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How to Develop a Powerful Prayer Life, Part One

Can we do something a little bit different, this morning? Would you allow me the freedom to step a bit outside our usual routine? God has placed a different kind of message on my heart, today and to get to it I need to involve you a little more directly in the opening moments of the message. I want to take a few moments to actually hear from you, today, and if this is going to work, we’re going to have to trust each other enough to be honest about something that may make us a little bit uncomfortable.

I want to ask you a few questions and I’d like you to actually answer me. No tricks. I’m not setting you up for anything. I just want to get a little feedback from you. OK? Let’s start with a really easy one.

A SURVEY

--How many of you consider yourself to be a Christian, that is, that you have a personal relationship with Jesus as both your Lord and your Savior?

--How many of you would say that your relationship with Jesus influences the way that you live your daily life, that is, that you actively strive to live your life in a way that is pleasing to God?

--How many of you believe that God wants to grow you spiritually beyond where you are today? You believe that God’s desire for you is that your relationship with Him would be continually growing deeper and stronger?

OK. Now, all of those questions were pretty easy but some of these next questions may cause us to get a little bit uncomfortable but, folks, we’re family. We love each other. We’re here for each other. So, let’s just keep it real and let’s be honest with one another.

So, we’ve acknowledged that God doesn’t want any of us to reach a certain level of spiritual maturity and then just stagnate and stay at that level for the rest of our lives. God’s desire is grow us deeper and deeper in our relationship with Him.

Next question:

--How many of you share that desire? You don’t want to plateau spiritually. You want your relationship with God to get deeper and closer as the months and years roll by.

--How many of you believe that prayer is one of the indispensable keys to a sustaining a lifetime of spiritual growth? In other words, without prayer, it is impossible…not just unlikely, but impossible…to experience everything that God wants us to experience in our relationship with Him. How many of you believe that?

--How many of you believe that God wants you to pray?

--How many of you believe that God hears you when you pray?

--How many of you believe that God that God actually answers your prayers?

--How many of you believe that God sometimes answers prayers in miraculous, supernatural ways?

All right, now here’s where it gets tough.

--How many of you would be willing to admit that even though you’re a Christian who is serious about pleasing God and growing in your relationship with Him…and you know that prayer is critical to that process…and you know that God wants us to pray…and you believe that God hears our prayer and answers our prayers……….even though all of that is true, you have found in your own experience that maintaining a consistent, disciplined practice of getting alone with God each day for a time of unhurried, uninterrupted prayer either has been a real struggle, continues to be a real struggle or it’s been something that you’ve never yet successfully sustained in your daily life? How many would say, “That’s me. Been there, done that.”

OK. I appreciate your honesty. Remember, folks, we’re family here. We’re here to help each other.

Now, let me say in response to your honesty that I don’t think that you’re at all unusual. I think your experience is actually representative of the vast majority of Christians. For a wide variety of reasons, some of which we’ll explore in the next few weeks, this discipline of setting aside time each day for the purpose of being alone with God in prayer is one of the most difficult of all the Christian disciplines to sustain.

And, folks, in the spirit of honesty let me confess to you that I can relate. I hope you noticed that my hand was up a few moments ago.

I’ve been walking with the Lord for a long time now and we have a really close relationship. When I wake up in the morning, my thoughts are drawn almost immediately to the Lord. And I begin to talk with Him. As I move through the day, God regularly grabs my attention and we converse, on and off, throughout the day. When I finally crawl into bed at night and close my eyes, my mind, again, is drawn almost immediately to the Lord and together we review the events of the day and I thank Him for His guiding hand. We have a great relationship. But even with all of those ongoing, running conversations with God throughout the day, it has been a struggle for me to secure and protect a time each day when I can shut myself into a quiet place and give my uninterrupted attention to God in prayer.

As I have recently sought God’s heart in this matter, I’ve realized that He doesn’t want me to settle for the status quo in my prayer life; and He doesn’t want you to settle for the status quo in your prayer life; and He doesn’t want us as a church family to settle for the status quo in our corporate prayer life. God has burned into my spirit an invitation to blow the status quo right out of the water. He wants to do it in my life, in fact, He’s already started doing it. He wants to do it in your life. And, folks, He wants to do it in our life together. He wants to turn each of us into praying people and He wants to turn Petaluma Valley into, “A House of Prayer.” And I can hardly wait to see it happen.

--I first glimpsed this vision in the fall of last year. I sensed God’s desire to lead me on an extended pilgrimage of prayer.

--Shortly after that, we launched our monthly church prayer meetings on the last Friday of the month and God immediately moved in dramatic fashion to confirm the direction in which we were heading as we saw Him answer our prayers with a full-blown, no other explanation miracle in the healing of Rick O’Connor’s brain aneurysm.

--This new prayer vision was further fueled and confirmed through the incredible experience that several of us had at the Pastor’s Prayer Conference at the Brooklyn Tabernacle last month.

--It was further confirmed, for me, just 2 weeks ago when I asked Sharon Agee to pray and see if God would lead her to become a member of my personal prayer team. The next Sunday she came to me and said, “All right. All right. I’m in. God obviously wants me praying for you. Every night since you asked me to pray about this God has woken me up throughout the night, with your name front and center in my mind. I’ll join your prayer team.”

