A few thoughts about prayer

Upon reflecting on a story from the 1 Kings 18, God showed me some lessons about prayer.  You may know the story, it's the story about Elijah and his standoff with the prophets of Baal and Asherah, two gods that the people of Israel were worshiping instead of God.  You can read about it here.

Quick synopsis:  King Ahab and his piece of work Queen Jezebel are leading the people away from God and the people were kind of flip-flopping back and forth between worshiping Baal & Asherah and then worshiping God.  They have persecuted and killed all the prophets of God except Elijah, and Elijah, who is now the last prophet alive, comes out of hiding and just shows up right in the middle of God and everyone in Jerusalem (when he does Ahab calls him the "trouble maker of Israel").  Elijah sets up this showdown on Mount Carmel with the prophets of Baal and Asherah to end the doubt about who should be worshiped.

There's 850 prophets on one side and then there's Elijah on the other.  The contest:  Set up an altar with a sacrifice on it and see which God can bring fire down to burn it up.

The 850 prophets of Baal and Aherah go all day.  They are dancing around, cutting themselves and calling out to their gods.  Elijah starts talking trash to them about noon...love that...nothing happens.  About the time of the evening sacrifice, Elijah goes "that's enough" and he sets up his altar with the bull on it and digs a trench around it.  He has people take 8 giant water jars and dump them on his sacrifice, so that it drenches the altar and fills the trench around the altar with water.

Elijah prays:

...“O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, prove today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant. Prove that I have done all this at your command. 37 O Lord, answer me! Answer me so these people will know that you, O Lord, are God and that you have brought them back to yourself.”


38 Immediately the fire of the Lord flashed down from heaven and burned up the young bull, the wood, the stones, and the dust. It even licked up all the water in the trench! 39 And when all the people saw it, they fell face down on the ground and cried out, “The Lord—he is God! Yes, the Lord is God!”

Here are some things about prayer that I learned from this passage.

1)  Pray big.  Elijah prayed big, this wasn't small...he really laid himself out there.  A great book that unpacks this idea is The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson.

2)  Pray specific.  Don't pray nebulous prayers.  Make them specific, don't just always pray in a way that is not measurable.

3)  Pray to leave no doubt.  Too often we just pray about things that would happen anyway...that's not bad, but our prayers don't need to be limited to that.  The reason we don't see God do things that only God can do more, is because we don't pray for things to happen that only God could do.  Pray in such a way that you leave no doubt who did it...this was a moment for Elijah, it was God doing it or nobody...leave no doubt.

3)  Pray for the glory of God.  That was Elijah's prayer, that God would show Himself to be who He is, that God show His glory, which is the evidence that God is working and is who He says He is.  Do you just pray for things that would make your life easier, get you something cool or do you pray purposefully for ways for God to glorify Himself?  Do you pray for what would be most in line with God's mission or yours?

I tell the story of how Bay West got land all the time, because it's a meaningful story that only God could have done.  Scott and I were looking with Jeff Robison and his co-worker, Brandon...after looking we had lunch at Sonny's BBQ, and when we left, we drove off saying, "Well that's great and all, but we don't have any money to buy it."  We delayed staff meeting because of the task, and when we got there, we told everyone that we had found a place, but we didn't have any money.  Our Minister of Administration pipes up with "Well, you aren't gonna believe this, but..." and he proceeds to tell us that he just finished lunch with a guy who, completely unprompted, asked what we were doing for the Bay West campus to get them land to build and that he wanted to buy us some land, if that was cool.  Zero in here...we weren't telling everyone we were even looking...our Administrator didn't even know we were looking, yet at the exact moment we were looking in faith, God had already prepared the answer.

It gets even better, because the land we were looking at was a great price, but in the process, we got outbid...I was crushed, because I was SURE that was what God had for us, because even the location was right in the middle of a map we'd plotted with the addresses of our attenders...but it wasn't.  I thought the story was over, but what ended up happening was that God's plan was for us to buy the land immediately next door...which was TWICE THE SIZE of the original plot...and THAT story is still being written and it is my hope that parts of the story will be us being the building on Easter 2016 with 800 disciple makers ready on our way with the rest of the body of Christ in Palm Bay to take the city and that it would be known as a "place where God moves" when we are done....every night, that's my prayer...and that this would not be the end of the story.

