Things to pray for us…

1. Pray we will get back to the basics. Last week Martin Rodriguez, a missionary to China, spoke a word from the Lord to us.  Interestingly, it was the same word God gave to us nearly a year ago when we started.  God’s Spirit is calling us back to a lifestyle of abundant prayer and abundant sowing of the seed (good news).  We pray for opportunities to plant the seed, we scatter the seed like crazy, and we pray again trusting God (not ourselves or our strategies) to bring the growth.  Pray that we will be a people on our knees more than ever.  Speaking for myself, I didn’t pray much last week.  I want next week to be different.  And I’m not talking about praying for the sake of praying so many minutes or hours per day, or the kind of animistic prayer that says if I address God in just the right way or enough times, then I can manipulate him into giving me what I want.  I’m talking about trusting in the One Source of real hope and lasting change for our world.  I’m talking about cultivating a relationship of love with the Greatest Lover of all time, who will still be demonstrating his love for us when time has come to an end.  The kind of prayer that is done out of obedience, whether we have something to say or not.  The kind of prayer that cries out to God and just listens.  We want the kind of relationship with God that oozes out of our being and results in Spirit-led action.  I don’t really understand prayer.  But I understand enough to know it’s the most important thing I do.
2. Pray we will resist the devil’s shortcuts to success. Sometimes I feel the pressures (however real or imagined) to take shortcuts to produce quicker “results” for those who are watching. For example, it is tempting to attract a Sunday crowd and call them “church” before they are committing to Jesus and his mission. Given our 200+ relationships, we could have done this by now. Yet God has called Way of Life Village to obedience-based discipleship that sees disciples reproducing disciples, leaders reproducing leaders, and churches reproducing churches. We are preparing the mission field of East Hollywood for what our friends call “the radical movement of the Holy Spirit known as a Church Planting Movement.” This means we have to go slow to go fast, investing heavily in new leaders upfront because they are the real church planters in East Hollywood!
3. Pray again for rejuvenation… and for wisdom! Speaking for Meredith and me, we’re still really tired.  Ideally, we want people to see how we approach missions as a way of life and be able to conclude, “I can do that too!”  But if someone looked at my past few weeks, they might say, “I can do that too with God’s help, but I’m no going to because it can’t be healthy to be that busy!”  We Americans like to be busy, busy, busy.  I think I’ve been sucked into the American way again and it’s kicking my butt.  It’s time for me to re-evaluate can I really maintain all these relationships at the same time?  What am I not trusting God to take care of that I have to do it all myself?  What am I doing that can be done by someone else?  How can I be more effective at reproducing myself in others?

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   A word to U.S. busy-freaks like me: I’m reminded that being busy with ministry tasks does not produce fruitfulness, but being obedient to God does.  Do you ever feel like God is calling you to obey him by abandoning your schedule for the rest of the evening or weekend?  In those moments, where do your loyalties lie?  Do you obey Him or keep meeting the many needs and demands of others?  Do you obey “them” (them could be real people or imagined pressures you’re placing on yourself, or both), or do you create the space needed to live out the gospel through rest and play?  Sometimes Jesus is calling me away from people to solitude with him.  Other times, he’s calling me away from “obligations” and back to people.  A Latino friend told me, “You Anglos plan everything.  You don’t have time for people.”  I’m happy to say that today I resisted the urge to be busy and obeyed.  And now I’m going to go be more effective as a way-of-life missionary!

Categories: stuff to pray for
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