Close Your Church for Good Archives - Page 32 of 63

James 2:14-21 has caused lots of problems in the church over the centuries. With our preoccupation with how to get to heaven when we die, we think that when James says, “Faith alone cannot save him, can it?” James is talking about eternal life and how to get to heaven when we die.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

The Book of James

The letter of James is one of the most practical books in the entire New Testament. It is not an evangelistic tract telling people how to get to heaven when they die. Instead, it is a book about how to love and serve one another in the church. It is practical book about money, favoritism, gossip, and meeting each other’s needs. Nowhere in the entire book is James concerned about trying to determine who has eternal life and who does not. This includes James 2.

James 2:14-21

When we read James 2 with this in mind, we see immediately what James is concerned about. There are brothers and sisters in the church who have need of food and daily clothes. There are others within the church who could meet those needs by providing food and clothes, but instead, they tell these needy brethren, “I have faith that God will provide for you.” In modern church lingo, we say, “I’ll pray for you.”

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How can I see more answers to prayer?

By Jeremy Myers

14 Comments

In a previous post, we have seen that work and prayer are both ways of accomplishing God’s will in the world.

This close connection between work and prayer as means of accomplishing God’s will in the world helps give us direction for how to see answers to our prayers, and how to go about accomplishing God’s will in this world.

Sometimes I think we confuse work and prayer: We pray when we should be working, and we work when we should be praying. There have been times in Christian history when the church has focused more on work than prayer, but I think that for the past fifty years or so, the church has focused more on prayer than work.

And this brings us back to the subject of prayer meetings. It is far more popular in many churches to get together and pray about a need in the community than it is to get together and actually do something about a need in the community.

Though prayer is a form of work, we must not think that prayer is a substitute for work.

Yet this is often what gets implicitly taught in many of our church prayer meetings.

Making Needs Known

People come together and share prayer requests for the neighbor lady whose husband is in the hospital, for the coworker who just got laid off, for the homeless people to find work, and for more people to start showing up for church.

These are all valid issues and concerns, but I think that in addition to praying for these things and then waiting for God to answer, He might want us to go and be an answer to our own prayers. I think God sometimes makes needs known to us, not so that we can pray about it, but so that we can do something about it.

I once saw a comic strip where a guy was praying, and he said, “God, why aren’t you answering any of my prayers?” And God’s reply was, “I was about to ask you the same thing.” (I tried to find this comic strip, but was unable. Do you know where it is?)

Praying for needs is important, but one way God wants to answer our prayers is by us going out to be answers to our own prayers.

Sometimes we don’t see answers to prayer, not because God doesn’t care or doesn’t want to answer them, but because God is saying to us, “Answer your own prayer.”

God often lays needs upon our minds so that we can both pray and do something about these needs.

The Church Advances on It’s Knees?

People often say that the church advances on its knees. While prayer is a vital activity of the church, when God presents to us a need we can meet, I don’t think He is pleased when we simply present the need right back to Him in prayer.

To really see God at work in our lives and in our churches, we sometimes need to get off our knees and serve. We need to unfold our hands, and help. We need to open our eyes and look around for the needs that God wants us to see.

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?

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How to get God to work in response to your prayers

By Jeremy Myers

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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?

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How to Pray According to God’s Will

By Jeremy Myers

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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.

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.

As 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?

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How to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17)

By Jeremy Myers

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Many people wonder what Paul meant in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 when he wrote about praying without ceasing.

But when we come to recognize prayer as a running conversation with God, it helps make sense of what Paul meant in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 when he instructed his readers to “pray without ceasing.”

If prayer is a set time and place where we go into a particular room, get down on our knees, fold our hands, bow our heads, close our eyes, and say certain things to God, it is nearly impossible to follow Paul’s instruction. How could one possibly do this nonstop?

Formal Prayer Without Ceasing is Impossible

And yet some Christians try.

You will often find illustrations in sermons and books on prayer about how prayer is a spiritual discipline, and while the new believer may only pray for five minutes a day, the longer one is a Christian, the more time they should spend in prayer, so that the truly spiritual prayer warrior will pray for several hours a day.

Martin Luther once said that he tried to spend two hours every day in prayer, but if he was really busy, he would spend three.

This sort of mentality was found in the Desert Fathers who went out into the wilderness so they could devote more time to prayer. Today, people go on “prayer retreats” so they can spend the majority of that time in prayer.

Yet in all of these cases, nobody claims to be praying without ceasing. They must sleep. They must eat. They must run errands, and talk to other people.

As long as one has a formalized definition of prayer that requires a certain posture and a certain way of speaking, then praying without ceasing is impossible.

Do not misunderstand.

I am not against formalized times, places, and postures of prayer. I think Jesus might have had all of these. We do read that He often got up very early in the morning, and went out to a solitary place to pray (Mark 1:35).

But it would be wrong to think that these were the only times Jesus prayed. Jesus understood what it meant to pray without ceasing, and these early mornings of prayer were a small part of His overall prayer life.

Conversational Prayer without Ceasing is Achievable and Enjoyable

Praying without ceasing requires us to think about prayer as we have seen in the recorded prayers of Jesus, Paul, and the Psalms.

If prayer is an ongoing conversation we are having with God, and if God is with us always, then we can always be in conversation with Him.

Sure, you will not always be talking to each other, but as in any relationship, silence is part of a conversation too. Sometimes there is a lot to say, and sometimes it is enough to just be in each other’s presence. Frequently, it is nice to sit down for a long talk, and other times, you can casually discuss issues as you run errands, take a walk, eat meals, or watch television.

When we view prayer as a conversation with a God who is always present, it opens up a whole new realm of freedom in prayer.

You no longer have to feel guilty about not spending enough time in prayer; you can always tell someone you pray nonstop during your waking hours. You no longer have to begin and end each prayer with certain words, because in an ongoing conversation, there is no beginning and end. You no longer have to remember to pray about something.

If you learn of a need, just start talking about it with God right then and there. If you find yourself in a bad situation, you no longer have to think, “I should have prayed for protection this morning.” If you find yourself in a predicament, don’t beat yourself over the head with guilt. That’s just makes things worse. Instead, pray for protection. A word or two will do: “God! Help!”

In these ways and so many others, your prayer life can be transformed from a tired and boring religious duty that you try to fit in to your busy day, into a vibrant and inspiring ongoing conversation with a living and powerful God who is always by your side.

You say “Good morning” when you wake up, and “Good night” when you go to bed. You thank him for the taste of your coffee, and praise Him for the beauty of the frost on the grass. You discuss with him the problems you are facing with your daughter, and your worry about the meeting with your boss at work.

And when you sin (as you will every day), you don’t need to fear that God was scared off. No, He’s seen and heard it all before. So you laugh with God about your weakness and thank Him for the forgiveness He has already offered by His grace through Jesus Christ. And then you continue with your day.

This is how we pray without ceasing. It is an ongoing conversation with God. Incidentally, this is also how we learn to pray according to the will of God.

If you want to learn more about this sort of prayer, I highly recommend The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.

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?

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Faith Alone is Useless

The Book of James

James 2:14-21

How can I see more answers to prayer?

Making Needs Known

The Church Advances on It’s Knees?

Do you want to pray like never before?

How to get God to work in response to your prayers

Do you want to pray like never before?

How to Pray According to God’s Will

Scriptures on Prayer

Abide with Christ

Praying According to the Will of God

Do you want to pray like never before?

How to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17)

Formal Prayer Without Ceasing is Impossible

Conversational Prayer without Ceasing is Achievable and Enjoyable

Do you want to pray like never before?

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