I say that to say this...Degree of difficulty is irrelevant.  God is not bound by amount of ability or resource, so for God, there is no challenge to the task, whatever it is, there is only purpose for doing it, so pray for His glory...He tends to show up, and most of the time, it's bigger and better than you thought.

4)  Be faithful to tell the story.  

I say this for two reasons...one, because I'm keeping my end of the bargain to point to the immense power of God to get that done and praise Him for it.  

Two, it's an example of a big part of our prayer life that we don't fulfill.  The purpose for Bay West is to ultimately be an example of God working in the world, so if he works, and I don't tell, I'm not doing my job.  Isaiah 43:10, Isaiah tells us that God has called us to be God's "witnesses"...witnesses just tell what they saw.  If they don't tell it, then they aren't doing their part.  A big part of being a Christian is being the person who points out to everyone.."Hey, see what God did there..."  

One time in prayer with my wife's family, her older sister Daphne prayed about God answering what we were praying for, "God, we will be faithful to tell the story."  Be faithful to tell the story.

We put God on the spot, so to speak, not in making Him do something, but in putting the spotlight on what He does, and through doing so, people, like the nation of Israel, hear the story and are shown that "The Lord, He is God...yes, the Lord -- He is God!"

Don't miss out...this is the stuff of legend and adventure (and Bible stories) are made of...if you want to have the story to tell your grandkids, then pray big, pray specific, pray to leave no doubt, pray for God's glory, and be faithful to tell the story.

How did this happen?

Here we go again.  I let myself get fat….again.  I know you’ve never done that.  A few years ago, I lost a lot of weight, got back down to high school weight, ran some 5ks (set personal bests) and all that.   Then, I started to let the workouts slip, and began to eat a little more.  I’d get on the scale the next day and I really didn’t gain anything, so I let it go a little more.  I mean, I worked out all the time, so I should be good, right?  Well, 3 years later, here I am...almost back where I started. How did that happen?  Maybe if my belly had just bulged out when I ate the first Krispy Kreme, I would have stuck it out, but the effects of weight gain aren’t that user friendly...they sneak up on you.

Spiritual consequences are like the effects of weight gain.  God created the physical world to reflect what He’s trying to tell us spiritually.  We fool ourselves into believing that spiritual consequences don't exist.  When we “commit” a sin and the boulder doesn’t drop from the sky or there are no explosions, we think we got away with it or God wasn’t watching or maybe even, all this Christian stuff is a bunch of junk.  It could go on this way for years.  Then, one day, we look at our lives and go, “How did this happen?”  It might even be after we made some good changes in our life.  Sometimes, the greatest collapses in someone’s life happen immediately after a resurgence of good behavior.

Jesus even tells a story about a guy who was possessed by an unclean spirit.  The spirit leaves, and the guy takes the opportunity to sort of “clean up his life”.  Later, the unclean spirit comes back only to find everything all fixed.  The spirit gets 7 of his buddies, all worse than him, and they gang up to wreak havoc on the guy’s life.  Jesus closes the story by saying that “the last state of that person is worse than the first.”

Sometimes, we might think, like that guy, that we can just make some lifestyle changes...start going to church, maybe learn a Bible verse or two, by heart even.  We volunteer at a charity, get clean off the “hard” drugs, and we feel pretty good about ourselves, thinking we’ve done enough.  Then the slide begins and before we know it, we are worse off than we were before.  It’s like we painted the living room of the house to hide the cracks in the walls, but never addressed the foundation problems that caused them to begin with..

The reality is we can’t clean our lives up on our own...only God can do that.  Without turning our lives over to Him once and for all, we don’t begin to really see the long-lasting results we dream of and we just gain “the weight” all back.  It might show in different places, but the reality is when we get on the scale, we’ll see that it’s worse than when we started.  Then we are just left to look around and wonder “How did this happen?”