Every season of growth is rewarded with pruning.
• Everything we do for people is just to get them to experience the Father. Striving for a Christian only exists in the absence of realizing the Father’s love.
• Faith doesn’t deny a problems existence. It denies it a place of influence.
• Faith is generated in the atmosphere of experiencing truth.
• Faith is not the absence of doubt, it is the presence of belief.
• Faith is the offspring of grace.
• Faith moves Heaven, so that Heaven will move earth.
• Faith offends the stationary.
• Faith provides eyes to the heart. Faith sees.
• Fear often looks like wisdom to those in unbelief.
• For the believer most closed heavens are between the ears.
• Gifts are free, but their development is really costly.

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One of the scariest times for a Christian is when they cannot hear the voice of God. Jesus lived His life doing whatever He saw the Father doing (John 5:19). As Jesus’ followers we are to have the same closeness of relationship. And yet, we doubt our ability to hear God. We cling to the Bible for our security, but the Bible doesn’t tell us what career to go into, which house to buy, who to marry, etc. Life is full of decisions and full of trials that we need the constant companionship of the Spirit to get us through.

I have been thinking a lot on this lately as I have tried to come to grips with this current stage in my life. I’m desperate for God’s voice, but I keep floundering about what my next step should be. Jesus said that His sheep would hear His voice, and whoever belongs to God would hear His voice (John 10:27 and 8:47). Hearing God’s voice should be as natural to a believer as taking a breathe. It’s necessary. A quick read of the first half of Joshua also reveals plenty of example of our need to hear God’s voice.

Why is it hard for most Christians to hear God’s voice then? To attempt to answer this I am going to look at a section from Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician’s Nephew. After I quote the passage I will explain.

David started out with great passion but in the end of his life, he allowed trauma to shock him into passivity. We all need to come out of passivity and speak life into our world.

For forty days the Israelites were kept in a prison of fear through the taunts of Goliath. One thing that is missed in this story is that the Israelites remained in fear because Saul offered no encouragement to their situation. His inaction led to a bubble of fear over his troops. David comes on the scene and bursts that bubble by speaking hope.

Some fifty years later one of David’s sons rapes one of his daughters. This sets up hatred between two brothers to the point one kills the other. The murderer flees to his mother’s hometown and hides for three years. Both the rape and the murder makes David mad and sad, but there is no record of him doing anything. His silence allowed things to fester. David’s children are left to figure out life on their own.

Joab wakes David from his slumber to go retrieve his son from excile. However David does not allow this son, Absalom, to see him. Left on his own, Absalom goes down the path of attempting to take the kingdom from his father. How much of this could have been avoided if only David engaged in their lives?

Avoidance does not make our problems go away. We only delay the inevitable and often make the confrontation larger because of the passage of time. God gave us the Comforter because His plan was to call us places where we would have to deal with things that were uncomfortable to us. If we are more than conquerers than we need to be in some kind of battle.

Be sure to check out my guest post over at Revival Lifestyle blog on the 4 Steps to Supernatural Breakthrough in Prayer.

• …a man who kneels before God will stand before men.
• A man who is intimate with God will never be intimidated by men.
• At the judgement seat the most embarrassing thing the believer will face will be the smallness of his praying.
• Even so, to our knees, O Christians! Desist the folly of sprinkling today’s individual and international iniquity with theological rose water! Turn loose against this putrefaction those mighty rivers of weeping, of prayer, and of unctionized preaching until all be cleansed.
• Let the fires go out in the boiler room of the church and the place will still look smart and clean, but it will be cold. The Prayer Room is the boiler room for its spiritual life.
• Ministers who do not spend two hours a day in prayer are not worth a dime a dozen – degrees or no degrees.
• No man – I don’t care how colossal his intellect – No man is greater than his prayer life.
• Notice, we never pray for folks we gossip about, and we never gossip about the folk for whom we pray! For prayer is a great detergent.
• People are making salvation a mental decision instead of a heart decision. This is a shame.
• Prayer in its highest form is agonizing soul sweat.
• Prayer is not a preparation for the battle; it is the battle!
• Prayer is the most unexplored area of the Christian life.
• Prayerlessness is disobedience, for God’s command is that men ought always to pray and not faint. To be prayerless is to fail God, for He says, Ask of me.

image courtesy of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

I have been reading Prince Caspian to my daughter and came away with a beautiful analogy on the fear of God. The fear of God has always been a tough concept for me to comprehend. How does fear and love coincide?

Like many I was taught that the fear discussed in the Bible referred more to an awe of God. While this helped ease my tensions about God’s love, I still had a hard time believing that was all it meant. Whenever people encountered the Lord, they always fell face down to the ground (Joshua 5:14, Ezekiel 1:28, Matthew 17:5-7, John 1:17). Gideon fear his life because he only recognized he encountered the Lord afterwards and had looked on the Lord face to face (Judges 6:22).

The image in Prince Caspian comes right after the children had made a long detour trying to get to Caspian. There is a small hint of this in the movie, but the book brings it out in more detail. Lucy had seen Aslan before the detour, but could not convince the others to believe her. In the end they made a long trek in the wrong direction.

When the children started back in the right direction, Lucy sees Aslan again. As they talk we find out that Aslan had wanted her to follow him even if the others had not. Lucy had feared the opinions of her siblings over what Aslan wanted her to do.

Here is the definition for the fear of God: to care more about what God thinks than anyone else.

The fear comes in the disappointment of hurting the one you love so much. Susan expressing this when she admits that Lucy had been right about Aslan. She said she could have had believe Lucy from the beginning but she listened to her fears. As she apologized to Lucy, she expressed anxiety of what she would say to Aslan.