. . . rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to
prayer . . .

My simple and humanly impossible goal this morning in this
message is that you would all be devoted to prayer in 2003. This is
my goal because this is what the Bible calls us to be. My text is
Romans 12:12 which is part of a longer chain of exhortations. It
says we are to be "rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation,
devoted (proskarterountes) to prayer."

Your version might say, "constant in prayer" or "faithful in
prayer." Those all get at aspects of the word. "Devoted" is a good
translation. The word is used in Mark 3:9 where it says, "[Jesus]
told his disciples to have a boat ready (proskartere) for
him because of the crowd, lest they crush him." A boat was to set
apart - devoted - for the purpose of taking Jesus away in case the
crowd became threatening. "Devoted" - dedicated for a task,
appointed for it.

Now, boats just sit there. But people are not dedicated that
way. When the word is applied to a person it means devoted or
dedicated in the sense not only of designation and appointment but
of action in the appointed task, and pressing on in it. So for
example in Romans 13:6 Paul talks about the role of government like
this: "You also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting
themselves to this very thing." That is, they are not only
designated by God for a task, but are giving themselves to it.

What's remarkable about this word is that five of the ten New
Testament uses apply to prayer. Listen, besides Romans 12:12 there
are:

• Acts 1:14 (after the ascension of Jesus while the disciples
  were waiting in Jerusalem for the outpouring of the Spirit), "These
  all with one mind were continually devoting themselves to prayer,
  along with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His
  brothers."
• Acts 2:42 (Of the early converts in Jerusalem), "They were
  continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to
  fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer."
• Acts 6:4 (The apostles say), "But we will devote ourselves to
  prayer and to the ministry of the word."
• Colossians 4:2 (Paul says to all of us), "Devote yourselves to
  prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving."

So we may say from the New Testament scriptures that the normal
Christian life is a life devoted to prayer. And so you should ask
as you turn from 2002 to 2003, "Am I devoted to prayer?"

It does not mean that prayer is all you do - any more than being
devoted to a wife means all the husband does is hang out with his
wife. But his devotion to her affects everything in his life and
causes him to give himself to her in many different ways. So being
devoted to prayer doesn't mean that all you do is pray (though Paul
does say in another place, "pray without ceasing," 1 Thessalonians
5:17). It means that there will be a pattern of praying that looks
like devotion to prayer. It won't be the same for everyone. But it
will be something significant. Being devoted to prayer looks
different from not being devoted to prayer. And God knows the
difference. He will call us to account: have we been devoted to
prayer? Is there a pattern of praying in your life that can fairly
be called "being devoted to prayer"?

I think most of us would agree on some kinds of praying that
would not be called "being devoted to prayer." Praying only as
crises enter your life would not be a pattern of devotion to
prayer. Praying only at meal times is a pattern, but does it
correspond to Paul exhorting the church to "be devoted to prayer"?
A short "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayer at the end of the day
is probably not "being devoted to prayer." Hit and miss "Help me,
Lord" in the car as you need a parking place is not "being devoted
to prayer." All those are good. But I think we would agree that
Paul expects something more and different from followers of Christ
when he says, "Be devoted to prayer."

Let us not forget in all of this, as we saw last week, that the
cross of Christ - his death in the place of sinners - is the
foundation of all prayer. There would be no acceptable answer to
WHY or HOW we pray if Christ had not died in our place. That's why
we pray "in Jesus name."

As I have weighed the obstacles to prayer that I could address,
some of them fall under the question, WHY pray? And some of them
fall under the question HOW pray. I want to
focus this morning on the HOW. Not that the question WHY is
unimportant, but it seems to me that we can have all our
theological answers in place as to why pray and still be very
negligent and careless in the life of prayer. So I will give
a short answer to the question WHY, and then focus on practical HOW
questions that I pray will stir you up to venture new levels of
"being devoted to prayer" in 2003.

WHY Pray?

I start with three brief answers to WHY we should be devoted to
prayer.

1. The Bible tells us to pray and we should do what God says.
This text, along with many other says, "Be devoted to prayer." If
we are not we are disobedient to the scriptures. That is foolish
and dangerous. If prayer doesn't come easy for you, consider
yourself normally fallen and sinful with the rest of us. Then
fight. Preach to yourself. Don't let your sins and weaknesses and
worldly inclinations rule you. God says, "Be devoted to prayer."
Fight for this.

