Adding Activity to My Prayers

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” (Philippians 4:6)

How’s your prayer life?  That can be a painful question to answer—few of us think our prayer life is where it needs to be.  Yet most of us would acknowledge how powerful and important prayer is.  So today, we’re going to tackle it head-on and discuss two prayer issues I’ve noticed in my own life. First is perspective and second is order.

When Alice and I were church planting in Alaska, I vividly remember working hard on an outreach event and then finalizing it with prayer. “God please bless this effort, please come and be mighty in this place. Please bring people and open their hearts.”  Sincere?  Yes.  Effective?  Not as much as it could have been.

For years I had the perspective that God was a divine cheerleader, trying to psyche us up. We’d ask God to guide our planning and then bless what we had generated.  We would do the work and ask God to add the power.

But that’s not what He meant when He said, “I will be with you.”  In reality, God is way out front, preparing the way for us.  We are to join His activity, what He is already doing. It’s not our work but His and we needed to discover His presence in it and try to help others see Him as well.

Now to the issue of order.  The other day I received an email, one of many about a particular situation.  After considering it for a time, I pounded out a response and then just before clicking “send,” I stopped to pray.  That has been a fairly consistent pattern in my life—act and then pray.  It’s a hard pattern to break.

I can quickly get caught up trying to influence a situation first through my character, my words, my actions, or my money.  I often then add prayer to empower the action.  But that is exactly opposite of what needs to take place.  Prayer must go first.  Prayer must pave the way.  Prayer must shape my thoughts and actions to that of my LORD.  Prayer must lead, and be followed by character, actions, words, money.

I need to stop adding prayer to my activity and instead add activity to my prayer.  Only in this way can we hope to penetrate the unreached for the sake of God's Kingdom.