Prayer and Participation

I can still remember the realization that settled on me, as I sat in my study in Greenville, Mississippi, three months after moving my family there to plant a church. I was in a miserable office with no windows in the top floor of a bank building. My second child had just been born, so I was sleep deprived, and it was dawning on me that I had no idea what I was doing. It was not for lack of prayer, I assure you. Church planters are desperate people. I was praying for revival, for a moment of God’s grace; they were lofty prayers, good prayers. Church planting is a precarious vocation—you are only guaranteed a job for a short period, and, if things don’t work out, you polish up the resume. 

 

At that time, I didn’t have the theological categories, as I do now, to articulate what I was wrestling with, but I did know a few true things. I knew I couldn’t save anyone—that was God’s business. I also knew that, if all I did was pray like a monk in a monastery of silence, it would not move the needle, at least for my calling. I was paralyzed and scared to death. Then I realized another thing, and it was from both an observation in the Bible and also from reading church history: God blesses effort. In other words, I couldn’t achieve the promise of seeing the gospel spread and people thrive by sheer force of will and personality, but nor could I plant a church by passively praying for God to convert sinners.

            

This Sunday we walk into another mystery—how God moves the Kingdom forward, both in small places like our homes or in larger places like a church that is seeking to bless a town. We see a glorious model of this as we see David’s response to God negating his will and instead giving him a bigger promise that He will build David a house. David prays in humble thanksgiving, and then he moves out to participate in the promise God has given him. 

            

Most of Christianity involves learning to pray and seek God’s face, but that is not all; we are then called to participate in our frail flesh with the promises God has made. As one man put it, “…it’s impossible to know God through private prayer without equally participating with God in public mercy.” (Tyler Staton, “Praying like Monks, Living Like Fools,” YouVersion, 10 Day Bible Reading Plan) Simple, but hard and risky. That, or something like that, is where we find ourselves in our text in I Chronicles. I can’t wait to explore it together on Sunday.