An Invitation to Prayer

If prayer isn’t vital for your church, then your church isn’t vital. This statement may be bold, but I believe it’s true. If you can accomplish your church’s mission without daily, passionate prayer, then your mission is insufficient and your church is irrelevant. (Francis Chan, Letters to the Church)

Honestly, I'm not very good at this. If anything, my prayer life defaults to being more reactively defending against the struggles life throws at us, rather than proactively being on the offense pleading with God to advance His Kingdom.

Here's the thing: God loves to pour out His Spirit with power on those who will dare to align radically their purposes with His. In fact, multiple times we are promised that God will hear our prayers (cf. Matt 7:7; 21:22; John 14:13; 15:16; 16:23; 1 John 3:22; 5:14; James 4:2).

"If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you." (John 15:7, NIV)

Personally, I need help to both to believe these words are true and to be intentional enough to put them into practice. I currently use two strategies to help keep me a little more intentional:

1. We have a picture box that sits next to our dinning room table. The picture rotates once a week. The family pictured is who our family are praying for that week. This is an easy way to involve the entire family.

2. I use an app called Fabriq for my personal daily prayer list. A few things I like about Fabriq:

   • My prayer list and their contact info is all in one place making it easy to send a text and catch up as I pray,

   • I can place my contacts in the appropriate "circle" indicating how close to my inner circle they are. (I'm always praying to move circles closer.)

   • I can take notes on each contact and set reminders for specific dates. (This is especially helpful for my very poor memory!)

   • Corresponding with what circle I place someone in, I get rhythmic reminders to connect/pray for each person/family. Some I pray for weekly, some every few weeks, others monthly, and still others quarterly.

This is not intended to be an advertisement for Fabriq, though. This is an invitation into join Jesus in His work of Kingdom expansion. This is an invitation (and hopefully some practice advice) on how to be more intentional in praying those people that God has placed within our social circles.

Before we start bringing our acquaintances to church, we should likely bring them into our homes. Before we ask them to join us in worshipping the One True God, we should likely share with them how He has demonstrated Himself worthy of our worship in our lives.