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Intercession and the Lord’s Prayer

March 10, 2010 by Jim

The Lord’s prayer is almost certainly the most well known prayer in the Bible. It is recorded for us in Matthew 6:9-13:

This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’

Much has been written on the Lord’s prayer and many people have commented that not only is it a prayer that can stand alone but it also is a series of themes or topics that Jesus intended us to explore in prayer. It is good to pray the actual prayer but it is also good to pray about such themes as the holiness of God, the provision of God, forgiveness, and spiritual protection.

The Lord’s prayer is most often prayed in a devotional way: meaning that we pray it in terms of our own lives. Yet this is a powerful ‘table of contents’ for intercession: praying on behalf of somebody else.

Let’s look at an example of how we can move through the themes of the Lord’s prayer in praying for the Church in a specific city or geographic area:

“Our Father in heaven, holy is your name” – ask God to reveal his character and his holiness to the Church in your city. Pray that the name of God will be honoured and lifted high.

“your kingdom come, your will be done..” -pray that all the programs and plans and strategies of the local churches in you city would be in full alignment with God’s will and that they would further establish God’s kingdom on earth, in your specific geographic region.

“Give us today our daily bread” -pray for all those who are in need; those who struggle to have enough food, shelter and clothing, etc. Also pray for God to provide spiritual bread; we live not only by bread alone but also by the Word of God.

“Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us” -this is a big one: pray for a spirit of forgiveness to move within the church. Ask God to speak to people about areas of unforgiveness, bitterness and resentment in their lives. Don’t get too specific. Keep this one general and make sure that you pray for yourself in this regard. Pray that God will strengthen people to forgive, through the power of his forgiveness of our sins.

“lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one” – pray that God would lead believers in your city or region away from temptation. Ask God to change circumstances and situations so that they are led away from the temptations of the devil. It is also critical that we pray for the spiritual protection from the evil one. We must pray this for ourselves, our families and the churches in our city/region.

Jesus intended us to use the themes of this prayer regularly in our prayer life, both for ourselves and for others. There are different ways to do this, but I’ve looked at 5 different areas that you can easily develop in your prayer life. It doesn’t take long and it gives a helpful framework for your prayer time.

I want to encourage you to take the next week and begin to intentionally include a framework like this from the Lord’s prayer. Give it a try and see how it impacts your times of prayer!

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Posted in Intercessory Prayer | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Knowing God’s Discipline

March 4, 2010 by Jim

There are passages of Scripture that we tend to read often and there are passages that we tend to avoid. There are also passages that are easier for us to pray through than others. Yesterday I was reading a familiar passage in Proverbs 3:

My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline and do not resent his rebuke because the Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.  -Prov.3:11-12

It was the word ‘delight’ that caught my attention. I often pray about the fact that God ‘delights’ in me. Psalm 149 makes that abundantly clear when it says ‘For the Lord takes delight in his people’ (v.4). I like to remind myself that God delights in me and that he enjoys me, so when the word ‘delight’ came up in Proverbs 3 it stood out to me.

So here is the question that came up: when was the last time that I prayed for insight to recognize and understand the discipline of the Lord in my life? This is such an important concept that the author of Hebrews takes an entire chapter to discuss the matter (see Heb. 12).

For most of us the issue is not so much ‘despising’ God’s discipline as much as we don’t recognize when it is happening. I virtually never hear anybody saying ‘God is disciplining me’. So what does God’s discipline look like? Obviously it will likely be different for different people, but the common denominator is that we need spiritual eyes and discernment to distinguish between what is God’s discipline and what is not.

Take difficult circumstances as an example: our tendency is to chalk it up as spiritual warfare. Or perhaps we have been praying for a particular door to open and we respond by ‘binding the enemy’ and taking our stand against the enemy, but in reality it is God on the other side of the door holding to shut!

I want to encourage you to join me in beginning to pray to be be able to recognize and understand where and how the Lord’s discipline is evident in our lives. When it comes to this issue we probably need to do more listening than talking!

