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Practical Alternatives to Prayer Meetings

By Jeremy Myers
5 Comments

Practical Alternatives to Prayer Meetings
Cancel Prayer meetings
Is this four prayer meetings every day? Imagine how much they could be doing in the community to be an answer to prayer!

After we recognize the problems of prayer meetings, we can start taking practical steps to help people better understand what prayer is, how to pray, and how to become answers to our own prayers.

Cancel Prayer Meetings

You may want to cancel all your church prayer meetings, or at least the regularly-scheduled prayer meetings. 

There is nothing wrong with having a time of corporate prayer on an occasional basis in response to a deep need or issue that is facing the entire congregation. But a regularly scheduled prayer meeting is most often unhealthy for the life of the church, and leads to many of the problems mentioned in previous posts. So cancel it.

But this does not mean we cancel prayer. Not at all!

Don’t Cancel Prayer

With some targeted teaching on prayer, and modeling of a healthy prayer life, pastors and church leaders can actually unleash the power of prayer within their congregation.

Rather than meet simply to pray, meet to go serve the community, and before you go, spend a few minutes in prayer for eyes to see and ears to hear the needs and issues that people in the neighborhood are dealing with.

Then remind the people that as they serve others, to maintain that prayerful communication with God to listen for what He might be leading His children to say and do. This sort of prayer can set a church on fire!

This is the active prayer life of the church.

This is the prayer of faith that moves mountains, feeds the multitudes, cleans up the city, and reaches thousands for Christ.

As a church moves out into the community with prayers of faith and acts of service, the true power of prayer is unleashed within the community of believers, and they begin to see prayer for what it is and how it works.

Let prayer meetings cease, not because prayer is unimportant, but because it is too important to be held hostage in a back room of the church building.

Do you want to pray like never before?

Do you what to talk to God like you talk to a friend? Do you want to see more answers to prayer?

If you have these (and other) questions about prayer, let me send you some teaching and instruction about prayer to your email inbox. You will receive one or two per week, absolutely free. Fill out the form below to get started.

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God is Redeeming Church, Redeeming Life Bible & Theology Topics: answers to prayer, Books I'm Writing, Close Your Church for Good, Discipleship, how to pray, pray to God, What is prayer

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Did you pick up any of these bad habits from Prayer Meetings?

By Jeremy Myers
11 Comments

Did you pick up any of these bad habits from Prayer Meetings?

As we conclude this chapter from Close Your Church for Good called “Let Prayer Meetings Cease” I have two recommendations for prayer meetings. The first one is below, the second will get posted tomorrow.

Prayer Meetings
Look at all of these prayer meetings! Would there be a better way for these people to spend there time?

Prayer Meetings Teach Bad Prayer Habits

First, we must recognize that most of the bad habits that people use in prayer are not learned from Scripture, but from prayer meetings. Scripture teaches us that God is a friend and a Father, there by our side, wanting to have an ongoing conversation with us about what is important to Him and what is important to us. We can talk to Him as we would talk to any other person.

But the things we learn in prayer meetings would never occur to someone who had not ever attended a prayer meeting.

It is in prayer meetings where we learn that prayer must be said in a certain location, using certain terminology and language, and sitting, or standing, or kneeling in a certain posture.

It is in prayer meetings that people learn the repetitive use of God’s name and certain phrases and to use 1611 King James English.

It is because of prayer meetings that we feel justified in spreading gossip about others while calling it “sharing a prayer request.”

It is because of payer meetings that we delay praying for someone when they need it, telling them instead, “I’ll mention it at prayer meeting.”

It is because of prayer meetings that we often feel it is better to pray about a need than actually do something to meet that need.

It is because of prayer meetings that we feel if we pray, we don’t have to obey.

IT is because of prayer meetings that we feel that if we pray for world missions and evangelism, we don’t have to do it ourselves.

Organic Prayer Meetings

Finding Organic ChurchFrank Viola has noticed many similar patterns in prayer meetings, and in his book Finding Organic Church, he writes this:

…Many Christians have picked up a great deal of artificiality in the way they pray and talk about spiritual matters. This is largely due to imitating bad models. To be more pointed: The way that many Christians pray is abysmal.

I would advise against having meetings where everyone offers a prayer request. Why? Two reasons. First, those meetings will no doubt turn out to be highly religious. (In every “prayer-request” meeting I’ve ever been in, the kinds of things that some Christians ask god to do for them range from the ludicrous to the insane.) Second, those meetings will be the first step down a slippery slope that will eventually become the death knell for your group.

There’s a great deal of unlearning and relearning that we Christians need when it comes to communing with the Lord. If the truth be told, most Christians would do well to allow their way of praying to go into death.

Do you want to pray like never before?

Do you what to talk to God like you talk to a friend? Do you want to see more answers to prayer?

