Are You Talking To God Through The Grapevine?

Everyone knows.

     My wife knows. My friends at work know. I've told my small group. Even my parents are in the loop. Everyone who's anyone has given me their wise advice. Now, as I reach the decision point, I realize I left someone out. I'm content sharing my anxieties, my struggles, and my fears with everyone - everyone except for God. I've been so busy talking to other people that it's almost like God's left to find out about it through the grapevine.

 

Talking to Everyone One Else But God.

     Lately, I've found myself seeking out Godly wisdom from people I trust more and more. Whether I’m discussing parenting and family situations with my accountability partner or asking for prayer from family members and friends from small group, God's been teaching me to reach out to others and trust them to offer guidance and care. But in doing this, I've neglected taking these concerns to God.

     Have you known you needed to spend time pouring your heart out to God but struggled to actually get on your knees? I often have the courage to open up with friends and family, but I rarely take the time to offer my requests to God. If I do make the time, I become easily distracted in my thoughts and lose focus. Whether it’s simply being distracted or finding it difficult to humble ourselves, it’s easy to let things get between us and our Heavenly Father.

Let's Be Direct.

     How can we be direct with God the same way we are with other people? As I searched for answers, I found a few resources that helped me focus.

     When consistency and depth is lacking in our prayer life, it’s helpful to try new ways to connect our hearts to the heart of God. Pastor Gavin Ortlund outlines several methods in his blog post “Seven Ways to Fight Distraction During Prayer”. One method I’ve been encouraged to use lately is “prayer with a pen.” Intentionality writing out a prayer to God might take a bigger time commitment, but I’ve found that needing to choose specific words helps me focus on what I’m truly hoping to communicate to God. Plus if I keep prayers in a journal or notebook, I can look back over them to see how God has provided and moved in my circumstances.

     Sometimes my lack of faithfulness in prayer goes deeper than simply being distracted. Fear and distress can also keep me from prayer instead of driving me towards my Heavenly Father. I appreciated Pastor Erik Raymond’s focus on the role that sin and guilt can play in keeping us from approaching God in prayer in his article “When Sin Keeps You from Prayer”. Although sometimes it’s difficult to consider my fears or exhaustion as sin, I resonated with his reminder that guilt multiplies. Often times I feel guilty over sin or for ignoring my need for prayer, and I get caught in a cycle of avoiding prayer because I feel guilty that I haven’t been praying!

A Prayer to Help Us Pray.

Refocus, talk to God, and be direct. Here's a passage that's helped me, and it's my personal prayer for all of us in this struggle:

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”  - Hebrews 4:15-16

The Amazon Prime Prayer

     It's 8:48pm on Saturday night. I've already sunk an hour into this home project before realizing I don't have the right piece to finish the job. All the hardware stores will be closed by the time I get there, so crack open my laptop and find my way to Amazon.com. 30 minutes and 17 reviews later, I found what I need.

Click. Cart. Buy. Done.

     It's 10:46am on Sunday morning. I pull in to see a brown package leaning against my front door. I mentally run through all the things it could be. I'm not even thinking about the item I ordered 14 hours ago. I open the box and immediately drop it on the table. It. Is. Here. How? Was it magic? Do they deliver by rocket ship? I have no idea, but I was blown away that my order was here so fast. 

Patience is a lost art.

     Most things that we want we can get immediately - streaming movies, on demand TV, ordering pizza with an app. We live in a culture that celebrates instant gratification, and this bleeds over into our spiritual life. Many times we expect our prayers to work like Amazon Prime. We pray and then wait for God's answer to show up at our doorstep 14 hours later. 

     Sometimes, God says "no." Sometimes, he makes us wait. Sometimes, we don't understand why. But God is a good Father, and only he says "no" to say "yes" to something better. 

So what do we do when God makes us wait?

We preach the Gospel to ourselves.

     It's only by remembering of the grace of Jesus that we are truly able to endure the waiting. We wait through sleepless nights, chronic pain, bouts of sickness, nagging anxiety, and lingering doubt because we "have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer [we] who live, but Christ who lives in [us]" (Galatians 2:20a). Because of Jesus, we will practice the art of patience and wait to see how much better God's answer is than what we asked for.

