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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.ย 

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 Godโ€™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 โ€œsharing a prayer request.โ€

It is because of payer meetings that we delay praying for someone when they need it, telling them instead, โ€œIโ€™ll mention it at prayer meeting.โ€

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 donโ€™t have to obey.

IT is because of prayer meetings that we feel that if we pray for world missions and evangelism, we donโ€™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:

โ€ฆMany 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 โ€œprayer-requestโ€ meeting Iโ€™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.

Thereโ€™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.

Membership-become-a-member

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

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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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The key to prayer is to ASK (Ask, Seek, Knock)

By Jeremy Myers
9 Comments

The key to prayer is to ASK (Ask, Seek, Knock)

Ask Seek Knock

Jesus taught us to be answers to our own prayers when, in the Sermon on the Mount, He told His disciples, โ€œAsk, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be openedโ€ (Matthew 7:7-8).

When reading Matthew 7:7-8, most people think that Jesus was saying the same thing three different times: pray, and your prayer will get answered. In other words they read “Ask, seek, knock” as “Pray, pray, and pray again.”

But there may be a better way of understanding the words of Jesus.

Jesus is not simply telling His disciples to pray, but is giving them instructions on how to see answers to their own prayers.

Ask

First, Jesus tells them to ask. This is the prayer part. It is taking our requests and needs to God, and presenting them before Him. It is not that He is unaware of our needs, for He knows what we need before we ask Him (Matthew 6:8).

Just as we talk over the issues of our day with our spouse or friends, so also God wants us to communicate with Him about the issues and needs which are heavy on our hearts and minds. So, we ask Him about these things. This is the first step to prayer.

Seek

But after we ask, we donโ€™t simply keep asking. We must begin to seek. This is the second step. Seeking is when we look around for how God might answer our prayers. After we ask God for something, the next thing we must do is start looking around with eyes of faith for how God might be providing answers to the issues we discussed with Him.

Knock

Seeking answers to our prayers leads to the third step in getting our prayers answer: knocking. After we ask God to help us with our needs, and as we seek for possible ways that God might answer our requests, we must then step out in faith and knock on the doors that present themselves. When we ask, we ask with faith.

When we seek, we seek possible answers with eyes of faith. And when we knock, we step out and take risks with faith by pursuing opportunities that were brought to our attention during the seeking phase.

Ask Seek KnockSometimes the first door we knock on is the one that opens, but this is usually not the case. Sometimes we have to knock on ten, fifty, even hundreds of doors.

For this reason, the knocking phase is often the most difficult, but it is here that perseverance is vitally important if we are going to see answers to our prayers.

Want to see more answers to prayer?

Don’t just ask God for things. Step out and seek ways that He might answer them, and then knock on the doors of opportunity that are presented.

In this way, praying is more than just asking God for things and then sitting around, waiting for Him to respond.

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
Upgrade your Membership to one of the paid groups.

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, Redeeming Theology Bible & Theology Topics: Close Your Church for Good, Discipleship, how to pray, Matthew 6:8, Matthew 7:7-8, What is prayer

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Faith Alone is Useless

By Jeremy Myers
11 Comments

Faith Alone is Useless

James 2 Faith Works

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, โ€œFaith alone cannot save him, can it?โ€ 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 otherโ€™s needs. ย 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, โ€œI have faith that God will provide for you.โ€ In modern church lingo, we say, โ€œIโ€™ll pray for you.โ€

[Read more…]

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: Close Your Church for Good, Discipleship, Theology of Salvation

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I’ll Pray for You

By Jeremy Myers
5 Comments

I’ll Pray for You

I'll Pray For You VideoIn the middle of this series on prayer, I thought I would lighten things up a bit by posting a funny video.

I love this video, because if you don’t listen to the words, it sounds like a nice, happy-go-lucky, song about praying for other people.

Well, he is praying, but not for anything good. So the next time someone says, “I’ll pray for you” it might be good to stop and think about what they will be praying for.

I wish he wouldn’t have used a Voodoo website for the video, since I think that many of us Christians pray bad things on people we don’t like without resorting to Voodoo, but whatever…. Enjoy the video!


God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: Discipleship

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