If you have these (and other) questions about prayer, let me send you some teaching and instruction about prayer to your email inbox. You will receive one or two per week, absolutely free. Fill out the form below to get started.

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God is Redeeming Church, Redeeming Life Bible & Theology Topics: answers to prayer, Close Your Church for Good, Discipleship, prayer, prayer meetings, What is prayer

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How to get God to work in response to your prayers

By Jeremy Myers
9 Comments

How to get God to work in response to your prayers

Work and Prayer

Many people believe that prayer is unnecessary, because if God wants something done, He will do it whether we pray or not, and if something is not His will, it will not happen, even if we pray for it.

No one refutes this idea better than C. S. Lewis. He has written about prayer in numerous places. Three of his best works on prayer are “Work and Prayer” in God in the Dock, “The Efficacy of Prayer” in The World’s Last Night, and what he writes about prayer in his Letters to Malcolm.

Essentially, the argument of C. S. Lewis is this: Any responsibility in this world which God can pass on to human beings, He does pass on to human beings.

God prefers not to do something if a human can do it.

And God has provided two means by which we can accomplish these God-given tasks: work and prayer. And just as we view work as a way of getting things done in the world, we must begin to view prayer similarly.

Here is what Lewis writes in “Work and Prayer”:

You cannot be sure of a good harvest whatever you do to a field. But you can be sure that if you pull up one weed that one weed will no longer be there. You can be sure that if you drink more than a certain amount of alcohol you will ruin your health or that if you go on for a few centuries more wasting the resources of the planet on wars and luxuries you will shorten the life of the whole human race. The kind of causality we exercise by work is, so to speak, divinely guaranteed, and therefore ruthless. By it we are free to do ourselves as much harm as we please. But the kind which we exercise by prayer is not like that; God has left Himself discretionary power. Had He not done so, prayer would be an activity too dangerous for man and should have the horrible state of things envisaged by Juvenal: “Enormous prayers which Heaven in anger grants.”

Prayers are not always – in the crude, factual sense of the word – “granted”. This is not because prayer is a weaker kind of causality, but because it is a stronger kind. When it “works” at all it works unlimited by space and time. That is why God has retained a discretionary power of granting or refusing it; except on that condition prayer would destroy us.

Read the whole on Prayer by C. S. Lewis here.

Do you want to pray like never before?

Do you what to talk to God like you talk to a friend? Do you want to see more answers to prayer?

If you have these (and other) questions about prayer, let me send you some teaching and instruction about prayer to your email inbox. You will receive one or two per week, absolutely free. Fill out the form below to get started.

Membership-become-a-member

Thanks for visiting this page ... but this page is for Discipleship Group members.

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God is Redeeming Life, Redeeming Theology Bible & Theology Topics: answers to prayer, Close Your Church for Good, CS Lewis, Discipleship, prayer, What is prayer

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How to Pray According to God’s Will

By Jeremy Myers
7 Comments

How to Pray According to God’s Will

Once we understand that talking with God is like talking to a person who is with us always, and that Scripture (especially the Psalms) can be a helpful guide in learning what to pray and how to pray, all of mystery disappears from praying according the will of God.

Pray According to Gods Will

Scriptures on Prayer

Several passages in Scripture have caused lots of problems over the years regarding prayer. Here are some of the more prominent:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! (Matthew 7:7-11)

If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you. (John 15:7)

Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him. (1 John 5:14-15)

Some have developed entire ministries around this idea that if you want something, all you have to do is ask God for it, and ask with enough faith, He will give it to you whatever you ask.

What is often neglected in these ministries is that the emphasis in the context of these Scriptures is not on the kind of faith or the amount of faith, but on abiding with Christ and asking according to the will of God.

Abide with Christ

What does it mean to abide with Christ? It means to remain, to dwell, to stay with. Abiding with Christ, or remaining with Him, is a prominent theme in John 14-17, and the first letter of John, and in both contexts it seems that to abide with Christ simply means to always be aware of His presence. To be in constant communication with Him. To understand that He is always with you, and you are always with Him.

To abide with Christ means to talk with Him and go through life with Him as you would someone who is always by your side.

Praying God's WillAs we develop this constant awareness and the constant communication that Goes with it, and as we learn to pray the Scriptures, we will soon find that our prayer life changes, what we pray for changes, and how we pray changes.

We will soon be praying for things that are only found in Scripture, which of course are all according to the will of God, and those things which we pray for which are not found in Scripture, our prayers for them will simply be part of a long-running conversation with God where He challenges some of our motives and requests and helps us focus on what we really need from His perspective, and what would be best for His purposes and mission in the world.

Praying According to the Will of God

As we pray Scripture, and as we pray conversationally with God, we can know that He is informing and guiding and refining our prayer requests so that we are praying according to His will.

We pray according to the will of God as we gain awareness of the presence of God.