Let's preach the Gospel to our family, and wait together to see what God does.

Teaching and Modeling Prayer - Discipleship at Home

Once Jesus was in a certain place praying. As he finished, one of his disciples came to him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

Luke 11:1 (NLT)

     Jesus gave us the perfect model for living a prayerful life. Even so, the people who spent the most time with him still needed help developing their own habit of prayer. My wife and I are also still growing in our habit of prayer. While we wouldn't consider ourselves prayer-experts by any means, we've made a choice to make prayer a priority in our home. We believe it's much better to model prayer for our kids than it is to teach them "about prayer," because ultimately the goal is that our children will be comfortable praying to God, not just able to say prayers. I hope that this post helps you to teach and model a vibrant prayer life to your kids.

Create a Routine for Prayer

     As my wife and I lead our kids in modeling prayer, here are some routines that we use to work prayer into our family life.

• Meals: This is an obvious time to pray. Maybe even too obvious. The danger is that we might say a rote, thoughtless prayer instead of authentic, real prayer to the Lord who gave us all of the grub on our plates. My family adds specific things to pray for at each meal. At breakfast we have a list of medical needs that we pray for. At dinner we pray for a missionary family or group somewhere across the globe. The specifics you choose aren't as important as looking for something to get us past the “Good bread, good meat, good Lord, let’s eat!” style of prayer.
• Bedtime: At bedtime we ask our kids to tell us about their favorite part of the day. We also ask if they have anything that they are worried or scared about. These are great conversation starters, but also natural connections to turn to prayer. We often ask our kids if they want to pray (sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t). We also make sure they understand that prayers don’t need to be fancy or long (just read Matthew 6:7-8). Sometimes, a one-sentence prayer from the heart is a huge win for my kids.
• Leaving: When someone leaves the house for the day (which is usually me going to work), we pause and pray for the day. We pray that we can all grow more like Jesus throughout the day. We’ll also pray for safety or protection depending on what’s going on. Bill Allison of Cadre Ministries has a Disciple-maker’s prayer that's a great “on your way” prayer to start your day.

 

When your routine fails, pray anyway

     The reality of life, however, is that it isn’t always routine. Sometimes life smacks you over the head, and you have to do your best to stay afloat until it returns to normal. Modeling honest prayer during these stressful times is even more important than the routine times for prayer. Last fall my family went through a pretty stressful time surrounding a vehicle purchase. For two entire weeks, every prayer we said centered around God watching over our vehicle situation, restoring what was ours, and protecting us. Our kids learned that if a situation is causing you stress, you can bring it to God and ask for his help and peace. Your kids will notice if you turn to God when things are hard (and they'll also notice if you don't).

     "Any-moment" prayers are useful when your kids are stressed or upset. We might gloss over an upset child by labeling their issue as "just a kid-problem." We might tell them to "get over it" when a sibling is mean to them or they scrape their knee. But in these tough moments, we should show them how to pray for God’s help. We can pause and pray with our kids right then, whether we think they are being whiny or not (and trust me, I’m still working on this one).

     Prayer is both awesome and scandalous: We can approach the God of the universe with seemingly trivial requests or concerns. The best way to teach our kids to do that is to model it ourselves. 

“And so I tell you, keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”  Luke 11:9-11 (NLT)

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Peter Lindell is the Executive Director at Camp of Champions USA. You can read his bio on our Full-Time Staff page. 

Make 2016 Count Part 2: Start the New Year Weak

     I find it easy to get swept up in the idea of what New Year’s represents: a clean slate, a new start, a chance to make things right. It’s an opportunity to start the year strong, but far too often our resolutions seem to be full of ambitious goals of self-improvement that will never succeed. What if instead of trying to start the new year strong, striving to accomplish goals we’ve set to make our lives better, we decided to start off our year by being weak? 

     When the apostle Paul was facing a struggle that forced him to see his own weaknesses, God told him, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul continues on describing his new outlook on his weaknesses saying, “So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me… For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Instead of looking to my own strength to find the willpower to make my life better, I can take Paul's view and boast in my weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings knowing that my brokenness is God’s platform for showing his power and grace in my life.

