Prayerlessness

 By Tim Challies at Challies.com

In her book A Place of Quiet Rest, Nancy Leigh DeMoss includes several chapters on prayer. In a chapter titled “The Privilege of Prayer” she discusses a period of prayerlessness in her life and her growing conviction that she had to get to the root of it. “As God opened my eyes to this matter of prayerlessness, I asked Him to let me see it from His point of view. Here is what I wrote in my journal one day when God first began to deal with my heart.” She does not attempt to provide a doctrine of prayer or prayerlessness as much as a reflection on what prayerlessness means in her own life. I found it very helpful.

Here is what she says:

 I am convicted that prayerlessness …

- is a sin against God (1 Samuel 12:23).
- is direct disobedience to the command of Christ (“watch and pray,” Matthew 26:41).
- is direct disobedience to the Word of God (“pray without ceasing,” 1 Thessalonians 5:17).
- makes me vulnerable to temptation (“watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation,” Matthew 26:41).
- expresses independence—no need for God. gives place to the Enemy and makes me vulnerable to his schemes (Ephesians 6:10-20; Daniel 10).
- results in powerlessness.
- limits (and defines)
- my relationship with God. hinders me from knowing His will, His priorities, His direction.
- forces me to operate in the realm of the natural (what I can do) versus the supernatural (what He can do).
- leaves me weak, harried, and hassled.
- is rooted in pride, self-sufficiency, laziness, and lack of discipline.
- reveals a lack of real burden and compassion for others.

 

“The seven characteristics of highly evangelistic Christians”

by Scott T. Brown at ScottBrownonline

1. They are people of prayer. They realize that only God can convict and convert, and they are totally dependent upon Him in prayer. Most of the highly evangelistic Christians spend at least an hour in prayer each day.

2. They have a theology that compels them to evangelize. They believe in the urgency of the gospel message. They believe that Christ is the only way of salvation. They believe that anyone without Christ is doomed for a literal hell.

3. They are people who spend time in the Word. The more time they spend in the Bible, the more likely they are to see the lostness of humanity and the love of God in Christ to save those who are lost.

4. They are compassionate people. Their hearts break for those who don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. They have learned to love the world by becoming more like Christ who has the greatest love for the world.

5. They love the communities where God has placed them. They are immersed in the culture because they desire for the light of Christ to shine through them in their communities.

6. They are intentional about evangelism. They pray for opportunities to share the gospel. They look for those opportunities. And they see many so-called casual encounters as appointments set by God.

7. They are accountable to someone for their evangelistic activities. They know that many good activities can replace Great Commission activities if they are not careful. Good can replace the best. So they make certain that someone holds them accountable each week, either formally or informally, for their evangelistic efforts.

The “Secret” of Evangelistic Churches 

The secret is really no secret at all. Ultimately, evangelistic churches see more persons become Christians through the passionate efforts of highly evangelistic Christians. More than any programs. More than any church events. More than anything else, we are the instruments God has chosen to use.

Sometimes we ask the question “What is my church doing to become more evangelistic?” But the better question is “What am I doing to become more evangelistic?”

Charles H. Spurgeon was right. We need more soul winners.

We need more highly evangelistic Christians.
 

A Letter From Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani

(an article from Persecution.com)

Greetings from your servant and younger brother in Christ, Youcef Nadarkhani.

To: All those who are concerned and worried about my current situation.

First, I would like to inform all of my beloved brothers and sisters that I am in perfect health in the flesh and spirit. And I try to have a little different approach from others to these days, and consider it as the day of exam and trial of my faith. And during these days which are hard in order to prove loyalty and sincerity to God, I am trying to do the best in my power to stay right with what I have learned from God’s commandments.

I need to remind my beloveds, though my trial has been so long, and as in the flesh I wish these days to end, yet I have surrendered myself to God’s will.

I am neither a political person nor do I know about political complicity, but I know that while there are many things in common between different cultures, there are also differences between these cultures around the world which can result in criticism, which most of the times response to this criticisms will be harsh and as a result will lengthen our problems.

