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 source unknown

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.

Most of us if we are honest with ourselves, know that we are lacking in love. We may have the ability to love those who love us, but somewhere between that and our enemies we falter. This is not to discourage us, but just to show us we need supernatural help to fulfill what God has asked of us. We need God’s assistance to be able to love.

How do we pray for love?

The first thing to remember is that we love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19). Any trouble we have in loving is directly tied to a lack of experience with God’s love for us.

• God open my heart to receive more love from you. Make me aware of what may be blocking my ability to receive from you.

The second thing to help you is to know that fear is the opposite of love (1 John 4:18). Your inability to love is directly related to an area of fear in your life. Are you afraid that person will hurt you, take too much of your time, or make you be someone you are not? Or, are you afraid that God will not take care of you?

image courtesy of Message in a Bottle

Most of Christians view prayer as a message in the bottle. We pour our hearts out in a one-side communication to our God who we hope has affection for us. Our prayers are cast out into the empty sea of quietness. Where are you God? I’ve just reached down into my soul and realized how I long for you. Please reply.

We are desperate for God’s voice—His words of affirmation, words of acceptance. We strain to hear Him in the crashing of the waves, in the thunderclaps, within the hurricane, but God’s voice was not there.

We sit back on the vast beach looking out into eternity and feel so small and insignificant. We lean back and feel the sand between our fingers, and once again are plagued by thoughts of insignificance. “I’m only just a grain of sand in this world.”

We need to persevere as Elijah and realize that God’s voice is in the whisper—the still small voice. Even though this grain of sand appears small, it represents one wonderful thought that God has for you. His amazing thoughts about you are as numbered as each grain of sand. One small handful has hundreds of grains. As you look up and down the beach, the sand endlessly goes on and on. Each one is a response to our request for returned affection.

The world is screaming at us that we are worthless and for the most part we have believed it. God is whispering it is not true. We are royalty in God’s kingdom (1 Peter 2:9). We are ambassadors of His Son (2 Corinthians 5:20). We are more than overcomers (1 John 5:4). We are the apple of His eye (Psalm 17:8). He risked it all that we may realize how much we mean to Him. He delights in us (Zephaniah 3:17).

• [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.

• Circumstances are transformed when we think differently about them.
• Contentment is the peaceful happiness that comes when we are in awe of how God feels about us.
• Don’t pray out of need, but out of identity and inheritance. You’ll get a much bigger response.
• Don’t be in too much of a hurry until you can keep what you’ve got.
• Don’t let the enemy push you into a battle you are not ready for. Keep your focus on Jesus, and natural obstacles will arise because of that.
• Every believer already possesses the things they need to both get free and stay free. It’s already in us, put there by God Himself.
• Every time God speaks to you, it is to put a smile on your face.
• Faith in the nature of God is what keeps you moving even when situations are against you because you KNOW that God is faithful.
• God allows in His wisdom what He could easily prevent by His power.
• God always speaks to your potential, not your actual.
• God and the devil wants to do one thing in common to you; that is to kill you.
• God does not measure time, He measures growth.
• God is acquainted with grief, he does not live there.
• God is always going to focus on your new nature because He killed your old one.
• God is always relentless. He is relentless against the enemy. He is relentless towards his people in terms of his kindness and goodness.

• 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.

After Jesus goes up into heaven, the disciples realized that they were now down two from their group. Judas, having been overcome with guilt for betraying Jesus, ended his own life. The disciples were aware that Judas’ place of leadership was to be replaced with another (Acts 1:20-21). It seemed right for the disciples to choose from someone who had been with them from the beginning. They narrowed it down between two men and after a blessing of the dice, let fate decide who would be next.

The Bible actually gives no indication on whether this was good or bad; Acts just gives an account of what happened. Casting lots was a normal practice of deciding things in the Old Testament, but as I reread this account this week, something interesting stood out to me. The disciples may have recognized a need and understood that filling Judas’ vacancy was part of God’s plan. BUT, I don’t think that God was given much of an opportunity to direct them. Out of all the options, they gave God two men.

I am in no way picking on their decision, but later on in Acts, God appoints Paul as an apostle. Was this God’s plan for replacing Judas? Did the others get ahead of Him? Do think that if the disciples had an option for a lot to fall on some other unknown, would that have happened?

My point is that it is far to easy to limit God by our understanding for how He works.

When I was a sophomore in college, I went to God to inquire about my following year. My options, as I understood them, were to:

1. continue rooming with my friend but move to another dorm
2. stay in my current dorm with a new roommate