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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.