[Written by Dr. Chris Peters]
“You can do more than pray after you pray, but you cannot do more than pray, until you pray.” – John Bunyan
The past Sunday, I invited our church to join me in four weeks of growing our prayer life. This is not only a helpful theme in general, but an important way for us to conclude our fantastic Missions Month and prepare to enter our Building Campaign in about a month.
4 Passages
Over the next few weeks we will examine four passages the Apostle Paul wrote, each of which gives us a model of how we can pray for ourselves, our families, our church family and our community. We started with Colossians 1:3-14 and saw that both spiritual growth, in general, and maturing in prayer, in particular, are grounded in God’s Good News of grace. We can pray and we should pray, propelled by the knowledge God has “qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.” And he has “delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His Beloved Son.” Because of Christ’s work in our lives we have the privilege and responsibility of prayer.
4 Tools
In addition to learning from these specific passages from Paul, I hope to share four key resources for prayer. On Sunday, I mentioned Donald Whitney’s short, but profound, book Praying the Bible. He contends that the primary reason most of us don’t pray more is that we are bored in prayer, and that we are bored in prayer, not because we pray over the same life matters, but because we do not use Scripture to direct our prayers.
In the upcoming weeks I will help us learn for the first time, or recall for fresh application, the acrostic A.C.T.S as a format for prayer, and also will show us how to use PrayerMate, a useful prayer App for smart devices. And lastly, we will talk about combining fasting with prayer.
In all of this, I hope we will be propelled to engage more deeply in prayer for missions, as one commitment we call make from our Missions Month, and I trust we will be equipped for the season of prayer we aim to have as a centerpiece for Twelve – Called By Him, Called For Him – our upcoming Building Campaign.
