How To Pray For Half-An-Hour

..............Some have wondered: How do you spend a half-an-hour in prayer, not to mention two or three hours? Here is my three-fold answer:

1. Resolve to do it. Don’t purpose to pray until you run dry. Purpose to pray the full half-hour. Prayer is work. It is not always a “sweet hour.” Jesus did many works with ease, but he prayed with “loud crying and tears” (Hebrews 5:7).

2. Think about what you want to see change in your heart and life and family and neighborhood and church and world. Make a list if necessary. Then pray through it, giving God reasons from Scripture why this is something that he would surely do.

3. Put the Bible in front of you and simply read a line and turn it into a prayer. Paraphrase it, expand on it, apply it to yourself and others. This works best with the ethical portions of Scripture like Matthew 5-7; Romans 12; 1 Corinthians 13; Galatians 5, 6; Ephesians 4-6; Colossians 3, 4; 1 Thessalonians 5; 1 John, etc. You can pray all day once you catch on. And you will be surprised how many insights come as you really take Scripture seriously and try to pray it into your life. If you run into theological or interpretational problems, tell the Lord you will work on that later and move on. If we seek hard to obey what we do understand, more light will come on the hard parts.

I am praying for your praying. What depth and power we will have as a church if hundreds of us learn to pray over the Word of the Almighty God!

By John Piper

Make This a Day of Turning

This is simply copied and pasted from the Desiring God Blog but I thought I'd put it here too since prayer is certainly on my mind all the time....

Here’s the challenge John Piper issues as he closes his chapter on prayer (chapter 6) in Desiring God:

[O]ne of the main reasons so many of God’s children don’t have a significant life of prayer is not so much that we don’t want to, but that we don’t plan to. If you want to take a four-week vacation, you don’t just get up one summer morning and say, “Hey, let’s go today!” You won’t have anything ready. You won’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned.

But that is how many of us treat prayer. We get up day after day and realize that significant times of prayer should be a part of our life, but nothing’s ever ready. We don’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned. No time. No place. No procedure. And we all know that the opposite of planning is not a wonderful flow of deep, spontaneous experiences in prayer. The opposite of planning is the rut. If you don’t plan a vacation, you will probably stay home and watch TV. The natural, unplanned flow of spiritual life sinks to the lowest ebb of vitality. There is a race to be run and a fight to be fought. If you want renewal in your life of prayer, you must plan to see it.

Therefore, my simple exhortation is this: Let us take time this very day to rethink our priorities and how prayer fits in. Make some new resolve. Try some new venture with God. Set a time. Set a place. Choose a portion of Scripture to guide you. Don’t be tyrannized by the press of busy days. We all need midcourse corrections. Make this a day of turning to prayer—for the glory of God and for the fullness of your joy. (Desiring God, 2003 edition, pages 182–183)

Thomas Watson and Prayer

As I was thinking about what to share at the lunchtime prayer meeting today I thought again about giving an encouragement from God's Word to keep on praying and not give. This caused me to look for Thomas Watson's comments on delayed answers to prayer that I remembered reading in a Piper sermon a while back.

Piper wrote,

Thomas Watson, a Puritan pastor from 350 years ago, asked in his book, Body of Divinity, "Why does God delay an answer to prayer?" In other words, why would God ever keep us asking and seeking and knocking when he could respond sooner? He gives four answers (Baker Book House, 1979, pp. 399-400). I give these to you for your pondering as we press on in prayer...

1. Because he loves to hear the voice of prayer. "You let the musician play a great while before you throw him down money, because you love to hear this music."
2. That he may humble us. We may too easily assume we merit some ready answer, or that he is at our beck and call like a butler, not as sovereign Lord and loving Father.
3. Because he sees we are not yet fit or ready for the mercy we seek. It may be he has things to put in place—in us or in our church or in the world. There are a million pieces to the puzzle. Some things go first to make a place for the others.
4. Finally, that the mercy we pray for may be the more prized, and may be sweeter when it comes.