From time to time I am informed about the news which is spreading in the media about my current situation, for instance being supported by various churches and famous politicians who have asked for my release, or campaigns and human rights activities which are going on against the charges which are applied to me. I do believe that these kind of activities can be very helpful in order to reach freedom and respecting human rights in a right way can bring forth positive results.

I want to appreciate all those are trying to reach this goal. But on the other hand, I’d like to announce my disagreement with the insulting activities that cause stress and trouble, which unfortunately are done with the justification (excuse) of defending human rights and freedom, for the results are so clear and obvious for me.

I try to be humble and obedient to those who are in power; obedience to those in the authority that God has granted to the officials of my country, and pray for them to rule the country according to the will of God and be successful in doing this. For I know in this way I have obeyed God’s Word. I try to obey along with those whom I see in a common situation with me. They never had any complaint, but just let the power of God be manifested in their lives, and though sometimes we read that they have used this right to defend themselves, for they had this right, I am not an exception as well and have used all possibilities and so forth and am waiting for the final result.

So I ask all the beloved ones to pray for me as the holy Word has said. At the end I hope my freedom will be prepared as soon as possible, as the authorities of my country will do with free will according to their law and commandments which they are answerable to.

May God’s grace and mercy be upon you now and forever. Amen.
Youcef Nadarkhani

 

A Call to Anguish

Thank you, Rev. Scott Brown for sharing this moving message by the late David Wilkerson.

Prayer and Ministry of the Word

by Scott Brown of NCFIC
"God's plan for His people has always included the raising up of men who would dedicate themselves to do two simple, but powerful things - "prayer and the ministry of the Word." This was clearly stated by the elders in Acts 6:4, who said, "But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word." This is part of a consistent pattern in scripture where godly culture includes men dedicated to these things. In fact, it is sinful for some men to neglect it. The prophet Samuel stated it this way, "Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you; but I will teach you the good and the right way." 1 Samuel 12:23"

Joel Beeke on Busyness and Prayer

by: Tyler Kenney @ desiring God 

"Like every other Christian, I suppose, my experience has been that the more I am given to truly pray in my prayers the more keenly I feel how little I truly pray.

My mother is the greatest prayer warrior I know; for decades, she has regularly spent two or more hours per day in earnest prayer. When she turned 85, I asked her, “Mother, if you had your entire life to live over, what would you do differently?” “Oh dear,” she said immediately, “I’d pray more, of course.”

For very busy lives, I would counsel:

Keep prayer as the priority of your life. Don’t do anything without praying about it first. Bunyan reminds us that we can do more than pray after we have prayed, but we cannot do more than prayer until we have prayed.
Cultivate a spirit of prayer. Pray your way through your day. To “pray without ceasing” certainly means at least this much: to pray as you work, as you drive, as you think—in whatever you do. The closer you live to God, the more fruitful and rich this will become for you.
Focus on intercessory prayer—both in private and with people. Pray much with your family; never skip family worship. And view prayer as the most important thing you can do for others."

Home by the Eshes

This beautiful song was written by one of the 12 children of John and Sadie Eshe. The parents and four of their children, plus a son-in-law to-be and a grandson and two friends were killed in a crash two days ago. This song was written after their oldest son died in an accident while a missionary over seas a couple of years ago.

Please pray for the remaining family members. Here is a link to an article about the accident.

Planned Parenthood director quits after watching abortion ultrasound

"After eight years working at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas, including two years as its director, Abby Johnson suddenly decided that she could no longer participate in abortions. What pushed Johnson out was both an ultrasound of an abortion and a renewed emphasis on the cash-generating business in the failing economy. After being told to deemphasize prevention and market for abortions, Johnson finally had enough:..."

To read the remainder of this article go to Hot Air blog.

We must pray that more abortion doctors and directors turn from their evil ways and turn their hearts to God. What a wonderful praise!!

