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PRAYER ROOMS

Tuesdays (online only today)

• 7:30am – Zoom Room
• 9am – Zoom Room

PRAYER GUIDE

“Lord I have heard of your fame. I stand in awe of your deeds. Renew them in our day, in our time, make them known.” 

– Habakkuk 3:2

Scholars believe Habbakuk was written at the tail end of the 7th Century BC, as the Babylonian Empire was on the rise and marching towards Jerusalem. This book is an attempt to wrestle with God about the threat Babylon posed to Israel and her purposes the world. In his prayer, the prophet Habakkuk recalls God’s mighty works in the past, especially the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. As Babylon prepares to lay waste to Jerusalem as a means of God’s judgment, Habbakuk prays for God to renew his deeds and God’s fame. This is a prayer for revival. Habbakuk is aware of the weakened state of the people of God and of the need for God’s intervention to cleanse and redeem and empower them once again. And this is what we need today as well. The Church in our time, especially in the West, especially in New England, desperately needs God to intervene and pour out his life and power on us. 

Throughout history, the life of God’s people has never been a steady record of achievements…rather, like a sine wave, her life has ebbed and flowed in seasons of declines and renewals. Like gravity or entropy, the spiritual life of God’s people and the human race is subject to the decaying forces of sin and death. Over time, all societies decay spiritually…as ours certainly seems to be doing now. But because of his mercy, God intervenes in this downward spiral, sending his Holy Spirit to bring renewal. The story of the Bible and of Church history is a story of these renewals, some of which have happened in our own city. In 1820, a great revival swept Providence. And a significant percentage of the city came to a knowledge of Jesus and entered the church that year. 

We are in desperate need of revival today. The church is in a long season of decline in the West, stretching back to the revivals of the early 1970s. The affiliation with Christianity has declined faster in this past decade than at any point in our nation’s history. And these trends show no signs of abating. Our nation is seized by increasing anxiety and political polarization. We need God to show up, as Habbakuk did. The good news is that the Church, even in America, has been here before. There have been seasons of spiritual deadness and decay in the past. One example is the season in the late 1700s, after the American Revolution.  Here the French writer Voltaire famously predicted that Christianity would be dead in thirty years. The Church, however, began praying in earnest, asking God to renew his power and presence. Some churches in New England began prayer meetings that lasted 60 years until the Civil War. Essentially what they prayed is this: “God we want you here.” The result of this cry from the heart was, among other things, the Second Great Awakening. Waves of revivals lasting sixty years swept through the nation and gave us much we still hold dear…including the abolitionist movement, many of our colleges and universities, hospitals, charities, and the global missions movement. 

Even now, we see signs and indications that God is preparing to unleash a wave of revival upon our nation and upon the church. If we are hungry enough to receive it. This past February in Asbury, KY, there was a noteworthy outpouring of the Spirit of God. Could it be that this is an appetizer, a foretaste, a proof of concept for the church. God is in the kitchen and he is telling us, essentially, “there is more where that came from.” Will we ask Him for it? And will we prepare ourselves to receive it? As Jon Tyson said, “God comes where He’s wanted.”

Prayer Prompt

It is time, like Habakkuk, for us to pray once again for God to renew his fame and deeds in our time. As we move into a new year and a new season, it is time for us to return to this foundational prayer: “Do it again, Lord, in our time!”  It is time to ask: “God, we want you here!” But it’s important to God that we mean it. That we pray it from the heart. Perhaps you feel apathetic as many of us do when we begin to pray, fast, or seek the Lord that’s okay. Lean in and ask God to stir and awaken spiritual hunger in your hearts. Whether you feel it or not, you need more of God. So ask him for more.

God, I want you in my life. I want you in my family/my friends/my home church. We want you in our church. We need you in our city and nation. 

PRAYER ROOMS

Tuesdays (online only today)

• 7:30am – Zoom Room
• 9am – Zoom Room

PRAYER GUIDE

“But deliver us from evil.”

Jesus ends his instruction on prayer by teaching us to pray for deliverance from evil. There are two fundamental truths that are implied by this prayer. The first is this: there is evil at work in the world. As we learned last week when we discussed temptation, our world is not spiritually inert. It is not a moral vacuum. Our world is a spiritual battlefield and has been ever since the Garden of Eden and even before. 

When God created the world, he made it good. And yet that goodness has been twisted as humans and angelic beings rebelled against God’s leadership and good order. And this rebellion and all the chaos that it has unleashed on the world is evil. The world we inhabit is in many ways, occupied by evil, as was Europe during the early part of World War II. 

The Apostle John in his first epistle, pointed out that, in a reverse mirroring of the Holy Trinity, evil is at work in the world in the unholy trinity of the world, the flesh, and the devil. That is, evil, over time can and does become embedded in the systems of the world. The institution of slavery in America is a blatant example. Over time the evil of slavery was embedded in the political, economic, and religious systems of our nation – so deeply that even if individuals opposed slavery – they were unable to dislodge it from its hold on America. It was so deeply embedded in the American way of life that it took a Civil War and 100 more years and many movements for social justice to affect it. Slavery is only one of many evil systems that are embedded in the systems of the world. 