Father, I thank you that you love us and that you are committed to leading us toward spiritual maturity. I choose to thank you for your discipline and for all our working in my life. Help me to recognize when you are disciplining me and give me understanding to cooperate with what you are doing. Father I trust you. Thank you that you delight in me and that you enjoy me. I pray that would sustain me and strengthen my heart today. In Jesus name, Amen

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Posted in Devotional Prayer, General Discipleship | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Finding Relief from Distress

February 26, 2010 by Jim

Today I’d like to look at Psalm 4 and how we can strengthen our hearts by praying through it in times of distress:

1 Answer me when I call to you, O my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress; be merciful to me and hear my prayer.
2 How long, O men, will you turn my glory into shame? How long will you love delusions and seek false gods? Selah
3 Know that the LORD has set apart the godly for himself; the LORD will hear when I call to him.
4 In your anger do not sin; when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent. Selah
5 Offer right sacrifices and trust in the LORD.
6 ¶ Many are asking, “Who can show us any good?” Let the light of your face shine upon us, O LORD.
7 You have filled my heart with greater joy than when their grain and new wine abound.
8 I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.

I begin with verse 1 and declaring that I will respond to the distress (or anxiety/fear/worry etc.) in my life by calling out to God in prayer. I thank God for his mercies; mercies that are new every morning.

Verse 2 expands on that by acknowledging that most people look to other things and people in order to find relief from the stress in their lives. I resolve that I want to only seek God to deliver me or give me relief. He is my only solution! Now of course that doesn’t mean that I sit on my hands and do nothing in times of trouble and anxiety, but it does mean that I begin with coming to God and that I seek to act and respond according to his direction.

Verse 4 is amazing because lying in bed and stewing about what is causing distress in our lives is common to all of us. The problem is that many times we over-analyze things and blow situations out of control. Often we are tired (thus why we are in bed!) and our thoughts become cloudy. Have you ever stressed about something when you lie in bed trying to go to sleep and then in the morning you say to yourself, ‘what was I thinking?’ I have. I have learned over the years that I can’t really trust my thoughts late at night.

I’ve also really connected to verse 7 and the theme of ‘greater joy’. Begin to pray and ask God to fill your heart with the greater joy. Tell him you are holding out for the greater joy. Grain and new wine are a reference to good natural things that we often find relief in. It might be food, but it might be something quite different, but it does legitimately give you a feeling of joy. When you are under stress, what do you do? Where do you go to find relief? Sometimes what we do is problematic (such as drunkenness) but not necessarily. What David is saying in this verse is to hold out for the greater joy that only God can provide! Ask him for it. He wants to give you greater joy today!

I strongly encourage you to pray the Scriptures and begin to include the language of Scripture into your prayer life. That doesn’t mean that you just recite the Bible and tag on an ‘amen’ at the end. You certainly should express in your own words what you are feeling and thinking. In the case of Psalm 4, you can begin with verse 1 and declare that you trust God as the solution for the distress in your life, and then get specific and talk to him about what the anxieties are in your circumstances. Tell him how you feel. As you look at the Psalm you come to verse 7 and begin to pray for joy to come to your heart. Ask God to release joy to your spirit. There is so much in the Psalms about how David and the other Psalmists responded to stress and anxiety through prayer.

When we begin to pray the Scriptures, it shapes and directs our times of prayer in very powerful ways and it releases revelation to our spirit about the Word of God. Our hearts end up being ‘washed in the water of the word’.

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Entering God’s Spacious Place

February 18, 2010 by Jim

One of the things that becomes clear when we read through the Psalms is that God is repeatedly trying to reinforce his truth into our hearts. Very often we know truth in our minds but struggle to believe in our hearts. Take Psalm 31:8 for example:

You have not handed me over to the enemy but have set my feet in a spacious place.

