Prayer

The Most Easily Overlooked Prayer

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Recently I had an aha moment! It happened while I was going through my prayer list of people for whom I pray regularly. The list, which has grown to over a hundred people, includes family members, relatives, friends and those who serve in the ministry and as missionaries. Since they are people I consider as given to me by God, just as Jesus viewed those the Father had given Him, I have been using His John 17 prayer as a model for similar ways to pray for them. (See Pray Like Jesus for Family and Friends)

As I was praying I heard the Holy Spirit whisper to me “Do you know what people in your life are missing from this list?” Pause . . . . “Your enemies.” I thought to myself, “But why would I want to pray for them, they’ve hurt me?” But no sooner had that thought formed as a bubble poised above my head than a pin prick of truth from the Bible popped it. The words of Jesus came darting into the picture “But to you who are willing to listen, I say, love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you.” (Luke 5:27-28) Ouch!

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An Antidote for Murphy’s Law

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It never ceases to amaze me how all evidences of sanctified spirituality seemingly drain away when the littlest thing comes along to unnerve a person. That leaking joint did it for me. After several hours of running back and forth halfway around the house to turn the sprinkler system on and then off to test the connection, I finally gave up. I put my tools away and called it a day.

To be honest I even lost some sleep over it that night, praying and trying to figure out what to do to stop the leaking. The next morning, as I began my daily intercession time, I felt reluctant to even bother praying anymore about that ridiculously insignificant piece of plastic. Why with so many people suffering the world over and so many serious, life and death issues at stake, how could I waste God’s time and any more of my time on that stupid leak. And so I chose to forget about it and pray for others.

After breakfast, on an impulse I asked my wife Susan to take a minute and bow with me in prayer that God would somehow intervene to provide some answer for the leak. Having said “amen” I decided to walk out onto the deck and down the stairs to survey the challenge. It was then that I noticed a van parked in front of the house next door and the lettering on the side spelled the name of a local nursery. My neighbor was out talking to a young man who appeared to be the truck’s driver. To my delight, it turns out the guy was there to open up and test my neighbor’s sprinkler system. What a sight for sore eyes he was.

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6 Prayers God Always Answers

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“You do not have, because you do not ask God.” James 4:2b

We find in the book of James one of the clearest, most succinct teachings on prayer contained anywhere in the Bible. In just six verses James, the brother of Jesus and someone who should know something about prayer, encourages his readers with six different prayers that God loves to answer. The underlying reason for his emphasis on prayer in this epistle is stated in the words “you do not have, because you do not ask God.” It could go without saying, but needs to be said again and again, because we are so prone to forget: we need to pray to get answers to prayer. The answers we desire only come from prayers that are prayed. The more we pray, the more answers we get. It is that simple.

That having been said here are the six prayers that always get answers from God. They are taken from the passage in James 5:13-18.

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Never underestimate the power of your prayer!

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Never underestimate the difference a prayer can make. “Never stop praying” is one of the shortest verses in the Bible and yet it conveys a remarkable and unmistakable truth. Prayer makes a difference! Even when it may seem like a brief formality or something one does simply out of habit, prayer is nonetheless important and does make a difference. I learned this in an unforgettably humorous way back when I was a youth pastor.

One practice of prayer since my early days as a believer in Christ has been to pause before embarking on any long journey and pray to God for His traveling mercies. Typically it is a spontaneous type of prayer asking for His presence and protection as I and those with me travel to our destination. It is as simple as sitting in our vehicle just before starting out and bowing for a few moments in prayer. And as a leader I have always been particularly cognizant of the necessity of doing this whenever I have had a van or bus load of people heading out on an outing together.

One winter I chartered a school bus to take the youth from our church located in the Twin Cities (Minnesota) up into the woods of Northern Wisconsin for a weekend retreat. The retreat center was a rustic one that was situated just off an isolated forest road in the middle of nowhere.

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Pray like Jesus for Family and Friends

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“I pray for them. I am not praying for the world but for those you have given me, for they are yours.” John 17:9

Have you ever struggled to pray regularly for the people God has placed in your life? I know I have. Like many people, for years I used a prayer list of all my family and friends as a helpful place to begin. But even then I often had difficulty staying focused and praying meaningful, confident prayers for many of them. Invariably I would gravitate merely to a rote recitation of their names as I moved down the list. It was not however, until I discovered a biblical, tried and true way to effectively pray for them, that a new focus and faith began to energize my prayers.

There is one chapter in the Bible that is dedicated entirely to a verbatim prayer recited by Jesus. That chapter is John 17 and it is considered to be one of the great treasures in all of scripture because it preserves for posterity an entire prayer, prayed by the greatest pray-er who ever lived! Some have called it the His great High Priestly Prayer.

Apart from the first verse which says “After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed” everything that follows is in red letters. They are the words of Jesus as He prays to the Father for a very specific group of people: “for all those you have given me” (vs. 2, 6) and for “those who will believe in me through their message.” (vs. 20) In fact Jesus specifically narrows the field by saying “I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me.”

Who then is this select group for whom Jesus was praying?

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