Prayer - April 28, 2021

Knowing How to Walk and Talk With God - Mini-Series on Prayer

I have appreciated the opportunities available for prayer at Mountainview. Prayer is offered every Sunday. There is a prayer gathering on Wednesday nights. Prayer walks happen monthly. And these things have been going on for quite some time. This is good stuff.

Prayer is the lifeline of the church.  It is our communication with God. It is the key to missional momentum. Yet, prayer is also difficult, confusing, and a life-long struggle for many Christians. So, because prayer is both crucial and challenging, our next mini-series of sermons will be on this topic. Yes, we are still in the macro-series on our sticky statement “Learning Missional Practices”.

We will begin this Sunday, May 2, with a look at listening prayer. Most of us have been taught to pray by talking. We have been given outlines like ACTS or BLESS and we have been taught to follow the pattern of the Lord’s prayer. All good. But also, all about one side of the conversation with God – the part where we are doing the talking. Sometimes, when we get too focused on the talking side of prayer it may become a case of us telling God things he already knows. So, what about the other half of the conversation? What about listening? We will begin this series by looking at 1 Samuel 3 which includes the great prayer line “speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”

Not that there is anything wrong with spoken prayer. And so, the second message in the series will indeed be on the Lord’s prayer and how it guides us as Jesus’ answer to the request “teach us to pray”. The Lord’s prayer is found in Matthew 6 and Luke 11, neither of which is in the form many of us have learned to say, by the way.

Finally, we will round out this series with a look at prayer and action. These two things are intimately tied together such that to pray without getting engaged can make a mockery of prayer. The book of James looks at this in teaching about faith and works. We will reflect on James 1:19-27 and 2:14-26 as we consider how to line up our prayer and our life.

For each of these messages, small group questions will be available. Even if a group meets less than weekly, you can use whichever message and questions you want, or deal with the whole mini-series in one conversation. As always, you are encouraged to consider how to engage the messages and allow others to help you practice the missional learnings you are receiving.

Pastor Erick