For most people this is a nice verse to have on the fridge or on a book mark, but it is more difficult to internalize it in our hearts

When David wrote this he was likely being pursued by Saul and his men, so in the context of the Psalm we know that David had literal enemies. The majority of us do not really have many true enemies. Perhaps there are a few people who don’t like us very much but not people who actually want to harm us. (hopefully!!)

The Scriptures make it clear that the devil is our true enemy. It is not only legitimate but important for us to read Ps. 31:8 with that in mind. We have NOT been handed over to the enemy; quite the contrary: God is leading us to a spacious place. This is a place of safety and rest. This is obviously a spiritual place and it is independent of our natural circumstances. We find this confirmed in Psalm 23 where David writes that God leads us into ‘green pastures’ and ‘beside quiet waters’, even when we are in the midst of the ’shadow of death’.

Psalm 31:8 is a powerful truth for our prayer life. We need to come into agreement with this truth, thanking God and confessing with our mouths that God has not given us into the hands of the enemy, and he has led us (and continues to lead us) into a spacious, restful place.

We can begin to pray this verse and agree with its truth. Here are a few suggestions of how to do that:

  1. begin by reading it out loud and verbally agreeing with its truth.
  2. if you struggle to believe that it is presently true in your life, talk to God and tell him why you feel that way.
  3. ask God to open your spiritual eyes to see the ’spacious place’ that he promises for you. (again, the power of this isn’t in us magically declaring something and ‘willing it’ to be true; we want real connection and relationship with God; we can agree with God’s truth even while we honestly struggle to believe it)
  4. express the verse in your own words. connect in verses like Ps. 23, that talk about the same thing. Thank God and talk to him about what you are reading and feeling about it.

What we need is eyes that see and hearts that believe. Take this verse and make a point of praying through it for the next 4-5 days and see what kind of impact it has on your Spirit. You’ll be surprised!

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Posted in Devotional Prayer, Spiritual Disciplines | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Prayer and the Mysteries of God

February 16, 2010 by Jim

Recently some good friends of mine have gone through an extremely challenging time. For the sake of their privacy, I will not say any more but the circumstances raise the age old questions about prayer and faith in the midst of great trouble.

When you have been praying along with someone and then things end up going so utterly differently than you had prayed for, knowing how to respond is quite difficult. In our culture the response of Job’s friends is more than a little impractical but there is something strangely appealing to tearing robes and sitting together for days on end in complete silence!

What I want to share here today is something that anybody knows who has sought out the journey of prayer for any length of time: Sometimes God’s ways are a mystery to us. Why does God so clearly answer one prayer but other times the answer is shrouded in the fog of mystery? Massive volumes have been written on these questions and while I will not seek to delve into them myself, I must recommend Philip Yancy’s classic book, Disappointment with God, to anybody who would like to read some helpful thoughts.

In the book of Job, Job’s friends start well enough by coming to sit with Job for seven days in silence, waiting for Job to speak. However after that they end up offering a lot of very unhelpful advice about the nature of God and the mystery of suffering and loss.

At the end of the book the Lord says about Job’s friends, “I am angry with you… because you have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.” (Job. 42:7) This is a terrifying sentence to me. To have the God of the universe speak and declare ‘I am angry with you’ is simply terrifying! However, the other part of what God said is equally important: God says that Job did speak rightly about God. Job said many really intense things and asked some very hard questions of God. It is critical to know that because we have to know that it is legitimate to ask ‘WHY GOD?’ Even though in the end Job says to God “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3), God is not angered by Job’s questions.

The bottom line is that many times we will encounter the mysteries of God as we pray and intercede. There are many times when we will ask ‘WHY GOD?’.

What I am left with is the deep conviction that I will not always understand the ways of God, but in the midst of the mysteries and questions I also have an equally deep conviction in the goodness and kindness of God.

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.  -Ps 43:5

Posted in General Discipleship, Intercessory Prayer | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

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