Dear friends,
What kind of prayers are you praying? Are your prayers filled with the words of the Kingdom or do you pray prayers of maintenance? In his book, Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City, Timothy Keller offers these powerful insights:
To kindle every revival, the Holy Spirit initially uses what Jonathan Edwards called “extraordinary prayer” united, persistent, and kingdom centered. Sometimes it begins with a single person or a small group of people praying for God’s glory in the community. What is important is not the number of people praying but the nature of the praying. C. John Miller makes a helpful and perceptive distinction between “maintenance” and “frontline” prayer meetings. 1 Maintenance prayer meetings are short, mechanical, and focused on physical needs inside the church. In contrast, the three basic traits of frontline prayer are these:
1. A request for grace to confess sins and to humble ourselves
2. A compassion and zeal for the flourishing of the church and the reaching of the lost
3. A yearning to know God, to see his face, to glimpse his glory
These distinctions are unavoidably powerful. If you pay attention at a prayer meeting, you can tell quite clearly whether these traits are present. In the biblical prayers for revival in Exodus 33; Nehemiah 1; and Acts 4, the three elements of frontline prayer are easy to see. Notice in Acts 4, for example, that after the disciples were threatened by the religious authorities, they asked not for protection for themselves and their families but only for boldness to keep preaching! Some kind of extraordinary prayer beyond the normal services and patterns of prayer is always involved.
So I ask again, what kind of prayers are you praying?
Blessings,
Pastor Stephen