This a guest blog by Acts 29 pastor, Robert Livingston, who pastors Source Church. Check out how they post corporate prayers and answers to prayer here.

I have never had a difficult time talking with my wife.  I think one of the first things I found attractive about her was how easy it was to talk for hours upon hours and never get bored.  And because of God’s goodness, even after almost 12 years of marriage we still spend most mornings together drinking coffee and talking.  Conversation with her is just so easy.  Talking keeps us close to each other.  Don’t get me wrong, sometimes our talks are difficult as we work through struggles or bicker with each other – but we do talk.

What about talking with God?  It’s called prayer and if you ask most Christians about their prayers you will usually get a garbled, apologetic response that concludes with, “I need to work harder at making time to pray.”  For some reason talking with God is hard for most of us to do.

But there is a time when prayer becomes easy.  For example: when my wife and I lost track of our 5 year old daughter in a sea of people at Disney World late one evening; or the time we got news that a family member had been struck in a head-on collision and was barely hanging on to life.  Prayer was instinctive.  Prayer was the easiest thing in the world in the moments surrounding those events.

Genesis 4 describes the first time in the bible when people begin to pray.  A man had a son named “Enosh” which literally means “frailty”.  I suspect that his son was born premature, or undersized and in light of the violent world he was born into, his dad began to pray.  When frailty or weakness becomes obvious, prayer becomes easy.

I have one of those jobs that exposes my frailty on a regular basis – I am a church planter/pastor.  Daily I am faced with tasks and conversations that require more than my education, charm, experience, or limited money can accommodate.  I am simply outmatched, and I think God is behind it all.  The good news of God is that I can talk with Him and share these burdens and find strength.  By talking with God I find so much more than help – I find the joy of truly knowing Him.  The bad news is that I forget that or stubbornly refuse to go to Him for help.

Prayer becomes easy, enjoyable, necessary, & satisfying when we become aware of our frailty and emptiness.

This Monday we discussed the Sovereignty of God & Prayer at City Seminary. We defined the sovereignty of God as: “The pleasure of the triune God in ruling over all things.” We then applied this doctrine to anxiety in our lives, which is often manifested in: controlling fear, constant busyness, or distracting habits.

Detecting Anxiety Idolatry

How do you discern where anxiety is festering in your life? Try to find where your feelings are out of control, and you’ll find your idol (paraphrase of TK). For instance, controlling fear may paralyze you in parenting, air travel, or solitude. Our feelings can mislead us. As Thom Yorke says, “Just because you feel it doesn’t mean its there.” Just because you fear failure doesn’t mean its there or to be trusted. Anxiety offers us a false promise: “Be anxious and you’ll have control or peace.”

Moving Beyond Anxiety into Sovereignty

In order to move beyond anxiety, we need a true promise to rely on. Phillipians 4:6-7 promises us “peace that surpasses comprehension” if we will bring our anxieties to God in prayer. Now, this promise can only be true and trustworthy if God is sovereign. If he isn’t, he can’t promise incomprehensible peace in all circumstances. However, there’s a condition on this promise. We must give up self-sovereignty before we can trust in God’s sovereignty. Where are your emotions out of control? What is sovereign in your life? God or fear or busyness?

Prayer Works with a Sovereign God

The way forward from paralyzing anxiety is to trust in God’s sovereignty. This doesn’t happen through mental resignation; it requires genuine prayer and trust in God. Repentance from trusting in false promises and new faith in true promises. This gift of prayer brings us into sweet communion with God.

But if God is sovereign, doesn’t he already know what I will ask? Yes, he does (Matt 6:8) but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pray. He’s ordained our prayers to sovereignly accomplish our good and keep his promises of peace. Tim Chester puts it well:

God offers us prayer as a possibility and commands us to pray because he is a relational God who purposes to have a relationship with his people. It is not that God receives new data through our prayers, but that through our prayers information is clothed in love making it communication. God has ordained that he will be affected by our loving communication to him.

In prayer, anxious humans meet a joyfully sovereign God. He calls us to deep dependence on him and promises to replace our anxiety with peace.

Books on Prayer

• The Message of Prayer (Tim Chester)
• The Praying Life (Paul Miller)
• Prayer & the Knowledge of God (Graeme Goldsworthy)
• E.M. Bounds on Prayer
• The Valley of Vision (Puritan Prayers)

Articles

• Learning to Pray in the Spirit & the Word
• Prayer & Sovereignty of God
• Resurgence Series on Prayer
• Three Types of Prayer

HERE also check out Winfield Bevins’ series of posts on Prayer & Fasting

Numbering 5-7 million, the Shan are one of the largest unreached people groups in Southeast Asia. They suffer from illiteracy, addiction, prostitution, AIDS, poverty, broken families, and a loss of hope. Their Buddhist faith, intricately combined with animism, is deeply rooted in their culture. Though there is a Shan Bible and a small established church, very few Shan have ever heard about Jesus. The Shan need the Gospel and the Shan need your prayers.

If you sign up, starting tomorrow, you will receive one email a day for the next 30 days. Each email will provide a glimpse into the culture and daily life of the Shan people and will conclude with a few prayer requests.

Sign up here.

Read more on the Shan here.

Download a copy of the Shan Prayer Guide here.

We had a great time of teaching on prayer and praying together on Sunday. In the sermon we discussed three types of prayer and mentioned some resources. Note that the three types of prayer are present in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13. Here they are:

Prayers of Communion (Matt 6:9-10) � fellowship with the triune God through worship and thanksgiving. Prayers of communion are lingering over God�s greatness and goodness with gratitude.