Pray for Noah

Please click on the link on the side of the blog entitled pray for Noah, so you can see how to pray for him. He is in pretty bad shape.

Prayer in School Joke

My husband received this via email, so I am not sure who wrote it, but I just had to share it.
After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said: “Let me see if I've got this right. 'You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning. 'You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride. 'You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job. 'You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the final exams. 'You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card. 'You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, 'You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . . I can’t pray?’

Matriarch, 94, leaves nearly 300 grandkids

"Gregoria Martinez, 94, might seem like your typical grandma. She made quilts for her grandchildren, encouraged them to go to church, prayed for them and gave advice.

Except the Vernon, Texas, grandma didn't have just a handful of grandchildren when she died late last month.

She had nearly 300."

To continue reading this heart-warming story go here. I wouldn't recommend reading the comments afterward, they are not uplifting at all.

What to do in an Obama World

by Rev. Bart Martin
“When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.”
– Jacques Barzun[1]

When a young state senator from Illinois ascended the platform to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, many considered him a rising star in the Democratic Party. But even his zaniest fans could not have anticipated that, in four short years, Barack Obama would have made the leap from state senator to United States Senator, and from United States Senator to the President of the United States.

What does Barack Obama’s rise to power mean? For one thing, it means that the “absurd” has become “normal”: when a large proportion of younger “evangelicals” vote for a man who will help perpetuate the war against the unborn, decadence has obviously set it. For another thing, it means that modern conservatism—the conservatism of William Buckley and Russell Kirk, of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan—is dead. As a matter of fact, it has been dead for a number of years: Election Day 2008 simply provided us the coroner’s report.

For we who consider ourselves “conservative,” it will do us no good to pine away for the glory of days gone by. We can’t re-live the Barry Goldwater campaign; we can’t call Ronald Reagan back from the dead—nor would we want to if we could.

What we Christians in America need to do is to rediscover what our vocation is: we are salt and light; we are strangers and sojourners; we are a nation of priests. This does not mean, as the pietistic Christian might take it to mean, that we are to withdraw from the public square, and simply build our own little Christian ghettoes while clutching our Bibles and waiting for the end of the world. No: the Scriptures call on the people of God to take dominion by being salt and light, to take dominion by being strangers and sojourners, to take dominion by acting as priests on behalf of the world. We are not called to withdraw; rather, we are called to engage the world, ruling as God’s co-regents.

But we have forgotten what it means to rule. We have confused the biblical mandate to “rule” and “take dominion” with the hackneyed imperative to “win the next election.” So what should Christians do in the world of President Barak Obama? How can we better prepare ourselves to be the vice-regents that God wants us to be? I would suggest three things:

1. Pray like a Saint Augustine
2. Know the times like an Edmund Burke
3. Love the law of God like a King Josiah

First, pray like a Saint Augustine. When there is an obvious need for a new reformation in the church, many Christians instinctively suggest that we need to go back and brush up on our theology. Absolutely, we must do so.

But whose theology should we turn to? The great Saint Augustine of Hippo should be topping our list. Augustine’s theology, as Peter Leithart put it, “is as big as reality, or bigger.”[2] Augustine’s theology is the perfect antidote to both ivory-tower bookishness and pietistic sentimentalism. Augustine wrote his theology in the white heat of battle and controversy: with barbarians storming the gates of Rome, Donatists infiltrating the Church, and Pelagians attempting to resuscitate a humanistic parody of the Gospel. Not a single paragraph of his theology is divorced from the real, tangible concerns of Christian living; not a single sentence is detached from his concern to build a Christian civilization. Every page of his theology addresses the flesh-and-blood realities that real Christians face in real life.

Moreover, Augustine’s theology is a prayed theology. What does this mean? It means that everything Augustine wrote was suffused with the real presence of God in the world. This is most evident in Augustine’s Confessions, the entirety of which is written in prayer form. But even Augustine’s other writings, which employ a different genre, are all bathed in prayer. Augustine realized, like few theologians since have realized, that true theology will always result in a deeper fellowship between God and man. If our theology fails to get us on our knees, if it fails to get us in closer fellowship with our Creator and Savior, and if it fails to equip us to take dominion in the name of King Jesus, then it is no theology at all, but simply a Gnostic pietism veiled in theological vocabulary.

