Alden Powers, Music Director @Roosevelt Community Church
Last month my wife and I hosted a two-week-long morning prayer vigil on behalf of our missionary team in Kenya. Having served on the team two years before, we felt a calling to be diligently in prayer for our current team as they shared the gospel half a world away. Committing this much time to prayer for one specific thing really opened my eyes to the nature and power of prayer. I have prayed for missionary teams, I have participated in days of fasting and prayer, but never anything of this length and I wish I would have done more of these sooner in my life. Here are a few of my insights:
1. God listens to your prayers
God tells us in places like 1 Kings 9:3 and 2 Kings 20:5 that he does hear our prayers and act on them. When we got together and prayed we had no idea what was happening in Kenya. We didn’t know how the community was doing. We didn’t even know if the team had arrived safely. But we stepped out in faith and came to the Lord with our prayers anyway. Upon hearing reports when they returned, we were amazed by the level of transformation that had taken place. We know that the church is growing rapidly. People in the church are growing in their spiritual maturity. Children are learning in school. There is more water. All of things we prayed for, God seemed to be doing in our sister community! Praise God!
2. God wants persistent prayers
In Luke 11:5-13, Jesus tells a parable of a friend asking another friend for loaves of bread to feed some guests arriving late at night. The friend, despite being already in bed, gives into his friend’s request due to his persistent asking. This parable illustrates the importance of asking God for things again and again. If we ask, we will receive and if we seek, we shall find. But we need to be bold and persistent in our efforts.
3. There are different ways to pray
When we pray, there are many different things we can do. It’s not just all about asking. Our prayers can be prayers of thanksgiving. They can be prayers of praise. We should also confess our sins to God. These categories of prayer can be summarized in the acronym A.C.T.S (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication).
We can ask God for things, but ultimately God will grant to us only what is truly good and right. The purpose of our prayers is to not align God’s will with ours, but to align our will with God’s. God may grant us what we ask for, but even more so we need to ask our Heavenly Father “thy will be done”.
A great way to keep in tune with this idea is to pray through scripture. Speak scripture passages to God so that your prayers can be more fully in line with His will.
Consistent and persistent prayer on a certain thing can greatly increase the level of sincerity of your prayers. When we pray for something once, we can easy to get pulled into the “checklist” mentality. I prayed for it, cross it off my list, now I can continue with what I was doing and feel good about myself that I prayed. But when we consistently come to the Lord again and again with the same requests, it can transform our simple prayers into heartfelt longing. It deepens our sincerity. It enables us to dwell upon what we are asking of our Father and really pour out our soul for what we are praying for. This deepens not only the effectiveness of our prayers, but it also deepens our relationship with God. We are no longer “mailing in” our requests. We are no longer folding our hands and talking out of obligation. We are now crying out to the Lord. We are talking to God! And we begin to understand prayer as an intimate conversation between a child and their Father.
4. It is important to have a consistent time of the day to pray
We held our prayer vigil every morning from 7am to 8am. We chose to pray in the morning because it worked best for our schedule. There’s no real significance to praying in the morning (my wife might have preferred at later time!). Some people might prefer afternoon or evening. But the important thing is to resolve to set aside a certain time every day to pray. Jesus seemed to pray morning and evening (Mark 1:35, Matthew 26:36), and he definitely resolved to pray often.
In our busy, on-the-go culture it’s easy to blow off prayer time in favor of “more important” matters. I know for me that if I don’t schedule it, it won’t happen. Take time to block off a certain amount of time during your day for prayer. It doesn’t have to be for a whole hour, but anything is better than nothing.
5. Quality is more important than quantity
Some days we had as many as ten people at our house praying. Some days it was only my wife and I. Regardless of how many people we had, the important thing was sincere prayer. God tells us that when two or more are gathered in His name, He is there also (Matthew 18:20). We didn’t have to have standing room only in our house in order for God to act on our prayers.
