May 10, 2020
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May 7, 2020
National Day of Prayer 2020
Prayer is… | Anne Graham Lotz from Anne Graham Lotz on Vimeo.
I am delighted to join you on this National Day of Prayer. I have been asked to answer the question, what does prayer mean to me?
And as I thought about it, that is a hard answer to put into words. So, I am going to try to illustrate it by pointing out the fact that I’ve been told that breathing is the strongest instinct we have. That we would let go of anything and everything else, but we will still fight to catch the next breath. I think that is one reason the Coronavirus is so frightening. It attacks the lungs and our ability to breathe…because without breath we die.
What breathing is to me physically — prayer is to me spiritually. Without prayer I don’t have spiritual life and not just prayer – that is like a “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” kind of prayer – but a conversation with God.
Prayer is… confiding in God — my hopes and my dreams and my aspirations, my fears, and my longings. Prayer is… discussing things with God — anything that is on my heart and mind; my family, my ministry. And prayer is also asking God for things; my wants, my needs; asking Him for help, for strength, for wisdom, for counsel, interceding on behalf of other people. So, prayer is not just presenting to God sort of a reading in King James English, and it’s not just giving him a shopping list of our needs; it’s not just quoting a Psalm or a poem or something. But prayer is a conversation that we have with God who is our Father…
On this National Day of Prayer I want to thank you for your commitment to pray for our Nation. Our nation desperately needs prayer. But I want to ask you this – are you praying effectively? Because your prayers are based on a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ.
If you’re not sure you’ve ever established a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus, or if you’re pretty sure you’ve never done that, then I’m going to ask you to do that right now. And I am going to lead you in a simple prayer as you establish a personal relationship with God.
Dear God,
I come to you now, and I want a personal relationship with You. I want to be able to call You my Father. I want to know that I have access into Your presence, that I have Your full attention when I pray, that I get answers to my prayers. And so… I confess to You that I am a sinner and I am so sorry. I am not perfect. I have done wrong things, and I am willing to turn away from my sin and my self-centeredness if You’ll help me.
And I believe Jesus died on the Cross for me. I am asking that You would forgive me in His name, wash me clean with His blood. And I believe Jesus rose up from the dead to give me eternal life. So right now I’m asking You, dear God, give me eternal life, which I understand is a personal relationship with You now and heaven when I die.
And I open up my heart, and I invite Jesus in the person of the Holy Spirit to come into me. I understand He will never leave nor forsake me. And I choose from this moment forward to submit my life to His authority, to follow Him in a life of obedience one day at a time, to follow Him all the way to HEAVEN. I thank You for hearing my prayer that I have prayed in Jesus’ name and for His glory. Amen.
So, I want to thank you for the prayer that you’ve just prayed and for your commitment to pray effectively for our nation.
God bless you.
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His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. JEREMIAH 20:9
Our Father, who is in Heaven, we worship You as the living God of Daniel. You set the heavens in place and laid the foundations of the earth.1 In a world that changes and undulates like the surface of the sea, You and Your Word are unshaken. You are the Creator who spoke everything into existence through the power of Your Word.2 Your thoughts are as high above our thoughts as the heavens are higher than the earth.3 Who could know what’s on Your mind and in Your heart except as You choose to reveal Yourself to us? And You have! You are Light.4 You have made Yourself visible and knowable through the pages of our Bibles. And Your Word is our life.5 It is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens.6 There is no shadow of turning with You.7 From age to age, from generation to generation, You and Your Word do not change.
Thank You for being utterly trustworthy. We find security and hope in knowing we can take You at Your Word. You are a Gentleman. You do not mock Your children. We can stand firmly on Your promises, which are like prophecy. They will come to pass because what You say is so. They resonate deep within our hearts; like sparks of life falling on our dry spirits, they ignite a holy passion for You and what You want.
When we lack fire and zeal for You, Your Word, Your will and Your wants, we have only to look at the priority we have given to our Bible reading and study. We confess we have been neglectful of Your Word. There are days when we go without reading it. And there are many days when we read it but we don’t take the time to process what we are reading. When we close our Bibles we don’t even remember what we read. No wonder we don’t know how to pray! So when we do pray we have cared more about our wants than Your wants. We often tell You what’s on our minds without ever asking what’s on Yours. We pour out our hearts to You, but quickly leave our prayer time without waiting to listen to Your heart.
We have been . . .
deaf to Your voice,
willful in our ways,
self-centered
in our wants,
shallow in our thoughts,
and miserly in our love.
We are deeply ashamed.
Let us know that the work of prayer is to bring our
wills to Yours,
And that without this it is folly to pray; When we try to bring Your will to ours it is to command You, to be above You, and wiser than You; this is our sin and pride.
We can only succeed when we pray
According to Your precept and promise,
According to Your sovereign will.
And now, O God who has ears to hear and listens to Your children as we pray, we ask that You would teach us to pray according to Your Word. We want our wills to conform to Yours. Mold our lives according to Your Word. We want to ask You for what You have already purposed to give us, to do for us, and to do through us, yet will not do so until we ask. We don’t want to get to Heaven and discover all the answers to prayer for which we never bothered to ask You, because we were ignorant of Your Word.8 We don’t want to get to Heaven and hear of all the blessings You wanted to pour out on others through us, only to find that our self-focus and self-centeredness had blocked the flow.
So come down, most Holy Lord. Look on our
world . . .
On the battlefields and the mine fields,
On the corruption and the destruction,
On the greed and the need,
On the strategy sessions and the spinning deception,
On the sin that’s flaunted and the sin that’s hidden,
On the murders and the misery,
On the abuse and the arrogance,
On the victim and the vice . . .
On our foundation that is cracking,
On our nation that is crumbling,
On Your church that is sleeping,
On Your people who are crying out to You.
Teach us to pray according to Your Word with such power that Heaven is moved and our nation, and our world, are changed.
We ask all of these things in the name of the One who said, “Here I am . . . I have come to do your will, O God . . .”9 then got up from Heaven’s throne, made Himself nothing, took on the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled Himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!10
We pray in the name of the One whom You have exalted to the highest place . . . the One to whom You have given the name that is above every name . . .11
We pray in the name of JESUS.
For the glory of Your Name.
Amen.
1. Isaiah 51:16.
2. Genesis 1:3, John 1:1–3.
3. Isaiah 55:9.
4. 1 John 1:5.
5. Deuteronomy 32:47.
6. Psalm 119:89.
7. James 1:17.
8. Ezekiel 36:37.
9. Hebrews 10:7.
10. Philippians 2:6–8.
11. Philippians 2:9–10.
**This Prayer is adapted from The Daniel Prayer, Anne Graham Lotz, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, MI, 2016