Augustine laid a foundation for the Christendom which followed; when we learn to pray as Augustine prayed, we too might see a new Christendom in our day.

Second, know the times like an Edmund Burke. Burke was the great Member of Parliament in the late eighteenth century who witnessed many tumultuous changes in England and Europe: the American War for Independence, Britain’s unsteady relations with India, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic War which followed.[3] He was a modern man of Issachar (1 Chron. 12:32). What set him apart from other capable men his age was his commitment to “permanent things” in an age of revolution. As Russell Kirk says of Burke,

He foresaw in the Age of Reason a scheme of innovation which was designed to turn society inside out, and he exposed this new menace to permanence with a passion of loathing that exceeded all his invectives against Tories and nabobs. For the great practical spokesman of the Whigs knew more of the wants of mankind than did all the galaxy of French economists and men of letters.[4]

You would not know it by talking to “conservatives” today, but Edmund Burke is the intellectual father of modern conservatism. All Christians who wish to see a return of genuine, robust conservatism would do well to re-acquaint themselves with this master. Burke can teach us how to see through the illusions of propaganda; Burke can teach us how to expose the shallowness of sound-bite dialogue and bumper-sticker slogans that displace rigorous thought.

Most importantly, Burke can teach us how to fight today’s battles, not the battles of yesteryear. As Burke said in his magisterial Reflections on the Revolution in France,

Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice.… It is thus with all those, who attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under colour of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse.[5]

Satan is a master of disguises. If we desire to understand the times and expose the works of darkness in their current forms, we need to have our minds properly trained. Edmund Burke remains the best tutor in this regard.

Third, love the law of God like a King Josiah. Our day is both similar and dissimilar to the early days of Josiah’s reign. It is similar in that, like Josiah’s early days, there is virtually no memory of God’s law in our land; it is dissimilar in that, unlike Josiah’s early days, there are millions upon millions of copies of God’s law scattered all over our land. Josiah, when the Book of the Law was found, heard it and immediately tore his clothes; we, on the other hand, have in our possession the same Law, but rarely bother to read it and never consider allowing it to tear our hearts.

The Law of God is perfect, modern Christians have said, but it’s not very useful. Modern Christians have treated the Law of God like that old professor emeritus that some universities keep around campus: you wouldn’t think about sacking him, but you’re also not going to take him very seriously. Likewise, no modern Christian would dream of suggesting that Deuteronomy, for instance, should be ripped out of their Bibles, yet their ignorance of Deuteronomy is palpable.

It is high time that we once again be able to sing with sincerity what David, Josiah, and our Lord Jesus Christ sang: I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart (Ps. 40:8). We have a mandate to disciple the nations; but if our own lives, our own families, and our own churches are not conformed to the Law of God, we have nothing to offer the world.

Elections are important; politics is one of the many areas that must be brought into submission to Jesus Christ. But before we think about how we are going to influence the next election, we have work cut out for us. Let Saint Augustine and Edmund Burke and King Josiah guide us as we navigate ourselves through the many challenges of the Barack Obama presidency.

Endnotes:[1] Peter Leithart, Against Christianity (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2003), 47[2] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001), 16.[3] Kirk, 23.[4] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 2004), 248–249

About the author: Rev. Bart Martin, B.S., U. S. Military Academy, M.Div., Reformed Episcopal Seminary, is an Ordained Deacon in Reformed Episcopal Church, Chaplain and Instructor of Theology at New Covenant Schools in Lynchburg, VA, and Minister-in-Charge of New Covenant Reformed Episcopal Church. He has a wife, Kristie, and four children, and is lamenting yet another Philadelphia Eagles NFC Championship debacle.

Article posted January 22, 2009