Something else I’ve been meaning to post is this passage from Tim Keller:
Biblically and historically, the one non-negotiable, universal ingredient in times of spiritual renewal is corporate, prevailing, intensive and kingdom-centered prayer. What is that?
- It is focused on God’s presence and kingdom. Jack Miller talks about the difference between “maintenance prayer” and “frontline” prayer meetings. Maintenance prayer meetings are short, mechanical and totally focused on physical needs inside the church or on personal needs of the people present. But frontline prayer has three basic traits:
a. a request for grace to confess sins and humble ourselves
b. a compassion and zeal for the flourishing of the church
c. a yearning to know God, to see his face, to see his glory. . . .
- It is bold and specific. The characteristics of this kind of prayer include:
a. Pacesetters in prayer spend time in self-examination. . . .
b. They then begin to make the big request—a sight of the glory of God. That includes asking: 1) for a personal experience of the glory/presence of God (“that I may know you”—Exod. 33:13); 2) for the people’s experience of the glory of God (v. 15); and 3) that the world might see the glory of God through his people (v. 16). Moses asks that God’s presence would be obvious to all: “What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” This is a prayer that the world be awed and amazed by a show of God’s power and radiance in the church, that it would become truly the new humanity that is a sign of the future kingdom.
- It is prevailing, corporate. By this we mean simply that prayer should be constant, not sporadic and brief. . . . Sporadic, brief prayer shows a lack of dependence, a self-sufficiency, and thus we have not built an altar that God can honor with his fire. We must pray without ceasing, pray long, pray hard, and we will find that the very process is bringing about that which we are asking for—to have our hard hearts melted, to tear down barriers, to have the glory of God break through.
This is the kind of prayer the church needs to practice, and the kind of prayer meeting it really needs to hold (not that there isn’t value to maintenance prayer meetings as well, as part of the pastoral care of the church); it’s the kind of prayer which I’m working to encourage in the congregation I serve, which means first of all in myself. It’s hard; it takes faithfulness and commitment and attention; but I do believe the fruit is more than worth it.HT: Joyce