I have been sharing with you about what all God is teaching me here and how we as Christians should see God’s purpose for our lives as spreading the Gospel. We should be making that our constant focus.
This takes work. We have to change the way we think so that we can change the way we react to situations and people.
Whether we have wanted them to or not, American materialism and conveniences have affected our lives in many ways. As I talked about in an earlier blog, modern conveniences have made our lives so much easier, and we are constantly trying to figure out new ways to make life easier still. Nearly everyone is looking for the newest gadget that will simplify their life or allow for more entertainment, and then those gadgets become something we can’t imagine living without. If this is what we’ve been surrounded with all your life, of course it is going to affect the way we think. This mentality may very well be affecting our spiritual lives as well and making us think that the Christian life could also be easy and that we can come up with ways that make it easier or more comfortable, but that’s not how God intended for us to follow Him. When we are following Him, we should not be looking for the easiest way, or the way that would least disrupt our comfortable lives. And if our sole purpose is to follow God, than we should be living everyday of our lives looking for how He wants us to serve, no matter how painful, uncomfortable, or inconvenient. Naturally, this is not how our minds will want to operate, because of how they have been trained to think up to this point in our lives. We have to retrain our minds (Romans 12:2) to think about God’s purpose in each situation first rather than our comfort.
What does this look like in real life? Well I don’t have a sure-fire method, but I do know what has been working for me. First, I have been reading verses about God’s heart for the nations (I’ll post some of the references of a few of these at the end of this blog, but really you can find them throughout the Bible, if you are looking for them with that mindset). This is somewhat like surrounding your mind with thoughts of how God feels about taking His Word to the nations, a step in changing what you are surrounding yourself with or changing what you are putting into your mind. Second, I have made a larger priority of praying for the nations. I am spending some time every day praying for workers to be sent out into God’s harvest field and for the unreached people groups. This is also a step in changing my thinking patterns. Making a priority of thinking about the importance of taking the Gospel to the nations and praying for God’s plan to be put into action each day is helping me to see more and more of God’s heart and less and less of my own selfishness. Going along with praying for the nations, I have also made it a priority of learning more about people from those nations. This is helping me to know more of what to pray for, and in the process also helping me to see more of God’s heart for each people group. The more I learn about a new people group, the more I desire to see them reached with the Gospel.
I think that the process of retraining my mind is following a track that seems to be going something like this:
Reading about God’s heart for the nations, and His purpose for our lives
Understanding more and more about that purpose
Beginning to implement what I am learning
Full implementation (I definitely have not reached this stage, but this is what I am straining towards!)
Here is a short list of verses from all throughout the Bible that show God’s heart for the nations and examples of how we should be seeing our purpose in God’s plan for reaching the nations:
Psalm 9:11-12, 17, Psalm 33:13-14, Psalm 46:10, Psalm 96:11-13, Isaiah 49:6, Habakkuk 1:5, Malachi 1:11, I Sam. 17: 46-47(According to David, why did God help him kill Goliath?), Mark 16:15, Acts 1:8, Romans 10:14 &Romans 15:20-21 (What was Paul's ministry philosophy?), Revelation 7:9-10
The Bible reveals to us that Jesus was also passionate about praying for workers to be sent into the harvest field. In Matthew 9:37-38 Jesus proclaims: "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest."
I would like to challenge you to grow in your conviction that apart from prayer we can do nothing. The first step is to memorize Matthew 9:37-38. The next step is to begin to pray Jesus’ prayer daily for workers to be sent out to the unreached people groups of the world.
There is a vast amount of things going on in the world right now that need prayer, but, for the most part, we are unaware of 99.9% of them. We must open a door for information about the needs in the world to flow consistently into our life so that we can have a consistent diet of things to pray for. Information is like the food that a Christian needs to have a healthy prayer life. If you are starved for information your prayer life could look sickly and weak. Here are some practical ideas and resources to “beef-up” your prayer life:
1) Buy a world map and have it laminated and hung up in your room. This way you can write prayer requests directly on the map as they arise and erase and write new ones all the time! I have done this and also added short bios for m’s that I know are serving in certain areas of the world so that I am reminded more often to pray for them. For a free map go to www.ehc.org or www.imb.com/resources has some good ones as well.
2) Subscribe to a free weekly email, Compassion Net is the IMB’s daily prayer update for needs of people groups and field personnel around the world. www.imb.org/compassionnet (you can even look for specific prayer requests from here in Ufa!)
3) www.joshuaproject.net highlights a new unreached people group each day to pray for. You can also add this feature as an application to your Facebook homepage!
4) Both www.cnn.com and www.bbc.com are great websites that cover world news that will enable you to know the latest happenings around the world.
5) Finally, here are fifteen general prayer requests. Try adding one of these suggestions each day by posting it on a mirror so that you are reminded often to pray for this request.
· Ask God to glorify Himself throughout the earth, among all peoples everywhere. Tell Him you want this to happen and tell Him what it will mean to you personally when it does.
· Pray that God would receive greater praise in the earth for what He is presently doing in the Church, and especially for all He will do through the Church to reach, save and fulfill unreached peoples around the world.
· Pray John 17:11-18 for a missionary family that you know.
· Pray for churches to be planted within every people group on our planet within the lifetime of this student generation.
· Pray for specific mission teams in your country of service who are working among the unreached.
· Ask God to give a spiritual hunger to the billions of lost peoples (such as Muslims, Chinese, Hindus, Buddhists and secularists) who have yet to clearly learn of Christ, that they may have a new sense of the reality of God and an unavoidable desire to seek Him. Jesus promised that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.
· Pray for international students in Western countries, particularly in the USA, to hear the Gospel and return to their homelands with the Good News of salvation through Christ.
· Pray for world leaders and governments and for the outcome of world events. All of these can directly affect the free course of the Gospel within a nation and within a people group
· Pray for major global issues which interrupt a world-mission thrust. These issues are part of the moral darkness which must be pressed back by the planting of responsible communities of disciples among the billions who have yet to hear. Such issues may include: global hunger, nuclear proliferation, political and economic oppression, and terrorism
· Pray for God's people everywhere to see and reach out to those peoples nearby whose ways of living differ from them enough to cut them off from the regular witness of the Gospel.
· Pray for God to move among specific people groups who are beyond the reach of the Gospel. Ask God to give to churches world-wide the wisdom to know how to reach them
· Ask that God would raise up hundreds of thousands of new cross-cultural messengers of the Gospel to be sent out in a variety of roles, by churches around the world (i.e. sending laborers into the harvest fields)
· Pray a passage of Scripture that has to do with God’s promises toward the world. (like Ps 2:8, 46:10, Ps 67, Ps 86 or 96, Hab 2:14, Rev 5:9)
· Pray for all current efforts to research and formulate mission strategy, so as to effectively train and deploy a new generation of missionaries.
· Pray for God to raise up a new movement of "senders" world-wide people who know God has called them to send a new force of cross-cultural witnesses and who embrace that assignment with the same vision and sacrifices as those who go.
- List taken from IMB “Grow” Bible study material.
I hope you will take a minute to evaluate your personal prayer life. Is it as strong as you want it to be? Think about what hindrances are keep you from praying for the world. Will you make a plan as to how you are going to incorporate praying for the world in your daily routine?
If you do, I hope you will share with me about how God speaks to you in your prayer time and how you see Him answering your prayers!
No comments:
Post a Comment