Celebration Community Church

I’m one of those rare kids who grew up with parents who prayed. I have treasured memories of passing my mom’s room with the door ajar seeing her pleading with God over an open Bible. But, prayer was not limited to private expression. Dropping me off for school in the morning, there were times my dad would simply say, “Let me pray for you.” We would bow right there in the car and he would start supplicating in full view of the whole world! I was never ashamed or embarrassed, but it did take years into adulthood before I began to realize the extraordinary grace of praying parents.

Where does someone get a burning desire to pray? I know I’m commanded in Colossians 4:2 to devote myself to prayer. My conscience confirms the obligation. I agree that it’s the right thing to do. But, I want to know---How do I get my heart and my will to bend along with my knees?

Trying new forms of prayer or adjusting my technique seems to help for awhile. Listening to lessons from prayer warriors who have spent years on the battlefront can strengthen my resolve. Accountability insures that I will at least go through the motions on a regular basis. Focusing on the needs around me is necessary but often only increases my sense of failure. The motive to pray the way someone like Paul prayed--earnestly, continually, night and day--will have to come from somewhere else.

If I’m going to pray like Paul, it’s important to listen to the way Paul prays. This is not the difficult part. He wrote twice as many letters in the New Testament as the other authors combined and recorded eight times as many of his prayers as they did. What fueled his life of prayer? You can discover the answer practically anytime his words begin to turn heavenward, but it’s too obvious to pick up without intentionally looking for it.

In short, the fuel for Paul’s passionate prayer life was…God and God’s work. John Owen, the seventeenth-century English theologian, distinguishes between prayer that is the result of a natural devotion to a “general notion of a Divine Power” (so prevalent today) and prayer that flows from the character of God revealed in Scripture (so rare today). There is a continental divide here. This distinction not only determines the eventual outcome of our prayers, but explains the fire in Paul’s heart.

Once you know God’s revelation, theological specificity is the tinderbox of prayer. Vague notions of God produce vague prayers. Childish notions of God produce childish prayers. But, when you know Paul’s God, you get Paul-like prayers.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is found in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. He begins praying just three verses into the letter and it’s difficult to say if he even stops praying until the end of chapter three. Along the way, we see that his heart is captivated and his prayer fueled by his detailed knowledge of God and God’s activity. Paul knows and expresses in his prayer…

Who God is
(“the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”),

What God has already done for Christians
(“chose…predestined…adopted…forgave…sealed”),

Why God has acted in these ways
(“in accordance with His pleasure and will--
to the praise of His glorious grace”),

The extent of God’s activity
(“works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will”),

How to recognize the work of God in others
(“faith…and…love”).

When is the last time we explicitly identified the God to whom we were praying, recounting the elements of our salvation, the extent of His sovereignty, and His motive for acting in our prayers? Paul obviously never listened to those who told him not to preach in his prayers.

Furthermore, it is Paul’s itemized doxology in verses 3-14 that determines his prayer requests for the Ephesian Christians in verses 17-23. Wouldn’t it have been a whole lot easier and saved a lot of expensive parchment paper to just say, “God bless the Ephesians”? Of course, but Paul’s heart was too inflamed with doctrine and love to settle for a one-candle prayer!

Imagine the absurdity of sitting down to order at your favorite high-class restaurant and saying, “I’d like food, please.” Everyone would think you were acting like an immature child, instead of a full-grown adult. Grown-ups get specific at the table and on their knees.

Not only is knowledge of God the source of Paul’s prayer, but is it’s aim as well. Listen carefully to his request: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know Him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and His incomparably great power for us who believe” (vv. 17-19a). It’s all about God!

Remember, Paul just declared that they had already received every spiritual blessing in Christ, including the Holy Spirit. Now, he keeps asking the Father for more. Paul, like his Lord before him, cannot stomach lukewarm Christianity. Positional blessings that are mine in Christ must be realized, celebrated, and exploited for the Kingdom now. Theological truth isn’t meant for books on the shelf. God has revealed Himself to me that I might grow into an ever deepening, ever responsive personal relationship with Him. My conversion to Christ is not the end, but only the beginning.

In his perceptive Dynamics of Spiritual Life, Richard Lovelace explores the link between spiritual renewal and prayer. He notes the overwhelming amount of horizontal communication in our churches that goes on in planning, arguing, and expounding. He then contrasts that with the relative absence of vertical communication in worship, thanksgiving, confession, and intercession. Prayer, in all of our meetings, has become a ritual obligation instead of a genuine and expectant expression of dependence on the God who “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.” Too often, our focus in prayer has been reduced to what Lovelace calls “psychological adjustment and other immediate individual burdens” while the larger interests of the Kingdom of God do not even make the agenda. In assessing the causes of such a lamentable state, he concludes:

“Perhaps it stems partly from the deficient teaching and emphasis on God Himself throughout the church, and partly from the man-centeredness of much religious activity. Deficiency in prayer both reflects and reinforces inattention toward God…The minimal prayer accompanying many projects in the church may indicate that what is being undertaken in simply what human beings can accomplish pretty well by themselves.” (1)

In other words, if we were only building buildings and seeking to draw crowds, God-deficient prayer would suffice. But, seeing hearts change and the Kingdom advance require that God show up. They push us beyond our own meager capabilities to continuous, dependent--if not desperate--prayer.

Here lies the impetus for Paul’s prayer life. This is where the burning desire for prayer is ignited: You know God, you know what God is up to, and you personally get involved in advancing His agenda. This keeps you utterly dependent on God, but excited about the possibilities of His actually using you in supernatural, extraordinary ways.

You learn to think like Paul, believe what Paul believed, get excited about the same things Paul got excited about, and pray like Paul prayed. It is no mere duty, but an exhilarating adventure of moving forward with God.

Some years ago, the congregation I pastored in Hudson, Wisconsin noted that God was bringing a couple dozen families to worship with us from the neighboring community of New Richmond. There were surplus funds in our budget that could be used to start a new church there and my wife, Heidi, and I had just been introduced to a very gifted couple that shared our theology and vision to plant churches. It didn’t take a lot of discernment to see that God was orchestrating something here. Stepping out of our comfort zone to move forward with God to plant a new church compelled us to pray more like Paul.

We found ourselves asking that the Gospel would be received with power and deep conviction by lost people in New Richmond (1 Thess. 1:5). We were always giving thanks to God for all the hard work and the loving spirit of launch team members (Col. 1:4), praying that this love would mature as their knowledge of God increased (Phil. 1:9). There were unanticipated setbacks along the way, but we prayed for perseverance that they might be counted worthy of the Kingdom (2 Thess. 1:5; 3:5). We prayed for purity (Phil. 1:10), divine power (Col. 1:11), and spiritual wisdom (Col. 1:9), because these qualities can only be produced by God. Today, we always pray with joy because of their partnership in the Gospel (Phil. 1:4). Sound familiar?

It’s not that we hadn’t valued these things before, but responding to God’s initiative required us to actually act upon truths we had always professed to believe. We really had to trust God in new ways. In such a setting, prayer becomes your lifeline and God becomes more than a doctrine on paper. Parenting children or churches that honor God fosters an expressed dependency on Him.

God has been faithful, not only in New Richmond--with its thriving new church--but also with a repeat performance in a second daughter church across the St. Croix River in Stillwater, Minnesota. He left us looking for and longing for what He wanted to do next. Believe me, we were asking!

We found that once it’s ignited, the fire refuses to be contained.

__________
(1) Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), p. 153.

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