--And it was confirmed to me yet again just a couple of days ago in the wonderful way that God showed His will to me in the selecting of a person to work with me to coordinate the prayer ministry of our church. For about the last month now I’ve had my prayer team praying that God would lead me to the person that He wants to be our Prayer Ministry Coordinator. Earlier this week God made His will clear to me. I met with the person, explained the position and asked him to begin to pray and see if this was something that he sensed that God was leading him to do.

Without a moment’s hesitation he said, “I knew this was coming. God put this on my heart several days ago. I gave Him every reason I could think of to prove that I wasn’t the right guy and He shot down all of my excuses. I don’t need to go home and pray about it any further. I’ve already been praying about it and God’s already answered.” I’m delighted to introduce our new Prayer Ministry Coordinator, Doug Ferrarelli.

Folks, all of this is to say that I am here today on Sunday, May 20, 2007 to tell you that God is turning Petaluma Valley into “A House of Prayer.” We are embarking upon a journey that is going to change our lives. And our lives are going to change because we are going to get to know God better than we’ve ever known Him before.

PRAYER: GETTING TO KNOW GOD BETTER

Folks, that’s what prayer is all about. It’s all about getting closer to God. And, folks, that’s #1 on God’s priority list for our lives. Far more important than anything we do for God is the quality of the love relationship that we maintain with God. Far more important.

--When Jesus was asked to identify the most important commandment what did He say? He said, “Serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Right? Wrong. His answer’s found in Mark 12:30. He said the most important commandment is this: “Love the Lord your God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” God’s first priority for us is that we will walk with Him in a relationship of love. And prayer is one of the primary means by which we deepen our love for God.

--When Jesus was explaining the essence of eternal life…the quality of life that God wants us to experience in our relationship with Him right here and right now…what did He say? He said, “Now this is eternal life: that they may serve you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” Is that right? Is that what He said. No. It’s not. His answer’s found in John 17:3 he says, “Now this is eternal life: That they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” Folks, God’s first priority for us is that we will walk in a loving relationship with the God that we really, truly know. And prayer is one of the primary means by which we get to know God.
You see, contrary to popular opinion, the primary purpose of prayer is not to try to get God to do stuff for us or to try to get God to give things to us. The primary purpose of prayer is for us to get to know God better and love Him more deeply. Prayer is the means by which we build a stronger and more intimate relationship with God.

PRAYER WORKS

And, do you know what? It works! It really and truly works. And it doesn’t just work for some of us. It works for all of us. As we become more and more faithful to spend time with God in prayer, our relationship with Him will get stronger and stronger. And you don’t have to just take my word on that…that’s a promise from God.

James 4:8 says, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.” Not, “He might.” Not, “He may.” “Come near to God and he will come near to you.” And, folks, when we pray we are choosing to come near to God.

Folks, God is not elusive by nature. He is a self-revealing God.

--He’s given us His written word so that we can get to know Him by studying His character, His promises, His plans and His purposes.

--He took on human flesh and became one of us in Jesus, so that we could see Him up close and really get to know Him.

--He’s given us the Holy Spirit to guide us and prompt us and open our eyes to spiritual truth and help us recognize His presence among us so that we can get to know Him.

--And He’s given us, His children, an open invitation to come into His presence any time of the day or night through prayer—so that we can talk to Him, share our heart with Him, listen to Him, receive from Him—and, in the process, get to know Him.
Now, I said up front that this was going to be a different kind of a sermon from me. So, I suppose it’s appropriate that we would bring things to a close, today, with a different kind of response.

Today, is the first day of a 27 day journey for our church family that we’re calling, “A Season of Prayer.” All of the details are in your bulletin—I hope you’ll take the time to read them thoroughly later. But right now I want to talk to you about the foundation of this journey and the foundation is, “The Prayer Closet.”

Here’s how it works. I am going to ask you, today, to make a bold but very doable commitment. In your bulletin you will find a blue card with the heading, “The Prayer Closet.” And the commitment that I’m asking you to make is printed there—“I commit to spend at least 10 minutes in private, personal prayer each day through June 15.”

That’s it. 10 minutes of private, personal prayer per day for the next 31⁄2 weeks.
And to help you as you pray each day, I’ve written a daily prayer guide that I’m going to send you each day via email. If you’ll just provide me your email address on The Prayer Closet card I’ll send you that daily prayer guide. If you don’t have email, we have paper copies available for you in the foyer.

So, if you’ve never done this before and think you don’t know how to pray or can’t imagine what you would pray for everyday, the prayer guide will walk you through the process.

And if you already have a well-developed habit of prayer, I’m confident that you’ll find that the prayer guides will be helpful to you as well—prompting you to pray in ways and about things you might not have considered before.

Now, I realize that the idea of making any kind of commitment can be a bit scary—and making a prayer commitment may seem especially scary to some of you.

--Some of you may be a bit nervous because you’ve never done this before.

--Others of you may be a little uneasy because you’ve made a similar kind of prayer commitment in the past and failed.

--Others of you may hesitant for reasons I’ve not mentioned.
But, folks, I have been praying all week long about this very moment. And this has been my prayer.

--That your desire to know God better, will move you past whatever fears might be trying to keep you from making this commitment.

--That your desire to love God more fully, will move you past whatever concerns you have about making this commitment.

--Most importantly, that your confidence in God’s promise is enough to move you to make this commitment. And this is the promise of God—“Come near to me and I will come near to you.”