     Instead of making a resolution this New Year, I simply pray to live and walk in the grace that God has shown me through Jesus Christ. I need the truth of the Gospel in my life every single day. I need to preach the Gospel to myself— not to guilt myself into obeying the Bible, not to check it off the list of things to do that day, but because the Gospel “is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). In recognizing my need for the Jesus everyday, I am able to start my day off humbly, relying on God’s grace for my strength and motivation.

Here are three practical way to start your day off weak:

• Place some verses near where you get ready each morning. Some great verses besides those already mentioned are: Ephesians 1:19-20, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Romans 8:1-2
• Start each morning acknowledging your weaknesses— from physical aches and pains that accompany getting out of bed to the emotional or spiritual exhaustion you may be experiencing from life’s struggles and trials. Pray and invite God’s grace into these weaknesses.
• Roll out of bed and onto your knees. When we kneel before God we physically acknowledge our need for His grace in our life. 

     So this year let’s start our year weak— with God in His rightful place as Lord and Savior and our place as grateful recipient of His grace. Let’s pray together that God will daily strengthen us in the the truth of His Gospel and that we will in turn help others find their need for His grace in their life. Let's make 2016 count by pointing others to Jesus in our weakness.

Surviving the Holiday Stress: Just Give Up

     Christmas is less than a week away. School is out. Store shelves are picked over. Your kids are probably waiting anxiously to jump out of bed on Christmas morning and unwrap their gifts sitting under the tree. We can all remember that feeling, but that kind of anxious excitement is hard to match for adults.

     The Christmas season can bring a different kind of anxiety for us. Instead of night-before-Christmas excitement, we might feel anxious about keeping up with bills, finding the present that our kid really, really wants, or losing that inevitable holiday weight. Recently, I had some unexpected car trouble. When I got the estimate for the repair, my knee-jerk reaction was to worry. “How am I going to pay for this?” In all of our lives, we have things that stress us out. So how do we handle this anxiety? The answer: Just give up.

Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs.

-Matthew 6:27, 31-32

 

Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.

-Philippians 4:6

     These classic passages from the Bible tell us to give up on anxiety and worry. I must admit that in stressful times, I’m not always thinking of how God is at work. If I do, it’s often in a sarcastic “How on earth is God providing for me right now?” Knowing that God cares enough about us to provide for our needs is a comforting truth. But there’s a difference between knowing this truth and acting on it.

     Jobs change. Cars change. Health changes. Friends change. These verses remind us that God’s love and kindness is not affected by the seasons or our situations. In a world of inconsistency, God doesn’t change. Instead of giving into worrying and anxiety, we need to hand over control to the God who can do something about it. We just need to give up.

Web Catch of the Week: Reclaiming Your Family's Bedtime

  Recently my oldest son turned three years old. Part of his becoming a “big boy” was that we would no longer be giving him a pacifier when he went to bed. My wife and I knew that this would be a difficult transition for him and braced ourselves for that first bedtime routine without his pacifier. Thus began our new 45 minute-long bedtime routine of going to the bathroom multiple times, getting milk, reading books, praying, and convincing him that he was old enough to fall asleep on his own. This got me thinking of how I as a father and we as a family can reclaim some of this bedtime routine to make it more about Jesus.

     Prayer has been a staple of bedtime routines for most families, including mine. In his article, “Two Bedtime Prayers for Weary Parents”, Chad Ashby outlines some quick prayers that parents can say to keep Jesus the focus of bedtime. I appreciated his heart for helping both parents and their children think and pray through the Gospel even during potentially chaotic bedtime routines.

     David Willis writes that a great way to make bedtime the best part of your family’s day is to spend time encouraging one another before turning out the lights. I love the idea of spending time in quiet conversation to build one another up before calling it a day. This not only helps to reclaim bedtime, but strengthens our family’s communication and helps set a tone of love and encouragement that will carry over into other aspects of life. Check out his blog “How to Make ‘Bedtime’ the Best Part of Your Family’s Day”.

     What about your family? What have you done to reclaim your bedtime?