Taking Steps for Prayer: When and Where?
When are you going to pray? You may say, "I don't want a compartmentalized life with prayer in one devotional compartment and the rest of my life in other compartments. I want an integrated life with prayer saturating all I do." Well, amen to that. But it's a false dichotomy, and it won't work to choose between a season of prayer in solitude and prayer soaking the rest of your life, as though those were alternatives. If you want to walk in prayer all day long, you will need to linger in prayer in times of quiet communion with God.
Why? Because you can't get deep with God on the run, fitting him into the cracks of your day. But you can enjoy continual fellowship with God on the run if you have gone deep with God in the stillness of the season of prayer. So yes, by all means make it your aim to have your whole day a walking conversation with God - his memorized Word feeding you all day, and your desires being offered up to him hour by hour. Make that your aim. And the way to "be devoted" to prayer like that is to be devoted to regular daily times of solitude in prayer. You will go deep with him in the moments of quiet focus, and this depth will make God real and weighty in the rest of the day.
So decide on a place and a time for this meeting with God in prayer.
Taking Steps: How Long?
How long? If you are doing nothing, do something. Start where you are and take a step. Then ask God to grow you into a deep and wise and fruitful person. We need Christian sages. And nobody becomes a sage on the run. There must be lingering in the presence of God with focused meditation on the Word and focused prayer.
It doesn't have to be one long time. It can be several planned shorter times. For example, there is the great example of Daniel. He was a high ranking political official in Babylon. He had enemies and they passed a law that no one could pray except to the king. Daniel 6:10 says, "Now when Daniel knew that the document was signed, he entered his house (now in his roof chamber he had windows open toward Jerusalem); and he continued kneeling on his knees three times a day, praying and giving thanks before his God, as he had been doing previously."
So not only do we see the courage and utter commitment of Daniel to pray in an open window when his life was threatened for it, but we see that he was "devoted" to it three times a day. I have found it very helpful at times in my life to set aside a time in the morning, at lunch and before or after supper. You go away by yourself and you read a small portion of Scripture and you pray and ask for God's help in that next third of the day.
Or you might do it differently. For example, Psalm 119:164 says, "Seven times a day I praise You, because of Your righteous ordinances." With alarm watches, you can set yourself any kind of prayer schedule. But don't do nothing. Devote yourself to prayer. Be alert in it, and do whatever you have to do to see that you meet God in a focused way to hear from him in his Word and to offer up your desires to him in prayer.
Taking Steps: How?
How? Dozens of things could be said. I will mention three.
First, consider praying in concentric circles from your own soul outward to the whole world. This is my regular practice. I pray for my own soul first. Not because I am more deserving than others, but because if God doesn't awaken and strengthen and humble and fill my own soul, then I can't pray for anybody else's. So I plead with the Lord every morning for my own soul's perseverance and purification and power.
Then I go to the next concentric circle, my family, and I pray for each of them by name: Noel, Karsten/Shelly/Millie, Benjamin, Abraham, Barnabas, Talitha and some of my extended family.
Then I go to the next concentric circle, the staff and elders of Bethlehem. I name them all by name.
Then I pray for you, Bethlehem Baptist Church. And then I go out from there to different concerns and groups at different times: our missionaries, our denomination and its schools, the Baptist General Conference, Evangelicalism in general and the church around the world, especially the suffering church. The wider circles include the city and the state and the nation and the cultural and social issues of the world.
You can't pray for everything every time. So there need to be differences. And your heart will dictate much of your burden. Some days one family member or one staff member or one crisis in the church or the world will consume most of your time. But if you have a pattern - like the concentric circles - you won't spin your wheels wondering where to start.
That's the first thing I would say in answer to the how question.
The other is to pray Scripture. The prayer time and the Bible meditation time don't have to be separate times. It would be best if they were not separate.
If you ask, What do I pray for myself and my family and my church and the missionaries and the city and the nations, the answer is pray Scripture. God's Word reveals God and his will. What you want for yourself and those you pray for is more of God and more of his will. As you see him in his Word, pray that God would make this seen and known and loved in the lives of the people you pray for. And as you see his will, pray that God would cause it to be done in the lives of those you pray for. "Thy will be done on earth as in heaven."
Be intentional about this, but don't be too self-conscious. Contrived prayers seem inauthentic. If we are so self-conscious that we try to craft our prayers with interesting turns of phrase, we will lose the power and reality of prayer. But do try to pray specific Biblical values for people, not worn out cliches and trite generalities that have no spiritual depth.
For example, if you want to pray for somebody, pray the beatitudes: Father, grant that John would recognize his poverty of spirit. Let him mourn for his sins and not be indifferent or unconcerned for his own soul. Work a meekness into his heart. Grant him to be hungry and thirsty for righteousness. Give him the heart of a peacemaker and a reconciler. Make him pure and keep him pure, O Lord. And if you will for him to be persecuted, give him grace to count it all joy and to remember that his reward is great in heaven.
Praying like this will be mighty in the Spirit, because it is the Spirit's own Word and the Spirit's own will that you are praying.
The third thing I would say about how to pray is that praying in groups is important to build into your life. Families, pray together. Small groups, pray together. Ministry groups, pray together.
So practically, if you followed through last week with your plan to find a place and time and method of reading the Bible, then add this: "Be devoted to prayer, keeping alert in it," this will link you more fully with God and his purpose for the universe.
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