2. The needs in your own life, and in your family, and in this
church and other churches, and in the cause of world missions, and
in our culture at large are huge and desperate. In many cases
heaven and hell hang in the balance, faith or unbelief, life and
death. Remember Paul's grief and anguish for his perishing kinsmen
in Romans 9:2, and remember that in Romans 10:1 he prays for them
earnestly, "Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them
is that they may be saved." Salvation hangs in the balance when we
pray. You will not know what prayer is for until you know that life
is war. One of the great obstacles to praying is that life is just
too routinely smooth for many of us. The battlefront is way out
there, but here in my tiny bubble of peace and contentment all is
well. O may God open our eyes to see and feel the needs around us
and the great potential of prayer.

3. A third reason to pray is that God acts when we pray. And God
can do more in five seconds than we can do in five years. O how I
have learned this over the years. What an amazing thing to bow my
head repeatedly and plead with God during sermon preparation, or
during some counseling crisis, or some witnessing conversation, or
some planning meeting, and to have breakthrough after breakthrough
which did not come until I prayed. What an important lesson to feel
fretful and eager to get to work immediately because I have so much
to do I don't know how I can get it all done, but to force myself
to be biblical and reasonable and take time to get on my knees to
pray before I work, and while on my knees, to have ideas tumble to
my mind for how to handle a problem, or shape a message, or deal
with a crisis, or solve a theological problem - and so to save
myself hours and hours of work and the frustration of beating my
head against the wall trying to figure out what came in five
seconds of illumination! I don't mean that God spares us hard work.
I mean prayer can make your work 5,000 times more fruitful than you
can make it alone.

There are more, but these are three answers to WHY pray: 1) God
commands us to pray; 2) the needs are great, and eternal things are
at stake; 3) God acts when we pray and often does more in seconds
than we could do in hours or weeks or sometimes years.

There are many other questions to be answered about prayer I
can't deal with here. That's why there are long chapters on prayer
on Desiring God and The Pleasures of God and Let the Nations Be
Glad and why there is a whole book called A Hunger for God:
Desiring God through Prayer and Fasting. Specifically if you are
struggling with how prayer for people's salvation fits together
with unconditional election go straight to pages 217-220 or The
Pleasures of God.

HOW to Pray

But for the rest of our time this morning I want to talk about
the HOW of prayer. I want to try to inspire you with practical,
Biblical possibilities that you may have never considered, or
perhaps tried and then failed to persevere - failed to "be devoted
to prayer."

This is my effort to sketch what it means to be devoted to
prayer without a narrow my-way-or-the-highway mentality. We are all
very different. Our schedules are different. Our families are
different. We are in different stages of life with different
demands on our days. We are at different levels of spiritual
maturity, and no one matures over night. What you may be doing in
five years in your devotion to prayer may make you look back and
wonder how you survived this season of leanness. But all of us can
move forward. Paul loves to write to his churches and say, "You are
doing well, but do so more and more" (1 Philippians 1:9;
Thessalonians 4:1,
10). And if there is any place where the "do so
more and more" applies, it is in our devotion to prayer.

I will put these practical suggestions in five pairs each
beginning with a different letter that together spell "F A D E S."
There is no significance to the word "fades." That's just what they
happened to spell. But if you wanted to force it, you could say
without these pairs, devotion to prayer "fades."

F - Free and Formed

I have in mind here the difference between structured and
unstructured prayer. Being devoted to prayer will mean that what
you say in your times of prayer will often be free and
unstructured, and often be formed and structured. If you are only
free in your prayers you will probably become shallow and trite. If
you are only formed in your prayers, you will probably become
mechanical and hollow. Both ways of praying are important. Not
either-r, but both-and.

By free I mean you will regularly feel like pouring out your
soul to God and you will do it. You will not want any script or
guidelines or lists or books. You will have so many needs that they
tumble out freely without any preset form. This is good. Without
this it is doubtful that we have any true relation with Christ at
all. Can you really imagine a marriage or friendship where all the
communication read from lists or books, or spoken only in memorized
texts. That would be artificial in the extreme.