• Praise God for his attributes: immensity, sovereignty, trinity, mercy, kindness, goodness,
• Thank God for his acts: creation, provision, salvation, protection, suffering, trial
• Meditate on his promises:

Prayers of Confession (Matt 6:12) � confession of sin, repentance, and hopeful faith in Christ. Being honest with God about who we are (sinners) and who he is (Savior).

• Confess sinful thoughts, actions, or feelings towards God or others
• Repent from valuing, cherishing, desiring, trusting in that person or thing or event
• Receive God�s perfect forgiveness and grace for our God-belittling sin
• Trust in the truth and grace of the gospel, that Christ is more desirable and trustworthy than these other things, no matter how good they are

Prayers of Petition (Matt 6:11, 13) � requests for all kinds of things in Jesus name for Jesus� fame. Prayers of petition are an opportunity for our desires to be aligned with God�s desires, not our will but his will (Matt 6). All of our requests, in the end, should move us closer to his will.

• For wisdom
• For healing
• For provision
• For mission

Here are some helpful books I mentioned on prayer,� including one by Tim Chester. The primary book I referred to is A Praying Life, by Paul Miller. Here is a blog post I wrote on Jesus, the Most Dependent Human Being Ever inspired by Miller’s insights.

I came across an interesting post that compares prayer to having sex with God.

But in order to have sex, you have to get naked, wrinkles and cellulite and all. In fact, in all honestly, prayer is like sex with God with the lights on. So often we are afraid to let God truly “see us” because He might think we are ugly, and leave without even so much as having a cigarette. Even Adam and Eve feared being naked before God.

What do you think?

As I continue to read through A Praying Life, I find myself pausing, repenting, rejoicing, deepening in prayer. In the chapter “Spending Time with Your Father”, Miller makes the point that Jesus acted like a child. Whenever asked about his Father, his comments were laced with affectionate dependency and admiration. Was this Jesus just “saying the spiritual thing, the right thing”? After all, he is Jesus; isn’t he powerful enough to do all the miracles on his own, to fulfill his calling on his own?

Miller asserts that “Jesus was the most dependent human being who ever lived.” Why? Because his entire sense of self is not self-reliant, self-centered. Rather, Jesus is because the Father and the Spirit are.

Unlike us, “Jesus has no separate sense of self, he has no identity crisis, no angst. Consequently, he doesn’t try to ‘find himself’. He knows himself only in relationship with his Father. He can’t conceive of himself outside of that relationship.

Here we have a very practical unpacking of perichoresis. Prayer was a constant expression of his identity as Jesus-in-relationship-with-the-Father. There is no other Jesus. Our trouble is that we have a self that is created out of relationship with the Father, a sinful, self-reliant not God-reliant self. Prayer returns us to our proper place of self, restores our identity as Jonathan-in-relationship-with-Father-Son-Spirit. Prayer reminds us of who we really are, where we find our identity, where we are most loved and best fathered. We spend time alone with God in prayer, not because it is a Christian duty, but because he is our father, because we love him, and we spend time alone with those we love most. We pray because we live with Him.

Prayer is one of the main agencies through which we are brought ot understand the mind of Christ toward our particular mission and the work of the kingdom of God in general. Undoubtedly the small quantity of intelligent intercessory prayer in most twentieth century congregations is part of the short-circuiting of missionary consiousness among the laity. The establishment of the kingdom of God is an elusive tak; we cannot even see what it involves in our vicinity without specific prayer, and we certainly will have little urgency to carry it out unless we are praying. ~ Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, 156-57

God is disposed to give himself to us, if we will only press into him. How can we receive of the bounty of God’s infinite goodness unless we pray? We have not because we ask not.

We become lifeless in ministry apart from him, as reminded by a friend this morning, the branch withers apart from the sap-flowing, life-sustaining vine. He is the Vine! And he ultimately calls us to come to him, not for the fruit of conversion or for the anointing in sermons or wisdom in counsel, but rather ,he is calling us to come to him for Him.

How do we come to him? We come to him in prayer, in the secret closet of communion with the holy Trinity.George Mueller has rightly been recognized as a man of prayer, a man who faithfully prayed and steadily restrained himself from asking others for money, financial support, to build five orphanages on Ashley Down and fill them with hundreds of abused, neglected, and abandoned children. He had the faith of ten thousand church planters, but beneath his great faith and prayer for God’s provision was a goal even more noble that housing and caring for orphans, a goal greater than ministry or church planting. Why did he not fundraise but “merely” pray for orphan provision? He writes:

I have refrained, because one of the primary objects of this Institution is, to bring before the world and the Church a tangible proof, how much even in this Nineteenth Century can be accomplished simply through the instrumentality of prayer and faith; and to give a clear demonstration, that God is now as much the Living God as He was Four Thousand years ago.

Brothers, we are in need of such a clear demonstration in the 21st century, not so much a demonstration of good works and godly provision, but a demonstration of the Living God. Mueller’s aim was ultimately the display of God’s living and abiding glory in a world that was prone to neglect and dismiss him. And should our aim as church planters, as pastors, as disciples of Jesus be any different? Should we not join Mueller on our knees, not supremely for his providential care or provision, but for Him, for a first-hand experience and demonstration of his sublime excellency and animated glory? To this end, may we pray, may we seek, and may we find him.