Time to pray

Our Church is undergoing a huge change.

God is asking us the think bigger.

With that in mind we have called a week of prayer and fasting.

At our lunchtime prayer meeting today there were 44 adults and 5 children.

I am humbled and excited about so many people caught up in the vision God is placing before us.

It does make me wonder what can be achieved in the kingdom if we do really give ourselves to prayer.

There are prayer meetings and there are prayer meetings.

This one was spiritually ablaze.

We had worship, we had spiritual songs, there was praying in tongues and in English, people had scriptures and pictures from the Holy Spirit to help us to pray.

If anything is going to happen it is down to God. So we are not going to focus on just buildings and people and practicalities, matter as they do.

We are going to pray.

A Father's prayer

Our Baptism Service on Sunday was really quite moving.

A guy in our church in his late teens nearly died earlier this year after suffering multiple organ failure following dehydration during a triathlon.

He was baptised.

His Dad was in the pool.

His Dad shared part of the story. he was in the relatives room of the ITU ward and prayed "Lord, let there not be another funeral in the Church this year, but let there be a baptism"

On Sunday his prayer came true.

What a gracious God we have.

Here is his story 2009 November 15th - Baptism Testimony - 11.20am service

Praying from Habakkuk

During the worship at our Church Together meeting on Tuesday I felt God speak to me through a relatively unlikely source: Habakkuk!

Chapter three, verse two to be precise. It just would not leave me, as a prayer for today, for what is stirring in my heart.

² LORD, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

What a prayer!

I was stirred.

I have been thinking about the seminars I heard at the Together on a Mission Conference last week as noted here, here and here.

Hundreds of Churches planted across France, larger resource Churches growing into the thousands, 3,000,000 people having their lives changed by the gospel of Jesus.

And I want to pray:

² LORD, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

I think of Wesley and Whitefield travelling in the UK and America, preaching in the towns, villages and cities. I read of huge crowds and huge responses to the gospel of Jesus. I see churches springing up in towns, villages, cities all across the nation in a move of God that could not be contained.

And I want to pray:

² LORD, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

I think of the Welsh Revival and the stories we read about thousands being saved, and the pit ponies being confused because they no longer understood commands now the men did not swear at them! Churches springing up all over a nation as the gospel was preached and thousands came to faith.

And I want to pray:

² LORD, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

I read about and see in practice the Church in South Korea where the Churches have stayed faithful in prayer and in the gospel and the whole nation is influenced by a strong and vibrant Church, sending thousands of missionaries and harnessing revival not into a decade but into a century of Church growth and gospel proclamation.

And I want to pray:

² LORD, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

So we did pray.

For each other. In our homes. At our place of work. With our families. With our friends. Where we go to have fun. Where God has placed us. Where we have the privilege of living as witnesses of Jesus, who has saved us.

I think of what we heard and saw last Sunday as just a glimpse of what God can do, and it makes me want to pray:

² LORD, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

So having been stirred I shared these things as a brief encouragement, and guess what?

We prayed.

Church Together

Every 8 weeks all the cell groups in our Church do not meet for a week and instead we have "Church Together"

This is an evening of worship and prayer.

The meeting on Tuesday was really special.

I always love it when Christians gather just to seek God. Sometimes I think Christian ministry focuses too much on what people receive rather than what they bring.

"Come and be blessed" the promotional material for many Christian events offers, whereas "Come to be a blessing" is less consumerist.

So we worshipped together, and prayed together.

1. We prayed for a young man in our Church who is critically ill.
2. We prayed for the nation of Iran. For justice, for peace, for a change in the political circumstances, for freedom for the people and for the Church there that is, and has been so persecuted.
3. We then prayed for each other, in our own personal witness, looking forward to the start of the Alpha Course in September. We prayed for the extension of the gospel in our town and that God would use us as we live as witnesses to what Christ has done for us.

So we prayed within our Church family, for a nation, and for the gospel to spread through us being effective in living as witnesses of Jesus, where God has put us.

Not only do we want to seek God for these things, but where possible we offer ourselves to be part of the solution.

More on Prayer

Last night at cell group we were worshipping using the song which asks "send revival start with me".

The "promises of old" really caught my attention, as in the most part they allude to 2 Chronicles 7 when following the dedication of the temple God appeared to Solomon.

The phrase picked up within the song comes from this part

¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. ¹⁵ Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place.

I was encouraged by this passage and what it says about how we relate to God and about He relates to us. It gives an example of how we can live out a relationship with the God who encounters His people like this.

THEIR STATUS

• They come as His people
• They come called by His name

THEIR RESPONSIBILITY

• Humble themselves
• Pray
• Seek His face
• Turn from their wicked ways
  

HIS PROMISE

• He will hear from heaven
• He will forgive their sin
• He will heal their land
• His eyes will be open
• His ears will be attentive to their prayers

The status, responsibilities and promises are in many ways the same for us now.

Calvin on Prayer

As we continue our series on the sermon on the mount I have just preached on the Lord's Prayer. I came across this quote from Calvin, and I thought it was great.

"Believers do not pray with the view of informing God about things unknown to Him, or of exciting Him to do His duty, or of urging Him as though He were reluctant. On the contrary, they pray in order that they may arouse themselves to seek Him, that they make exercise their faith by meditating on His promises, that they may relieve themselves from their anxieties by pouring them out to Him, in a word, that they may declare that from Him alone they hope, and expect, both from themselves, and others, all good things."

An interesting picture

On Sunday morning in the prayer meeting before our Church service I saw the following picture.

I saw a blank canvas, stretching as far as the eye could see in either direction. It was almost infinite.

We had just been singing "One day every tongue will confess you are God, one day every knee will bow" from the song "Come, now is the time to worship".

I could see that scene way in the distance on the canvas ahead of us.

But the focus was on the here and now, and instead of painting with brush strokes it was almost as thought he painter (God) was not brushing paint but placing people.

It really felt as though as a painter mixes paints to make the shade he wants, and then spreads them to make the scene he wants, God was bringing together and mixing together people here to make something wonderful.

The canvas seemed to be God's plan through history for the salvation of mankind, with future glory mapped out ahead and this was a glimpse of the here and now, for us, that each individual person was being shaped and moulded into the scene together.