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 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:

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.

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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• Don’t plan with what is in your pocket; plan with what is in God’s pocket.
• Faith is a kind of immune system filtering out fears that otherwise would paralyze all activity.
• Faith is a leap into the light, not a step into the darkness.
• Faith is not presumption but assumption. You rightly assume that God will never let you down—and thus “enter into rest.”
• Faith is not the absence of fear; it is its conquest.
• Faith is the vital principle of prayer.
• Faith removes the mountains which unbelief creates.
• Go for the purposes of God, and the means to fulfill them will follow.
• God always hears prayer. He cannot make it obvious, but He hears every time we move our lips.
• God always works with workers and moves with movers, but He does not sit with sitters.
• God answers prayer. For every deadline He will throw you a lifeline. Keep believing and be blessed!
• God has a thousand-year calendar with only one day marked on it.  It is marked TODAY.
• I don’t want to play with marbles … when God told me to move mountains!
• Jesus showed us how he lived as the Son of Man so that we would know how to live as the children of God.
• Prayer is faith in action.
• Praying for God to work is fine, but praying for Him to do what we should be doing is pointless.
• The Bible knows nothing about air in a jar, only wind in motion.  It knows nothing about the Holy Spirit except in action, in manifestation.
• The difficulty is not in knowing His will but doing it.

• [Jesus and the apostles] obviously believed that they knew the will of God was before they prayed the prayer of faith.
• [Meditation is] the detachment from the confusion all around us in order to have a richer attachment to God.
• Attuning ourselves to divine breathings is spiritual work, but without it our prayer is vain repetition.
• Christian meditation, very simply, is the ability to hear God’s voice and obey his word.
• Confession begins in sorrow, but it ends in joy.
• Do we really think we can experience integration of heart and mind and spirit with an erratic prayer life?
• Either option is painful. To not grow in His likeness is to not enjoy his fullness. When this happens, a haunting voice continues to ask, ‘What could I have become in him if I would have been a man of prayer?’ To grow in His likeness is to enjoy His fullness. When this happens, the priorities of the world begin to fade away.
• God delights in showing us exciting new alternatives for the future.
• God has ordained the Disciplines of the spiritual life as the means by which we place ourselves where He can bless us.
• I determined to learn to pray so that my experience confirmed to the words of Jesus rather than try to make his words conform to my impoverished experience.
• If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives.
• If we long to go where God is going and do what God is doing, we will move into deeper, more authentic worship.

• Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.
• We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense.
• We pray when there’s nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.
• We don’t want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of ‘good time’ is seldom in sync with ours.
• The remarkable thing about God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else.
• Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.
• We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties.
• One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God.
• If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.
  
• The most important aspect of Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the surrounding influence and qualities produced by that relationship. That is all God asks us to give our attention to, and it is the one thing that is continually under attack.
• There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what God prizes.
• Intercession is putting yourself in God’s place; it is having His mind and His perspective.

I marked this daily reading from John Eldredge’s as something I wanted to share. With the last two posts on fear (Jesus not having fear and We are not to be afraid), I thought this would be a nice place to add this angle on fear. Fear can come in many ways, and as Eldredge himself admits here, this is not one we typically think. Enjoy

Embracing the Glory
4/10/2011

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us . . . And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. (Marianne Williamson)

When I first read this quote, I thought, No, that’s not true. We don’t fear our glory. We fear we are not glorious at all. We fear that at bottom, we are going to be revealed as . . . disappointments. Mandela is just trying to make a nice speech, like a sermon, to buoy us up for a day or two. But as I thought about it more, I realized we do fear our glory. We fear even heading this direction because, for one thing, it seems prideful. Now pride is a bad thing, to be sure, but it’s not prideful to embrace the truth that you bear the image of God. Paul says it brings glory to God. We walk in humility because we know it is a glory bestowed. It reflects something of the Lord’s glory.