On the other hand, I plead with you not to think you are so
spiritually deep or resourceful or rich or disciplined that you can
do without the help of forms. I have in mind four kinds of forms
that I hope you all make use of.

Form #1. The Bible.Pray the Bible. Pray
Biblical prayers. This week we are building our prayers around the
prayer in Ephesians 3:14-19.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom
every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that according to
the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with
power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may
dwell in your hearts through faith- that you, being rooted and
grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the
saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and
to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may
be filled with all the fullness of God.

Memorize it and pray it often. Pray the Lord's prayer and as you
pray it put each phrase in your own words and apply it to the
people you are burdened about. Pray the commands of the Bible:
"Help me - help my wife, my children, the elders, our missionaries
to love you, O God, with all my heart and all my soul and all my
strength." Pray the promises of the Bible: "O Lord, take all the
authority that is yours in heaven and on earth and make our
missionaries feel the sweetness of the promise that you will be
with them to the end of the age." Pray the warnings of the Bible:
"Or Lord, grant me to fight against lust with the kind of urgency
that you taught when you said, gouge out your eye and got to heaven
rather than leave it good and go to hell." Open the Bible in front
of you and put one elbow on one side and one on the other and pray
every paragraph of into contrition or praise or thanks or
petition.

Form #2. Lists. Pray lists. I have in mind
lists of people to pray for and lists of needs to pray about. If
you can remember all the people and needs you should be praying for
without a list, you are God. I must have lists, some in my head and
some on paper. I have memorized about 70 people that I pray for by
name every day. But that does not include the list of people who
came to missions in the manse that Noel and I pray for each night
from a written list. It does not include the list of our
missionaries that I read from a list. And that's just people, not
to mention needs that change in my own soul and in the family and
in the church and in the world week by week. So I encourage you to
use lists of people and lists of needs. Keep some kind of prayer
folder or notebook or files in your handheld computer. Remember I
am only talking about the second half of this pair: freedom and
form. Don't forget the value of freedom. It is both-and, not
either-or.

Form #3. Books.Pray through books like
Operation World - a different country, and the cause of Christ in
it, every day or two. What a powerful way to get a globe-sized
heart and vision of God's supremacy! Pray through a book like
Extreme Devotion - a one-page glimpse into the suffering,
persecuted church for every day of the year. Take my book, Let the
Nations Be Glad, and turn to pages 57-62 and pray through the 36
things that the early church prayed for each other. Take The Valley
of Vision, a book of Puritan prayers, and pray what great saints of
the past have prayed. We are so foolish to think that left to
ourselves we will see all the Bible has to say and all the needs we
should pray about without the help of good books.

Form #4. Patterns.Develop patters of prayer
that give you some guidance of what do first and second and third
when you get down on your knees. One pattern, as I already
mentioned, would be to structure your prayers around each of the
petitions of the Lord's prayer. A pattern that I use virtually
every day is the pattern of concentric circles starting with my own
soul - which I feel the sin and needs of most keenly - and moving
out to my family, and then the pastoral staff and elders, then all
the church staff, then our missionaries, and then general needs in
the larger body of Christ and the cause of Christ in missions and
culture. Without some form or pattern like this I tend to freeze
and go nowhere.

So the first pair is free and formed. Unstructured with free
flowing needs and thanks and praise; and structured with helps like
the Bible, lists, books and patterns. If you are "devoted to
prayer" you will pursue freedom and form in your prayer life.

A - Alone and Assembled

Being devoted to prayer will mean that you will regularly pray
alone and regularly pray in the assembly of other Christians.

O how crucial it is that we meet God alone through Jesus Christ.
There is no Christianity without a personal trust in and communion
with God through Jesus. All is show and husks and pretension
without this. Susana Wesley with her 16 children used to pull her
apron over her head in the kitchen and all the children had learned
that this meant silence in the kitchen. Children need to learn that
mommy and daddy have times with Jesus that are sacred and may not
be interrupted. Find the place, plan the time, teach the children
discipline.