This is important because according to the passages above, when we pray according to His will, we know that He hears us, and we know that we have what we asked of Him. When we pray according to His will, we are guaranteed that our prayers get answered.

Do you want to pray like never before?

Do you what to talk to God like you talk to a friend? Do you want to see more answers to prayer?

If you have these (and other) questions about prayer, let me send you some teaching and instruction about prayer to your email inbox. You will receive one or two per week, absolutely free. Fill out the form below to get started.

Membership-become-a-member

Thanks for visiting this page ... but this page is for Discipleship Group members.

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God is Redeeming Life, Redeeming Scripture, Redeeming Theology Bible & Theology Topics: answers to prayer, Close Your Church for Good, Discipleship, how to pray, prayer, What is prayer

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Why you should try Praying the Psalms

By Jeremy Myers
5 Comments

Why you should try Praying the Psalms

In previous posts, we have seen that both the prayers of Jesus and the prayers of Paul were conversational prayers with God. They talked to God about the same sorts of things they would talk to anyone else about, and used the same sort of language. The book of Psalms reflects something similar about prayer. When we pray the Psalms, we learn to pray to God in a way that sounds like we are talking to anyone else.

Praying the Psalms

The Psalms as Prayers

The Psalms are not exactly prayers. They are actually songs that were intended to be sung. But they are not just songs, either. They were intended to be sung when Israel worshiped God in the temple and during their annual festivals. As such, it is safe to think of the Psalms as prayers to God that are sung.

And the great thing about the Psalms is that they reflect the full range of human emotions. If you are feeling something … there’s a Psalm you can use to pray about it.

Most of the Psalms are about giving praise and honor God, and calling on the people to faithfully love and serve Him, but sometimes the Psalmist is angry with God, and tells Him so (Psalms 10:1; 22:1; 42:9; 74:1, 11). Other times the Psalmist is angry and people, and tells God about this too, to the point of asking God to destroy his enemies (Psalms 54:5; 79:10; 143:12). Sometimes the Psalms are quite long (Psalm 119). Sometimes short (Psalm 117). Sometimes they use repetition (Psalm 136). Sometimes they focus on simply praising God (Psalm 150), while others focusing on His past works (Psalm 78).

Walter Brueggemann, in his excellent little book, Praying the Psalms, says that the Psalms are not the voice of God addressing us, but rather contain the voice of a common humanity addressing God (p. 1). When you pray the Psalms, you are praying together with believers throughout the world and throughout time.
Praying the Psalms

Conversations with God

When people wonder what sorts of things they can and should pray about, and what kind of language and words to use when communicating with God, it is often not enough to just tell them that they can have a conversation with God just like with any other person. For some, this seems too informal.

So it is often always a good idea to also recommend the Book of Psalms a helpful guide to learning how to pray and what to pray for. As people pray through the Psalms, they learn that pretty much anything can be said to God, and any emotion is welcome by Him. There are no taboo topics or emotions.

Again, from Walter Brueggemann: “The Psalter knows that life is dislocated. No cover-up is necessary” (Praying the Psalms, p. 9).

But this is just like our real relationships in life, right? Your genuine relationships, your meaningful friendships, are the ones where you interact with each other with honesty and reality. You share your emotions, feelings, and ideas without fear of being judged. Where you do not have this freedom to be real, you do not have a real friendship.

So why do we so often hold back in our prayers? We should not and we must not, if we desire true friendship with God. When we pray the Psalms, we learn to express all our feelings and emotions to God, just as we do with any true friend.

But this is just like life, isn’t it? Our conversations with others cover the whole spectrum of emotions and subjects. Sometimes we are careful with our words and ideas. Other times we don’t hold back.

Just like the prayers of Jesus and the prayers of Paul, praying the Psalms helps us see that prayer is an ongoing and open conversation with God.

All of this, I think, helps us understand what Paul meant when He instructed the Thessalonian believers to “Pray without ceasing.”.

What about praying the Scriptures?

Do you want to pray like never before?

Do you what to talk to God like you talk to a friend? Do you want to see more answers to prayer?

If you have these (and other) questions about prayer, let me send you some teaching and instruction about prayer to your email inbox. You will receive one or two per week, absolutely free. Fill out the form below to get started.

Membership-become-a-member

Thanks for visiting this page ... but this page is for Discipleship Group members.

If you are already part of a Faith, Hope, or Love Discipleship Group,
Login here.

If you are part of the free "Grace" Discipleship group, you will need to
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If you are not part of any group, you may learn about the various groups and their benefits here:
Join Us Today.

Membership-become-a-member

God is Redeeming Life, Redeeming Scripture Bible & Theology Topics: answers to prayer, Books I'm Writing, Close Your Church for Good, Discipleship, how to pray, pray to God, Psalms, What is prayer

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