Evil is not only embedded in human systems and culture but it is reinforced by the devil. That is, evil is backed and fanned into flame by spiritual forces that remain in rebellion to God and his Kingdom. We talked last week about Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness and Adam and Eve in the garden. In like fashion, any effort to dislodge evil from human systems will be opposed not only by those systems but by the spiritual forces that support those systems. This is why scripture commands us to keep watch, to be aware of the devil and his schemes. Not to give the enemy a foothold in our lives.

Finally, evil takes root in the flesh. That is, evil exists in the unredeemed aspect of human nature. Because of the Fall, we human beings possess the instinct for evil within us. When the Holy Spirit regenerates our heart, we are given a new nature that wants to do good, but we remain subject to the inertia of the flesh, which is bent towards evil even when we want to do good. 

The second truth implied in Jesus’ prayer is that we need to be delivered from evil. We cannot battle evil on our own, it is too strong for us. The devil is too strong for us. The world systems are too strong for us. And yes, even the evil within us is too strong for us. In order to battle and defeat evil in us, in the world, and in the heavenly realms, we need God. We need God’s strength, wisdom, goodness, and deliverance.

It is Jesus, who on the cross, defeated evil. We could never hope to do it. He came and died to do what we could never do. To bind the strongman Satan who had, like Hitler in Europe, laid claim to our world. Jesus defeated Satan on the cross. Jesus defeated Rome and every empire on the cross. And Jesus defeated even the human flesh that he took on in the incarnation. 

And so we are called to pray “deliver us from evil.” And this means 1) we are to become aware of evil in the world and 2) we are to trust in God and His power to deliver us and 3) we are praying for an expansive “us,” not just you and me personally, not just those we love, but for the entire human family. We are praying for God’s deliverance and rescue and salvation from the evil that has occupied our world since the Fall. 

For Prayer/Reflection:

• Where are you experiencing evil? In the world, from the Devil, in your flesh? Pray for God’s deliverance?
• Where do we see evil at work in the church? Pray for deliverance?
• Where is evil at work in our city or region? In its systems? Where is this evil reinforced by spiritual forces in the heavenly realms? Let’s name these places and ask for deliverance?

PRAYER ROOMS

Tuesdays (online only today)

• 7:30am – Zoom Room
• 9am – Zoom Room

PRAYER GUIDE

“And lead us not into temptation.”

Matthew 6:13

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” This version of the quote comes from the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects, but other versions have been circulating through the centuries. The French writer Charles Boudelaire said something similar in a Paris newspaper article in 1864. At times, when thinking about organized crime or the liberation of concentration camps, it is painfully obvious that organized and intelligent evil is at work in the world. But often, we go about our days thinking we inhabit a spiritual vacuum, a spiritually and morally inert world. We are often unaware that a battle is playing out all around us between good and evil.

But when we look at the cosmology of the Bible, it is obvious that from the first pages of Genesis, to the last pages of Revelation, a war is being waged between good and evil, between God and Satan. And that somehow humans are in the middle of this war. Will the humans side with God and his purposes, or will they be tempted and lured astray by Satan, as Adam and Eve were in the garden? 

We like to think it is only Adam and Eve who faced temptation, but this would be naive. Every human being faces temptation every day. The same choice faced at the first tree in the garden, humans face constantly. Will we define good and evil for ourselves? Will we seek wisdom and knowledge and power apart from God? Will we seek to run our own lives? Or will we trust and submit to God? 

This is why, to redeem humanity, Jesus had to recapitulate in his own life the entire human saga. His first act of ministry, after being baptized, was to go into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. He had to, fully emptied of food and possibly water, reject the temptations to use his power selfishly, to be famous, to shortcut the cross on his way to his Kingdom. Jesus faced the temptations we all face…and succeeded in facing them in a concentrated form during that fast and for the next three years of ministry. He faced them again in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. 

Jesus recognized that he and all human beings will be tempted. Tempted by Satan, by the world, by our flesh. We will be tempted to sin, just as he was. And he recognized that we would often be unaware that we are being tempted. And he knew that the stakes were high. When we give in to temptation, it gives Satan a foothold in our lives, and it also limits what God can do in and through us. It is Satan’s way of taking us out of the battle, of disqualifying us and disabling us from running and finishing our leg of the race. Satan’s primary tool to disrupt the Kingdom of God is temptation. He tempts us, by lying to us, just as he did with Jesus and just as he did with Adam and Eve. 

So Jesus teaches us to pray, “lead us not into temptation,” in part to remind us that we are not living in a spiritual vacuum. We are at war with a cruel enemy who is constantly seeking to trick and deceive us. We are asking God to lead us through the minefield to safety. In part, by helping us to become aware of the temptations. As GI Joe always said, “knowing is half the battle.” So let’s pray this prayer and ask God to lead us not into temptation today, by making us aware of the battle raging around us and the specific ways the enemy would lead us astray today. James says, “resist the devil and he will flee from you.” This is what happened with Jesus in the wilderness and because it happened with him, it can happen with us as well. 

For Reflection/Prayer:

• Ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten your understanding to see and discern the places of temptation in your life.
• Bring these areas to God.
• Ask God for strength to be aware of temptation and to resist the devil so that he will flee from us. 
• Are there scriptures you need to lay hold off and use to wage war against the devil and his schemes in your life and the lives of those you love? Do it!
• Ask God for wisdom to see where those in our community or the church at large is being tempted or led astray – and to help us to pray against these temptations.