But I think that praying in the assembly of other believers is
more neglected than praying alone. Alone and assembled. The New
Testament is full of corporate prayer gatherings. In fact most
prayer in the New Testament is probably thought of in terms of
gatherings for prayer. Acts 1:14, "These all with one mind were
continually devoting themselves to prayer, along with the women,
and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers" - that is
typical of what you find. Acts 12:12, When Peter got out of prison
"he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John whose other name
was Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying."
Prayer meetings were normal and I think normative in the early
church.

Being devoted to prayer in the New Testament surely included
praying with God's people. How are you doing in this? This is not
advanced Christianity. This is basic Christianity. This week we
have twelve 30-minute prayer meetings planned plus the eight hours
of prayer all night on Friday. The options are meant to help you
make a new breakthrough. During the rest of the year there are
30-minute prayer meetings six mornings each week, Wednesday evening
at 5:45 downtown. Then there are the small groups that meet for
prayer and ministry. Then there is Sunday morning that includes
prayer in song and other ways. If assembling for prayer is not part
of your devotion to prayer, make 2003 a breakthrough year.
Both-and: free and formed, alone and assembled.

D - Desperate and Delighted

Being devoted to prayer will mean that you come to God in prayer
often desperate and often delighted. I simply mean that prayer is a
place for meeting God with your deepest heartaches and fears and
prayer is a place for meeting God with your highest joys and
thanks. The pillow you use for your elbows when you kneel daily
before the Father, will be a tear-stained pillow. And yet, because
God is a prayer-hearing God, you will say with the apostle Paul,
"sorrowful yet always rejoicing" (2 Corinthians 6:10). And often
that joy will overwhelm the burdens of this fallen world - as it
should - and make you want to leap for joy. The Father wants to
meet you at those times too. Be devoted to prayer in desperation
and in delight - in fasting and feasting. Not either-or, but
both-and.

E - Explosive and Extended

All I mean here is short and long. I would have said short and
long, but then the letters would not match and the acronym would
not spell anything. Besides explosive is more vivid and is exactly
what prayers can be from time to time. If you are devoted to
prayer
you will explode regularly with prayers of praise and thanks and
need and they will not last more than a few seconds. And if you are
devoted to prayer you will have times when you linger for a long
time in prayer to the Lord. Sometimes I make a quick phone call to
Noel and other times we spend an evening together. If you love
Christ and lean on him for all things and treasure him above all
else, you with meet him often with explosive prayers and often with
extended prayers.

S - Spontaneous and Scheduled

What's the difference between this and "free and formed" or
"explosive and extended"? By "free and formed" I meant the content
of our prayers - what we do when we come to pray. By "explosive and
extended" I meant the length of our prayers. By spontaneous and
scheduled I mean when we pray.

If we are devoted to prayer we will pray spontaneously through
the day - without ceasing as Paul says - a constant spirit of
communion with Christ, walking by the Spirit and knowing him as a
continual personal presence in your life. No plan will govern when
you speak to him. It will happen dozens of time in the day. This is
normal and good. This is being devoted to prayer.

But if you only have this, you won't have this very long. The
true rich fruit of spontaneity grows in the garden that is well
tended by the discipline of schedule. So I plead with you, have
your set times of prayer. Plan it for 2003. When will you meet him
regularly? How long will you set aside? I encourage you to begin
every day this way. Are you willing to plan one or two half-days or
days away by yourself or with a friend or your spouse - not to read
a book but to pray for 4 hours or eight hours. How? By simply
reading your Bible and turning it all into prayer. Noel and I have
had some of our richest days away by taking a short book of the
Bible and reading a chapter and then pausing and praying that
chapter into our family and church. Then reading another chapter
and praying, and so on. But that does not just happen. It must be
planned. It is not spontaneous. It is structured. And it is
glorious.

So there you have it. God's word to us to day is "Be devoted to
prayer." Be constant in it. Be faithful in it. Why? God commands us
to; the needs are great and eternity hangs in the balance; and God
hears and does more in five seconds that we can do in five
years.

And how shall we be devoted to prayer? These things. Without
them prayer F A D E S. Let your prayer be…

F - Free and Formed
A - Alone and Assembled
D - Desperate and Delighted
E - Explosive and Extended
S - Spontaneous and scheduled

May the Lord give you a spirit of grace and supplication in this
week of prayer and all year long.