Fighting to pray

I believe that prayer matters.  So does Satan.

Satan actively works to stop my praying - and, too often, he succeeds.

I know - as Satan does - that prayer is vital in advancing the kingdom of God.  Jesus prayed throughout his work on earth and called on us to pray because he said prayer is powerful.  We are working with God as we pray.

But everyone who prays knows that we are constantly bombarded with reasons not to pray - thoughts that Satan drops into our minds.

Watchman Nee, a great Chinese Christian who died in a Chinese Communist prison camp several decades ago, was aware of this issue in his own life and discussed it in his book The Prayer Ministry of the Church.

Nee says we must be watchful and persistent in our prayers - we must fight the distractions that Satan uses to turn us away from time with the Lord.

He points to Paul's words in Ephesians 6:18: "And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.  With this in mind, be alert and always keep praying for all the Lord's people."

Paul's comments come at the end of a great passage in Ephesians 6 where he urges us to "put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes".  He outlines the various spiritual weapons at our disposal to combat Satan's wiles, culminating in prayer.

What does it mean to "be alert" as Paul says?  It means being aware that even seemingly harmless things may be used by the evil one to divert us from prayer.

Maybe it is our jobs or even our families.  It could be worthy church activities.  Or, it could be hobbies or pleasant diversions which draw our minds away from prayer.

More damaging, perhaps, is the thought that prayer is ultimately useless.  Even prayer warriors may fall victim to that idea if fervent prayers are not answered as we wish.

Nee says we must begin by placing prayer in a "preeminent position".  We must take on faith the Bible's declarations that prayer matters and is effective in carrying out God's plan on earth.

For many Christians, the demand of church activities can squeeze out the time normally spent in prayer.  If that's the case, Nee says, we should bring these duties before God and ask him to ensure they will not suffer any damage as we pray.

He suggests we ask God to "protect this time of prayer and forbid Satan to intrude for I am using this time to seek your glory."

Nee also calls on us to ask God to help us pray because we may find we don't have the words to pray through the distracting thoughts Satan always uses against us.

As well, he warns against praying empty words - just rhyming off old prayers without sincerity.

"Do not pray without any desire in your heart," he writes.  "All prayers should be governed by heart desire."

We should be specific in our prayers, as specific as we can be.  Satan will try to get us to pray vaguely and generally.

Being alert also means watching what happens after we pray, Nee says.  We can adjust our prayers as we see how God is working.

The apostle Paul saw that spiritual forces - good and bad - are far more powerful than what is in our world.  Whether we realize it or not, we believers are engaged in spiritual warfare.

Satan is trying to take away our most powerful weapon - prayer.  We must fight back.

Keep your ears open!

Peter Lord has learned to keep his spiritual ears open to God.

The results are sometimes amazing.

Lord, author of Hearing God, says he has never heard God speak to him audibly.

But he does tell people regularly that "God spoke to me" through "the concrete impressions in my heart and mind".

"I know God was communicating to me because the words I heard came to pass and the outcomes bore fruit that glorified him."

Here's an example:  Lord was pastor of Park Avenue Baptist church in Titusville, Florida when he received a strong impression in early December that God wanted him to construct a building where people could pray.

But there was a major catch: God was saying to him that "as proof that this is my idea and not yours, I will send someone to the church who will give five hundred dollars toward the building".  The Lord added that this would happen before Christmas, just three weeks away.

Lord recorded this impression but did not tell anyone about it because he feared some well-meaning person would feel he should give the money to make this come true.

Two weeks went by and nothing happened.  Lord began to doubt what he had heard.

On December 20, he prayed: "Lord, are you sure you didn't mean by New Year's Day?"

On December 24, a married couple from another city pulled into the church parking lot.  They asked the church secretary if they could see him.

"Pastor, you don't know us, but when we were praying, God spoke to us," they told him. "We don't really understand why we needed to drive here to give this to you, but we're just being obedient."

They handed him a cheque for $500.  And they later contributed an even larger amount.

The prayer chapel was built and has been used for many years for prayer intercession.

This should not be a surprise to believers.  There are a number of stories in the Book of Acts where God speaks to people through visions and other means.  Often this led to major breakthroughs for Christ in the ancient world.

In Acts 10, we read about Cornelius, a Roman centurion, who is told by an angel in a vision to get the apostle Peter to come to him from another city.

While his servants are on the way, God urges a reluctant Peter in a vision to eat what the apostle considered unclean and impure from  Jewish standpoint.  Puzzling over this, he is interrupted by the arrival of Cornelius' servants.

When he complies to their request and Cornelius becomes a believer, Peter realizes that the good news of Jesus Christ is for non-Jews as well as Jews.  That was a major turning point in the spread of Christianity.

Lord calls on us to pay attention to the emotions, desires, and impressions that come to us which lead us to honour God.  If they are what God wants of us as believers, we can be confident God is speaking to us.

This is impetus to keep our ears open.

Titans of prayer

I am in awe of titans of prayer like Moses and Father Nash.

Father Nash? Many know of Moses' powerful prayers to God for his people, but most are unaware of Father Nash.

Father Nash - his real name was Daniel Nash - was a country preacher in northern New York state whose persistent and dedicated praying supported the great American evangelist Charles Finney in the 1820s and 1830s.

Despite success in his small church, he was voted out of his job by his congregation and was jobless when he encountered Finney.  Finney recognized an amazing man of prayer when he met him and, from then on, the two worked as a team - aided by a couple of other prayer warriors.

Many of us would consider him strange today.  There are stories of people overhearing him and Abel Clary, another prayer warrior, groaning as they prayed for people behind closed doors in the towns where Finney preached.

They groaned because the Holy Spirit was working on their hearts to the point where they yearned for people to come to the Lord.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Moses groaned, too, as he prayed for the Israelites.  Moses spent a lot of time in a tent set aside for prayer - the "tent of meeting" - where people would go to seek God.

The most wonderful story of Moses' intercession is in Exodus 32-33 where the Israelite leader and prophet pleads with God to not destroy the Israelites for their disobedience.  And God responds by promising to not abandon his people but to take them into the promised land.

Father Nash was like that.

One writer reported that "Finney said that the key which unlocked the heavens in the [Rochester, New York] revival was the prayer of Clary, Father Nash, and other unnamed folk who laid themselves prostrate before God's throne and besought Him for a divine out-pouring".   More than 100,000 people became believers during meetings in that city.

There was strong opposition to Finney and Nash and his co-workers.  On one occasion, opponents - including some church leaders - burned Finney and Nash in effigy.  On other occasions, they threw rocks at the houses where they preached or fired guns nearby or tried to disturb the meetings with noisy demonstrations.

This teaches me that praying for God's kingdom to advance and spread - for people to give their lives to Christ - is vital.

I am reminded of the terrible words in Ezekiel 22:30 where God says he looked for people to "build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found none".

That's a challenge to me and to praying people everywhere.